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Janesville GM Plant - Make the place an NFL stadium and pony up an expansion team
This entry was posted on 8/11/2010 2:08 AM and is filed under General Motors Janesville, Economic misery The facilitators of, Crappy Economy Redux, Economic Hell, Unemployment Hell.
There is a guy named Steve Knox who posts for the Janesville Gazette Community Blogger platform. The Gazette has a bunch of Community Bloggers now, from mothering, from books, to gardening. For the record, I had the first Community Blog on their Website and it was regarding my work in Iraq. However, they dropped me because my shtick was temporary. The gaggle of bloggers now have ongoing postings. Besides, I like my own gig. I can swear and be as crass as I like on cooldadiomedia.com and dailydadio.cooldadiomedia.com .
Anyway Ol' Knox's tag is that he represents the Gen-Xers in Janesville. None-the-less, last week he brought up the issue of the empty GM plant in Janesville . This is a sour subject that has been beat to death in economic ravaged Rock County for a while now. It was even beat about long before "The Plant" actually shut down. The mammoth plant approaches two years in moth balls - still owned by General Motors.
Knox's premise in a nutshell, is that GM should let the property go and let somebody, anybody, try to utilize the massive acreage and buildings for something, even if it turns out to be wrong.
I tend to agree with Knox.
After months of silence in the quirky world of...collective comment-posting schizophrenia, Knox flushed me out of independent blog-land. Here's what I posted on his Gazette platform:
Is this a brainstorm session you have going here Steve? Then all ideas should flow, even if the readers have to hold their collective noses; no pun intended regarding Janesville's Love Canal. The only ideas posted here seem to be from "new-norm crappy economy apologist and perpetual optimist" Janesvillean [a perennial Gazette commenter]. At least "The 'Villean" has some economic ideas, although they lean toward not even bothering to include "The Plant." But, that does not address Steve's angle of letting somebody do something with "The Plant" even if it is wrong. I assume GM is still paying the property tax; or did we let them off the hook in some deal a way's back? What ever.
Here's a wild idea. Get a’ hold of the property in some manner. Get investors to dig a hundred foot hole on the place and cart off said "bad soil." Then said investors build a 70,000 seat football stadium. They would need to dig a deep hole anyway to build a stadium that size. Then bring in an NFL team, new or existing, to compete with the Packers and the Bears.
Midwesterners will live in their junk cars before they give up their pro football tickets. And, I am thinking they don't care which team it may be as long as said ticket holder has bonded with said team and has some notion of a stake in the franchise. Somebody dare tell me that statement is a lie.
At first there will be bitterness about the competing sacrilegious and evil Janesville franchise. Make sure all the faithful on the "Packer season ticket waiting list," and the "Bear waiting list" as well, just happen to get a flyer advertising the new team's season tickets. Make the seats a bit cheaper than the Packers and the Bears, but not much. [And put real seats in the stadium instead of those damn Lambeau aluminum benches. Within a couple years, all those unemployed Midwesterners living in their cars and savoring their beloved tickets, and all the Packer and Bear's fans tired of willing their season ticket waiting-list place to their grandchildren will forgive us due to their new-found season ticket team - all is forgiven in professional football.
Just an idea. And it will no doubt take the 12 years The 'Villean is insisting is reality for a facility the size of "The Plant" to become economically viable again in some other construct.
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of blog-posting war to tear me to shreds. I look forward to the literary carnage.
