Jer,

Nicely done.

I think you know my view on the EDA. Goodness knows I've shared it with anyone who will listen. Here is the rough outline, which you can share as you wish. It is an opinion not a secret:

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For a generation or more, Port Huron invested nearly every penny of its surplus cash, particularly proceeds from its tax-increment districts, into developing a Tier 3 industrial park. The city also handed out lucrative incentives and tax breaks to anyone who agreed to create jobs.

Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. This was the mantra.

Unfortunately, we didn't give a damn whether they were good jobs. A job paying $7.50 an hour was trumpeted just as loudly as if it paid $75,000 a year. Quality didn't matter. Employers came and employers went as tax incentives expired. Stability didn't matter.

It was a shell game. If you were a lawyer or a banker or a commercial real-estate broker, there was money to be made on the sidelines, but the big money went to out-of-town investors who couldn't have found Port Huron on a map without two clues and a hint.

Meanwhile, the people working those $7.50-an-hour jobs couldn't afford a mortgage payment. And if they did manage to buy a home, they couldn't afford to reshingle the roof. A long and inexorable deterioration of the housing stock was inevitable. As the housing went, so went the neighborhoods; and as the neighborhoods went, so went the town.

Couple this with the folly of imposing the county's highest taxes (including a let's-kill-the-town income tax) on the county's poorest community, and we were given the rare opportunity of witnessing a slow-motion suicide. Today, we stand at the tipping point. Our poverty rate has reached what a Wayne State University professor of urban affairs calls the point of no return.

In effect, Port Huron strangled itself. Our neighborhoods began to fray and decay not because of bad luck or outside forces, but because of the community's own misguided and short-sighted policies. Port Huron invested all of its surplus cash, millions and millions of dollars, not to mention all of its civic aspirations and fondest dreams, into a strategy of self-destruction.

And, yes, we were patting ourselves on the backs and passing out awards even as we did it.

The EDA and its predecessors, along with many other agencies -- the chamber, the various downtown booster groups, a few of the civic clubs and, of course, the city's elected leaders and paid administrators -- were all parties to the crime. Anyone who spoke out against it, and the late Larry Lick springs to mind, was ridiculed as a witless oaf.

What happened to Port Huron was not inevitable. We managed to do it to ourselves all by ourselves, thank you.

The question now is what do we do about it? We can't rewrite history. We can't change what is done. Cursing the night doesn't bring dawn.

My personal opinion is Shaun Groden deserves a chance to find a new path and to push the rest of us onto it. Frankly, if he cannot do it, there is no one else waiting in the wings. I don't see anyone else with a vision and the resources to make it happen.

The old guard is all but gone. The age of the old-fashioned capitalist (Ward, McMorran, Murphy, Mueller, Acheson, Kiefer, Haynes, Boynton, Sherman, Ottaway, et al) is long gone. There are no John Wismers or Granger Weils pulling the strings of power. The three foundations (Acheson, Citizens, Community) that dominated civic affairs for the past decade are fading fast. If Jim Acheson has proven anything, it's that $150 million only goes so far.

Lamentations and jeremiads have their place, but they are not solutions.