Donated Beds for Habitat Homes

Story first reported from Detroit Free Press

 Two years ago, Adrianne Chamblis managed to get her family into a Habitat for Humanity home on Detroit's east side.

But she was never able to afford much in the way of furniture. Her 13-year-old daughter slept on a used, donated mattress and her 8- and 5-year-olds either slept in her bed, or with her 16-year-old son.

On Saturday, Chamblis and her children received two twin beds for the younger children and a double bed to replace her 13-year-old's secondhand one. As she proudly showed off the new beds, complete with colorful new comforters, her younger daughter dug into a bag of tutus and other dress up clothes the donors brought.

The Chamblis family was one of 46 families across the region who received 100 donated bedroom furniture from two charities on Saturday.

Leigh Ann Lanaux of the nonprofit organization Good Night's Sleep of Los Angeles said they give beds and bedding essentials to the homeless population coming into permanent housing.

The group delivered 518 beds to other cities in the last 18 months before coming to Detroit, where it partnered with Humble Designs of Troy to deliver beds in the area. Humble Designs is a nonprofit organization that gives free home makeovers to families recommended by charitable organizations.

The brand-new beds are purchased with money donated to Good Night's Sleep.

The idea for donating beds to families in need came from a line in the 2009 movie, "The Blind Side," when Michael Oher tells Leigh Anne Tuohy, the character played by Sandra Bullock, that he's never had a bed before, Lanaux said.

The bed recipients had to have been homeless, but moved into permanent housing for six to 12 months, and have a job or be in a program that will help them remain in their permanent housing.

The Detroit donations came with sheets, comforters, pillows and other bedding donated by employees of Doner, an advertising agency in Southfield, from a Michigan Furniture Store.

Lanaux said the best reaction is from the children.

More donations in Detroit were not ruled out.

Lanaux said she’d love to come back to Detroit any time.

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Boardman River Dams Ready to Fall

 Story first reported from Traverse City Record Eagle

TRAVERSE CITY — Finally, after seven years, local Boardman River dam removal project leaders have a $2.9 million price tag and construction contract for dismantling the first of three Boardman River dams.

The Boardman River Implementation Team this week approved the general contractor/project management contract with AMEC Engineering & Infrastructure to remove the Brown Bridge Dam powerhouse, restore the river to its historic channel and reseed exposed bottomlands and construction areas.

The bulk of the contract, about $2.5 million, will go to Molon Excavating of Traverse City and its subcontractors for deconstruction, dredging, sediment management, restoration and re-seeding over an estimated 20 weeks. If work is not finished by Dec. 19, the project will be completed in the spring. 

Deconstruction cannot begin until the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality issues a permit, expected possibly early next week, Sroonian said. It will take about a week after the permit is approved to start.

Molon first will build a temporary "de-watering" structure to slowly drain the remaining 22 vertical feet of water in Brown Bridge Pond. The city's permit request seeks a flow rate of 1-foot-per-day to manage sediment, a major focus of the project. 

Sediment will be captured in traps as the water recedes. The MDEQ will set the rate of flow. 

The dam blocked the natural flow of river sediment for 90 years and created a sand delta at the north end of the former pond. 

About 250,000 cubic yards of spoils, a quantity that would fill 25,000 dump trucks with 10-yard beds, will be dredged during stream restoration in the upper impoundment. All of the spoils will remain on site in upland areas, according to information included in the city's permit request. Another 3,100 cubic feet of material will be dredged in late summer to install a temporary water-control structure upstream from the dam. 

The powerhouse foundation, buried under five feet of soil, will remain as will part of the earthen embankment, which will be graded and sloped. The river will be 55 feet wide in that section, Sroonian, AMEC’s senior principal engineer said.

The contract is the culmination of years of planning, feasibility studies, and engineering designs that started in 2005, after Traverse City Light & Power announced it would shut down the three hydroelectric dams. The announcement led to a study and a recommendation from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers that the three dams be removed and Union Street Dam be reconstructed.

Brown Bridge, built in 1921, is the first of three dams scheduled to be taken out over the next three years. It is owned by Traverse City. Boardman and Sabin dams are owned by Grand Traverse County. The Army Corps is handling their removal. 

AMEC selected Molon from a field of 14 companies. Once completed, the dam removal project will restore 18 miles of cold-water river flowing into Lake Michigan and reconnect 160 miles of river and tributaries to Lake Michigan.

It is the state's largest-ever river restoration project and is believed by project leaders to one of the most comprehensive dam removal and restoration projects undertaken in the United States.

