The New York Times checks in on the cheery scene of Flint North, a giant factory complex that was left to Motors Liquidation Corp (aka “Old GM”) after the GM bankruptcy, and finds that the liquidation process is moving along nicely. It turns out that all Motors Liquidation Corp needed to do was look the other way… Flint North was more than happy to liquidate itself.
Ownership of Flint North was ceded to Motors Liquidation in July 2009, though in a special arrangement, G.M. kept making pistons and other engine parts at one of the factories. The empty plants were essentially abandoned in their as-is condition on their last day of production. “They still have personal goods on the table,” said Captain Swanson of the sheriff’s department. “There’s still ceiling fans going.”
Shortly afterward, thieves began to systematically strip copper — used in heating, cooling and other systems — from one of the nearby vacant plants. Authorities said that a ring of thieves hit the building night after night over a three-month period, taking out more than 150,000 pounds of copper.
The gang would load the metal on flatbed rail cars — owned and once used by G.M. — and roll the cars to a hole in a fence, where the copper was put on trucks and then sold to scrap dealers.
In March, the authorities arrested 11 people and estimated the value of the stolen copper at more than $1 million. “They were trying to steal every piece of copper that they could,” said the Genesee County prosecutor, David S. Leyton.
But even after the arrests, no additional security was posted at Flint North until August, when thieves returned and the arrests resumed. Seven adults and four juveniles were arrested, including one person who had been convicted and sentenced to probation for participating in the earlier burglaries, the police said.
Since the latest intrusions, Motors Liquidation and G.M. said they had hired more armed guards to patrol the complex. The 400 workers at the only functioning plant, meanwhile, will either be transferred out of the plant or laid off by November.
Meanwhile, no politician has stepped forward to take credit for the million dollar economic stimulus to Michigan’s valued copper thief community. And Motors Liquidation execs insist that they’re not dragging their heels on site sales for redevelopment because
It is nearly impossible to redevelop such properties for productive, job-creating purposes unless environmental remediation is complete
Luckily there’s $836m in federal money to be spent on that. In the meantime, taxpayers clearly understand that Motors Liquidation Corp’s assets technically belong to them… and they’re doing the dirty work of liquidation themselves.
(sigh) GM can’t even get a plant closure right! I attended GMI (now Kettering Univ) in Flint from ’84 – ’86 (the “Roger & Me” era, when the plant closures were just starting in this area, but most of the original buildings from the founding of Buick & GM were still in use) and follow the sad decline of the area.
Flint used to be one of the greatest manufacturing cities of our nation, and now look at it on a satellite map – Buick City (once home to 28K employees) has been wiped off the face of the earth, save for a few buildings still standing such as the one mentioned in this article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_auto_industry_in_Flint,_Michigan#Division_HQ_and_Assembly.2C_Engine.2C_Parts_Plants.2FBuick_City.2FPowertrain_Flint_North
tinyurl.com is your friend
This is actually a beautifully appropriate allegory about GM and the UAW.
Seconded!
Too bad TTAC missed the punchline.
Every thief caught stealing copper was a UAW member.
+And the fixers and fences working the ends of the deal are too.
(okay, okay, I keed, I keed :P …)
Actually, I would imagine that the assets of Motors Liquidation Corp don’t really belong to the taxpayers, but to the bondholders of old GM. Not that it makes the situation any more palatable.
From my chair, the thieves shouldn’t have been prosecuted for anything more than trespassing. They have provided economic stimulus that the remediation fund won’t have to pay for.
Come to think of it, why not give these entrepreneurs a door key and let them procure their materials in the daylight?
That’s exactly what I was thinking gslippy….GM sure wasn’t using it and some money may as flow into the community.
The problem is that the “entrepreneurs” are not very careful about how they go about extracting the copper. Similar entrepreneurs have ruined many foreclosed and unoccupied homes by removing copper plumbing without bothering to shut off the water supply. And I doubt that they’re very careful about (or aware of) any asbestos wrapped around the copper pipes.
These “entrepreneurs” broke into a fully equipped auto manufacturing facility and stole copper to sell as scrap? I would have grabbed some of the machinery or tooling, stuffed it into my garage and gone into business. Alternately, I would have packed all that equipment into shipping containers and sold it to the Vietnamese. They’d be cranking out cars in less than a month’s time after receiving the stuff — fantastic cars that they’d cheerfully sell to you for less than $10K per copy. This country is doomed.
100 -on cranes aren’t laying around to be borrowed on a whim. Do you have any idea how BIG the “tooling” for a car line is?
I admit that I’ve never worked in an auto plant, but there’s got to be something that would fit in my garage. Machine center, lathe, drill press, milling machine? I’ll bet there was a fork lift in the place. You could make off with the machine using the forklift, and then sell the forklift on Craig’s List if you had no more use for it.
I want to know how they moved the “rail car”! NOBODY saw this?? Amazing…
Don’t you remember the Chevy truck ad from several years ago that showed a heavy duty pickup pulling a train? In this case, they probably stole a Ford F350 for the job.
