Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By P.J. GLISSON
Marenisco — Marenisco Township Supervisor Richard Bouvette reported Friday that the township has lost its appeal with the Michigan Court of Appeals regarding the closing of the Ojibway Correctional Facility.
The Michigan Department of Corrections closed OCF on Dec. 1, 2018 after only a few months of notice to local officials.
The township had sued MDOC that fall for not engaging in a longer-term study as to how the closing would impact the local community.
In November 2018, however, Michigan Court of Claims Judge Stephen Borrello declared that the township had not provided adequate proof to stop the prison closure.
When the township then turned to the Michigan Court of Appeals, local officials expected to have the case heard no later than last summer, but the court did not hear statements from both sides until the start of this year, and the outcome was not announced until weeks later.
“They decided with MDOC,” said Bouvette. “We apparently didn’t have a good enough case.”
Bouvette said local officials had hoped for a better resolution. “It would have been nice if they had reopened the prison,” he said, although he added that such an outcome appeared unlikely after MDOC rendered the prison’s sewer lagoons inert during work last summer.
“The prison was one of the biggest businesses around here,” said Bouvette of the facility that employed more than 200 people.
He said only 25 people from Marenisco worked there, but added that most of them have left while some struggle with long commutes now necessitated by transfers to other U.P. prisons.
Other former OCF employees, including those who live throughout Gogebic County, have accepted the best possible jobs they can, but that still amounts to a compromise, in Bouvette’s view.
He said some employees who earned $30 an hour at the prison now may earn $20 an hour, even in the best of scenarios.
“You discover you can’t make ends meet,” he said in relation to trying to maintain budgets.
Bouvette said he now expects no further communication from MDOC and has no information regarding the fate of the former OCF property, which amounts to about 70 acres with several buildings that remain surrounded by barbed-wire fencing.