Albion Michigan News

Albion, Michigan News

Sunday December 15th, 2019 - 7:12 pm

100-year-old Michigan golf course turned into naturalized prairie.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mi (WXMI) — The land of the former Highlands Golf Club is transforming into a naturalized prairie, thanks to a partnership between two nonprofits and the work of dozens of volunteers.

“What we are doing here is putting nature back in the city,” Justin Heslinga, the stewardship director of Land Conservancy of West Michigan said.

Land Conservancy of West Michigan and Blandford Nature Center have been working together for several years to naturalize the 120-acre plot of land. On Saturday, the groups hosted about 50 volunteers to plant seeds.

“This was turf grass from border to border, manicured as a golf course for over 100 years, and so what we’re doing is removing that turf grass, which doesn’t provide any wildlife habitat to speak of,” Heslinga said.

Julie Batty, the land stewardship manager at Blandford Nature Center said the land will be utilized in the center’s educational programs.

“It cannot be understated how impossible this would be without volunteers,” Batty said. “It will last for decades. It’s a little bit of effort that individuals can put in and then together, they’re making an incredible impact.”

Batty said planting the seeds during winter is important. ... See MoreSee Less

100-year-old Michigan golf course turned into naturalized prairie

cbs4indy.com

GRAND RAPIDS, Mi (WXMI) -- The land of the former Highlands Golf Club is transforming into a naturalized prairie, thanks to a partnership between two nonprofits and the work of dozens of volunteers. �...

Albion, Michigan News

Sunday December 15th, 2019 - 7:04 pm

Michigan is one of the ‘Grinchiest’ states in America, study says

By Brandon Champion | 12/12/2019

The holiday season is in full swing, but according to a new report, Michigan isn’t feeling very festive.

Compiled by CenturyLink’s data analysis team, the report considered 10 metrics across two key categories, online activity and area culture, to determine which states have the most and least holiday cheer.

Michigan ranked 41st. In other words, the Great Lakes State is one of the “Grinchiest” states in America, according to the very unscientific study. Metrics considered include:

Online activity:

Google searches for Christmas movies and gingerbread houses

Google shopping trends for wrapping paper, Christmas cards, Christmas ornaments, and “elf on a shelf”

Number of Christmas songs streamed

Number of tweets related to Christmas

Area culture

Number of Christmas tree farms per capita
Amount of charitable donations
Only Delaware, Texas, New Mexico, New Jersey, Arizona, Florida, California, Hawaii and Nevada ranked behind Michigan in Christmas spirit.

Noteworthy is that the bottom five states are all in warm climates, eliminating virtually any chance of a white Christmas.

A puzzling result considering Michigan is home to Frankenmuth, which VacationRenter listed as the top city in the United States for holiday vibes this December. The city is home to the world’s largest Christmas store,” Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland.

Tennessee has the most Christmas spirit, according to the study.

Alaska scored a sad ranking of 40th overall, but it snagged the No. 1 ranking in two different categories: Christmas tweets and searches for ‘Christmas Cards’ on Google shopping.

Utah gets the top prize for being the most giving state. According to the IRS, the Beehive State donated 4.8% of their adjusted income in 2018 ... See MoreSee Less

Michigan is one of the ‘Grinchiest’ states in America, study says

www.mlive.com

Michigan ranked 41st is the study compiled by CenturyLink.

Albion, Michigan News

Sunday December 15th, 2019 - 7:00 pm

Asian carp in Illinois waters press toward Lake Michigan

By Sheri Mcwhirter smcwhirter@record-eagle.com | 12/15/2019

PESHAWBESTOWN — About an eighth of Ed John’s typical catch is whitefish, with the rest usually lake trout.

There’s an occasional walleye or salmon among what John pulls in and unloads at the marina in Peshawbestown, but it’s the whitefish that garners the best price, he said.

“We’re not catching as many as we used to,” said the owner of Treaty Fish Company.

