People who’ve been putting up with thick, smelly clumps of algae in Lake St. Clair may get some relief soon.

Macomb County has contracted two marine excavators to start removing muck from parts of the Lake in the fall. Each needs to get permits from the state and federal governments, which have jurisdiction over the lake.

The organisms, known collectively as Microseira wollei, have been growing on the bottom of the lake since about the mid 2010s. 

Macomb County Public Works Commissioner Candice Miller says they start by forming tiny balls about as big as a person’s thumbnail.

“And when you have an onshore breeze, all these little balls roll up onto the shore, which doesn’t sound like much until there are literally billions of them,” she says. 

The algae form mats on the water that can be several feet thick. Miller says it keeps growing and begins to vegetate over time.

“It almost looks like land, but it’s not,” she says. “Now if that’s happened to your boat well, whether you’re a resident, a residential property owner, or whether you’re a marina owner, you can imagine the negative impact.”

The three-year pilot project will focus on three specific areas where water is stagnant. One is near Veterans Memorial Park in St. Clair Shores. The other two are Campau Bay and the marina at Hidden Cove condominiums in Harrison Township.

The Michigan Legislature appropriated $880,000 to begin removing the muck, which officials will study over the next three years. Miller says she hopes to find a long-term solution.

“We all know as soon as we dredge it, it will begin to come back,” she says. “But will it come back in a month, a year? We’re sort of in the learning process.”

Republican state Representative Alicia St. Germaine and Democratic state Senator Kevin Hertel worked together to put the project in the state budget. Miller says that kind of bipartisan support is critical to the cleanup’s success.

“The water doesn’t know if it’s a Republican or a Democrat or an independent or Green Party or whatever,” she says. “It’s just something that all of us live here, we all have to solve this together.”

Miller says it’ll take a lot more money and time to remove and manage algae in the lake. She hopes state and federal agencies step up to protect the waterway.

Michigan’s air quality declined dangerously earlier this month due to wildfire smoke from Minnesota and Canada. 

Pollutants in the smoke can have long-term health consequences for humans, pets, and wildlife. However, for trees themselves the health effects are less consequential.  

Wayne State University forestry professor Dan Kashian says that while our tree canopy is important for converting carbon dioxide into life-supporting oxygen, days or even weeks of heavy smoke plumes is unlikely to harm Michigan’s trees. He says the main effect would be on the amount of sunlight on smokey days. 

Kashian says,  “Trees need to photosynthesize…anything that affects the amount of light that they’re receiving is going to affect how well they can grow.”

According to Kashian, harmful pollutants from wildfire smoke can settle on leaves but are often washed away by rain without lasting harm to the tree’s health.  

“But when you’re talking about a couple of days of heavy smoke like this, especially when it’s hot, it can actually help them because they don’t really like really high temperatures either,” Kashian says.

This story is a part of WDET’s ongoing series, the Detroit Tree Canopy Project.

Detroit’s Cadillac Heights neighborhood was once a thriving Black middle-class community. Today, parts of it are more industrial than residential.

One company—Crown Enterprises—has acquired almost every parcel surrounding its Kronos Concrete plant on East McNichols Road near Conant Street. Most of the homes in that area have been demolished. Of the few that remain, the people who live in them blame the owners of the concrete plant and the city for the noise, the dust, and the traffic they deal with every day.

Bridge Detroit and ProPublica spent more than a year investigating what’s happening in Cadillac Heights.

WDET’s Pat Batcheller spoke with Bridge Detroit’s Jena Brooker. She says residents are used to living next to industry, owing to old zoning laws that still exist dating back to the 1940s. But she adds that more recent developments have worsened things.

The following interview has been edited for clarity.

Pat Batcheller: What was Cadillac Heights like before the concrete plant started operating?

Jena Brooker: Residents were used to living next to industry to a degree in this neighborhood. And there was even a truck depot on this lot where the concrete plant is that the Morouns have owned since 1966. But then when the concrete plant went in in 2022, residents said that the neighborhood really changed. There are streets that used to have houses on them and nicely maintained lawns and trees. And those whole streets now are completely empty, and the lots are vacant.

PB: You mentioned the Moroun family, which owns the Ambassador Bridge. Do they also own Kronos Concrete?

JB: Yes, and then they also have another concrete operation by the Ambassador Bridge on the riverfront. They own several other concrete plants throughout Southeast Michigan, and they’re expected to open one soon in Toledo, Ohio, and in Windsor.

PB: How did they end up owning so much property in Cadillac Heights?

JB: They bought this central lot where they owned a truck depot and operated it since 1966. And over the decades, they acquired some properties in this neighborhood. They have property across the city, so that’s not unusual. By 2019, they had about 80 properties.

Then in 2019, Detroit had this historic land swap deal where they wanted to give land to Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to open the first new car plant in 30 years. To do that, the city orchestrated this deal where they were shifting around different land.

