Covering GE Tech Center opening a new experience

The following was posted by Belleville View Staff Reporter Jerry LaVaute:

On Monday, the General Electric Corporation opened its new technical center in the former Visteon Village in the northeast corner of Van Buren Township.

I was there to cover the ribbon cutting and the press conference that followed.

I believe the name of the campus-like site has been changed to the Grace Lake Technical Center, as Visteon and GE now share it, although the signs in the area as I drove toward the event on Monday morning didn’t confirm that.

There was a small GE sign in front of one its buildings, but that was the extent of it. Fortunately, some security guards posted along the route provided directions.

How can you help but be buoyed by such an event? The promise of 1,100 new jobs in the community, 200 of them already filled, 90 percent of them from Michigan, is plenty of reason to start the excitement.

And, for me, it was my first major press conference – TV stations were there, the daily newspaper publications appeared to be represented, replete with professional photographers who acted as if they had seen it all before.

Me, I was rounding up local township officials for a posed photo using Grace Lake as the backdrop, a candid shot of high-level state and federal and local officials chatting amiably among themselves on the patio in the bright sunshine, a ribbon cutting ceremony for which a small platform was set up for photographers (I had no idea what it was for until I saw the other photographers begin to climb atop it, and quickly clambered up among them to get a good angle for a photo), and my first real press conference.

A surfeit of public official glitz surrounded me, as I was breathing the same air as some legitimately famous people, enabling me to drop names like Granholm, Stabenow, and Levin.

A heady atmosphere, as they say, and one in which I was pleased and felt lucky to be introduced.