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Tag: Detroit
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GM considers move from Detroit’s Renaissance Center
The most visible and commanding element of Detroit’s riverfront skyline is a tubular 73-story hotel girded by four squarish 39-story office towers, all gleaming with mirrored glass. It’s called the Renaissance Center, or RenCen, but the logo at the top of the complex is “GM” – identifying it as home and world headquarters to the immensely troubled General Motors Corp.
So when GM CEO Fritz Henderson raised the possibility Monday that the giant automaker could vacate the structure and move to the suburbs, joining Ford and Chrysler as absentee figureheads of the Motor City, it raised the threat of both real and symbolic devastation for Detroit.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)Henderson, who made his comments during a press teleconference, took pains to stress that GM doesn’t “have any such plans,” at least as he spoke. Then he added the hook: “But if we did, it would be motivated by business rationale, which would be cost, efficiency and speed.
Renaissance Center“We’re looking at, frankly, everything within our business, but it’s not like we have that queued up at the top of our list. But as we look at the structure, look at the business, we’re looking at everything.”
Having posted yet another astronomical quarterly loss – $6 billion for the first three months of 2009 – and already operating on more than $15 billion in federal loans, GM has until June 1 to come up with a restructuring plan that meets the approval of the Obama administration.
If that includes a move out of the RenCen as part of those cost-cutting measures, it will take some 4,300 white-collar workers off Detroit income tax rolls and potentially leave yet another vacant office structure in the city’s downtown, which already has a reported vacancy rate of 30 percent. GM also pays the city about $6 million in property taxes.
Mayor Jim Fouts of the blue-collar suburb Warren – Michigan’s third largest city, which borders Detroit on the north and has been home to GM’s one-square-mile Tech Center since 1955 – raised civic hackles last week when he suggested relocating the corporate headquarters to his city as a cost-cutting move. He pointedly dangled a carrot of no city income taxes, “unlike our sister city to the south.”
Fouts told the Detroit Free Press that he brought it up during a private meeting with Ed Montgomery, Obama’s point man in recovery assistance for autoworkers and their communities, and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
Detroit’s brand-new mayor, Dave Bing – who is already tasked with finding solutions for his city’s 20-plus percent unemployment, vast residential ruin and commercial blight, multimillion-dollar deficits, epidemic crime, and enough municipal corruption to keep the FBI scurrying in an ongoing investigation – called the possibility of a GM decampment “absolutely horrendous.”
The RenCen had been shopped unsuccessfully for two years when GM bought it for $73 million in 1996, later borrowing $500 million to reconfigure the maze-like interior design that had always frustrated visitors, and to remove massive concrete berms outside the structure that effectively cut off its entrance from the rest of downtown and gave it the feel of a well-defended citadel.
When the complex opened in 1977, it was at an announced cost of $340 million and was the largest private construction project in Michigan history, financed by an alliance between 51 local companies, led by Henry Ford II.
A public contest was held to give it a fitting name, and the winner was Renaissance Center, symbolizing a rebirth that, in more than 30 years since, has never come to Detroit.
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GOP Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. nominated as China ambassadorMay 16, 2009 at 3:04pm
President Obama seems to have pulled off a slick three-fer today in announcing his nomination of Republican Utah Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. as U.S. ambassador to China.
Dave Bing, political neophyte, will be Detroit’s oldest mayor
When pro basketball hall-of-famer Dave Bing was elected May 5 as Detroit’s third mayor in less than a year, a voter turnout of just 14 percent showed they’d prefer a duke to an emperor, and age to outrage.
Duke, as Bing was known in his youth, narrowly beat interim Mayor Kenneth V. Cockrel Jr. in a special election to choose who would serve the remaining term of the city’s disgraced chief executive, Kwame M. Kilpatrick.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)Elected Detroit’s youngest mayor at 31, Kilpatrick’s first and abortive second terms were marked by his penchant for high living, big cars, entourages, luxury junkets and marital infidelity. When a police whistleblower lawsuit threatened to disclose thousands of sexually explicit text messages between Kilpatrick and his chief of staff, former high school classmate Christine Beatty, the two lied about their relationship in court and settled the lawsuit for $8.4 million in taxpayer money.
Dave BingBoth resigned their positions, admitted their perjury in separate plea deals and spent several months in jail. In addition, Kilpatrick confessed to obstructing justice and assaulting two county investigators who went to his home to serve a subpoena on businessman Bobby Ferguson, another childhood friend and convicted felon who was awarded some $170 million in city contracts during Kilpatrick’s tenure.
Bing, at 65, will be sworn in as Detroit’s oldest mayor, and the first political neophyte to hold the job in nearly 120 years. While he will hold the office through the end of the year, he faces an August primary and November general election to claim his own full 4-year term.
A native of Washington, D.C., and high school dropout who dreamed of professional sports greatness while playing basketball with childhood friend – and later Motown musical legend – Marvin Gaye, Bing moved to Detroit as the 1966 NBA draft’s No. 2 pick, and was a Piston for nine seasons.
