She finds Alyssa in the paneled family room, watching TV with Justin, her boyfriend. “Do you want to come with?” Kayzia asks, putting it that way because she doesn’t want her sister to feel pressure to help. Alyssa has more obligations than she does, with the payments on the 2005 Chevy Impala she’s just bought to get to work, and her car insurance, while Kayzia is still saving up to make sure she has enough money for a car. But Alyssa is in, of course. Justin, too, because, even if it hasn’t been plain to him what’s up, if Alyssa is going, he is, too.
Before they leave, Kayzia and her mom look through the coupons to see which ones would be useful. Her mom makes a grocery list. Then they are in the car, Tammy at the wheel and Kayzia in the front seat, with Alyssa and Justin in back, as if this thing they’re doing isn’t completely topsy-turvy. First stop is the Blackhawk Credit Union ATM, where Kayzia and Alyssa jump out and get $100 each, the maximum daily withdrawal from their accounts. Then they shoot off to the all-night Woodman’s on the north side of town. By the time they arrive, it’s almost midnight, the wide aisles nearly empty of shoppers.
Kayzia has worked out the details. Justin takes charge of the coupons, Alyssa works the calculator, and she pushes the cart and helps her mother load. They buy chicken because they’ve been having too much pasta. Lunch meat, because Kayzia is sick of pb&j. Cocoa Puffs and Cap’n Crunch for a change, instead of generic cereal. And then they come to an aisle so tempting but unnecessary that Kayzia lets herself walk down it only because it is, after all, her own money: the aisle with chocolate chip cookie dough Pop-Tarts.
The crucial part of the whole venture, the key to its success, is the checkout. They need to do it just right. No clue that her mom isn’t buying the groceries the way mothers usually do. So, in line, with no one saying a word, the girls slip Tammy their crisp $20 bills. She takes them as easily as she does the coupons that Justin hands her.
On the ride home, groceries in the trunk, Kayzia relaxes. Sure she’s tired, but the thought of Cocoa Puffs in the morning makes her as happy as the little girl she used to be. Funny she should think that, she tells herself, because, at this moment, she’s feeling more grown up than ever in her life. Taking responsibility. There are times when she doesn’t know how to think about what it means that she and Alyssa have more money in their accounts than their parents. With her bringing home $150 to $200, depending on her hours, from Culver’s every two weeks, and trying to save $100 of it, as often as she can. Sometimes she resents the sacrifices and the responsibilities. But she reminds herself that she and Alyssa have been taught to be helping people since they were little. They donate to the National Honor Society blood drive and raise money for Parker High’s Relay for Life. So why, really, when her parents need the help, should it be any different at home?
When they get to the house, and she puts away the groceries with her mom, Kayzia is feeling something besides happiness over the Cocoa Puffs: relief that her dad is asleep. All this time after his General Motors job went away, with him bumping in and out of other work that doesn’t pay enough, she knows that he still isn’t over the idea that he’s supposed to provide for his family. He’s so hard on himself, she thinks, not giving himself credit for trying as hard as he can, looking online all the time for better jobs. In the morning, she knows, he will not be happy to find the refrigerator filled by this midnight shopping adventure fueled by his daughters’ checking accounts.
Part Five
2012
37
SHINE
Mary Willmer is in the audience of the Janesville City Council chambers, her son, Connor, at her side. It is 7 p.m. on the second Monday in February, and the third City Council meeting of 2012 is about to begin. Mary doesn’t often come to watch her local government in action, and she certainly doesn’t bring her kids. Tonight, the chambers are uncommonly full. Driving downtown to the Municipal Building, on Jackson Street just off Milwaukee Street, where the Labor Fest parade marches each year, Mary reminded Connor, her youngest and a Craig High School junior, that it was good for him to come because this is such a big night for the community.
In the car, Connor had asked whether she was nervous. “Scared to death,” Mary admitted.