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Joel Ewanick Resigns from GM

Story first reported from Detroit Free Press

General Motors' global chief marketing officer, Joel Ewanick, has elected to resign effective immediately, the automaker announced Sunday evening.

Greg Martin, GM spokesman, said  Ewanick failed to meet expectations for company employees.

He declined to be more specific.

Ewanick, 52, joined GM in May 2010 to lead marketing in the company's North America unit.

He soon set in motion the first of several management shake-ups as GM continued its restructuring post-bankruptcy. He became global marketing chief in December 2010, giving him oversight of a $4.5-billion budget.

Ewanick had developed a reputation as an innovative marketing leader, but also as someone who had moved quickly among jobs before GM hired him.

"It has been a privilege & honor to work with the GM Team and to be a small part of Detroit's turnaround. I wish everyone at GM all the best," he tweeted on his Twitter account Sunday.

GM's market share in the U.S. for the first six months of 2012 slipped to 18.1% from 19.9% a year earlier, according to researcher Autodata Corp.

Ewanick's departure comes amid GM's continuing effort to clearly communicate to investors how it will restructure its European business that has lost more than $12 billion during the last 12 years, and is expected to report another loss for the second quarter of this year on Thursday.

Before joining GM, Ewanick was vice president of marketing and chief marketing officer for Nissan North America for little more than a month.

Before joining Nissan, he served as vice president of marketing for Hyundai Motor America. At Hyundai he launched the Hyundai Assurance program during the depth of the financial crisis in 2009. That program allowed customers to return their Hyundai vehicles if they lost their jobs.

Ewanick's departure comes less than three weeks after Chevrolet launched a similar program called "Love it or Return it" that allows consumers who buy Chevrolets between now and Labor Day to return them between 30 and 60 days of ownership if they're not satisfied, as long as they have less than 4,000 miles on the odometer.

Ewanick was instrumental in streamlining Chevrolet's more than 70 different advertising and marketing agencies into a more manageable relationship with one: In March, Ewanick orchestrated the merger of two large agencies -- Goodby, Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco and McCann Erickson Worldwide -- into one new agency called Commonwealth to handle Chevrolet advertising globally.

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Ewanick clashed with GM over "failing to properly vet the financial details of a European soccer-sponsorship deal that he struck recently."

Chevrolet sponsors both Manchester United and Liverpool Football Club.

Those deals came shortly after GM announced it would not advertise in the 2013 Super Bowl and that it would not pay for any advertising on Facebook.

Alan Batey, vice president, U.S. Sales and Service, will assume the role of global chief marketing officer on an interim basis.

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Full Employment in Ann Arbor's Future

Story first reported from Detroit Free Press

Full employment -- when everybody who wants a job can find one in a reasonable time -- is something you'd expect to see in places such as North Dakota and Texas, not Michigan.

Ann Arbor is getting closer to this economic nirvana. Help-wanted signs have popped up in the windows of some of its crowded restaurants and bars, and the area's online jobs portal for high-skilled workers has nearly 900 job listings yet to be filled. In late June, the Web security firm Barracuda Networks announced plans to create 184 jobs in Ann Arbor for software engineers and other technical workers during the next three years.

With the lowest jobless rate in the state, 6.2% in June, the college town has rebounded from the loss of 2,100 Pfizer jobs and the demise of Borders' corporate headquarters. With a vibrant downtown, a Big Ten university and cultural activities such as this month's art fair, Ann Arbor is leading Michigan's economic recovery.

Ann Arbor is the new job growth center of the greater Detroit region, said Richard Florida, an economist at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and author of the best-seller "The Rise of the Creative Class."

He said Ann Arbor resembles Austin, Texas, in the 1990s and Boulder, Colo., in the early 2000s. It tied for fourth place on his list of the top 20 creative metro areas in the country, behind only Boulder, San Francisco and Boston.

Stores and restaurants are full, and it all looks and feels affluent, said Donald Grimes, the co-author of a Washtenaw County economic outlook report and a senior research specialist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Research on Labor, Employment and the Economy.

It took Tyler Mettie just two weeks to land a part-time job after he stepped up his search efforts. On July 16, the 20-year-old Washtenaw Community College student started washing dishes at Tios, a Mexican café on East Liberty Street.

Ann Arbor's jobless rate plunged to a recent low of 5% in April. Along with the rest of the state, this rate has since increased because many people who previously had stayed out of the job market now are looking for work.

Economists say that Ann Arbor's rate of full employment is likely in the 4% range. For the country as a whole, full employment -- also known as the natural unemployment rate -- was 6% in late 2011, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In June, the U.S. jobless rate stood at 8.2%.

