“Not every business is a good business.”

At long last the Menominee City Council has asked for a resolution opposing the Back Forty Mine.

Read about it.

Kudos to Mayor Jean Stegeman and council Rep. Frank Pohlmann for pushing it past opposing council members.

More kudos to Stegeman for recognizing and pointing out that all business is not good for the community.

I’m reminded of my 18-month fill-in stint on the Marinette Plan Commission. We very wisely said no to a fireworks business that would have allowed stock to remain in the building during months of closure. The building would have been located near a residential patch of Marinette Avenue.

Good for the community? I think not.

Tourism & MCABI: Good Match?

Marinette County officials are giving serious thought to moving tourism promotion to the county’s economic development arm, MCABI.

That’s a good idea. Read more here.

MCABI, by the way, stands for Marinette County Association for Business & Industry. It was a moribund little organization until Ann Hartnell took over as executive director in late 2012.

Hartnell and her board are responsible for finally getting the long-talked about business center/ incubator off the ground. The center is located across from Ironworks on Main Street in mid-town Marinette.

She retired at the end of 2017, and will be replaced by Lindsay Callow. That is another piece of good news, I think, as Callow has demonstrated that she is a creative thinker with a solid background in business and marketing.

Callow and her husband own two area wineries, and have done a stellar job getting them off the ground and engaged in the community. They are vested in the community.

Now is the time to make tourism promotion a part of economic development. Lindsay Callow appears to be a great choice to oversee both areas.

I never met the county’s most recent tourism coordinator who quit last fall.

I do know that within the last two years, I picked up a copy of the Marinette County tourism guide that was full of misused words, misplaced modifiers, dangling participles and other grammatical catastrophes. It looked good, but was full of writing errors. I can’t see that happening with Callow at the helm.

Tourism has been a political football in Marinette County. It’s been overseen by the chamber on at least two occasions, by a consultant, by the county, by a committee - and dare we hope, finally under MCABI?


It seems Callow resigned 3-4 weeks into the job.

Oh, well.

Kudos to Stegeman and Pohlmann

I haven’t always agreed with Menominee Mayor Jean Stegeman.

But I respect her for opposing the Back Forty Mine. She deftly handled the city council’s refusal to discuss the issue a few months back (that’s when I started but never finished this post.) She correctly pointed out that several council members skip meetings when the issue is on the agenda.

She showed more grit this week when some council members - well, mostly one - grilled Aquila representatives. Read more here.

The very fact that Stegeman opposes the mine when so many around her appear to be aligned with mine officials is admirable. She’s sticking to her convictions.

So is Frank Pohlmann, one of two Ward 4 reps. He’s better informed than the Aquila reps.

I don’t know why Stegeman gave up her chance to earn real money by leading the Tri City Area United Way. I know what she earns in her very part-time mayoral position, ands it’s a pittance. It wouldn’t even pay for a years worth of groceries.

But Menominee is lucky to have Stegeman and Pohlmann on board.