The source of Mary’s anxiety, and the reason she is here, is item #1 under new business on the Council’s agenda. The item is a pricey, $9 million proposal, two years in the making, to help what Mary—and the rest of the Rock County 5.0 economic development coalition—regard as a linchpin to Janesville’s revival. It is called SHINE.
As linchpins go, this one isn’t the sturdiest. SHINE Medical Technologies is a start-up company in Madison that has devised a novel method for producing a medical isotope from uranium. The isotope in question is needed in hospitals for stress tests to detect heart disease, bone scans to detect cancer metastases, and twenty-eight other diagnostic imaging purposes. The global supply of this isotope, molybdenum-99, is running low, and SHINE is one of four companies that have received $25 million, early-phase matching grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to try to develop commercially viable manufacturing methods to keep enough Moly-99 (or Mo-99), as it is known for short, flowing.
In an odd coincidence, another of the four companies, called NorthStar, is planning to build its manufacturing plant down the road in Beloit; Diane Hendricks has become the main investor. In the past, these coinciding ambitions would have ignited rivalry. But now, with the government encouraging them both, the pair of start-ups is being welcomed in the spirit of regional collaboration that is Rock County 5.0’s bedrock. Maybe the area can emerge as the nation’s hub of medical isotope manufacturing. “A whole different halo on our Rock County brand,” is how John Beckord, the president of the business alliance, Forward Janesville, is putting it.
At the moment, SHINE has just a dozen employees, insufficient investment capital, a never-before-used isotope-making process, and a considerable government obstacle in its path: rigorous, complex reviews by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will evaluate whether what SHINE wants to do is safe and environmentally sound before deciding whether it deserves a federal license. No license, no manufacturing.
These hurdles notwithstanding, SHINE has been prominent on the radar screen of Janesville’s business and political leaders. It has been there because of the vision of SHINE’s founder and chief executive, Greg Piefer, a guy of thirty-five with floppy brown bangs, an easygoing manner, and a formidable intellect backed up by a University of Wisconsin PhD in nuclear engineering. Two years ago, a Madison business journal singled out Piefer as a “shining star” in its annual listing of forty local entrepreneurs under forty. That was around the time that he began shopping for a community as the site for a future manufacturing plant, if and when SHINE becomes ready to do any manufacturing.
From Mary’s vantage point, SHINE looks like a perfect opportunity. Ever since the assembly plant closed just over three years ago, she and local economic development officials have been working to court businesses that could lift up and diversify Janesville’s sunken economy. Paul Ryan, too. From Capitol Hill and when he is back home, Paul has been making business recruitment calls anytime that Rock County’s economic development manager, James Otterstein, sends him a lead and the name of a CEO to contact. Paul has learned that there is not a good pool of businesses to call because, even two and a half years after the recession officially ended, not many companies are looking to move or to expand. “In this economy? I’m not taking a risk,” is the reply that Paul has heard from CEOs more times than he cares to remember.
Paul has spoken with Piefer four times. Paul has talked up Janesville—its community spirit, its geographic assets, its favorable cost of living. How you can have a really good life in Janesville. The basic spiel he makes to all the CEOs. He has even offered to take Piefer to dinner and, while Piefer has declined, Paul senses that he appreciates that the congressman is there for him. Mary and the rest at Rock County 5.0 have been working on Piefer, as well. And Janesville’s
economic development officials have been negotiating with Piefer and the SHINE team over a crucial piece of nitty-gritty: what it would require in dollars and cents as incentives to bring SHINE to town.
Finally, not quite three weeks ago, Piefer announced that he was very excited to call Janesville home and “to become part of the community as an employer and corporate citizen.” He selected Janesville over two other Wisconsin communities that also had been competing to become SHINE’s future manufacturing home.