John is a tribal commercial fisherman who has been fishing Lake Michigan for years. He said he intends to continue that tradition for years to come, even should any of the several species collectively known as Asian carp make their way into the big water.

And that’s an actual threat — environmental DNA evidence of Asian carp has been detected in parts of the Chicago River, miles past an electrical barrier meant to halt the fishes’ progression toward Lake Michigan and the rest of the Great Lakes beyond.

“As a commercial fisherman, I don’t think it will be as bad as people think it will be,” John said. “We’ve already got the mussels and the round goby. We’ve just got to wait for them to get here.”

But not everyone has such a laissez-faire attitude about it.

The invasive species and the risk
Asian carp is a moniker for silver, bighead and black carp. They are invasive species that exploded through the sprawling Mississippi River watershed and took up residency everywhere from aquaculture farms in Arkansas to the Louisiana bayous, and from the Illinois River to Indiana’s marshlands.

These fishes overwhelmed other, native species with extreme proliferation, took over ecosystems and became so abundant that their notorious summertime jumping behavior has become a safety hazard to boaters.

Fisheries experts consider Asian carp to be a major threat to Great Lakes walleye, perch and especially whitefish, which, like the invasive species, is a filter feeder fish. These invasive carp have placed a $7 billion recreational and commercial fishery at stake, experts warn.

No live Asian carp were discovered in the Chicago Area Waterway System during a November survey of more than 150 sites, including hours of electrofishing and setting 10 miles of nets. Nevertheless, concerns persist about the dozens of eDNA hits discovered in October in Bubbly Creek, also known as the South Fork of the Chicago River’s South Branch.

That’s too close for comfort for many scientists and government officials.

“It’s at the doorstep to the invasion,” said Peter Alsip, research assistant for the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan’s School for the Environment and Sustainability.

Alsip and others recently published a study about the suitability of Lake Michigan as an environment for Asian carp.

“It may not be prime habitat in Lake Michigan, but it may be better than we first thought,” he said.

Initially, scientists thought a decrease of plankton in the lake as a result of reduced phosphorous runoff and the invasion of zebra and quagga mussels would make it impossible for the invasive filter-feeding Asian carp to find a home there. The question was whether a lake that has become a “plankton desert” can be suitable habitat.

“Our study suggests it could be possible,” Alsip said.

Asian carp prefer to consume phytoplankton and cynobacteria in near-shore areas, but researchers discovered the fish will eat invasive mussels when fed them in laboratories. It’s an opportunistic feeding behavior that could sustain the fishes just enough as they make their way across the lake to better habitats, Alsip said.

Scientists say the best possible habitat for Asian carp in Lake Michigan is likely in Green Bay near its river mouths.

“These fish are capable of swimming long distances and they can fast,” Alsip said. “They might lose weight on the journey.”

Research shows they just might make it, though.

Knowing that, natural resources managers in Michigan are dead-set against allowing Asian carp to slip through Chicago and into North America’s freshwater inland seas.

“We are approaching this with a no-regrets policy,” said Tammy Newcomb, senior water policy adviser for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

Asian carp in the Great Lakes would directly compete with walleye, chubs, lake herring and whitefish. They eat like alewives, spawn like walleye and grow like salmon, Newcomb said.

Should Asian carp arrive and begin to thrive, she said it could spell disaster for the existing fishery and those who depend upon it — including Michigan’s American Indian tribes.

“We certainly see sufficient habitat out there for these fish to take hold,” Newcomb said.

That sentiment isn’t lost on Mike Ripley, environmental coordinator for the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority, which in 2000 banded together five Michigan tribes to negotiate a consent agreement with the state regarding tribal fishing and hunting rights protected by an 1836 treaty.

“In that treaty it specifically said the tribes would keep their right to hunt and fish forever,” Ripley said. “Federal and state governments have a responsibility to protect the resources and they haven’t done a great job of that. We have pollution, we have invasive species — all threaten the tribes’ right to fish.”

