Border Security Trumps Local Economic Opportunity

Is Michigan doing enough to make sure Port Huron and other border communities connect with their Canadian neighbor?

by John Foren
April 16, 2010

PORT HURON — It is early afternoon on a beautiful Friday, the last vestiges of ice floes are streaming down the St. Clair River and if Port Huron wanted to pose for a postcard, today would be the day. Downtown — just a couple blocks off the water — looks abandoned, however. There are only a few scattered walkers and a man on a street corner with a sandwich-board sign hawking a going-out-business sale.

Kathleen Smith is admiring the water outside the Great Lakes Maritime Center off of downtown and talking about the days when Port Huron was bustling and heading over the border to Canada didn’t arouse international suspicion.

Smith, a 66-year-old poet, is speaking of the ties between the two countries, citing her poem “Under the Blue Water Bridge.” Its verse includes the lines, “There is a magical, captivating beauty. The United States and Canada connect here, sharing river and the great lakes it reaches. It is an area enjoyed and loved.”

The question is, is Michigan doing enough to make sure Port Huron and other border communities connect with their Canadian neighbor?

Those who have studied Michigan’s border communities say Port Huron, in particular, has huge assets as an international hub that few, if any, communities in the nation can claim. That includes the twin spans of the Blue Water Bridge and the Canadian National Railway’s rail tunnel under the St. Clair River, an entry point for international goods.

But in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the border has tightened and security, not economics, rules the day.

The same kind of gridlock that cripples the lines at the bridge seems to have commandeered any efforts to play on the border’s assets, some say.

“You can’t be talking about any other city in Michigan in terms of the infrastructure already in place — double-decker bridges, underwater railroad tunnel. How long would it take to put that stuff in place today?” said Lawrence Molnar, who heads the Michigan Business Incubation Association.

“Port Huron has a competitive advantage over any other communities that are located on the Canadian border, both in Michigan and probably across the entire border between Canada and the United States. It’s really a global crossing point for commerce, trade, intermodal and just about anything else you can think of.”

Molnar, also of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Labor, Employment and the Economy, has been working with St. Clair Community College on the possibility of starting an incubator tied to transportation, distribution and warehousing firms. That’s directly tied to Port Huron’s border crossing status.

U.S. Rep. Candace Miller (R-Harrison Township) is a member of the House Homeland Security Committee and stresses that border safety trumps everything. “Let me be pretty frank: my job is to protect America,” she says.

Still, as the Port Huron area’s congressional representative she bridles at what she sees as missed opportunities to use the economic advantages of the crossing. While state officials engage in an almost-daily debate on a second international bridge in Detroit, they are ignoring the potential a few miles up the road, she says.

“It’s unbelievable the potential that is there,” says Miller, who sits on the U.S.-Canada Interparliamentary Exchange Group, which promotes interaction between lawmakers on both sides. “You have to play to your strength.”

Port Huron, she says, has “tremendous assets. You can’t just drive anywhere and find those assets.”

Port Huron is one of the top trade crossings in the country and is the busiest international rail entry point in the U.S. Nearly 22 million tons of goods was expected to cross the bridge last year.

Some 8 percent of St. Clair County’s total payroll comes from workers in businesses dependent on the border, according to a December study financed by state and local economic development officials. The study identified 62 firms in the county as relying on border business, such as freight.

About 700,000 visitors from Canada were expected to visit the county in 2009, spending an estimated $57 million.

The study, by Chmura Economics & Analytics of Richmond, Va., said the border gave the area several clear economic advantages, namely access to a larger labor pool, and would help the region replace manufacturing jobs with trade-related work.

The study largely buttressed local officials’ arguments in favor of the massive Blue Water Bridge Plaza Project, a $600-million plan to expand the plaza on the American side of the bridge and improve 2.5 miles of the I-94/I-69 corridor west of the site.