Either that, or they had access to railroad car movers:
http://www.rrtoolsnsolutions.com/miscProducts/RailroadCarMovers.asp
When I was in manufacturing many years ago, we used these to move the railcars around to specific unloading stations. Cheaper than calling out the switch engine.
Railroad cars almost universally have roller bearings these days. They roll pretty easily once you get them started. Ten healthy adults could do that without too much effort. Of course, then they have to stop the car.
Newton’s first law’s a bitch.
It is nearly impossible to redevelop such properties for productive, job-creating purposes unless environmental remediation is complete
Luckily there’s $836m in federal money to be spent on that.
It’s “impossible” because current legal liability requires the site to be cleaned so that a 2 year old can consume 5 lbs of dirt with paint chips with no ill health effects. Congress could change the liability and environmental laws, but it’s easier to hand out money.
That’s OK though… With Michigan slowly becoming Mississippi-circa-1960 and homorraging population / political clout, this house of cards built with others’ money will soon crash.
There’s this lovely neighborhood called “love Canal” perhaps you and your family would enjoy it.
Funny you should mention that. I remember “way back” in 1995 there was this new channel on my cable system called “C-SPAN” and I was channel surfing and watched a few minutes of it. There was this guy from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, who had just become Speaker of the House, and he was talking about this very thing before a committee. He said it didn’t make any sense that our environmental laws required that a brownfield site has to be cleaned up to the extent that, in his words “you could open up a day care” on it. He said it made a lot more sense to clean it up to the levels that would make it safe for another industrial site, and that would have the added benefit of preserving green spaces. As the law was written then (and now I’m afraid) it makes more sen$e to knock down 200 acres of trees and build a brand new factory out in farm or forest country than to renovate an old industrial site. As much as he was concerned about the waste of money involved he appeared just as concerned over the loss of green spaces. You would think the leader of the house Republicans wouldn’t give a nit about the environment but before he became a political lightening rod he used to be endorsed by the Sierra Club.
I thought to myself this makes so much sense. I’m sure Congress will update the law and correct this oversight. I was pretty naive back then. Today we could have diesel options allowing cars to get mpg in the 40’s and small trucks in 30’s if the EPA rules were relaxed. But that makes too much sense to do that either.
@Windswords
Brownfield site redevelopment is a reality. It was done multiple times around St Joe/Benton Harbor in MI when I lived there. The bigger problem is that once the industry that created the pollution has left an area there is little economic sense in redeveloping the site without remediating whatever conditions caused the original user to shut down operations.
Then that is the result of laws and regulations that make it easier and cheaper to develop a green filed site. The rules still need to be changed. A new business should be able to develop a site that an old business has abandoned. In today’s economic climate that may not be possible but in the 90’s and the early 2000’s it was.
It’s not that laws and regs make it so much easier to develop greenfield, but that govt’s offer so many giveaways to bring in new development. Why work on the thorny issues of brownfield development when there’s a state (probably in the south) that will use eminent domain to take the 200 acres for you, clear the trees, build out the infrastructure needed and offer years of tax abatements in order to capture the jobs to be had at the new facility. It’s rare that the govt where the old facility exists still has the wherewithal to match such an offer. How much can Flint or the state of MI afford to offer a corp to take over the GM plant? And any govt willing to make greenfield development less attractive than brownfield will quickly be undercut by other govts willing to do anything for the jobs.
Here’s a clip that brings it all together.
enjoy.
W
I think there is an old rail yard trick that you can move a rail car with a crowbar
In Baltimore, they don’t need no stinking rail cars.
http://tinyurl.com/BU6B7ES
You can move a railcar with a crowbar and also with a device called a ‘car jack,’ which uses leverage against a wheel to move the car. I wouldn’t want to move a car very far that way, but if there were a slightly down-grade, you could get it started and loaded it would probably have enough momentum to go pretty easily. It would still be rough going back even with it empty, especially given what is probably not very good track. I vote for the F350. I don’t understand, though, why Motors Liquidation didn’t sell all this stuff off. When a large tire plant closed here 15 or 20 years ago, a local entrepreneur bought it for, according to local legend, $1M. The former assistant tire plant manager told me that when other potential buyers walked through it, parts of which dated back to the early 20th century, they saw junk. This guy walked through it, saw scrap, and sold the innards as scrap for $1.5M. At its peak after WWII the place employed 8,000 and by its demise around 1,300. The buyer used the proceeds from the scrap sale to remake the place into a multi-use facility, which now has everything from warehousing, to offices, to day care, to small manufacturing, to trendy loft apartments, etc. Apparently around 1,000 people work there now in a variety of businesses, and it’s much more attractive than when it was a tire plant.
Can you give more information about this ex-plant, like where it is and what it’s called today? That sounds like a fascinating story to look into just for general interest.
So.. the best contribution that GM has made to average Americans in 50 years and ppl are bitching?