After all this wooing and negotiating, after all the futile attempts by Paul and Rock County 5.0 to recruit other companies, the joy with which Mary has greeted SHINE’s decision cannot be overstated. All along, the Rock County 5.0 philosophy—in contrast with that of the no-longer-auto-workers still hoping that the GM plant will come back to life—has been that Janesville needs to update its identity from an old auto town to a twenty-first-century center of advanced manufacturing. What a waste, Mary and the other 5.0’ers believe, that the University of Wisconsin–Madison has a research park, just forty-four miles northwest of Janesville, filled with start-ups dreaming up entrepreneurial innovations in the life sciences and other technologies, and none of the manufacturing spun off from these innovative ideas has ever come to Janesville. Mary and other 5.0’ers have toured the park and met with the people developing new technologies and explained how eager Janesville is to diversify and how especially eager it is for companies in the biosciences. And now, here comes SHINE, the first Madison-born high-tech venture to choose the town. SHINE would, Mary believes, be a game changer.
This joy is undimmed by certain facts. SHINE would not bring many jobs. Piefer has been saying that he’d need 125 employees—a tiny fraction of the jobs that went away. And the soonest those jobs would arrive is three years from now, and it could be later, unless all goes smoothly with investment capital and the federal reviews. And whenever he’s been asked, Piefer has side-stepped the question of how many of those jobs could be filled by people from Janesville, instead of people from elsewhere with greater scientific expertise. “What are the skills he is looking for?” Bob Borremans, over at the Job Center, has been wondering. And if SHINE is going to need to import people with master’s degrees and doctorates in nuclear engineering, Bob wonders, too, what makes Piefer so confident that he can attract those people to what has essentially been a blue-collar town?
Still the salaries Piefer has been talking about—$50,000 to $60,000 a year—have stirred hope across the city, when so many are working for so much less than their wages in the past. From her perch as vice president of learning at Blackhawk Technical College, Sharon Kennedy winces when she sees how this hope has welled up. A Janesville Gazette story saying that SHINE had chosen Janesville mentioned that Piefer was planning to meet soon with administrators at Blackhawk and another technical college to discuss the possibility of creating a new program to train nuclear technicians. No jobs yet. No training yet. Yet Blackhawk’s switchboard lit up right away. All over town, Sharon can see, people are still grabbing on to any shard of hope they can find.
There is another catch, too. The joy that Mary is carrying around, the hope stirred across town by the seductive idea of even just 125 well-paid jobs, have run smack into a sobering reality: Getting SHINE to come to Janesville would cost a lot of money. Exactly how much it would cost has only now become apparent because, though Mary and all the rest have been talking with Piefer and his team for a long time and giving city officials their advice, the negotiations have been conducted by the city’s economic development director, who has disclosed the details to the public just a few days ago.
What details they are! As part of its economic incentives to get SHINE, the city government would donate an eighty-four-acre tract of land. The land, worth $1.5 million, would be on the south side of town, next to the airport, because Moly-99 degrades within hours, so being able to speed freshly made isotope to airports and then to hospitals around the country is vital. The land in question is adjacent to 224 acres of which Mary and Janesville’s other economic development leaders are very proud, because it is intended for a business park, and Rock County 5.0 has paid a pair of consultants to certify it as shovel-ready, meaning that companies could build on it and move right in. This future business park and a smaller site in Beloit make Rock County the only county in Wisconsin with this kind of designated, certified, shovel-ready land for manufacturing or offices or distribution centers. For just over two years now, this has been a big piece of Rock 5.0’s economic development marketing pitch. Except that so far, no businesses eager to build have shown up.
This dearth of interested businesses makes SHINE an especially big deal and is why Janesville, in addition to donating the land, is offering to cover the cost of extending utility lines and otherwise developing the site for the future Moly-99 plant. The city also is offering to guarantee a $4 million private loan that SHINE will need if it is to move forward. This money, nearly $9 million in all with incentives for land, utilities, and construction costs, would come in the form of relief from future property taxes—a much-debated public financing technique that has become popular around the country. Over the years, the idea is, SHINE would more than repay its loan in taxes. And the help would not come directly from Janesville’s hurting city budget. But to put in perspective just how big the incentives are, this $9 million offer to SHINE compares with an entire city budget this year of $42 million. And this question of incentives to SHINE has arisen as, up in Madison, Governor Walker prodded the legislature to approve last summer, over the objections of Tim Cullen and every other Democrat, spending cuts that now have drained from Janesville fully 10 percent of the state aid it had a year ago.