Full employment is the jobless rate that if you dip below it would spark inflation, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. It can never be 0% because there are always people changing jobs.

The labor market, however, can vary widely from one metropolitan area to the next. Just 33 miles to the east of Ann Arbor, the Detroit metro area has a jobless rate of 10.2%, the highest in the state.

What accounts for the difference? "The work force in Ann Arbor is far better educated than the work force in Detroit and the suburbs," Grimes said.

Donna Doleman, vice president of marketing, communications and talent at Ann Arbor SPARK, the area's economic development organization, said the Ann Arbor job market is thriving because it is diversified, with industries such as health care, software, life sciences and automotive research and development.

So far this year, employers have posted 1,737 jobs on SPARK's online jobs portal ( www.annarborusa.org/talent/jobs ), and 850 of these positions have been filled.

All of this is a turnaround from five years ago, when the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced plans to shutter its massive Ann Arbor research campus, a loss that Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje describes as similar to the closing of an auto plant.

A third of the 2,100 laid-off Pfizer workers wound up staying in Ann Arbor, and in recent years the University of Michigan has stepped up its efforts to transfer its technology to local businesses. The area is now home to dozens of start-up firms.

The tighter labor market means employers such as Terumo Cardiovascular Systems and ProQuest have had to become more proactive to find the talent they need.

Terumo, which makes heart-lung machines and other medical devices, has 35 positions to fill and has hired almost 200 workers during the last 18 months. To find experienced medical device workers, the company has participated in Michigan Economic Development Corp. recruiting events in Boston and northern California.

Like other companies, Terumo gets a flood of résumés when it posts any entry-level positions that require only a high school education. But for technical positions, DeLuca said they are happy to get 3 to 10 applications.

ProQuest, a research products firm, held its first-ever job fair at its Ann Arbor headquarters in mid-June to fill 20 information technology positions, including Java software developers and Oracle developers. The job fair drew 50 people, with the company choosing to do further interviews with 16 of them. So far, ProQuest has hired three people from this group, but it still has about 40 positions to fill in Ann Arbor..

High-skilled workers aren't the only ones in demand. Tios is struggling to find delivery drivers, who earn $6 an hour plus delivery charges and tips.

To be sure, Ann Arbor's jobless rate is still high enough that many people are searching for work for months, not weeks. Keely Ann Kaleski, 53, has been sending out résumés and going to job fairs and networking events since late May. The former software implementation and training manager now is targeting smaller companies and increasing her networking efforts.

The last time Kaleski had looked for work was in 2005, and back then it only took her a month to find a new job. "Everything is just taking a lot longer," the Ann Arbor resident said.

But Kaleski may not have to wait much longer to get hired. Economists expect the jobless rate in the Ann Arbor area will continue to decline. After all, before the recession, the area's annual unemployment rate hovered in the 4% range.

Grimes predicts that Ann Arbor will get to full employment, because universities tend to be very stable employers.

More Details: Ann Arbor's largest employers as of January 2012 for the metro area.

1. University of Michigan

2. University of Michigan Medical Center

3. Trinity Health

4. Ann Arbor Public Schools

5. ACH Saline (auto supplier)

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Art Van Grows, Hires Doner

Story first reported from Detroit Free Press

Art Van Furniture, Michigan's largest home furniture retailer, is moving its big advertising and marketing account to Southfield-based Doner, as Art Van prepares to launch a major growth push into Ohio and the Chicago market.

"We're looking for Doner to take us to a place that most furniture retailers haven't been ... We believe they would be a breath of fresh air for us," Art Van Elslander, founder and chairman of the 53-year-old furniture chain, told me Friday.

He cited Doner's recent work on Fiat 500 ads featuring Charlie Sheen and Jennifer Lopez as the kind of attention-grabbing spots that can help draw customers to a new brand, which Art Van will soon be to shoppers in Chicago.

Art Van and Doner will formally announce their tie-up later this week. Doner, a 75-year-old agency with 560 people, replaces a smaller Southfield agency, Sussman Sikes & Associates, which has had the account since 2009.

Art Van, based in Warren, operates 34 furniture stores and six PureSleep bedding stores in Michigan, but hasn't ventured out-of-state -- until now.

Van Elslander said the firm is building a 100,000-square-foot superstore on a 10-acre site off I-475 near Toledo, and is looking seriously at six to eight locations for a push into the Chicago area, where he said there is no dominant competitor. Smaller furniture chains in the Chicago area, such as Wickes, Levitz and Plunkett, have gone out of business in recent years.

