Housing, traffic solutions addressed at Louisiana meeting
by Richard Lamb, Advance Editor
The construction of the 600-megawatt circulating fluidized bed technology (CFB) power plant in Rogers Township will present opportunities for workers in the area and challenges that comes with the size of the labor force. That is according to Elton Pody, executive director of the Central Louisiana Chamber of Commerce who lives in an area, which has undergone a similar process.
Pody met with a group of 11 community leaders from Presque Isle County during the group?s visit to Alexandria, Louisiana. The group visited a power plant similar to the one proposed for Rogers Township by Wolverine Power and met with various local government and business leaders to discuss common issues.
Pody said those who recognized opportunity cashed in on the stream of construction workers who resided in the area for the four years of construction on the Rodemacher III power plant.
?Your economic impact because of the construction will be phenomenal,? Pody told the community leaders on the final day of the trip.
The differences in the areas will present different challenges and opportunities, Pody said, but planning ahead can minimize the potential problems. The population is much different in Presque Isle County as opposed to the Boyce and Rapides Parish area, with some 360,000 people residing within a 60-mile radius of the Louisiana plant.
?WE WERE FORTUNATE that we had enough local people in the beginning. We had 325 to 350 people right away who were working,? Pody said, suggesting the Rogers Township plant may not be able to find that many workers within the area.
?You have a disadvantage of a (low) at-home population,? Pody said. But when told that the unemployment rate in the area could be as high as 20 percent, he saw that as an advantage.
?Let?s go back and say ?good?. You probably have 6,000 to 7,000 unemployed in that area. Maybe you have enough people there,? Pody said. ?If you have got that, you are blessed?I don?t say blessed because you are unemployed.?
Deb Greene, Rogers City council member, told Pody that a recent job opening at Carmeuse drew some 400 applicants, she understood. ?Sounds like you have an unengaged workforce, so that is good. Plus much of the jobs require very specific skills,? Pody said.
CITY MANAGER MARK Slown asked if there was a local government entity that helped with job applicants. Jason Parks, interim director of the Parish Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said his agency, working with the Louisiana Workforce Commission helped the contractor find construction workers. Applicants were given tests to develop a profile of the workers and they were assessed by the agency to determine skills needed by the plant for the construction job.
Michigan Works! would be the Michigan equivalent of the Louisiana agency, said Presque Isle County Economic Development Corporation executive director Bill Valentine.
Pody suggested some job training funds could be available in the stimulus package recently passed at the federal level. Pody said assessing the unemployed workers for skills, well in advance of the construction boom, is a good idea. Workers could be trained for future skills beyond the construction of the power plant.
?What you are saying is to use this opportunity for Wolverine and our new power plant to build a workforce improvement program that will have legs beyond Wolverine,? Slown said. ?That is your lasting benefit,? Pody replied.
HAVING AS MANY as 1,700 workers on the construction site meant handling greatly increased traffic. When told about the 400-acre site with many additional acres possibly available in the Calcite quarry, Pody thought the parking situation would be better in Rogers City than it was for Boyce.
?That solves one problem that we had,? Pody said. ?One of the problems that existed here when they were peaking was finding a place for them to park on the site. (The construction company) had to arrange transportation for them to park five or 10 miles away and then bus them. But that won?t be a problem for you.?
Many of that 1,700 figure came from outside of the immediate area, filling rental units, mobile home parks and recreational vehicle parks, Pody said.
?Many of the skilled workers travel from job-to-job,? Pody said. ?The economic impact will be tremendous on the little community. It will be hard to supply the requirements for the people who come there temporarily. You can?t build a nice restaurant to feed these people because they are only going to be there (temporarily).?
He said opportunities for recreational vehicle (RV) parking and food services were great. ?We did not have a lot of RV parks. We had a few scattered around, but these people are good at finding a place to go. They are not novice. We had enough (RV parks) in a 35- to 40-mile radius within the plant where they could come in for a few months. And we have a condition of weather that really allowed them to live in an RV. I don?t know if you have the weather for people to live in an RV over the winter,? Pody said.
Pody asked how many vacant homes were in the county to which real estate agent Mike Eustice advised him he estimated there were 95 units available.
Rod Noles, a realtor from the central Louisiana area, said several realtors met with the Shaw Group, the construction firm used for the Boyce plant, before construction to offer assistance for housing concerns. A series of contingency plans with the construction group were worked on, but few were implemented, he said.
?The situation kind of took care of itself,? Noles said. ?Shaw thought that the comfortable commute would be 60 minutes. It turned out to be 90 minutes.? THE AREA EXPANDED to meet the demand, he said. During peak times of construction, likely to occur in the second and third years of the project, there was very high occupancy, he said.
?A few people upgraded their mobile home parks or RV parks or added some cabins,? Noles said. He didn?t know of any new apartment buildings constructed for the workers, but every available apartment, he estimated, was rented out.
?If you have 1,000 workers, you might only need 500 apartments or 200 apartments, because there are a lot of roommates. One of the reasons why we didn?t have any trouble was because these men and women go to work early, they work late and they go home on Fridays. It is a real good environment,? Noles said.
The construction company talked about bringing in temporary housing, but didn?t need to, Noles told the group. Temporary housing Noles called ?evacuee housing? such as vacant retail stores used in hurricane season, didn?t get used either, as the workers were absorbed into the larger area. He said the construction company does some of the housing planning, but it pays to have the community ready.
?We had our restaurants notice the increase in sales and the whole community enjoyed that,? Noles said.
It was common for a home to be rented by one group of workers and have another group assume the lease after the first had finished their portion of the job. WITHOUT THE LARGER population to draw on, the housing situation could be quite different in northeast Michigan, Noles said. Weather conditions might stretch out the construction process longer than it took to build the Boyce plant.
?Let?s remember the point. This is a one-time four-year deal and you want to come out with something on the other end,? Pody said. ?Go four years down the road and back up and see what you can do to make this thing profitable.?
A clearinghouse for rentals was suggested, as the construction company could work with a local agency, such as the chamber of commerce to match up workers with rental units.
THE LOUISIANA GROUP suggested Rogers City entrepreneurs find vacant build
Ken Bradstreet, Wolverine?s director of community and government relations, moderated the session, which included representatives from several Alexandria economic groups. The meeting was one of several the Presque Isle County community leaders attended where they had the chance to ask questions of local leaders nearby the Rodemacher III 600-megawatt power plant nearly completed in Boyce, some 15 miles from Alexandria.
(Part one of this series on the Wolverine Power group and Presque Isle County community leaders, attended by Advance publisher Richard Lamb, is available in last week?s edition or online at www.PIAdvance.com. The Advance was the only media on the trip and will share more about the sessions in next week?s edition.)