By By JOHN EBY / Niles Daily Star
DOWAGIAC – State Rep. Neal Nitz got an earful about gas prices in Dowagiac Saturday morning.
Although other issues concern his Cass County constituents, from Gov. Jennifer Granholm's budget proposal and the vanishing middle class to landfills and education, fuel pump fluctuation frustrates many.
"Gas went up (to $2.35)," a city man told Nitz, R-Baroda. "We're the highest in southwest Michigan, always, in Dowagiac and no one will look into it. We have four stations and they're all the same price. Supposedly, it takes six months to get a barrel of crude into a finished product, so why if a barrel goes up today, the price at the pump goes up in an hour? They're robbing us."
"Do they have an e-mail by which they talk to each other?" to keep prices identical, a woman added. "Yet Exxon is reporting incredible profits. Why is the gas price going up?"
"We hadn't ought to patronize them for a week and see what happens," another woman suggested.
That wouldn't work, the man replied, "because you have to commute 100 miles a day to work in St. Joseph, South Bend or Mishawaka or Elkhart because there are no jobs here. Michigan doesn't have any jobs. We relied on the auto industry way, way too long."
Whirlpool "doesn't have any production in Benton Harbor anymore. They make some parts." Hyandai, the Korean car brand, is made in Birmingham, Ala., while Ford police cars come from overseas. It was also pointed out not only did Daimler Benz of Germany acquire Chrysler after the government bailed it out, but it also controls the trucking industry.
"Corn's going to save our butts when we go to ethanol," the man said. "That's not going to work because it gets 27 percent less mileage, but the oil companies are buying corn and storing it. They'll even sell it at a loss because that comes off their bottom line."
Nitz said ethanol serves as a replacement for an additive outlawed by Michigan and California, among other states. "Right now, corn is $3.50 to $4 a bushel," the Berrien County farmer said. "There's a plant going up in Watervliet. Currently, there are five in Michigan that are producing or are close to producing" ethanol. "Two or three others are being planned. Each produces about 50 million gallons, so we should be at 250 million gallons in Michigan. As more and more plants come on line across the nation, supplies will get better and prices at the pump will start coming down on ethanol."
Each plant also represents 40 to 50 jobs, Nitz stated.
Nitz said Michigan has two biodiesel plants operating – one in Bangor, neighboring Van Buren County, with soybeans – and in the Upper Peninsula. The one in the U.P. uses beef tallow and restaurant grease.
Nitz said one of his staff members in Lansing is from Illinois. His parents live on the west side of the state on the Mississippi River.
"Illinois has 100 to 150 gas stations that sell this E-85 gas. The price is usually 40 to 50 cents a gallon cheaper – and it has to be because of the gas mileage difference. It's a homegrown product, so we don't have to rely on foreign oil. You're burning 15 percent petroleum product and 85 percent alcohol."
Nitz drives a flex-fuel vehicle that gets 15 to 15.5 miles per gallon on regular gasoline and 13 mpg on E-85 he buys in Kalamazoo.
An Edwardsburg woman questioned why diesel fuel for her truck costs more, since it is a gasoline byproduct.
"Two reasons," Nitz said. "There's higher demand for it now than there used to be. Another reason, according to the oil companies, is it costs more to produce because they have to take the sulphur out of it to satisfy Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards."
"When I introduced the legislation to promote the use of alternative fuels," Nitz remarked, "the oil companies were kicking and fighting me tooth and nail every step. I don't know why this latest surge in gas prices has occurred."
"What scares me" about Gov. Jennifer Granholm's budget proposal, he said, "is she wants to put a two-cent sales tax on services. "I was talking to some attorneys yesterday. If you go to a lawyer and get a will drawn up for $500, it will now cost $510. What's this going to do to real estate sales? Are you going to have to pay 2 percent on the entire house or on what the Realtor charges?"
The Edwardsburg woman said everyone says they want to attract manufacturing jobs to Cass County, but planning and zoning "is not conducive to bringing in industry because everybody wants a bedroom community," so instead tourists come from Indiana or Illinois with their vehicles packed with groceries they buy somewhere else.
Stores in southwest Michigan towns such as St. Joseph and Dowagiac subsist on "six-month economies that run from the end of October to Christmas and right now until May. People aren't buying men's clothing like they did when Whirlpool was there and Auto Specialties, Clark and Heath Kit," and they're buying apparel at Wal-Mart or online.
Untaxed Internet purchases "put downtown Main Street at a disadvantage. The majority of property taxes go toward schools. People who live in Chicago or Indiana pay an extra 18 mills. If Dowagiac gets a certain amount of money off property taxes when students are counted, the state doesn't send them any money, but if they're a million dollars short," the district will be made whole under Proposal A.
The lottery still benefits education, Nitz answered one question, but the state spends more than $13 billion on schools, compared to $600 million in profits – "enough funding to run schools for two weeks."
"If the Pokagons would have built that casino in this town, we'd have jobs," Nitz heard. "It isn't even in this county," but near New Buffalo in Berrien County. "Amtrak comes from Chicago all summer long, so it's not like if they built the casino in Dowagiac no one would come."
On recycling, Nitz recalled touring of O.K. Distributing north of Dowagiac. "They crush the beer bottles. They can sell brown glass and clear glass. There are markets for those two, but not the green glass, so it's hauled to the landfill. Heineken is not going to put its beer in brown glass or clear glass for Michigan. That's their trademark. I'm not opposed to the bottle law, but I think it has a big bearing on the profitability of recycling in Michigan."
"I hear people complain that China's ruining our manufacturing," Nitz observed, "but chances are those slacks you've got on were made in Taiwan or Korea or somewhere overseas. It all started in the 1970s when Ford and GM (General Motors) were lackadaisical and figured that they could never be beaten or outproduced, but there were years when they had poor quality steel. You'd buy a new vehicle and three years later it would be rusted apart. Japan got the reputation for high-quality workmanship and American workmanship was shoddy and poor. Today, if you don't get 200,000 miles out of an American car, there's something wrong with it. Thirty years ago if you got 75,000 miles, you were lucky. Things are made so much better today and last so much longer. Our standard of workmanship is just as good, if not better, than foreign-made. We stepped up to the plate, but it took a while."
"There's no magic bullet out there that's going to be the salvation," said Nitz, who is in his third two-year term in the Legislature. "If we put a lot of taxes back on things, I think it's going to hurt the state. Businesses don't mind paying taxes if they're profitable. I've talked with some people who lost money and they still owe taxes. That's not right. If you're losing money you shouldn't owe taxes. Taxes should be based on profitability – not on doing things or you inventory, your assets or your net worth. It has to be on what you make. We've trimmed a lot out of government, but the governor's proposal is still an increase in spending. It takes more to run Michigan than Alabama or Louisiana. Our roads get a lot of snow, heaving and thawing, which creates potholes they don't have. We need to build roads a lot thicker. Michigan was a big swamp when it was discovered. Roads don't hold up on swamp. It takes a lot of money to put in a road and it takes a lot of money to maintain it – especially on a bad winter like we've had here the last couple of weeks," Nitz said.
A Dowagiac resident of a year and a half said few here care enough to vote, let alone attend council meetings, but they find the time to gather at McDonald's, drink coffee and gripe.
"I was on the (Berrien) county board for 10 years before I went to Lansing," Nitz nodded. "If we had visitors in the audience, I was always worried, wondering what we had done wrong, because normally there was nobody there."