What Changed at the Second Town Hall

The University held its second town hall in Ypsilanti Township on October 1, with the same panel as September 9. The recording is public and timestamps below link to it.

More got answered this time. Two answers in particular are worth your attention, and one of them creates a problem the University will need to address.

They confirmed the pipeline

A resident raised the gas pipelines directly. The answer, at 24:11:

yes we are aware there are natural gas pipelines run throughout that site. There are natural gas pipelines owned and operated by DTE as well as a major interstate natural gas pipeline operated by the Nexus gas Corporation. We have coordinated with those agencies to make sure any construction is done in a manner that is safe and does not disturb those lines

That’s a real answer and I’ll credit it. At the September meeting the moderator said the pipeline was the first he’d heard of it. Three weeks later the panel confirms a major interstate line runs through the property and that they’ve been coordinating with the operator.

It squares with the confidentiality agreement the University signed with Nexus in December 2025 to evaluate construction conditions.

The resident’s question had a second part, and the answer to it is worth recording. He asked whether those pipelines would be used to generate power on site — a 110 MW gas generator was the figure he put to them. The panel said the facility is not planning to tie into or use those natural gas lines.

That one I’d treat as settled unless something contradicts it. There’s been talk around the township about on-site gas generation, and the panel has now said on the record that it isn’t the plan. It also squares with the documents: the budget filed with the State has no generation line in it, and $30 million is going toward a DTE substation instead — which is not what you’d do if you intended to make your own power.

Backup generators are a separate matter and they are still planned, at roughly 10% of load, running on hydrotreated vegetable oil. Those aren’t tied to the gas lines.

What we still don’t have is the constraint. How wide is the easement, what setbacks apply, and how much of the 144 acres can’t be built on as a result. “We’ve coordinated’’ isn’t the same as a number, and it bears directly on the claim that most of the site stays natural — some of that land may be undevelopable rather than preserved.

Why Willow Run was rejected

This was the fullest account we’ve had, and it answers a question I’ve been asking since the October 2023 letter surfaced showing the State committed $400 million for a laboratory at the American Center for Mobility campus.

At 35:04, two reasons were given. Multiple entities own or lease parts of that land, and no agreement could be reached across all of them. And the landowner was never in a position to offer it for sale — the panelist says they were never even able to purchase it.

They describe spending roughly eighteen months on it, then another six months when the Township asked them to look again, and walking away. The speaker added that he had personally pushed for it, believing the University was one of the few entities that could redevelop a brownfield there, but that the cooperation required simply wasn’t available.

I take that at face value. It’s a specific, checkable explanation and it’s more than we had before.

And then the harder part

At 37:44, a second reason for rejecting Willow Run:

digging into the ground would disturb a lot of the contaminants that are there … there are known contaminants in the ground throughout that property but are in a stable condition as long as they are left undisturbed. As soon as you start disturbing that property … it requires a significant amount of mitigation and poses a risk to not just those occupying the property but the surrounding communities

That risk, they said, was too much to accept.

Now set that beside what the University has filed with the State about Textile Road.

Two Baseline Environmental Assessments, filed with EGLE in January 2025 and March 2026, record all three Textile Road parcels as “facilities” under Part 201 — meaning contamination above generic residential cleanup criteria. On the 20-acre parcel that includes mercury above the volatilization-to-indoor-air criterion, lead at 24,000 µg/kg, and PCBs. On the 118 acres, arsenic, chromium and silver.

They are going to dig there.

To be fair to them, the assessments did come up. At 95:11 a panelist confirmed they had done an initial baseline environmental assessment and said it is publicly available. That’s the first time anyone from the University has mentioned it at a public meeting, and the statement is accurate. They are available — through a records request to EGLE, which is how I obtained them, and now directly here: 10221 Textile Road and 10455 and 10635 Textile Road.

There is a second assessment, incidentally — the panelist referred to one. The 118-acre filing came in March 2026, eight days after the purchase closed.

I want to be fair about this. Contamination is a matter of degree, and there’s a real difference between a former bomber plant and a field with elevated metals. Willow Run’s history is far worse than Textile Road’s, and it’s entirely possible that the engineering judgment is sound.

But it’s now a question they have to answer, and nobody has asked it:

If disturbing contaminated ground at Willow Run posed too much risk to the surrounding community, what makes disturbing contaminated ground at Textile Road acceptable — next to a school, housing, and the Huron River?

The answer may be perfectly good. It needs to be given.

The substation location, confirmed

At 14:35, the panel confirmed the substation is expected at the Bridge and Textile intersection, and showed the Apex substation on North Campus as roughly equivalent in size.

That’s a specific commitment on the record, and it’s the first time the location has been stated publicly.

Two accounts of the same conversation

Later in the evening I asked about the dates — the March 2023 non-disclosure agreement, what the University knew and when, and how that squares with what the Township was told in November 2024.

