On a snowy, early December evening, dozens of KI Sawyer residents and supporters met at the Tailwinds restaurant to discuss how to solve some of Sawyer’s problems. The Sawyer Community Alliance, spearheaded by outgoing county commissioner Bob Struck, holds monthly meetings, open to the public, where members have voiced a number of concerns, such as a lack of adequate public transportation, preservation of vacant buildings from vandalism and scrap metal recyclers, and the need for small businesses that serve the community, like a gas station and grocery store.
Sawyer has come a long way in the fifteen years since a US Air Force base closed at the site. According to county planner, Eric Anderson, it wasn’t long ago that Sawyer lacked even speed limits, let alone a gas station.
“Because it was federal property, they couldn’t have a speed limit,” said Anderson. “It was like a huge Kmart parking lot – they could ticket you for reckless driving, but not for speeding.”
The Air Force left Sawyer in 1995, leaving an infrastructure in place that a number of large and small businesses have occupied since, taking advantage of generous county tax subsidies. However, many buildings, most notably in the residential districts at Sawyer, remain vacant and are routinely vandalized. The community fitness center, called the “W”, is the most controversial of these empty buildings.
Closed in Spring 2009, after being open for more than a decade – the Air Force finished building it shortly before leaving town – it was only by chance that local residents learned about West Branch Township’s now controversial plan to auction the building and gut it for scrap. Dale Throenle, a Munising teacher and Sawyer resident, happened to be at an auction in Manistique when the auctioneer announced he would be in Throenle’s neighborhood for an auction soon.
“I asked him ‘what for’,” Throenle explained. “When he said ‘to sell the W,’ I almost fell over.”
Since then a grassroots citizen group, Community Hand-UP, has been in high gear, working to save the building and eventually reopen it for public use. The group, along with the Marquette County Board of Commissioners and Forsyth Township, recently convinced West Branch to postpone the auction until March.
Lisa Johnson is a key member of Community Hand-UP, a citizen group working to protect and reopen the KI Sawyer community center
Lisa Johnson, a well-spoken and seemingly tireless educator at Marquette General Hospital, has taken a lead role at Community Hand-UP. Johnson, a lifelong Sawyer and West Branch resident, says she wants to see the community center re-opened for the benefit of the whole community, which she sees as focused on Marquette, Alger and Delta counties, where most former members live.
“I’m not looking at the short-term, I’m looking at the long-term, and I want this facility here for a long time,” Johnson says. “We would never be able to replicate that kind of facility or even have that kind of facility in our remote areas,” said Johnson.
Johnson is particularly concerned with elderly inactivity and rising levels of obesity in school-age children who have little to do outside of the classroom since the community center closed. According to a report published this year by the Michigan Department of Community Health, obesity is endemic to the area; already 77% of Marquette County’s adult population is either overweight or obese, the second highest rate in Michigan.
“I’ve had more than one parent, but one parent particularly said, ‘you know, my daughter has gained twenty pounds since that facility closed’,” said Johnson. “Twenty pounds on a kid is a lot of weight.”
Hand-UP’s efforts to reopen the community center have been supported by a number of health and education organizations in the area. The group has obtained support letters from the UP Diabetes Outreach Network, the Marquette County Health Department, the NMU Student Nurses’ Association, and the Central Upper Peninsula Red Cross.
Forsyth Township Police Chief Tim Rector sees the community center’s impact from a different angle. His department is already hard-pressed to serve a 200 square mile area, and 7,000 residents, with only six officers, including himself. There’s been at least a 25% increase in calls to Forsyth police since last year, and some of it is related to petty juvenile crime at Sawyer.
“It’s gone up,” Rector says of crime at Sawyer. “Instead of the kids up at the W playing basketball, you see a lot of them standing on the corner looking for trouble. The kids don’t have anything to do, so they find something to do”
Rector thinks many of the problems are related to the low-income nature of the area, as well as absentee landowner neglect. According to Rector, some landlords live out-of-state and fail to maintain their rental units, often scrapping them for metal and leaving empty buildings that are attractive to vandals. This, Rector says, creates eyesores and affects the legitimate businesses of local landowners that need the income.