The Morouns, who own Crown Enterprises, gave up a lot on the east side. In exchange, they were given 34 [Detroit] Land Bank [Authority] parcels in this neighborhood. And from 2019 until now, we also saw at least 16 private individuals sell their properties to Crown. That land swap deal also gave Crown first rights on any properties that enter into the Land Bank until 2034.

PB: How has the concrete plant affected the neighborhood?

JB: Residents say that it’s been dirty and noisy, and just a general nuisance in their everyday lives. We submitted many Freedom of Information Act public records requests, and we found that more than 80 complaints have been submitted to the city and the state regarding dust.

Residents described literal whiteout conditions, having to go inside when they were doing yard work. One of the families we featured had two kids under five and had just had a baby. They were concerned about how the dust was affecting their development. Another resident has COPD, and so the dust is a major concern, coating cars and entering people’s homes. Then there is the noise, the increased truck traffic, and the bright industrial lights from having this industrial operation right in the middle of a neighborhood.

PB: Have these operations broken any kind of laws or regulations?

JB: When the concrete plant was first set up, Crown did not have a permit to do so. They had applied for a permit. They hadn’t gotten it yet, but then they put it up. The city ordered it to be taken down, and then what we saw after that was the city giving special allowances to Crown to operate this whole thing. You’re not supposed to be able to get permits from the city if you have outstanding blight tickets, but we saw that happen in multiple instances. We also saw that they participated in the Wayne County tax auction and were able to purchase a house, even though they had outstanding blight tickets.

PB: How has the city responded to complaints from the neighbors?

JB: The city says that inspectors go out three times a week. The company was required to submit a fugitive dust plan of how they will control dust from exiting the site and going into the neighborhood. That includes things like watering around the plant daily, filtering the dust on the site, and reducing the speed of traffic. When Mayor [Mary] Sheffield took office, she directed the city to install some more air monitors around the plant. But the concern is we have so many air monitors across the city. What’s the next step once we have this data that the air quality isn’t great?

PB: How has the company responded?

JB: The company has said that they’ve increased fugitive dust protections by watering the site every day – they have a water truck that goes around the plant and wets the streets to keep the dust down – that they have never NOT been compliant with city laws and ordinances, and that this represents the biggest investment in the neighborhood in in recent memory.

PB: What promises did they make, and which ones, if any, have they kept?

JB: They promised to create a vegetative buffer and plant trees. In renderings that they publish online, it shows brand new sidewalks around their properties. And when you go out to the neighborhood today, it looks maybe worse than what it looked like before.

PB: How long did it take you to research and report this story?

JB: I’ve been working on this story for a few years. We had published a few articles in Bridge Detroit. But since July 2025, I really took the time to work with ProPublica for the whole year, looking at what this neighborhood used to be like.

Going back to one of the people I feature the most, her family built the first homes in this neighborhood in 1917. It took a long time to get a picture of what this neighborhood was like and how it’s transformed throughout the decades with the help of the city and the state, and the presence of Crown Enterprises.

PB: What do you think the next chapter in this story is going to be?

JB: I plan to continue to follow up. I was recently in the neighborhood dropping printed copies of the story off, and it was dusty. It’s still an issue. They recently got tickets for the dust, but they weren’t fined because of this special agreement they have with the city. There are still some residents left there, and they deserve to be protected and continue to focus on environmental justice stories in Detroit.

Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield recently appointed Ali Abazeed as the city’s new Chief Public Health Officer, saying he would be a part of creating a “health in all policies” approach to government.

“We’re really excited to get up and going and also to continue the good work that the department has done over the years, but also to upgrade the software of what public health can look like in the city of Detroit,” he shares. 

Abazeed previously created and led the city of Dearborn’s health department. He also worked as a public health advisor at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

Past policies shape today’s health issues

He says health is impacted by housing quality and environment. He hopes to work with the department’s staff of 280 people to create better health outcomes for Detroiters.

“The challenges that Detroit faces from a health perspective, those aren’t inevitable…  they’re created by decades, if not centuries of decisions made by man, policies that have been excluding people from opportunities,” he says.

Abazeed says the city focuses on a harm reduction approach by working with all city departments to connect the dots for people who live in the city. He says part of that will include having more health department officials out in the city.

“90% of your life expectancy happens in the communities where you live, learn, work, worship, play…  then it requires us to take that 90% collaborative approach across everything that we do at the city,” he says. 

Abazeed says Detroiters face health burdens like asthma, which he says require a multifaceted response. 

He says everyone is entitled to good health. 

“Understanding who has been disqualified, who has been sort of pushed to the side, and whether that’s… in Washington or Dearborn and now in Detroit, I think the work is relatively the same, even if it does take on a little bit of a different scale,” he says.