By JOHN EBY
Dowagiac Daily News

U.S. Rep. Fred Upton stopped in at the Dowagiac Daily News Wednesday afternoon on his way from Three Rivers to St. Joseph, where he was to conduct one of his monthly “teletown meetings.”

Cass County’s congressman, seeking re-election this year to his 13th two-year term since upsetting Mark Siljander in his first try at public office, visited Peterson Spring as co-chair of the Congressional Auto Caucus to highlight auto sector improvements.

The St. Joseph County auto supplier and manufacturer on Heimbach Road employs 55 workers at its facility producing springs, rings and wire forms for Chrysler, among others.
Southwest Michigan’s economy would have suffered a catastrophic blow if General Motors and/or Chrysler had been liquidated.

This morning the St. Joseph Republican returned to Portage, where he got wet in the Memorial Day parade, to highlight another auto supplier’s importance to his region.
Upton’s visit to Mann+Hummel on S. Sprinkle Road will be another opportunity to extol the good news that General Motors June 2 posted double-digit sales growth for the fifth straight month.

GM said that for the fifth straight month, Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac together posted a double-digit sales gain, with combined sales increasing 32 percent over last May.

Year-to-date sales for GM’s four brands have risen 31 percent to 874,749 units – an increase of 206,994 units compared to last year, or almost twice the volume lost from brands the company discontinued.

Mann+Hummel, with 285 employees at its headquarters in Portage, produces a variety of parts and components for a number of automotive manufacturers, including the battery casing for the new GM Chevrolet Volt and sound pipes for the Ford Mustang.

“The way people communicate has changed a lot,” Upton acknowledged, with e-mail virtually replacing letters and constituents posting their ideas on his Web site.
“We’re doing a teletown meeting tonight at 5” from St. Joseph, he said. “We’ve done them every month for the last two or three years. We have a vendor who calls 40,000 to 50,000 households with a message I tape to stay on the line to connect. I give a four- to five-minute intro about some of the things I’m doing, then we go into Q&A for an hour. People had a lot of questions during the health care debate. We had as many as 7,000 or 8,000 people still on the phone an hour later, compare to the town meetings we used to do where four or five people showed up. We get a whole mix of people.”

It is our first face-to-face interview since March 7, 2008, when the topic was Upton’s travels with Arizona Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign.

The night of Cass County Republicans’ Lincoln Day dinner Upton accepted an award on his parents’ behalf at Lake Michigan College, and his wife, Amey, has had lupus.

Upton’s “big circle” through the 6th District started in Kalamazoo with an endorsement by homebuilders, whose ranks now include former state senator Dale Shugars, Upton’s 2002 primary foe.

In addition to GM, there was Chrysler’s announcement of 1,100 new Jeep jobs.

“All of a sudden,” Upton said, “things are looking a little bit rosier. I sat down with the Big Three CEOs in the last two to three weeks. GM’s paying a 9-percent dividend on the money they owe so they’re anxious to pay off the balance, which they hope to do before the end of the year, and be completely out of debt with the feds. As sales go, they bottomed out at 8.5 million and could have sales this year of 11.5 million. For our corner of the state, one third of our manufacturing jobs are automotive. As they begin to pick up, things look a little brighter,” though “we’re not out of the woods yet by anyone’s estimation. It would have been far worse, as Bill Ford told me, if GM or Chrysler had gone under, it would have tripped the dominoes for all three because they rely on the same suppliers.”

Of course, despite bailing out Chrysler, Dowagiac lost its Heartland dealership. “For the life of me, I don’t know how closing dealerships helps sell products. It doesn’t. I don’t know how they came to that conclusion,” Upton said, shifting gears to the nuclear industry, of which his district has the Palisades and Cook plants.

“When those were put on line in the early ’70s,” he said, “85 percent of parts came from this country. Because we haven’t built a new reactor in 30 years – President Obama broke ground in March in Georgia – so maybe we’ll get back to making the parts here, and that’s lots of jobs we’ve lost overseas that we’d like to get back. Literally hundreds of thousands of jobs – steelworkers, pipe fitters, you name it – instead of Japan and Germany. If we add 50 to 55 plants, all of a sudden, bingo! We have new jobs here and, of course, there’s no greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear. AEP is actively considering it maybe at Cook and Detroit Edison made application two years ago to add a reactor at the Fermi plant. It takes us 10 to 12 years from start to finish, yet the French can do it in four to five. I’m working on a bipartisan basis to follow the French model and reduce the cost of building these. By 2030, our nation is going to need 30 to 40 percent more energy than we use today. To grow our population base and get out of this recession, we’re going to need that much more energy.”