“There’s a handful of bad landlords out there,” Rector says. “Some of them don’t seem to care if they rent the buildings or even get paid rent; it’s just a tax write-off for them. They put a bad rap on landowners that live there.”
Rector thinks gutting the community center would only make the situation worse. “That’ll devastate that building,” says Rector. “It’ll never come back.”
Right now, the decision to gut the building rests with West Branch, which owns the building. West Branch has invested about $100,000 of $300,000 in federal funds, obtained when the Air Force left, in maintaining the building. Selling the community center for scrap would only get the township about half of the $200,000 it still owes on its loan. Demolishing the building, in order to avoid paying ongoing insurance and maintenance fees for a vacant building, would cost about $500,000. Whatever it chooses to do the township would lose money on the deal.
“There’s no logic, no business sense to that whole piece of it,” says Lisa Johnson.
Young girls playing basketball at the "W" fitness center, before it closed in Spring 2009; Photo courtesy Lisa Johnson
Which introduces a critical issue to saving the community center: even with all the local support, the facility will remain closed until a business agreement can be reached with Marquette County to create a recreational authority, buy or lease the building, or Hand-UP can raise funds necessary to make the building more energy efficient.
Helped by Senator Debbie Stabenow and Representative Bart Stupak, the community center may get $650,000 in federal funding to revamp the heating system and pool. The funding has been approved by the Senate, but sits in committee in the House. With these modifications, the community center would save about $80,000 in annual energy costs, meaning the facility could cost about $320,000 a year to operate. Johnson sees this federal funding as critical to reopening the community center.
With membership fees in the past contributing $190,000 and support from businesses and organizations pulling in $50,000 annually, Hand-UP will need to find a way to come up with the additional $80,000 to run the community center every year. Johnson sees company sponsorship and support as a possibility for closing the gap, if they can obtain it.
While Hand-UP and Sawyer Community Alliance members have ideas ranging from asking Cliffs Natural Resources to provide free or inexpensive electricity from its wood-fired power plant (right next door to the community center) to funding the facility with 1% of Sawyer-based company profits, there seems to be a general frustration that companies benefiting from the county’s largesse aren’t giving back to the community.
Forsyth Township Supervisor Joe Minelli thinks that large companies in the area, while creating jobs, aren’t doing enough to actively promote community betterment. “The money that we give them and save them on this tax free zone that they’ve had for fifteen years, the money they’re giving us is such a small amount,” said Minelli.
Chief Rector says the county’s KI Sawyer Renaissance Zone allows companies to build and operate at Sawyer tax-free, yet Forsyth Township still has to provide police, ambulance, fire and other services to these companies. Starting in 2000, businesses located within the zone are exempted from state and local taxes through 2015. Cliffs, which operates two iron mines in the county, was granted a nine-year extension beyond that date, allowing the company to avoid paying state and local taxes on its Renewafuel 6-acre industrial site until 2024.
One Sawyer Community Alliance member suggested that big companies like Cliffs, which posted record third quarter profits recently, “can afford it if they want to” and would benefit from the publicity of helping the Sawyer community.
Headwaters editor Teresa Bertossi draws winning tickets at Community Hand-UP's December 13 raffle
Despite obstacles, with strong public support and hard work Community Hand-UP may be on its way to reopening the community center. For Johnson saving it from the wrecking ball is essential to the future well being of not only Sawyer, but also the entire “tri-county area” that it recently served.
“To take that kind of resource that we have in our community, we will never ever get it back,” says Johnson. “If we let it become a dilapidated building, we will never ever have that opportunity again. . . I think it would be a shame to not put every effort forward to make sure that it stays a viable resource.”
This post was written by
Gabriel Caplett – who has written 106 posts on Headwaters - Community Journalism for the Great Lakes.
