By Joel Thurtell
Six years ago, I wrote a story about election high-jinks in a development project that is back in the news.
Wannabe real estate developer Craig Schubiner’s vaunted $2 billion Bloomfield Park, it turns out, is a huge bust.
Bloomfield Farce.
Seven-story buildings sit vacant near Telegraph and Square Mile Lake roads.
Marble lines parts of buildings that will never be finished.
Construction ended nearly two years ago, and township officials don’t expect it to re-commence.
L. Brooks Patterson, Oakland County’s executive, once backed the project, but now says it’ll take a couple hundred million smackers just to tear it down, according to Laura Berman of The Detroit News.
Big surprise.
Schubiner thought he was going to be the 21st century’s Al Taubman.
But Bloomfield Park is no Twelve Oaks.
You didn’t need a crystal ball to see this disaster coming.
The Bloomfield Township board tried to kill it, but Pontiac embraced it, the territory was attached to the city, yet the big question — where’s the $2 billion of investment capital coming from? — was dodged by Schubiner.
His answer, it turns out, should have been clear to all: He never had it.
But it wasn’t clear to the wishful-thinkers in Pontiac who jumped at the chance of having high-rise concrete shells in their community.
Nor was the specter of this architectural catastrophe enough to motivate Bloomfield Township officials to jump at their one big chance to stop Schubiner cold.
Only one official truly opposed this project, and she was roundly criticized and cold-shouldered by her township trustee colleagaues. That was then Bloomfield Township Clerk Wilma Cotton.
Oh sure, Supervisor David Payne is crying that he tried to stop this monster for 15 years, but he was elsewhere when Cotton made her all-out effort to quash this sham development.
Cotton knew this was a stinker, and did her best to stop it.
Thanks to Cotton, the last best chance of squashing this imbecilic project landed in the hands of our attorney general, Mike Cox.
According to the Detroit News, “To launch it (the project), developer Craig Schubiner convinced a cluster of residents to vote their homes, and the Schubiner-owned property, into Pontiac.”
Well, sort of. According to some of the voters, they were “convinced” to vote for annexation by deals of free rent offered by people from Schubiner’s development company.
Selling votes.
There was evidence, according to the state police detective who investigated, that Schubiner’s acolytes — employees of his Harbor Companies firm — promised free rent to people if they would move into homes in the target area, register to vote and then vote “yes” for annexation to Pontiac.
Had there been a prosecution and conviction, Cotton was going to ask the state to set aside what a corrupt election.
That would have cut off the annexation and ended this disaster before it got underway.
But Cox said “no” to prosecution. Apparently, there wasn’t enough glory or free PR to be gained from a handful of convictions for buying an election.
Now Pontiac and Bloomfield Township are left to clean up the mess.
Here’s a link to the story I wrote for the May 10, 2004 Detroit Free Press about Schubiner’s renters who claimed they swapped votes for rent.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
