Consumers Energy substation at Colony Farm Orchard. Photo by Richard Brewer

Just a quick update for historical purposes:  Mid-afternoon on Tuesday 5 January 2010, Governor Jennifer Granholm signed HB 5207.  She made no reported comment and she has made no known responses to the hundreds of letters, phone calls, emails, and Faxes opposing the bill she received over the past several months.  Governor Granholm has not said Boo.

The Kalamazoo Gazette reported promptly the governor’s failure to veto the bill.  Reporter Paula M. Davis’s first sentence was, “Western Michigan University now has no official barrier to expanding its business park to a nearby 55-acre green space known as Colony Farm Orchard.”

It’s an appropriately neutral statement.  The official barrier, in the form of a restrictive covenant placed on the land at the time it was given to WMU in 1977, has been removed.  The land now belongs to WMU to do with as it may.  One possibility, of course, is to retain it as open green space, not because the university has to, but because it’s the right thing to do.

One immediate response to the governor’s action was an increase in the number of alumni and former supporters calling for a boycott on donations and other types of support to WMU, the WMU Foundation, and other WMU-related causes.  One letter to President Dunn (which I received a copy of) said, “I feel that WMU’s recent actions in this matter reveal a profound lack of respect for the wishes of donors in general. Supporters of WMU are beginning to feel mistrustful about the intentions of the university in regard to the Kalamazoo community.”

One area of mistrust is the real long-term intentions of WMU as to the Asylum Lake Preserve.  Although WMU was party to a Declaration of Conservation Restrictions that is supposed to protect this land in a fashion similar to a conservation easement, the disregard for the covenant protecting the Colony Farm Orchard shown by WMU and the state has brought suspicions and fears of earlier years back to life.

My guess is that we have not yet seen the last go-round.