He said whitefish has been the primary catch for tribal fishers going back “hundreds, if not thousands of years.” Asian carp now present a terrible threat to that long-standing culture, he said.

“It would devastate the fishery, and in ways we can’t even know right now,” Ripley said.

Fishes’ future
So what can be done to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes?

Both Illinois and Michigan are placing heavy bets on the proposed $800 million barrier at Brandon Road Lock and Dam on the Des Plaines River. It’s upstream from the river’s confluence with the Kankakee River which creates the Illinois River, a major tributary to the Mississippi River.

The site is a few miles downstream from the electrical barriers that now serve as the last deterrent to keep Asian carp from continuing north toward the lake.

Michigan chipped in $8 million last month to engineer and design the planned system that will include another electrical barrier, along with acoustic fish deterrents, bubble curtains and a flushing lock.

The project will require significant federal funding and is expected to take up to eight years to construct.

“It’s a lot of money to build this, but it costs much more to manage a species once it already arrived,” said Andrew Leichty, assistant chief in the project management branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Corps in May approved and sent to Congress the plan to fortify the Illinois waterway at a crucial choke point for Asian carp.

“What we’re proposing here is a management zone. It’s a layered defense,” Leichty said.

Environmental advocacy groups support the project, even if some suggest even more could be done.

David Hamilton, senior policy director for the Nature Conservancy’s Great Lakes Project, argues the river water at the lock and dam facility could be chemically treated with chlorine, a way to rapidly kill every living thing in the lock channel and better guarantee Asian carp never slip through. It’s an idea the Corps didn’t swallow.

“Gates would not be released until it’s detoxified,” Hamilton said. “This is a novel application of a proven technology.”

Leichty said the Corps opted for tested methods, saying “we won’t just throw anything in here and try it.”

Marc Smith, conservation partnerships director for the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes regional center, said the Brandon Road project is the only chance to get additional protections in place to stop Asian carp. The facility may slow down shipping, but will significantly reduce the risk of the invasive species making it through and moving further north, he said.

“This is the compromise. There really is no Plan B,” Smith said. “In 10 years, we’ve had one plan.”

Joel Brammeier, president of Chicago-based nonprofit Alliance for the Great Lakes, said Asian carp are a “catastrophic threat” and authorities should do all they can to prevent them from getting to the Great Lakes, and that includes pressing for Brandon Road facility funding.

“I think the investment is worth it. I think Great Lakers think the investment is worth it,” he said.

Brammeier argued it’s time to switch the mentality from holding the line on Asian carp through commercial fishing in the Illinois River to a position of doing everything possible for prevention. Those invasive fishes cannot be allowed to reach the Great Lakes, he said.

“The red alarm has been flashing for years and years,” Brammeier said.

Newcomb agreed and said Michigan DNR officials are in an all-out war against these invasive fishes.

“There is no Asian carp fatigue in terms of our agency,” she said. “We can’t afford to fail.” ... See MoreSee Less

Asian carp in Illinois waters press toward Lake Michigan

www.record-eagle.com

PESHAWBESTOWN — About an eighth of Ed John’s typical catch is whitefish, with the rest usually lake trout.

Albion, Michigan News

Sunday December 15th, 2019 - 6:57 pm

141-year-old fruitcake is a Michigan family’s heirloom ... See MoreSee Less

141-year-old fruitcake is a Michigan family’s heirloom

www.wilx.com

Some families pass down jewelry, watches or even recipes. But a Michigan family has its own heirloom: a 141-year-old fruitcake.

Albion, Michigan News

Sunday December 15th, 2019 - 6:56 pm

Automation and labor: Inside Michigan's liquor delivery trouble

CHAD LIVENGOOD | Crainsdetroit | 12/15/19

Republic National's high-tech liquor warehouse at the center of retail inventory shortages. Malfunction in automated storage system led to delivery snafus
Fulfilling split-order cases of liquor remains a labor-intensive process.

