Detroit — It’s a deal so rancid, you can smell the stink all the way to Kalamazoo.
Dan Gilbert—one of the world’s richest men—and General Motors—one of the world’s largest companies —have teamed up to strong-arm Michigan taxpayers out of $350 million for a remodel of the Detroit Renaissance Center.
Some quick math: Approximately $250 million of the ask is from the state. The other $100 million will come from Detroit, the poorest big city in America.
General Motors, which over the years has shown itself to be Michigan’s top welfare grub, threatens to tear down the architectural icon if it doesn’t get its loot.
In the words of convicted crackpot and former Detroit city councilwoman Monica Conyers: “Do it, baby, do it!”
Why? Because almost nobody knows any specifics of the deal outside of Whitmer’s cloistered coterie. Where’s the paperwork? Who owns the buildings, Gilbert or GM? Who will be the tenants? Why hasn’t the property been put up for sale to see what the market would bear?
Not even incoming Speaker of the House Matt Hall, a Republican, has much of a clue.
“General Motors are the one’s leaving Michigan and Detroit,” he said. “They laid off a thousand workers and move factories to Mexico. So instead of doing a deal in the dark, wouldn’t it be better if GM, which is making record profits, just pays to tear it down and redevelop it?”
If you want an idea of just how putrid this deal may be, just take a look at the resumes of the water boys carrying the slop pails.
First is GM’s point man, Dave Massaron, who exactly one year ago was named its chief economic development and real estate officer.
Who is Massaron? He’s the lawyer who put the deadly Flint Water Deal together. He was the subject of a sprawling racketeering investigation over the Flint disaster, until our famously incompetent Attorney General Dana Nessel botched the case.
After Flint, Massaron was hired by Mayor Mike Duggan as Detroit’s chief operating officer. Massaron quickly found himself ensnared in a federal grand jury investigation looking into bid-rigging, fraud, and the use of contaminated dirt in Detroit’s demolition program. That case withered when Biden’s Justice Department declined to prosecute.
The boy genius then went on to have a quick cup of coffee as Whitmer’s budget director and then chief financial officer at Wayne State University, before landing at GM as the locker room attendant.
Then there’s Gilbert’s guy, Jared Fleisher. His official title is vice president of government affairs and economic development for Rocket Companies. In plain English? Lobbyist.
Fleisher, an out-of-town Harvard-trained lawyer, worked on Gilbert’s failed QLine streetcar project in Detroit. That financial boondoggle was eventually foisted off on the taxpayers of Metro Detroit.
Fleisher was a force behind the notorious auto insurance reform that led to the abandonment of 18,000 catastrophically injured and an explosion in auto insurance rates. Michiganders now pay the highest rates in America.
Fleisher also lobbied hard for Gilbert for a handful of downtown developments. Anybody who looks in the windows of those Gilbert projects, however, might be reminded of a backlot facade from an old Hollywood western.
There’s the unfinished Hudson’s skyscraper that broke ground way back in 2017. Any developer not dining in the public trough would have gone bankrupt by now.
General Motors announced it will move its corporate headquarters into the Hudson whenever it might be finished, even though GM already has a headquarters called the Renaissance Center.
Then there is the Italian Renaissance-style Book Tower, once the tallest building in Detroit. Hundreds of millions were poured into it. The Book reopened last summer “after a complete renovation,” according to the literature.
Not really a complete renovation. From the street, anyone can see that the first and second floors are still construction zones littered with boxes, drywall, exposed pipes, and wiring.
Gilbert’s people claim the skyscraper is 90% leased. Perhaps. But the rents there must be exceedingly high because tenants don’t use their lights. On any given night, 50% of the windows are dark.
Talk to anyone who works around there: the valet, the parking lot attendant, the gas station clerk, the cop. Something stinks. Even the fine people of Kalamazoo can smell it.
That’s why the Detroit business mafia pushing the Ren Cen deal is pressuring our elected representatives in Lansing to shut their eyes, plug their noses, hold out their palms and take the campaign donations.
Charlie LeDuff is a reporter educated in public schools.
