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Posted Apr 10, 2017, 2:07 AM
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Registered User
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Join Date: May 2012
Location: Metropolitan Detroit
Posts: 712
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Really great news despite the reputation the Flint River has gained from the water crisis it's water would have been safe to drink if it had been treated with corrosion resisting chemicals so while many wouldn't think that recreation along its banks and in it would be possible let alone enjoyable that's not the case. However that's just the river water of today and because Flint is the first major city along its course i have lingering worries about its sediment especially downstream of Flint in the Tri-Cities area where Dow Chemical wreaked havoc on the Saginaw River watershed up till the clean water act era.
But this should have an amazing effect on Downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods such as the U of M Flint campus area.
Quote:
Flint River Restoration Project will remove dams, boost recreation by 2018
Crain's Detroit Business
By TOM HENDERSON
4-9-2017
It's been a cliché of journalism teachers for years: dog bites man isn't news. Man bites dog is.
The end of the Hamilton Dam is the ultimate man bites dog story — a story about the Flint River that is all good news. It isn't the dog-bites-man story long associated with the river of the leaching of lead, of corrosive water, of scandal, of indictments and of state control gone horribly wrong.
It will be the man-bites-dog Flint River story of kayakers and tubers floating downstream as what is actually a relatively clean body of water meanders to the Saginaw Bay, of fishermen and women casting their lines for fish, of students at the nearby University of Michigan-Flint catching some sun on the grassy banks on a spring day as they kill time between classes.
The Flint Riverfront Restoration Project is a $37 million effort to replace a crumbling, long-dangerous dam and surround it with 80 acres of parks, people-friendly access to the water and three miles of hiking and biking trails along a 1.5-mile stretch of river. The latest funding approval for the project occurred on March 10, when the Department of Natural Resources' Grant Management Program approved a $3 million grant.
The project has had broad support from other nonprofit and government funding sources, including $7.6 million from the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund; $5 million from the Flint-based C.S. Mott Foundation; $5 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation; $4.3 million from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources; $3.5 million from the state's Department of Environmental Quality; and $1.4 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Consumers Energy is also doing some remediation on land it used to own along the river that is now part of the UM-Flint campus.
The 200-foot-wide Hamilton Dam is in the middle of UM-Flint's campus, on the north edge of downtown. Built in 1920, it once also served as a pedestrian bridge, but pedestrians have been blocked by a locked gate for years because of the bridge's deterioration.
The dam has long been rated as unsatisfactory by state inspectors, the lowest ranking given. It is also classified as a high-hazard dam, meaning there's a chance of fatalities and significant impact on infrastructure downriver, including destruction to buildings downtown and widespread flooding in the city, if the dam were to fail.
....
According to Amy McMillan, director of the Genesee County Parks and Recreation Commission, talk of demolishing the dam had gone on for years but languished for lack of funding.
"One of the most important parts of the story of how the project was essentially revived by the Flint River Corridor Alliance and the Flint River Watershed Coalition in 2015 was when they were awarded the grant from the Hagerman Foundation to initiate the preliminary engineering and design for the project," she said.
Momentum gathered quickly after that $200,000 grant.
The restoration project will also take down a small dam called the Fabri Dam just downriver from the Hamilton that was built in 1979, remove walls along the river bank near the Hamilton and, to make the river more kayakable, lower some falls upriver that were exposed when the river was lowered to reduce pressure on the Hamilton Dam.
The two dams are the last on the way to Saginaw Bay.
McMillan said the project is in the final stages of design and the permitting process to get the dam removed is underway. She said plans are to have the dam removed by November and for the entire project to be done by the end of 2018.
The dams' removal is expected to have a significant beneficial effect on fish populations, according to DNR fisheries managers, particularly on fish that live in lakes but swim upriver to spawn, including walleye but also lake sturgeon and white suckers.
....
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...-recreation-by
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Quote:
New incubator in historic building aims to transform Flint
Crain's Detroit Business
By TOM HENDERSON
4-9-2017
Phil Hagerman helped transform a corner drug store into a $4.4 billion company. To create a headquarters for the company, he transformed one of automotive history's most significant sites. Now, inspired by the change he has seen in downtown Detroit, he wants to transform downtown Flint.
Hagerman and his father, Dale, founded Diplomat Pharmacy (NYSE: DPLO) in 1975. Today, the company supplies rare and expensive drugs and support services to patients with cancer and immunological disorders in every state in the country and employs about 3,000 in 17 facilities in 14 states, including 1,200 at its Genesee County headquarters a few miles south of downtown Flint.
Diplomat, which went public in 2014, has grown both organically and through acquisitions. In 2005, it had revenue of just $30 million, and by 2015 it had grown revenue to $2.2 billion. In 2016, it doubled that at $4.4 billion.
In 2009, Diplomat bought a sprawling, 583,000-square-foot former General Motors Technology Centre at auction and moved 200 employees in the next year, with plans to grow headcount quickly.
