Local passionate environmentalist fights on

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
Watching Bob Grooters mingle with the baristas at Glen Arbor’s Leelanau Coffee Roasting Company and greet the few folks seated outside on a typically quiet fall day, he looks as unassuming as any northern Michigan year-rounder. You wouldn’t think Bob is worth $150 million.
But that’s the amount of increased revenues he’s generated for the State of Michigan’s natural resources trust fund from oil drilling since 1979 — and $150 million is only as of 2002. Grooters is an environmentalist who won’t quit. He’s no policy expert, but an instigator who has accomplished missions with his voice and his passion, his letter-writing campaigns and his long drives.

Now Grooters is about to turn 70 years old and he has embraced a new cause, or rather one that hasn’t yet gotten the recognition it deserves. Grooters owns pristine land just outside of Grand Rapids dubbed the Bear Creek Nature Preserve. For the last 10 years he and his partners have been trying to sell the 42-acre parcel to an organization that will preserve it long after they’re gone, but so far they’ve come up empty. The Department of Natural Resources Trust Fund wouldn’t agree to sponsor it, and after expressing interest early on, the Land Conservancy of West Michigan seems to have dropped the ball, or at least it won’t make an offer within Grooters’ ballpark.
“It’s long past time to get this preserved,” he says. “If I have to form a new land conservancy, I’ll do it!”
Bob Grooters should be taken seriously.
Turn back the clock to March of 1979. The Michigan Supreme Court had just handed victory to environmental groups fighting to stop oil companies from drilling in the Pigeon River near Gaylord. But attorney Roger Conner, then a rookie lawyer and now executive director of the U.S. arm of Search for Common Ground (one of the world’s largest nongovernmental conflict resolution organizations), told Grooters not to get his hopes up, for “the oil companies would challenge everything, drag it out and narrow any victory we got. Anything they didn’t like, they’d go to the legislature and get it overturned.”
No sooner had the state Supreme Court made its decision than a proposal to lease one million acres all around Pigeon River dropped onto the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) desk. Without contest the deal made it onto the DNR’s agenda for approval at a meeting to be held in Detroit on March 16.
From 10 p.m. on Wednesday evening until 2 a.m. the next morning Bob Grooters sat and penned a letter he would deliver that morning. At 5 a.m. he climbed into an old Plymouth Station Wagon (he called it his Plymouth 7 because he could never get the eighth cylinder to work) and left Grand Rapids. After breakfast he went straight to the office of the Detroit Free Press and asked to speak to an editorial writer named Barbara Stanton. On the eighth floor he told the receptionist that Roger Conner had sent him.
“What do you want to see her about?” the receptionist asked.
“Oil,” said Grooters.
Stanton flew out of the meeting she was in and Grooters briefed her that Michigan was about to authorize a million-acre lease to oil companies. He asked for an editorial to run in the Free Press the next day.
“Mr. Grooters, do you hear that pounding going on?” she told him. “That is tomorrow’s paper … But I’ll see what I can do.”
At the DNR commission meeting in the Detroit Veteran’s Memorial Building Grooters wasn’t penciled in to speak until late in the day, and he spent the buildup lobbying everyone there to “please stay strong and listen” to what he was about to say.
When Grooters finally spoke, he told the commission that Michigan’s 1/8 (12.5 percent) royalty share from private oil companies drilling on its lands was miniscule compared to what other states, and other countries, received. His correspondence with Premier Lougheed of Alberta, Canada two years earlier had revealed, for instance, that Alberta received shares ranging from 28-45 percent.
Grooters was asked by a Mrs. Wolfe whether pools of oil in Alberta are much larger than here in Michigan, and would thus lend themselves to far greater efficiency. The moment she asked the question Grooters knew that he should not be debating the topic. After all, he was no scientist. Strategically, he answered that the answer was very complex and that he would need 30 days to study it.
Grooters then weathered an attack by a Dr. Tanner who sought to put him on trial and not the initiative to lease a million acres for oil drilling. Strategically, again, he backed down and apologized unconditionally, “because I hold you and the commissioners in the highest esteem.” The passionate environmentalist knew he had planted the seed. He took his seat and watched the mudslinging begin. Shortly thereafter the meeting broke up in chaos without even a motion to adjourn.
“I was so excited that I left a gas station in Detroit with the gas hose still attached to my tank and I ripped the tank loose.
“The next morning I awoke at 5 a.m. again and went to a news stand to purchase the Detroit Free Press. The headline to Barbara Stanton’s editorial read: “Oil and gas and pitfalls underline Michigan.”
Michigan eventually increased its state royalty rate from 12.5 to 16.66 percent, meaning that Lansing has Bob Grooters to thank for a full quarter of the oil and gas royalties it has collected since 1979.
“On that scale I’m the biggest producer of oil royalties for the State of Michigan — even bigger than Shell Oil!”
Twenty-seven years later Grooters has picked another fight. This time it’s about the Bear Creek Nature Preserve, a setting every bit as close to his heart as Pigeon River. And he won’t stop fighting until he wins.