Supervisor Stumbo picked up the same thread in her remarks. She has described that November 2024 meeting as twenty acres, two office buildings, and two hundred jobs doing medical research.

Chris Kolb, the University’s vice president for government relations, was in that meeting. His answer, at 106:10, gives a different account of it:

we have been upfront from day one about who we were, what we were working on, that we never stepped away from the national security component of the relationship and we did not say it was two buildings. We said it was one facility with two components. One for the University of Michigan that was open, the other side was classified for Los Alamos. We said at the site there would be 30 to 50 jobs at the facility, 200 researchers who… our assumption is they would want to be closer to campus

Pressed again at 109:03, he said simply: We have a different recollection of that conversation. And again a minute later, after someone asked whether he was calling State Representative Jimmie Wilson a liar: What I’ve said is their recollection is different than our recollection of that conversation.

I’m not going to tell you one of them is lying. A speaker before Brenda put that question to the panel directly — who was lying — and I understand the impulse, but I don’t think it’s the useful question. People do remember meetings differently, especially two years on, and especially when one side came away hearing a project described and the other came away having described it.

The useful point is this. The University’s vice president for government relations and the elected supervisor of the host township have materially different accounts of the only conversation that happened before the land was bought. Both were in the room. Neither can produce a record of it.

That is precisely what you get when the engagement is a phone call instead of a document. And it’s why I keep asking for things in writing — not because anyone is dishonest, but because memory is a terrible foundation for a billion-dollar project and an easy thing to disagree about later.

There is a way to settle it. Meeting invitations, calendar entries, notes, any presentation shown on that call. Those exist or they don’t, and I’ve asked for them. If the University’s account is right, the documents will show it.

What I’d add is that the characterisation of this process as open and transparent did not land well in that room, and I don’t think it should have. Whatever was said in November 2024, the Township learned the project’s full scope in July 2025, learned the land had been bought by text message in March 2026, and learned the site had been selected from an announcement in August 2026.

Let Brenda speak

The last part of the night isn’t in the recording, so what follows is my own account of what I saw in the room.

Tension over time had been building for a while. On the recording you can hear it at 96:18, when the moderator notes the meeting is scheduled until 7:30 and voices from the room answer: Why don’t you commit until everyone has had their say and You will not commit to hear this community out.

The published recording ends shortly after that, mid-speaker.

What happened next: the panel moved to conclude. Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo was standing in line to speak. The feed was cut and the panel began to walk out.

The room started chanting. Let Brenda speak. It went on for several minutes.

The panel came back, sat down, and she spoke. The recording picks her up at 123:03.

She asked for one thing first: another meeting, with Ypsilanti Township on the stage alongside them, open to anyone without having to register, with nobody turned away while seats sit empty. A panelist agreed on the spot — that he would be more than willing to join.

That commitment was made in public, and it should be held to.

Then she turned to the substation, and made a point I hadn’t heard anyone make. In 2017 Ann Arbor asked DTE for a new substation and an upgrade for its future development. The picture shown to this room earlier in the evening was of a substation Ann Arbor wanted.

Her words, roughly: we are not asking for a switchyard, we are not asking for a substation, we do not need nor want additional energy for this purpose, and she wanted that on the record.

That distinction matters more than it might sound. The comparison the University drew was to a facility a community requested. This one wasn’t requested by anybody here.

She closed on security. Los Alamos is a federal defense contractor and the sole producer of plutonium pits for the nuclear arsenal, and she said plainly that if the University doesn’t believe this facility would be a target, they’re wrong.

I want to separate two things here, because they get conflated and they shouldn’t be.

One is whether any government body has formally classified this site as a high-value target. None has, and Director Mason said so in writing. I’ve written that here and I stand by it — if someone can produce a classification document, produce it.

The other is whether a facility running nuclear weapons stockpile simulation draws hostile attention regardless of how it’s labelled on paper. That’s a different question, and an official designation isn’t what makes it real. The University has confirmed that computational work related to nuclear modernization will happen here. We are in a period when nuclear weapons are back in mainstream political conversation. A township is entitled to raise that without being told it has its facts wrong.

Supervisor Stumbo is making the second argument, not the first. Those can both be true at once.

I’d ask the University to think about what that looked like. The elected supervisor of the township you are building in was in line at a public meeting you called, and she had to be chanted back into the room by her neighbors.

Whatever else is in dispute here, that one is easy to fix. Publish the full recording, including what came after the cut.

What still hasn’t been answered

Two meetings, nearly five hours, and the two numbers this community has asked for longest still haven’t been given: how many megawatts, and how many gallons a day.

Nor has anyone explained why the contamination on these parcels has never been mentioned to the people who live beside them.

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Quotations are from the automatically generated captions of the public recording of the October 1, 2026 town hall; each timestamp links to that moment. Captions contain transcription errors — check anything you intend to quote. The account of what happened after the feed cut is mine, from the room. Environmental filings are on our sources page. If I’ve got something wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it and say that I did.