For region on rise, roads a downfall
Amid economic boom in Mich., crumbling roads, leaking sewers plague local officials
FRASER, Mich. — Warnings begin as soon as you arrive. Beware of the potholes.
They’re everywhere in this Michigan city near Detroit, rattling travelers’ teeth and popping tires, making for a lunar-like obstacle course.
“It’s out of control,” said Todd Faulkner, 45, who runs a lawn fertilizer business.
The problem is not just above ground. Faulkner and his family were evacuated on Christmas Eve 2016 after a giant sinkhole swallowed one neighbor’s house and forced another to be demolished. Then the Faulkners suffered through months of foul odors as crews repaired aging sewer mains. Nearby beaches on Lake St. Claire closed for weeks over the summer because of fecal contamination from overflowing sewers.
Such decay is one reason President Donald Trump found such a receptive audience here and in other industrial cities in the Midwest when he described aging airports, lead-tainted water systems and crumbling roads and bridges as evidence of a country that had lost its way, thanks to feckless leaders of both parties who’d neglected the basics. The celebrity businessman was the one to fix things, he boasted.
Here in middle-class Macomb County, where more than half of the 1,500 lanes of road are deemed in poor condition, local business and political leaders say fixing the infrastructure is also essential to fulfilling another Trump vow: restoring the country’s manufacturing base. An industrial renaissance is brewing here, they say, with billions of dollars in investment and thousands of new jobs, but the roads needed to test self-driving cars and carry workers and heavy trucks are falling apart.
Trump’s failure to gain traction on the infrastructure issue has not received the same attention as last year’s health care failure. Yet falling short could have broad consequences in undercutting his economic vision.
“We have a situation in this country and in this town, and one way or another we’ll have to address it,” said Mike Brzoska, president of Chardam Gear Co., which builds gears and assemblies for the aerospace industry.
Brzoska voted for Trump, despite his concerns over global warming, hoping that an experienced businessman could fight for fairer trade and better fiscal policies. His plant is the type of business Trump loves to promote.
Brzoska doubled his workforce to 135 over the last decade and takes pride in the salaries and health benefits he gives to his employees, who stood with him during a past downturn. He is excited to show off the expanding factory floor, full of the skilled workers needed to cut precise teeth in the cylinders or shave just enough heavy metal off a part to meet specifications.
He is less eager to show off the eight-lane highway, Mound Road, which leads to his plant.
“I don’t want to break your neck,” he says before opening the door to his Jeep. The passenger window has a big crack left by road debris Brzoska encountered recently.
Then begins a tour full of swerves, bumps and sudden stops. Asphalt crews are everywhere, spreading temporary fill into holes as fast as they can in a sort of never-ending whack-amole game. Brzoska points out the old rebar jutting from the crumbling road and the cracks between holes.
“What do you do with this?” he says at a familiar ditch. “This has been patched two weeks ago.”
From the decrepit road, the signs of economic development are all around — factories, parking lots full of workers’ cars and warehouses for some of the world’s biggest manufacturers. According to county data, the Big Three automakers have invested $10.3 billion in factories along Mound Road since 2010, after the recession-era bailout of President Barack Obama’s first year. General Motors is testing its selfdriving car in one, FiatChrysler plans to begin assembling Dodge Ram 1500 trucks in another.
Brzoska passes a massive Frito-Lay distribution center, a robotics plant for the German company KUKA, a General Dynamics campus and more. Commerce parks and engineering firms feed off this economic ecosystem.
It all slows down, however, when the heavy trucks and the commuters hit the road.
Hours before Brzoska’s wild drive, the county executive, Mark Hackel, kicked off the latest effort to fix at least part of Mound Road, a $10 million plan that’s considered a stopgap.
Local officials and businesses have proposed a more ambitious plan that depends on nearly $200 million from the federal government to revive 12 miles of crumbling corridor that connects with Detroit, which Brzoska hopes will link with that city’s own rebound. It’s the type of investment Trump encourages — public investment with tangible private-sector benefits.
This is a crucial location for Trump to make good on his talk. Macomb County remains famous politically as the home of the “Reagan Democrats” — blue-collar union members, traditionally Democratic, who became swing voters, leaning Republican in presidential contests. Trump’s ability to win the county, which supported Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, and others like it, was essential to his surprise Electoral College victory.
Policy experts, however, say Trump’s multi-year, $200 billion infrastructure plan, unveiled last month, falls far short of what’s needed for Macomb County and the rest of the nation. The president’s figure is a fraction of the $1 trillion in direct spending he promised during and after his campaign, and would not come close to producing, as he claims, a total of $1.5 trillion by attracting investors for public-private partnerships.
Trump’s budget proposal, released in February along with the infrastructure outline, would eliminate many of the popular grant programs that counties like Macomb were depending on. Among them is the TIGER grant, a popular initiative of the Obama-era economic stimulus program that the county looked to for a major portion of the cost of the Mound Road rebuilding. While Congress is unlikely to approve such cuts, Trump’s proposals have flummoxed local officials who have been traveling to Washington to lobby.
“It’s confusing,” said Hackel, the Macomb County executive and a Democrat. “We’re trying to figure out what we are chasing. It’s a moving target.”