The move brought back to life one of the most famous sites in automotive history: At 8 p.m. on Dec. 30, 1936, autoworkers began a sit-down strike there at GM's Fisher Body Plant Number One, which after 44 days led to the recognition of the United Auto Workers.
Hagerman wants to bring the same approach to downtown Flint — to fix up buildings abandoned by failing companies, invest in early-stage companies that want to call Genesee County home and establish a business incubator whose tenants can capitalize on creative partnerships with for-profit companies, nonprofits and area universities.
Ferris Wheel
For the last 30 years, the only tenants of the historic Ferris Building have been pigeons. A seven-story art deco icon built in 1930, the Ferris Building originally housed the Gainey Furniture Co. and got its current name when the Ferris Brothers Fur Co. moved in a few years later. Today, the building is undergoing a $7.5 million renovation and will be home to a business incubator called the Ferris Wheel Innovation Center.
Anyone will be welcome to walk in off the street with an idea for a business and get the idea vetted, in part by a team of part-time students in a wide range of disciplines from the University of Michigan, the University of Michigan-Flint, Oakland University, Kettering University and the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
If the idea warrants further development, the incubator will help create a business plan, offer marketing, design, prototyping and small-batch runs and low-cost ancillary services such as legal and accounting. As businesses evolve, the center will help raise seed funding and later rounds of equity capital.
The incubator will also host regular business-plan competitions, boot camps and demo days for startups to strut their stuff.
The state of Michigan is on board, too. On March 28, the Michigan Strategic Fund approved grants totaling $2.5 million for Hagerman's projects, including $1.5 million for the Ferris Wheel.
"This is a creative, ambitious swing for the fences that is one of the most interesting ideas for startup companies that we've seen in Michigan. If you think about all the elements that make for a successful startup, it's tough, particularly tough outside a university setting," said Chris Rizik, CEO and fund manager of Ann Arbor-based Renaissance Venture Capital Fund, which is affiliated with Business Leaders for Michigan.
"The thought of bringing all that together in a single place? We haven't seen it done anywhere else. It's exciting. In my opinion, it's doing God's work."
The Hagermans renovated the Dryden Building for $6.8 million. Now it's the offices of SkyPoint Ventures LLC, the Hagermans' venture capital and real estate development firm.
Hagerman credits Dan Gilbert and his efforts in Detroit for inspiring him to invest in Flint's transformation. Gilbert has bought and rehabbed long-empty office buildings, made the Madison Building a home and showcase for early-stage tech companies and co-founded Detroit Venture Partners, a venture capital firm.
"I've been incredibly inspired by what Dan has done. His taking Quicken downtown when everyone else was going in the other direction was inspiring," said Hagerman.
Members of his SkyPoint team have made several trips to downtown Detroit to meet with various members of Gilbert's team.
"When we started buying buildings in Flint, Gilbert had already gotten traction in Detroit. We wanted to bring credibility to downtown Flint. We knew we had to make a splash, that we had to put significant money in to make a difference," said Hagerman, who spent $6.8 million to buy and renovate the historic Dryden Building next door to the Ferris Building. The Dryden Building had been vacant for 20 years; Hagerman's wife, Jocelyn, managed the renovation, which was finished in 2015.
Dryden is home to the Hagerman Foundation; SkyPoint Ventures LLC; and Flint Ferris Building LLC. Located at the corner of Second Street and Saginaw, it was built in 1902 and at one time housed offices for the Durant-Dort Carriage Co., one of the Flint companies that at the turn of the 20th century morphed into the General Motors Corp.
It also was home to one of the earliest J.C. Penney stores in the country.
Hagerman's team didn't just look to Detroit for inspiration. It also flew to, among other places, Chicago, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh to visit incubators and tech centers there. The vision that evolved for Hagerman was to form a for-profit venture-capital arm to buy real estate and invest in early-stage companies, to form a nonprofit foundation and to create a full-service incubator and co-working space.
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...NEWS/170409865
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Here is a link and a blerb about the Crain's special on the current happenings in Flint there are many links on the page itself to other projects currently going on in downtown and across the city and metropolitan area.
Quote:
Special report: The revitalization of Flint
Crain's Detroit Business
By TOM HENDERSON
4-9-2017
The Capitol Theatre in downtown Flint opened in 1928 as a vaudeville house and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. It showed its last movie in 1976 and stopped holding concerts in 1996. But if things go according to plan, it will be back up and running this fall in all its original glory.
It may come as a surprise to those who only know Flint through its water crisis or old Michael Moore documentaries that its downtown is bustling these days. At the heart of much of the development are Diplomat Pharmacy's Phil Hagerman and his wife, Jocelyn, whose foundation and investments are revitalizing the city and Genesee County.
This month's Crain's Michigan Business section focuses on the many ways the Hagermans are transforming the city, from renovating historic buildings to investing in startup companies that want to call Genesee County home:
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...ation-of-flint
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