ISHPEMING, MI-- The closure of the Empire Mine has created financial challenges for the City of Ishpeming, but officials are confident in a positive outcome.
City Finance Director Jim Lampman says the city likely won’t feel the impact of the mine’s closure for another one to two years.
“A lot of those employees, or former employees of the mine were entitled to some severance benefits and I’m sure some unemployment. There’s going to be a little bit of a delay before it really ripples through our local economy,” he says.
The impact to Marquette County as a whole is expected to run in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ishpeming City Manager Mark Slown says various federal, state, and local programs have been collected to create “Project Empire”—an umbrella effort to bring together various and disparate activities that would have already been in place, along with new initiatives, to help strengthen the area’s economy.
“We’re not trying to let the grass grow under our feet,” he says. “We’re doing a whole bunch of things along with the state of Michigan and the County. The Project Empire effort is intended to mitigate and come up with ways to strengthen the local economy in the face of these problems.”
Trade adjustment assistance, MichiganWorks! and the Lake Superior Community Partnership are just three of the programs involved in helping Marquette County.
Slown says he’s applied for a $1 million grant under Michigan’s Financially Distressed Cities program. If Ishpeming is awarded the money, it would be used to supplement a $12 million USDA Rural Development grant and loan project to improve the city’s water delivery system.
And while Ishpeming officials will be dealing with a bunch of unknowns in the near future, they say they’ve been strengthening the city’s financial system over the past few years and intend to continue.
“I definitely don’t want to let anyone have the impression that the city is even within any likelihood of going into bankruptcy or anything like that,” Slown says. “It’s just not the case.”