For Doner, the Art Van account is a big step in strengthening connections with the agency's hometown. Doner made a name for itself as an independent Detroit-based agency not completely reliant on the auto industry, and won national acclaim for work on non-local brands such as Mazda cars and Serta mattresses.

David DeMuth and Rob Strasberg, co-CEOs of Doner, said that three years ago, Doner's longtime pro bono work for the Detroit Zoo was its only major local client relationship.

That changed after Doner lost the Mazda account in 2010, which was 20% of its business after a long run with the "Zoom Zoom" campaigns. Doner quickly picked up a new automotive client by snagging Chrysler's "tier-two" work on dealer ads and sale events -- then parlayed that into the nod as the agency for the Fiat 500 launch, a product of the Chrysler-Fiat marriage.

Art Van, a private company, doesn't reveal specific numbers for the tens of millions of dollars it spends on TV and print advertising. But it does brag in employment ads for salespeople about having "great customer traffic driven by Michigan's No. 1 advertising spend."

"We believe the best client relationships are when advertising is mission-critical to business," DeMuth said, "because that creates urgency and focus from the very highest levels of the company. And Art Van is clearly that kind of business."

The delicate part of Doner's task in tweaking Art Van's image will be trying to elevate the perception of the product range as stylish and sophisticated, without abandoning the emphasis on value and blowout sales that made Art Van the 800-pound gorilla of Michigan furniture retailing.

"We've got a reputation for value, quality and customer satisfaction," Van Elslander said. "We could use a little help in our message about style and fashion." He said his target buyer is female, age 30-54.

"There are still going to be lots of sales and some heavy-duty retail massaging," said Strasberg, "but it will be wrapped in a nice package."

Doner's work for Art Van will start appearing in a couple months, but the first major campaign will break around November, the Doner executives said.

Van Elslander mentioned that one of the unusual ads he liked recently was Chrysler's 2-minute "Halftime in America" Super Bowl ad starring Clint Eastwood, which was done by the Wieden + Kennedy agency.

Doner's aim will obviously be to deliver memorable advertising spots for Art Van. But maybe we shouldn't hold our breaths waiting to see Clint lounging on a plush sofa, brandishing a TV remote and growling at the TV, "Come on, make my day!"

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Refrigeration Company Admits to False Carbon Claims

Story first reported from ABC

A consumer watchdog says a South Australian refrigeration company has admitted to making false carbon tax price claims.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has accepted a legally-enforceable undertaking from Equipserve Solutions that it will not make further false statements linking price rises to the carbon tax.

Equipserve sent an email to customers which attributed the entire increase of a refrigerant gas price to the carbon tax, when this was not the case.

The refrigeration contractor of walk in coolers has agreed to not make similar misleading claims in the future and to send out a corrective notice to its customers advising them of the false claims.

Equipserve has also agreed to train its staff on their legal obligations.

The ACCC's chairman Rod Sims says Equipserve avoided potential fines because of its full cooperation with the regulator once concerns about the statements were raised.

Mr Sims says consumers may be less likely to question price hikes of walk in freezers if they are blamed on the carbon tax.

So far the ACCC has dealt with misleading carbon tax pricing claims through undertakings by the offending companies to correct their statements.

However, penalties of up to $1.1 million per contravention are available in more serious cases or where companies do not cooperate with the regulator.

The provides information for companies about their compliance requirements.

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Class Action Suits Against GM Still Out There

Story first appeared in USA Today.

Q: Are there any securities class-action lawsuits filed on behalf of former General Motors shareholders who lost money from the bankruptcy restructuring?

A: Investors in the company formerly known as Motors Liquidation may feel as though they got run over.

These investors had owned shares of General Motors prior to the massive bankruptcy restructuring proceedings in 2009.

The company underwent the restructuring, then re-emerged as a new company called General Motors. This new company sold shares to the public in 2010, raised more than $16 billion from an initial public offering and was reborn, again, as General Motors (GM).

Investors in the pre-restructuring company formerly known as General Motors saw their shares get delisted and end up trading for pennies on an informal trading marketplace under the name Motors Liquidation.

Some investors in the old General Motors continue to be frustrated by the turn of events. And when investors feel wronged, they are able to turn to the courts.

Investors who want to check to see if any securities action lawsuits have been filed can get quick answers from the Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse. This site aggregates securities class-action lawsuits and helps investors see if a stock they own or owned might be involved in litigation.

Not surprisingly, General Motors has been the subject of several securities class-action lawsuits. The cases have been consolidated into a suit filed on Sept. 19, 2005, called Folksam Asset Management, et al. v. General Motors.

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