Upton added about the British Petroleum spill, “A third of our oil comes from the Gulf. Mistakes clearly were made. We can’t afford that again. It’s awful. We need an energy policy that relies less on foreign oil. The company I’m going to be at tomorrow makes parts for the Volt. I’m a big supporter of the Volt, which should be in showrooms this fall. Michigan is one of three states with California and New York. We’ve found great reserves of natural gas relatively cheap that a number of vehicles around the country are using, and more than just fleets. We need an all-of-the-above strategy, and I believe the electric hybrid is going to prove to be a good answer to where we want to go – and it’s here. I went to the auto show in Detroit and there was an electric car being built in Mishawaka that should be in showrooms next summer. Nationwide, one in nine or one in 10 jobs are directly tied to autos. Michigan is much higher than that – almost one in four or one in five, and we’ve lost one in five manufacturing jobs the last three years. Almost half of those jobs are in one state – ours. So, if we can capture the battery side of things, which we’re doing with the Volt. We as a delegation have worked very hard to convince GM to add a plant here in Michigan, which should be open this summer in Lake Orion. Had that plant gone to Janesville, Wis., or Tennessee, that supplier base would have moved with it.”

Asked about his no vote on a reauthorization act for $85.6 billion in scientific research over five years, Upton, who has only missed one of more than 1,300 votes this session, said, “They’ve brought that up three times and only last week did they pass $85 billion we don’t have. They increased it by two times what it was before. Debt now exceeds $13 trillion. We can’t be doubling programs. The president himself in his budget he offered asked to freeze domestic spending except defense, veterans and Social Security. We can’t have a program that goes up 200 percent.”

Of his no vote on the $760 billion bill authorizing defense spending, Upton commented, “A couple of things. There was an amendment within the bill for a new fighter plane, which has doubled in cost since it was approved in, I want to say, ’02. It’s gone from almost $45 million per plane to $90 million. It’s almost doubled in cost. I also didn’t like repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ It’s the cart before the horse when we’re fighting two wars. I walked the parade Monday with two Marines and they said it was the wrong time for us to reverse the policy. Was it debated in committee? No. And it was on the floor 10 minutes – five minutes on each side.”

“I’ve missed about 20 votes in 24 years,” he said, some when he went to Iraq.
Addressing the idea that members of Congress routinely vote on things they never read, Upton asks, “Do you know what’s on page 727 of the health care bill? There’s a provision that requires every employer to file a 1099 with the IRS” on any expenditure exceeding $600.

“So,” Upton said, ” if Dowagiac Daily News carriers happen to use a certain Shell gas station and might happen to spend more than $600 at the pump during the course of the year, every employer is going to have to file a 1099.”

And that relates to health care how?

“They want to tax it,” Upton said. “If you buy the statement, ‘If you like your health insurance, you can keep it,’ the problem for a lot of employers is they’re going to figure out it’s better for them to drop their coverage and move all the people into the state plan, which will not be as generous for the employees. Some individuals are not going to be able to keep it. For Stryker, a major manufacturer in our district, it’s a $150 million hit, and they can’t increase their price, which is already locked in. For AT&T, $1 billion. John Deere, $150 million. First thing my farmers said is, ‘How much is that going to raise the price of a tractor?’ Caterpillar, $100 million. I went to a small company in Kalamazoo that makes plastic cups. There’s not a lot of margin. There are eight such manufacturers in the country. If one decides to move people into the state plan versus private health insurance, they sort of all have to because of the cost savings in the neighborhood of $5,000 per employee. Rather than have incentives for employers to provide health insurance, there are now going to be disincentives. Companies may rather pay the penalty and be out from underneath it altogether. It’s going to be a lot more expensive for our state. If you go back to when Part D was written, part of the bill was to encourage employers to provide prescription drugs for their Medicare-eligible, i.e., retirees over 65. To do that, it provided a direct subsidy to the companies for up to 28 percent of the value of their prescription drug plans, so they wouldn’t shift it all to the feds. This bill took that all away. Companies will cancel the plan and shift it to the taxpayers, almost doubling the cost per employee from what the federal government did before. It will be as much as $1,200 per person versus giving the subsidy to the company for $600. That retiree would rather have the previous plan than what the feds will offer because of more choices. If you like your health insurance, you can keep it – until your company cancels the plan and forces you into a government-mandated plan.”