The federally approved project, scheduled for completion in 2017, involves replacing and widening the bridge to nine lanes to separate local and international traffic. It will accommodate what could be a doubling in truck traffic across the bridge and provide an intermodal facility that will make it easier to shift goods by rail to truck or other means.

Proponents say there also will be hundreds of construction jobs and, once the project is finished, dozens of new businesses that benefit from the increased traffic.

Most important, perhaps, the expanded bridge is projected to decrease the average delay in crossing from 28 minutes to 3 minutes in the year 2030.

The project comes in the wake of increasing grumbling about security tie-ups at the bridge in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. On a recent day, traffic volume on the bridge seemed relatively light but still the trucks lined up and caused a quarter-mile backup.

It’s the chief reason cited by residents and businesses for why they don’t partake more often in their international neighbor.

The last time Dale Myers, of nearby Peck, was across the bridge in in Sarnia, Ontario, was just after 9/11. Myers, 68 and retired from the Navy, says he’d cross the border more often “if they didn’t make it so difficult.”

“We’re neighbors, we’re not enemies,” he says.

Another longtime area resident, Paula Rosenthal, 61, says she understands the concerns after 9/11, “but we need to do something to allow for easier access to the public.”

Rosenthal also says the American and Canadian sides should market themselves better to capitalize on the jewel they have.

Canadians make up about 10 percent of the business at the Office Lounge, which is just off the exit at Water Street near the bridge. That’s dropped in the last year after passport laws tightened, said Norm Krol, who owns the place.

Krol also is not looking forward to the May 1 enactment of Michigan’s smoke ban in bars and restaurants. He said being able to puff is another attraction to Canadians, who face public bans in their own country.

The Canadian influence on local business shouldn’t be underestimated, says Krol.

“It’s pretty strong,” he says. “You get a lot of people who come over shopping, they get things they can’t normally get in Canada…The regulars we get are here to get fuel, stop by and get some steaks at Sam’s Club, come here for a beer, have a couple smokes.”

Check the parking lot of the Birchwood Mall, in Fort Gratiot, a northern Port Huron suburb, and you’ll get an instant reminder of how much the area relies on Canadian consumers.

Ontario license plates are omnipresent — not the majority of shoppers by any means but plentiful enough to make a difference.

Toby and Sally Zimmerman of London, Ontario, had a choice on a recent open afternoon: drive a couple hours to Toronto for some shopping or head almost directly west more than an hour to Port Huron. The Michigan city won, and so did their pocketbook.

The Zimmermans, both in their 30s and with a young son, said they paid $20 less to fill their gas tank than they would have in their country.

“I think generally almost everything is less,” Toby Zimmerman said.

They are the kind of people Port Huron’s economy relies on (Canadians spend an average of $77 per day when they visit St. Clair County, according to the Chmura study). And that’s who Vickie Ledsworth, president of the Blue Water Area Chamber of Commerce, is working to keep.

Ledsworth has been meeting with Sarnia chamber leaders on developing stronger commercial ties between the two border communities. One priority is allaying Americans’ fears about border hang-ups and exchange rates so they frequent Canadian businesses, including Sarnia’s Hiawatha horse track.

“We’ve always had a very strong relationship with Canada, it’s just become more complicated,” Ledsworth says.

How complicated?

In the old days, Dan Lockwood would swim a half-mile across the St. Clair River into Canada. The last time he tried it, about three years ago, he was told firmly by a border patrol agent not to do it again.

In another sign of the times, a Homeland Security camera is being installed in his neighborhood to keep an eye on the waterfront and border. The images will be sent to Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Harrison Township.

Lockwood, president of the Downtown Development Authority in the city of St. Clair, south of Port Huron, says business between the two sides isn’t what it used to be.

“Canadians think twice about crossing the border because of the difficulty of coming across,” he says. “We used to think absolutely nothing of going to Sarnia for dinner. You have to think about those things now.”

John Foren is the former editor of The Flint Journal and spent years as a reporter for Booth Newspapers in Washington D.C., Lansing and Flint. He is an instructor at the Michigan State University School of Journalism.