Mistersky Power Plant
By Marshall Powell, from Detroit Uncovered
Detroit soon will jettison its Public Lighting Department, according to a city hall insider.
“Detroit will be out of the public lighting business by the time your business is done,” Charles Beckham told Detroit Charter Commissioners, who must finish their work by the end of 2012.
Beckham, Mayor Bing’s former chief administrative officer, was the guest speaker at a Commission meeting Sept. 14. He was invited to discuss the City’s enterprise departments, described as those that generate relatively significant revenue such as the municipal parking, building and safety, and water and sewerage departments.
No stranger to Detroit politics, having been part of the good and sad of it, Beckham was Water and Sewerage director under Coleman A. Young, later joined the Kilpatrick administration and helped run Mayor Bing’s 2009 campaign. Beckham served as the Mayor’s chief administrative officer until he resigned in May.
City workers protest privatization of PLD, loss of jobs for residents May 27
“The move is not to necessarily sell public lighting. That’s always controversial,” Beckham said. “These assets in the public lighting department cannot be sold without the approval of voters,” he said referring to the “old and antiquated” equipment at Detroit’s Mistersky Power Plant.
Russ Bellant, a retired city worker, agrees with Beckham but only to a point. Citizens readily voice opposition to selling city assets but in this case that’s not the threat, Bellant said. DTE never wanted to buy Misterksy, according to Bellant. “They just wanted it to go out of business to eliminate the competition.”
“Although the PLD can’t be sold, it can be dismantled,” Bellant says. He contends that dismantling the PLD is exactly what mayors have been doing for the last 50 years. “Mayors have been under a lot of pressure and persuasion from the downtown business community, including DTE.”
Bellant says Mayor Bing is stripping Public Lighting of its ability to generate revenue. “What Bing is doing is he’s implementing the death of the public lighting department.”
Bellant says the Water and Sewerage Department and Wayne State University are no longer PLD customers.
“Wayne State was a multi-million dollar a year customer. If you have these sources as customers, you can sell bonds. People who sell bonds know these folks are going to pay their bills.” Consequently, Bellant considers empty and shortsighted arguments that the city can’t support the PLD.
Beckham disagrees. “We could save a lot of money by shutting down Mistersky and buying all our energy from DTE,” he told those attending the meeting held at the Fellowship Chapel church on the City’s west side.
Shortly after taking office, Mayor Bing announced plans to decommission Mistersky within 90 days in favor of buying energy for DTE. The city currently buys 75 percent of its energy from DTE, according to Beckham. Mistersky is still up and running, although Beckham described it as feeble and lacking capacity to serve the city’s needs. Continue reading