Inside a hulking three-story warehouse near I-275 and I-96 in Livonia, the towering shelves built to store two-thirds of Michigan's liquor supply reveal something that may not have been evident on the barren shelves of package liquor stores last month.

Every shelf in Republic National Distributing Co.'s new $85 million super warehouse is jam-packed with pallet loads of popular brands such as Jameson Irish whiskey and Hennessey cognac and hard-to-find rare hooch like a bottle of 25-year-old O.F.C. Vintage bourbon.

"As you can see, there's not a liquor shortage in Michigan," said Joe Gigliotti, region president of control states for Republic National, a multi-state alcohol broker and distributor.

But there has been a liquor inventory shortage on the shelves of Republic National's 13,000 retail customers this fall that was triggered by major computer glitches and "bugs" in the warehouse management system the company's contractors built inside the new 515,000-square-foot distribution center.

"You're going to have glitches. It's like buying a new house," said Gigliotti, a Virginia-based executive who has been encamped in Michigan for weeks overseeing the company's efforts to correct the breakdowns in its distribution business.

Inside the massive facility, Republic National has designed a system for moving Kentucky bourbon from pallet load to bar top that conforms to Michigan's unique liquor control law. The 1996 law provides consumers more choice in spirits products than most states while letting retailers order custom-packed split cases from a selection of 10,600 different liquor brands and bottle sizes.

It's the laborious hand-picking of 12 fifth-size bottles or 24 pint-size bottles for each split case that Republic National has been attempting to streamline to speed up the volume it can handle as consumer tastes have shifted to new flavors of vodka and whiskey that didn't exist 23 years ago when Michigan privatized its distribution system.

Last year, the Texas-based liquor broker distributed 6.7 million cases of liquor to Michigan restaurants, bars, gas stations, package liquor stores and big-box warehouses. Four million of those cases were split, underscoring the company's need to cut labor and handling costs

"That's why we're trying to automate it," Gigliotti said while giving Crain's an exclusive tour of the facility.

The Livonia warehouse was designed with three bottle-picking lines for workers to fulfill individual orders — the modern-day equivalent of Henry Ford's automotive assembly line for boxing up alcoholic beverages (Ford, like other industrialists of his day, supported Prohibition, by the way).

Two of the bottle-picking lines are for repackaging larger bottles — fifths and half-gallons — placing them into new 12-bottle cases that a machine mostly assembles.

"Years ago, you'd go back to all of the liquor stores and you'd get all of the empty liquor cartons and you'd bring them back and you'd use them to deliver again the following day," Gigliotti said. "Now, they're all standard boxes that we produce to help make that more efficient. If we can reuse them, we do. But that's rare."

The third line, referred to by employees as "the flasks," is used to repackage split orders of pints and half-pint bottles (22 of the top 25 best-selling liquors by number of units come in bottles that are a pint or smaller, according to the Michigan Liquor Control Commission).

Each split case contains 24 bottles, usually in some disparate combination, like pints of Crown Royal Canadian whiskey mixed with half-pints of Smirnoff vodka.

Once the boxes are packed, they travel on conveyors to an automated shelving system known as "the shuttle."

It's a towering 16-level enclosed shelving system with rolling surfaces, where robotic arms place completed split cases into individual bays — and take them out when they're ready to be shipped to retailers.

If you don't want to take up floor space, what do you do? You go vertical," Gigliotti said as he pointed up at the caged shelving units.

During the day, "the shuttle" is filled with custom split-case orders. At night, they're taken out of the shelving system and sent to the loading docks, bound for trucks.

But the automated shelves have been a choke point, hampering Republic National's ability to fulfill just-in-time deliveries in a system where there's little room for error.

Earlier this fall, there were periods where "the shuttle" malfunctioned and the cases got stuck inside and couldn't be retrieved.

