“Is there a Ford in your future?”

BY ED FELIEN

Probably not, if you mean a new Ford Ranger truck built at the Highland Park Ford Plant in St. Paul.

“Is there a Ford in your future?” was the popular advertising slogan of Ford through much of the last half of the 20th century. It is a bitterly ironic slogan now as United Auto Workers union members contemplate their future without Ford. For 86 years workers in St. Paul and South Minneapolis built Fords. It was good work, and they had good reasons to be proud of what they did.

The Ford Motor Company is demolishing the plant and clearing the site. It’s been turned over to a real estate firm to market it. The City of St. Paul has sponsored an advisory group to meet with neighbors to discuss how the 22-acre site should be developed. The Ford Site Open Space Workgroup has been meeting since June of 2010. Composed of 12 members representing specialized knowledge or expertise in urban design, real estate development and finance, landscape/park design, stormwater management, recreation programming, and Upper Mississippi River corridor planning and management, the Workgroup has been prioritizing active and passive space scenarios for the site.

The city has the power to control the kind of usage of the land through its authority to zone. Currently, of course, the site is zoned industrial, which is the highest level, allowing the most varied kind of development. The most likely future use for the site would seem to be a mixed use of shopping and housing. More shopping would mean competition for the existing shops in Highland Park, and more housing would crowd an already crowded housing market. But new construction would mean jobs for the Building and Trades union members and, therefore, any new proposal for new construction would have a strong and active fan base.

Of course, there are some who wish the city had done more than re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Rather than sitting back and allowing Ford to dismantle and destroy the plant, there are some who wish the city had exercised its power of eminent domain to purchase the property and (along with State of Minnesota) operate the plant as a public utility producing cars and trucks for local, county and state government agencies. Once the machinery and buildings are gone, the tools that were used to mass produce cars and trucks will be gone. The workers at the Ford plant had the knowledge to use those tools. The knowledge still remains, but, now, it is a memory fading into nostalgia.