Water World

How a $26-billion plan to revitalize Michigan and the Great Lakes ‘Freshwater Coast’ could lead to $100 billion in economic development

By Tom Beaman

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Photograph by Ed Wargin

Whenever it rains more than 2 inches in Bay County, Mich., sewer systems in the area often release combined sewer overflows, a mix of wastewater and storm water, into nearby rivers and streams. Combined sewer overflows serve as a safety valve to prevent untreated wastewater from backing up into homes, flooding streets, or bursting underground pipes when its volume exceeds the capacity of the sewer system. Soon, thousands of gallons of untreated wastewater are rushing their way toward the Saginaw Bay, along with phosphorous and other nutrient-rich agricultural byproducts from the 22 counties that make up the Saginaw Bay watershed. This concoction stews in the shallow bay, where algae bloom, die, and are blown up along the shoreline to form what locals call “beach muck.”

“As you get closer to the water, you start to smell an odor; then if you step into the water, you might sink up to your knees in the muck,” says Ernie Krygier, Bay County commissioner and president of the advocacy group Save Our Shoreline. “It’s not just dead plant life; there’s E. coli in it.”
Beach muck is just one of the issues, along with jobs, education, and transportation, that must be addressed before the full potential of the regional renewal and revitalization concept called the Freshwater Coast can be realized. The Freshwater Coast (also called the North Coast) extends from Minnesota to New York — anywhere the land touches a Great Lakes shoreline. Backers of the concept, like John Austin, vice president of the Michigan Department of Education and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., say that Detroit, the state of Michigan, and the entire Great Lakes region have as many or more natural and intellectual resources and, therefore, more economic potential, than the country’s other coasts, and that we should leverage those strengths to revive our sagging economies.

Austin has emerged as a prominent voice in support of reinventing the Rust Belt as a vibrant fourth U.S. coastline. His name appears on many Brookings Institution reports about the economic potential of the Great Lakes, including the 2007 report “The Vital Center — A Federal-State Compact to Renew the Great Lakes Region,” which “… remains a vital part of the U.S. economy and possesses many assets that, if leveraged, can help it be a major contributor to the knowledge economy.”

There’s good reason why the West Coast and the Gulf Coast and the East Coast are thriving economically, Austin says. “In part, it’s because people want to live and work and be near the coast. Particularly for well-educated people or knowledge workers, it’s very important to be near natural amenities, from looking out your office window over the Detroit River or the Chicago River to having the chance to take out your sailboat or your kayak. We have a unique economic opportunity [in that] Michigan and its sister states and provinces are located on a … coastline that makes us an attractive place to live and work.”

Austin says it’s not just a matter of lakes and beaches and sand dunes. “We’re a leading research and knowledge-creation center, we have world-leading research universities, and we have large corporations that do their R&D work here. We have an incredible opportunity to be a center of education and learning.” Indeed, according to the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Great Lakes region is home to 19 of the world’s 100 top-ranked universities. Brookings research shows that the region accounts for 29 percent of the nation’s total public and private research and development, and nearly one-third of the country’s new intellectual property in the form of patents.

The perception and reality of Michigan as a beat-up industrial state with hulking factories and obsolete mills on its waterfront — that’s real,” Austin says. “So part of what we’ve got to do is tear down or remake our waterfronts to be open for people to develop new offices and residences, and that’s beginning to happen on the Detroit riverfront. It should’ve happened 20 or 30 years ago.”

Sarah Hubbard, vice president of government relations at the Detroit Regional Chamber, thinks we need to market the Great Lakes region to the world as a destination, similar to what the Pacific Northwest and the South do for their regions. “The Great Lakes have unique assets that should be considered when companies are looking for a place to do business,” she says. “[We have] lakes, access to fresh water, the border with Canada, infrastructure, [and] the crossroads of the NAFTA corridor going from Canada to Mexico. Most of that trade comes right through Michigan. Michigan is also known as a melting pot for high-skilled immigrant labor, very talented people who come here and work in the knowledge industry.”

This thinking isn’t lost on the business and political leaders consumed with trying to figure out how to recast their region as a post-industrial economy. In February 2008, just months after Austin published “The Vital Center,” the Summit of Midwestern Chambers of Commerce convened at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, bringing together 45 CEOs and staff from 30 metropolitan chambers of commerce and municipal leagues in the Great Lakes region. Led by a core of chambers from Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, and Pittsburgh, the group established priorities relating to transportation; border security; immigration; research, development, innovation; and the creation and preservation of clean water resources.

“Out of that meeting in February came an agreement that we would take these priority areas back to our individual communities, that we would make them business priorities, and that we would … begin a dialogue with those running for public office in the fall on the importance of these areas,” says Ed Wolking, executive vice president of the Detroit Regional Chamber and president of the Great Lakes Manufacturing Council. “It’s our chance to get focus and commitment to delivery in these five areas.”

That last priority focuses attention back on beach muck, PCBs, dioxins, and the entire nasty cast of pollutants that must be cleaned up before the Freshwater Coast can reach its full potential as a magnet for new businesses and residents. Some progress has already been made. “We’ve been very active in policies related to the environment in the basin,” says George Kuper, president and CEO of the Council of Great Lakes Industries, which represents around 40 Canadian and U.S. companies with significant operations in the Great Lakes basin. “We’ve been very active in cleaning up some of our past behaviors, voluntarily removing some toxins from the basin. [But] we’re woefully behind in cleaning up our sewer infrastructure, [and] every time it rains, we have a problem on our beaches.”