"When it's not working, it's not like you can put men or people in there to start pulling cases — and therein lies the dilemma," Gigliotti said. "You get glitches, you get bugs that come up and you fix them and you keep moving,"

When the shuttle has been working correctly, the facility has been able to process up to 300,000 cases of liquor in a day, Gigliotti said.

"When it's working, it's a beautiful thing," he said.

Republic National's new facility has the capacity to warehouse 1.8 million cases of liquor at a time; its old warehouse in Brownstown Township topped out at 500,000, Gigliotti said.

In response to problems with the automation system, Republic National moved part of its operation back to Brownstown Township. It's unclear how long operations will continue there, Gigliotti said.

The Eckles Road facility sits on 33 acres that was once the home to General Motors Co.'s Delco chassis plant.

And though Republic National's warehouse looks gigantic from aerial views, it's actually still just half the size of the sprawling 1 million-square-foot Amazon distribution center next door on Amrhein Street.

The building was designed to accommodate a 250,000-square-foot addition, signaling the company's desire to potentially gain an even larger share of Michigan's liquor distribution business.

"We're very bullish on Michigan — in all ways," Gigliotti told Crain's.

Republic National's automation troubles have given its main competitor pause.

"I've yet to find a piece of equipment that takes a bottle out of a box and puts it into another box better than a human can," Lew Cooper II, co-CEO of Great Lakes Wine & Spirits, a Highland Park-based distributor.

Brand exclusivity
Republic National and the state's other main authorized distribution agent, Great Lakes Wine & Spirits, have exclusive control over the distribution of individual brands.

Smirnoff vodka is distributed only by Republic National, while Great Lakes is the exclusive distributor of Grey Goose vodka.

A third distributor, Kalamazoo-based Imperial Beverage, focuses on lesser-known craft spirits and, for example, is the only distributor in Michigan that delivers East Side Gin, produced by the Toledo Spirits Co.

Some retailers have criticized Michigan's liquor control system for leaving them out of stock of popular brands like Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey and Tito's Handmade Vodka during Republic National's monthslong delivery snafus because there are no alternative distributors.

The timing of the breakdown in Republic National's delivery system stretching well into the busy fall months was "unfortunate," Gigliotti said.

"If you're going through this in January, February, March, nobody's going to like it, but they're a lot more understanding than they are in October, November and December," Gigliotti said. "And I understand that. I don't blame them."

Executives at Republic National and Great Lakes said they would welcome more competitors that operate under the same rules requiring weekly delivery of at least one split case of liquor to more than 13,000 retail customers.

Gigliotti acknowledges that his company's private owners wouldn't have been so inclined to invest in the Livonia warehouse if they had to compete with another distributor for delivery of individual liquor brands.

"I think you'd find less investment," he said.

Justin Winslow, president and CEO of the Michigan Restaurant & Lodging Association, attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony this summer at Republic National's new warehouse.

He was awed by the facility's size and capacity to handle the wine and liquor that will end up in the bars of his members' dining establishments.

"It's an amazing, beautiful facility," Winslow said. "And when it's fully functional, it will be amazing to watch in its full glory." ... See MoreSee Less

Automation and labor: Inside Michigan's liquor delivery trouble

www.crainsdetroit.com

Inside a hulking three-story warehouse near I-275 and I-96 in Livonia, the towering shelves built to store two-thirds of Michigan's liquor supply reveal something that may not have been evident on the...

Albion, Michigan News

Sunday December 15th, 2019 - 6:51 pm

'Porch piracy' becomes a felony in Michigan on 12/16/2019

Punishments range from fines to a year in jail and upwards of five years in prison for repeat offenders. ... See MoreSee Less

'Porch piracy' becomes a felony in Michigan on Monday

www.foxbusiness.com

Punishments range from fines to a year in jail and upwards of five years in prison for repeat offenders.