For tonight’s meeting, the city’s economic development director has prepared a candid, detailed memo that lays out the specifics of this SHINE incentive package. It explains that, as Mary and Forward Janesville have urged, most of the incentives would be withheld until SHINE reached specific milestones. Among these milestones would be proof that its nuclear particle accelerator actually works, plus permission from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build the plant.
These milestones would be a kind of financial buffer for the city, a hedge against dumping a fortune into a bad investment. Even with this hedge, though, the economic development director admitted in his forty-page memo that risks to this investment exist. Among these risks, the memo says, is that neither SHINE, nor the NorthStar operation planned for Beloit, nor the other two isotope-making companies that also have been given the $25 million federal grants have so far “proven that their processes can work on a large scale.” Besides, the memo says, the milestones in the deal that Janesville has negotiated with SHINE do not guarantee that SHINE’s technology will be on such a “production scale” before it gets the money. “The challenges facing the company that could put a portion of the city’s funding at risk include economics of the project, federal regulatory process, competition . . . from other countries, and providing a plan to manage any environmental issues.”
SHINE, in other words, is no sure bet.
This, then, is the weak linchpin to Janesville’s economic revival. And this is the deal—the $9 million economic incentive package—that is item #1 on the City Council’s agenda and that has caused Mary to come sit in the audience, with Connor beside her to see a crucial moment of the city government in action.
To Mary, SHINE is such a no-brainer that she was surprised, at first, by the pushback from some in town. She is not surprised anymore. Driving downtown this evening with her son, Mary knows that the City Council is divided about the wisdom of this investment. The public is divided, too.
Still, it is disheartening to Mary and more fuel for her nervousness that, as ten citizens take turns speaking to the Council, only two are in favor of the project. Give SHINE a chance, the pair of proponents say, to make Janesville part of what one calls the nation’s “biotech heartland.” The eight citizens who speak out against SHINE warn of the financial
risk to taxpayers, the lack of planning for nuclear storage and disposal, the possibility that other companies might not want to come to Janesville to be neighbors to a plant that uses uranium.
Nearly an hour into the meeting, Piefer moves from the back of the Council chambers, where he has been hanging out all this time, to the microphone. In addition to being a smart nuclear scientist, he is a good listener with a soothing manner. He is not surprised, he says, that there are a lot of questions about the agreement that city officials have reached with SHINE. The agreement has taken two years, he says, specifically because city officials have been so careful and brought in so many experts.
“If I were a Janesville citizen, which I look forward to becoming,” Piefer says, “I would be proud that this is my City Council.”
In fact, Piefer tells the Council, in a message calculated to delight Mary and everyone else who has been trying so hard to recruit companies to town, he already has begun spreading the word that Janesville is a good place with good leaders with whom to do business.
“SHINE is very much looking forward to building a future in Janesville,” Piefer says. “It is an exciting company. It is the next big thing.”
And yet, for all his geniality and his soothing touch, Piefer is tough enough not to let this moment slip away. One Council member asks what would happen if the vote were delayed a couple of weeks, so that the public could have a little more time to learn and ask questions about the deal.
“The probable result of an unknown delay,” Piefer replies in a quiet tone, “is we will re-engage other sites.” Janesville, in other words, might lose SHINE to somewhere else.
By the time the Council members take turns asking Piefer and members of the SHINE team their own questions, it is past 9 p.m.—more than two hours since the meeting began. They are about to vote. But first, two Council members deliver soliloquies. Their speeches frame the debate in a city that, for all its proud entrepreneurial history, never faced a decision this hard or divisive back when George S. Parker patented his first fountain pen, back when Joseph A. Craig persuaded General Motors’ founder to take over the tractor factory he ran.
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