After moonlighting as a bank manager trainee and in a steel company PR job, he started his own business in 1980, first as Bing Steel and later expanded as the Bing Group, an auto parts manufacturer with reported annual revenues of as much as $300 million. He also has interests in money management and construction.
Although long active in Detroit civic affairs, Bing resisted calls for a mayoral candidacy until his successful run this year. Attacked as an outsider – he moved into the city from his suburban home to run for office – and forced to admit that he falsely claimed to hold a master’s in business administration from Syracuse University, Bing edged out Cockrel, who as city council president had assumed the mayor’s office after Kilpatrick’s resignation.
He’s pledged to take a businessman’s approach to governing one of the country’s most impoverished, crime-ridden, and corrupt cities, and has just three months to prove his effectiveness before having once again to face the voters, however few, in August.
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Can Warren Hellman save the San Francisco Chronicle?May 12, 2009 at 11:04am
Billionaire financier F. Warren Hellman is already beloved in his native San Francisco for underwriting an eccentric annual music festival called Hardlly Strictly Bluegrass.
But if the California mogul can figure out how to save another bit of endangered Americana, the community newspaper, he will surely be regarded as a national, as well as a local […]Judge rejects hardship plea from ex-Detroit mayor
Convicted felon and former Detroit mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick today lost a hardship bid to reduce $6,000 in monthly restitution payments to the city for his crimes.
As part of a plea deal last year to end criminal prosecution in a sex and obstruction-of-justice scandal, the ex-mayor agreed to repay Detroit taxpayers $1 million, resign his office, serve four months in jail, forfeit his law license and refrain from running for elected office for five years.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)After his release from jail, Kilpatrick moved his family to a Dallas suburb where he lives in a 2,800-square-foot home, drives a Cadillac Escalade, and earns a base salary of more than $100,000 with income potential of as much as $360,000 a year as a software salesman for Covisint, a subsidiary of Detroit-based Compuware Corp.
Chairman and CEO Peter Karmanos, who moved Compuware headquarters to downtown Detroit in a political deal with Kilpatrick, said when he hired the confessed perjurer that he is “on a short leash,” and will be fired if an ongoing federal investigation of corruption in Detroit leads to new charges against him.
Kilpatrick claimed hardship in the terms of his restitution, saying that after all monthly living expenses, only $6 remained to repay the city.
Wayne County Circuit Judge David Groner, who had ordered those terms as part of Kilpatrick’s plea deal, said Kilpatrick will have to reconsider the “lifestyle in which he has grown accustomed.”
“In other words,” Groner ruled, the ex-mayor “may not be able to sustain an upper-middle-class existence while he still owes a debt to society and a substantial financial debt to the citizens of Detroit.”
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Dave Bing, political neophyte, will be Detroit’s oldest mayorMay 10, 2009 at 12:42pm
When pro basketball hall-of-famer Dave Bing was elected May 5 as Detroit’s third mayor in less than a year, a voter turnout of just 14 percent showed they’d prefer a duke to an emperor, and age to outrage.
Feinberg and Cerberus: out of the frying pan
What’s in a name? Ask the folks at Cerberus Capital Management, named for the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell.
Managers of the private equity firm like to stay out of the limelight, an impossibility given Cerberus’ ownership of Chrysler.
As Reuters noted yesterday, Cerberus co-founder Stephen Feinberg is in the untenable position of seeking government funds to rescue a privately held company:
Feinberg – a frequent contributor to Republican coffers — seems content to let fellow executives John Snow, a former treasury secretary in the current Bush administration, and Dan Quayle, who was vice president under former president George H. W. Bush, be the famous names at his company.
Snow’s title is chairman of Cerberus Capital Management. Quayle is chairman of Cerberus Global Investments.
It has been Snow who has been the public face of the Chrysler deal. Snow talked in a press release at the time of the deal about the “inherent strength of U.S. manufacturing and of the U.S. auto industry” – a judgment called into question by the current economic crisis.
Cerberus has pledged that federal assistance would be used to shore up Chrysler, and would not flow back to the investment company.
Chrysler chief Bob Nardelli told a Senate committee Tuesday that Cerberus “has made it clear that it will forgo any benefit from the upside that would, in part, be created from any government assistance that Chrysler LLC may obtain.”
Although Republicans have vociferously opposed a bailout for the automakers, Feinberg is a generous supporter of the GOP. Earlier this year, he gave $28,500 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
When Cerberus bought Chrysler in 2007, Feinberg was hailed as a man who might save Detroit. In retrospect, the task seems as impossible as Katie Couric saving network news.
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FDR knew networksJuly 29, 2010 at 8:03am
A 75-year-old document released Wednesday by the National Archives highlights Franklin Roosevelt’s keen understanding of network dynamics.
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