Bob Keith
[ I always use my real name in blog commenter-land ]
Wisconsin Military Service Person Special Mention of the Week
(each week Cooldadiomedia mentions a Wisconsin service person killed in Iraq or Afghanistan)
Sergeant First Class Merideth Leigh Howard, 52, of Waukesha, Wisconsin, died in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Friday, September 8, 2006, when a suicide car bomber detonated a vehicle near the Humvee she was in. SFC Howard was assigned to the Army Reserve's 405th Civil Affairs Battalion, out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She was one of two soldiers killed in the incident. Fourteen Afghanis were also killed in the incident. At the time of her death she was listed as the oldest American Servicewoman killed in combat in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Like so many American service members in this modern era, Howard is claimed as a native of several states. And, being a bit older than her military colleagues and also a female from a transitional era, she traveled through life attaining many firsts. According to jarrarsupariver.blogspot.com (Iraq Bloggers Central) Howard was all of 5-foot and 4-inches tall and had to stand on a box to see over the turret to man the .50 caliber machine gun on the Humvee she rode shotgun on in Afghanistan. They were on the infamous Jalalabad Road, known as Kabul's suicide-bomb alley. Iraq Bloggers Central also noted Howard was a native of Corpus Christi, Texas. While at Texas A& M University, she was a member of the first women's tennis team there, and became the second woman to graduate from the University's Brayton Fire School. She went on to become the first woman to join the Bryan, Texas Fire Department in 1978; she then moved on and became a fire-risk-management specialist with insurance companies, eventually helping set up a consulting company in Alameda, California.
Merideth Howard joined the military in 1988 at the age of 34 as a medical equipment repairer for the Army Reserve. She was called for active duty in December 2005 and sent to Afghanistan in the spring of 2006. She married long time partner Hugh Hvolboll prior to deployment. They had met in 1991 in California. The couple owned a home in Alameda, California and also had an apartment in Waukesha, Wisconsin. In Afghanistan, Howard was part of a provincial-reconstruction team, assigned to a Civil Affairs unit at the the Mehtarlam base in eastern Laghman province. Their task was to help rebuild roads, schools, and other infrastructure needed in the war torn country.
The Website landstuhlhospitalcareproject.org via information gleaned from the Chicago Tribune also notes Howard was a resident of Waukesha, Wisconsin. They also mention Howard's vehicle was making a supply run to a Bagram Air Base near the Afghan capital when she was killed. They also noted this was Howard's first deployment since joining the Reserves in 1988. In late April of 2006, nine members of SFC Howard's civil affairs team arrived at the Mehtarlam Base.
The Texas A&M University Association of Former Students, notes Howard was assigned to the 364th Civil Affairs Brigade in support of the 10th Mountain Division at the time of her death. The Association goes on to mention Howard graduated from Corpus Christi’s King High School in 1973 and earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology from Texas A&M University.
The Seattle Times states Merideth's long time partner Hugh Hvolboll, made fireworks for a living. In 2004, the couple moved to Waukesha for his job. The Los Angeles Times notes that her husband would honor her request and celebrate her life by blasting her ashes skyward in two fireworks displays more than a thousand miles apart. Her husband was quoted as saying, "She loved fireworks and being near the water." She was known to have an infectious smile. Her husband went on to note he would set off the fireworks displays with his wife's ashes off Corpus Christi, Texas, and San Francisco. The L. A. Times goes on to note Merideth was born in Corpus Christi in 1954, was an only child, and spent some of her childhood crabbing and fishing at Laguna Madre, a channel along the Texas coast. She also liked water skiing and duck hunting. At the time of her death, Merideth Howard was survived by her cousin Lorraine Stevenson of Corpus Christi, Texas; and, her husband, Hugh Hvolboll, of Waukesha, Wisconsin. Her parents preceded her in death. Sergeant First Class Merideth Howard was the ninth Wisconsin military service person to be killed in Afghanistan since October 2001.
As of this blog entry's posting date:
97,172 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
9,587 Iraqi Security Forces have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
4,417 Americans have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
1216 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
318 Coalition soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
767 Coalition soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
31,902 U.S. troops have been wounded in action in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
7,285 U.S. troops have been wounded in action in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
102 Wisconsin soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
19 Wisconsin soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
142 journalists (several nationalities) have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
21 journalists (various nationalities) have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
Wisconsin military service person special mention of the week, military casualty, and journalist casualty information sources: Committee to Protect Journalists; cnn.com; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; washingtonpost.com; thehighground.org; Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs; iraqbodycount.org; and, icasualties.org.
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