Blue-collar Flint sees airport in its own light

FLINT, Mich. | Bishop International Airport serves as a beacon in the sky for a city that hasn't had much to brag about for decades.

Civic and business leaders point to the busy air hub and a downtown revival as examples of what the city of Flint and Genesee County can do when they roll up their sleeves.

But in blue-collar Flint, that pride is tempered by the knowledge that the city faces more downsizing and possible plant closures at General Motors Corp., which can only add to problems like blighted neighborhoods and high crime.

"We've been hit so bad by GM's problems," said Leo Jennings, a deacon at Pentecostal Temple Church, just a few blocks northwest of downtown. "The airport is needed, but so is urban renewal and so is job training."

Thirty years ago, GM employed 79,000 people in Flint. Today that number is down to 16,000.

Jennings, a 30-year GM employee, was cutting the grass around the church, a rented brick building, on a 94-degree day in August. He pointed across the street to a boarded-up building with a sign reading "Party Store" in faded red letters.

"They want $180,000 for that," Jennings said. "Can you believe it? We'd like to put our church there. But everyone thinks because they're fixing up downtown, this will be next."

A few blocks away, Deborah Springer was helping oversee about half a dozen children as they shoveled mulch around two large pine trees in front of the Christ Enrichment Center, a former Episcopal church on Hamilton Street.

Springer's son and daughter fly regularly out of Bishop International. With 60 arrivals and departures daily on seven airlines, passengers can connect to hundreds of destinations. The airlines, airport vendors and other businesses at the airport employ about 800 people.

Springer agreed the airport creates jobs and is something the city needs.

"At the same time, I look at our kids and they have needs too," Springer said. "I see some children come here hungry some mornings and I say, 'Why can't we support them too?' "

Taxpayers in Genesee County, which includes the city of Flint, pitched in almost $4.8 million to support the airport last year. Other airport revenues from parking, landing fees and other sources came to $9.7 million.

Springer said the gardening work the children were doing around the former church was sponsored with a $1,995 grant from the Flint-based Mott Foundation. She rolled her eyes when reminded the foundation kicked in $10 million so Bishop International terminal designers could add architectural niceties.

Even those who go to work every day at the airport say it took quite a while to make believers out of them.

"When they built that terminal, and it was a build-it-and-they-will-come type of thing, we thought they were crazy," said Mike Wagner, 37, an aircraft mechanic with McLellan Aviation, which has a small aircraft repair hangar at the airport's east end.

The Bishop International terminal was built in 1993 and was part of a series of projects totaling more than $100 million. It initially involved road and rail relocations, the condemnation of strip joints and massage parlors, and construction of an immaculately landscaped parking area.

Wagner's boss, McLellan Aviation owner Fred McLellan, 73, said he knows most airport jobs don't pay as well as the auto plant jobs of the past. But few jobs do.

"Back when, GM could give employees anything they wanted," he said. "And today, we're still living by the mentality that we can have anything we want."