Neal Rubin

City has its own rules for Tiger Stadium

The city finally has a timeline for knocking down Tiger Stadium and putting up a Starbucks. What it doesn't have, as usual, is a way to pay for anything.

The Detroit Economic Growth Corp. (DEGC) said last week that it would award the demolition contract Oct. 23. The money to pay for the wrecking balls and bulldozers, it said, estimated at $1.6 million, would come from the Clean Michigan Initiative and city brownfield tax credits.

It turns out, though, that the city hasn't even applied for the state's money yet -- and the money itself might not exist.

Also, there's no clear evidence that Tiger Stadium's 8.5 acres constitute a brownfield, which is a site that's either contaminated or suspected of contamination.

Maybe there's a problem with some old lead paint. Maybe the city is factoring in all those years of tobacco juice. Or maybe the city is just sort of making things up as it goes along, the way it's done since the Tigers moved to Comerica Park in 2000.

The DEGC rebuffed and ridiculed even the most logical and credible proposals for Tiger Stadium, which opened for business five days after the Titanic slipped to the bottom of the North Atlantic in 1912.

Show us financing and blueprints, the city said, even as it denied reasonable access to the building. Show us a developer. Then a year ago, it announced the official plan -- stores and condos, with much of the playing field preserved as a park.

The city had no financing. It had no blueprints. It had no developer. It still doesn't, but it had a nice announcement on Wednesday, all about spending money it doesn't control.

The biggest issue

Susan Erickson works for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Her official designation is Chief of the Environmental Stewardship Grants and Loans Unit in the Environmental Science and Services Division.

"We tried to come up with a longer title," she says, "but we couldn't think of one."

Her team doles out money from the Clean Michigan Initiative (CMI), a $675 million bond approved by Michigan voters in late 1998. The biggest chunk of the money, $335 million, was targeted for brownfields.

Tiger Stadium, which at least used to be a green field before the city opted to let the place fall apart, has indeed come up in discussion. "I have a staff person who covers that area," Erickson says, and the staffer has chatted with the city.

But "we certainly don't have an application at this point," she says, "and I'm not sure it would be eligible."

Beyond that, "our biggest issue right now is that there's not much CMI funding left," she says. As to be expected nearly nine years after the bond was approved, "there's less than $4 million available in the grant and loan program, and we have a number of applications in hand right now."

None of them have to do with the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. From where the city stands today, it can't even see the on-deck circle of the funding process. But the city was conducting business as usual last week, writing checks with its mouth that the bank can't cash.

Reach Neal Rubin at (313) 222-1874 or nrubin@detnews.com.