Gabriel Caplett is a writer and market farmer from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
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When the “W” was open, I was the Director of the Learning Center and Library. We had a room for the children, where parents could go sit and read to their kids, or watch one of our many movies on the tv. They could relax and read a book in our “Ambiance Area” by the fireplace. A lot of the people at Sawyer don’t have computers or the internet, so they used ours to check in with family or apply for a job. we had an amazing supply of great books! We used to rent out the Great Room for birthday parties, sometimes 2 or 3 a weekend! When we had summer programs, the “W” was packed with kids, giving them a place to go every day, to play games, see friends and learn. I had my Cards for Troops projects there also. We had “Make A Difference Day” activities where we gathered and packed goody boxes for our Troops and had days where the kids would go into the library and make cards for them. Our pool and exercise classes helped people who had health problems, some it helped them to be able to function much better. Our track, my favorite place besides the library, meant a lot to me. I began walking there the week after our 13 year old granddaughter died. It helped me get through those rough days, which may sound silly to some people, but there I could walk and think, in a warm and safe place. Our gym was amazing! Please help us get this great place open again. K.I. Sawyer is a wonderful place to live. I feel safe, as we do have respectable, kind, hard working people who call this place home. The “W” needs to be open for the children to have a safe and fun place to be. Please don’t tear down our building, build it up!
I’m sure if our community could afford this it would still be open. on that note it should have never opened in the first place as the township had no way of funding it. it was a great idea and a few people saw that and approved it but with no concern on how it would be paid….. 200-400,000 for a small community is well too much as it was proved to be
I served as West Branch Township Treasurer for 3 years from 2004 to 2007 and saw our township’s fund balance decline from almost $500,000 to less than $40,000 during that time frame as a direct result of this facility. The township still owes more than $200,000 for a roof loan and a day care facility that operated for about a year before closing down. This is money that’s owed on a building that is continuing to decay – just look at the sides of the building that are falling off. It was very sad to see this facility destroy the finances of a formerly fiscally sound township. It was fiscal insanity at its finest!!! It was a fantastic facility, but just way too much for a small rural township to handle. I recall utility bills in excess of $8,000 per month for gas and $8,000 per month for electricity. If anyone decides to re-open this facility they should plan on having an extra $500,000 on hand just to make it through the first 3 years of operations.
WB Twp had an ‘abundant’ cash flow from Sawyer while it was there, with no obligation to provide any services or support (as many of the surrounding twps).
Once Sawyer moved out of course the flow stopped. However, the spending didn’t change. In the time since Sawyer funds no longer supported the WB Twp some important Twp improvements:
- WB continued to almost completely support the Transfer station (almost free garbage/transfer facility). In the past couple years they finally up’d the rate this year to cover more of the cost of them operating the transfer facility. Until this point WB Twp residents paid about $30/yr, then recently about $50/yr, and now $85/yr for garbage (many other twps pay this much per month); WB Twp covered the rest of the cost of that which is approximately $100/yr per household (that’s an average of about $50 times about 800 households or $40,000 every year supported by WB Twp)
- WB bought a new fire truck – that bill was about $130,000 (split between Skandia and WB/ joint operations) so about $60-65,000 from WB
- WB put about $100,000 into cemetary improvements (backhoe/tractor, polebarn, turf, paved driveway, flag pole, light, ‘rock’) (I don’t have the actual dollar amount but this is what I’m told from individuals invovled in that project)
- Road improvements to 545 and Krieger (I don’t have the dollar amount)
- WB Twp does have an outstanding loan of just under $200,000 for replacement of the roof on the ‘W’ building
- While the township was operating the facility they contributed about $150,000 in support of operations. No where near the $500,000 stated as ‘destroyed the finances’ of the township. They have paid about $40,000 toward the roof repair loan, making the amount they’ve contributed about $200,000.
*Let me be clear – I have always said I believe WB Twp is too small a township to have taken on the responsibility of operating a facility like this. However, there is no reason they should have been against someone running it for them and making the most of it being their asset.
We have never asked WB Twp to support our efforts financially. We have only asked that they allow us to move forward with our efforts and support us with access to the building. When that has not been successful, we have requested the support of Marquette County by asking that they purchase the building (helps WB out by giving them a dollar amount, probably grreater than what they’ll get at auction, removes them from building liability, keeps the building avaiable to the community, and fgives us more opportunity to obtain other funding sources). We also have not asked Marquette County for support other than initial purchase and even propose that by year 5 we would be able to start paying them for that investment.
Our business plan and budget projections have been reviewed by two well respected business development groups and they feel we have been very thorough in our assessment and planning. We do NOT plan to operate ‘business as usual’ and just hope it’s successful. We have a well layed out plan for operations and building memberships, programs, and community partners. We just need the opportunity to show that in our county our community efforts can work together to help themselves.