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Long-time auto town successful in altering automaker’s course

JANESVILLE — Lansing Mayor Dave Hollister wasn’t asked if he wanted the good news or bad news first.

General Motors officials made Hollister smile in 1996 when they told him they’d be building the new Oldsmobile Alero at the Lansing, Mich., assembly plant.

Then the bad news: When Alero production ended in 2004, GM’s presence in Lansing would end, too.

“I thought, ‘Wow, what in the world am I going to do with this,’” said Hollister, who served as Lansing’s mayor from 1993 to 2003.

What he did was put together a team that convinced GM officials not to abandon Lansing. GM built and opened the $560 million Lansing Grand River plant in 2001 and the $1 billion Lansing Delta Township plant in 2006.

The two plants are the newest in GM’s stable.

Now that GM has said it will close its Janesville plant by 2010 at the latest, the community finds itself in a predicament similar to the one Lansing faced more than 10 years ago.

Granted, the auto industry has changed dramatically:

-- Big trucks such as those that Janesville plant is tooled to build have fallen out of favor with consumers.

-- GM has far more capacity than it needs.

-- GM’s balance sheet says it’s in no position to build new plants or retool existing facilities.

And beyond that, Janesville has long been considered a GM outpost far from GM’s preferred network of suppliers, distributors and decision makers.

Even so, Janesville should not give up hope, said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

“Don’t just accept that this has happened and we’re all gonna die.

“Lansing was a very different situation in a very different time, but Janesville could be like Lansing with a new product or a new plant,” Cole said.

War room

Hollister visited Toledo, Ohio, where Chrysler had reversed its decision to close a Jeep facility.

“The takeaway was that we needed a proactive, well-organized team with engineers leading the effort,” Hollister said. “GM doesn’t speak political language at all. They speak engineering, so we had to talk the language they understand.”

Hollister formed a “Keep GM” team of about 100 people who represented all facets of the community.

A smaller operating group met every couple of weeks.

Hollister chaired an even smaller group, a quick response team of eight to 10 people. He described it as a one-stop problem-solving operation capable of handling any issue GM threw its way.

“We had a war room that no one else had access to,” he said. “We had maps all over the walls, we knew every GM officer, and we gathered a lot of information.

“We knew what the hell we were doing.”

The team capitalized on the track record of the local GM workforce and the positive relationship between the local union and company management.

“The thing was not for me to take a political approach,” he said. “I had to represent the collective thinking of the entire region and keep the key players together.

“We didn’t do anything without first checking with labor, checking with the banks, checking with the council, checking with everyone.”

In a nutshell, Hollister said, the team was able to put aside political squabbling and turn a situation that looked hopeless into one of civic pride.

The schools

Concerned that Lansing’s schools weren’t producing the best workforce they could, the team developed strategies to improve the K-12 education system. More than 1,100 volunteers—including the mayor—spent an hour a week for six years helping kids improve their reading skills.

“We decided we would not tolerate dropouts, and one way to achieve that was to get the schools to stop advancing third graders to fourth grade when they couldn’t read,” Hollister said. “We raised reading levels pretty dramatically and sent the message to GM that we were concerned about our workforce and were doing something about it.”

When it was time to launch the new Alero, the Lansing plant did so on its second shift to show GM that even its younger, less-experienced workers were capable of such an important task.

The launch went so well that the plant won a $25,000 award.

“Instead of buying shirts and having a weenie roast, the plant manager used the money to set up a scholarship fund,” said Hollister, who bought the first Alero off the line and the next 12 for members of his cabinet.

“Some of these cabinet members were used to driving Cadillacs and Lincolns. I said, ‘To hell with that. We’ll all drive Aleros and send another message to GM.’”

‘Keep GM’

Knowing that GM officials would be routine visitors to Lansing, the team plastered its “Keep GM” logo on billboards, bumper stickers and auto dealership advertising. It made up a series of awards—the “Award for Progressive Leadership,” for example—that were bestowed upon GM officials at every turn.

“We wined and dined them and did whatever it took to let them know what we were doing in Lansing,” said Hollister, who went on to serve as director of Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth and now runs an economic development organization.

It worked, at least to the point that when GM wanted to build a new plant to produce Cadillacs, it invited Lansing to submit a proposal.

GM said it wanted 200 acres. To accommodate that, Hollister figured he’d have to knock down neighborhoods or tear up golf courses.

Instead, the engineering members of his team reconfigured the blueprints for GM’s ultra high-tech “Blue Macaw” plant in Brazil to replicate it in an 80-acre parcel in Lansing.

“We went to GM and said, ‘We know this is not what you asked for, but we have a plan to redevelop your site, a site you’ll never sell because it’s so contaminated,’” Hollister said.

GM officials were impressed, but said the new plant would be serviced by up to 1,000 trucks a day on a tight schedule.

Lansing’s infrastructure needed dramatic changes, including moving an expressway that ran through the heart of town.

“They said that if we could handle infrastructure, they’d consider it,” Hollister said. “On a handshake deal, I said I’d make a run at it.”

He and the team did, and the new Grand River plant is now building three Cadillac models.

GM then approached Lansing with a need for a state-of-the-art plant that would ultimately build the popular Buick Enclave, GMC Acadia and Saturn Outlook crossovers.

Lansing didn’t have that kind of acreage, so Hollister turned to his regional teammates to site the plant in Delta Township, about 10 miles outside Lansing.

“We jumped through lots and lots of hoops over the years,” he said. “Our quick response team became GM’s problem solver. (GM Chairman Rick) Wagoner said that our committee knew more about his business than his own people.

“We were that deeply engaged. It can be done.”