Fifth Third Park Is A Foul Choice & Should Michigan Ditch Bottle Returns?

0:00Daily Detroit is brought to you by the community. Support our work at patreon.com slash daily Detroit. Hello friends and welcome to your daily Detroit. It is Monday, September 21st, 2026. I am Jair Stays coming to you from our studio at Tech Town with lots of news, breaking news, a new name and an old friend, Norris Howard, the Prince Brightmore. How are you? I'm going fantastic until I heard what the new name for a America Park was and now I am filled with fury and indignation. And I just saw the logo for it. It's so bad. It's so mediocre. It's so milk toast. That's what it is. Normal, bland, corporate, tope, griege. Phone in. Phone it all the way in, bro. America Park has a new name. It's the third park, which by the way, it shares with Spartansburg. In fact, it shares with the Spartansburg hub city Spartan burgers.

1:04Listen, they didn't have to do that. They didn't have to do that. They did not have to have a press event for this announcement. Right? If you were just going to name it fifth-third park, you literally could have just in the day and of night just changed the signs. Like literally, man, this is once again in my opinion and just I just want to make it clear. That's the third bank representatives on this show. But I just want to be very clear when I say this is that that is the lamest, worst, most awful name they could have went with. Period. I feel like there was so much more opportunity here. For one, you could have done something like Tiger, Stady and brought to you by fifth-third. You could have done a variety of things where it wasn't so cookie and cookie cutter. Yeah. Exactly. Maybe a number of tigers, great. You could have named the field after. There was maybe a number of Detroit luminaries. You could have named the field after. But to just once again, go with the regular, all corporate, like fifth-third field.

2:06It doesn't inspire anything, right? It's the same reason why so many of these, so many people here in the city still call Huntington, place Kobo. Even though Kobo has all kinds of history, that's not great. No. Kobo is a legitimate racist. Like we still call it Kobo because that is the nameness stuck. Nobody's corporate name sticks because first of all, they get bought out and changed all the time as we see. I think also it's a reminder that we no longer have Comarica, right? Because Comarica was in our market for so long. Love them or hate them. Just imagine the telecasts or the radio broadcasts of like, yes, the tigers go up six to seven after that three-run shot here at fifth-third field. That is not, again, you're not thinking about anything beyond the corporate branding. That's not fun to say. It's not an easy thing to say. Well, then if they had named it something different, then there would have been a whole discourse around is that what they should have named it, then people would remember it fifth-third. I also look at it from the marketing standpoint as somebody who used to do corporate marketing.

3:06Yeah, 1000%. Like for me, you know, you get to a point where yes, we will talk about this for a little bit. You will get to a point where nine times out of 10, all the money that you're putting into rebranding the stadium doesn't even stick because everybody's just going to call it Comarica because Comarica is just easier to say. I would love to hear what you think, daily Detroit at gmail.com. I'm going to say it. I think this might be one of the dumbest rebrands I've ever seen. It's not a good one. All right. Let's get into some news. Michigan grocery retailers are pushing to change the state's bottle bill. The Detroit Free Press reports that they want to stop requiring stores to take back bottles and cans. They say returns creates annotation concerns, drop-ests, and take up staff time and valuable store space. The retailers group is proposing a two-year transition while Michigan develops alternatives such as standalone redemption centers, which they have in Oregon or expanded curbside collection.

4:08Michigan's redemption rate was once above 95% but has fallen to 69% this year. You know, I think people have gotten over the whole taking your bottles to the store for one reason or one reason only. All of the corporate stores have decided to put the bottle returns outside. Well, I think a lot of times it's something where it's seen as there's something they can't make money on. Yep. You know, and also I will say this, I actually think that the bottle return price should have gone up with inflation. So it's been 10 cents and 70. Yeah. It should be a quarter. No, I did some math. It could be darn near 50 cents with inflation. I mean, listen, you ain't going to get argument from me. You can't do that immediately. You can't just drop that on people, right? No, you can. But that's what it should have done. Yeah, but I think when you have the bottle returns outside that de-incensivizes everybody to be able to do it. And listen, here's the thing for me is I think they should have never been attached to retail stores with a profit motivation anyway. I think we should have redemption centers from the very beginning. So you're pro keeping it, but adding redemption centers.

5:11Absolutely. We should still have bottle returns. We should absolutely still have bottle returns. We should absolutely incentivize people to recycle and to reuse the materials and bottle returns help do that. We posted about this on social media and was very hot. A lot of people had takes. I did not realize how many people and places in this region do not have recycling of any kind. I was stunned. Yeah, a lot of places don't. I mean, listen, Detroit kind of was on a cutting edge by even giving us those recycle bins if you live in a single family home. But what I will say also is that, listen, we can't get rid of it because let me tell you, you know, I mean, the college, coal college nights that I just had a gang of bottles and was able to take them back and get my last few little bit of sense to get it hot and ready. All right. Let's never take that away. All right. Like the ability to be able to at least bare minimum get a couple bucks to take the bottles back to the store. Sure, it's not the most transformative thing in the world, but at least that is being put

6:11to good use. And I think we need to create the distribution centers and increase curbside pickup. Let's do both. Yes, Anne. Train Detroit business reports that Wayne County and Detroit are looking at consolidating several court operations now spread across four buildings into a new facility or possibly two that could affect roughly six hundred and seventy five thousand square feet and more than 1100 court workers. The locations in play include the combing a young municipal center, an abscot building, Lincoln Hall of Justice and Detroit's 36 district court. No site price tag or timeline has been set according to the report, but the county is seeking help evaluating the project, including a possible location near the current criminal justice center. This is another effort by Wayne County to consolidate office space and reduce its scattered real estate footprint. Recently, the county bought the former Comarica building on West Lafayette downtown for 25 million plans to put another $13 million into that renovation.

7:15I think when we're looking at the amount of office space needed for any sort of municipal function, we just don't need it as much as we used to. We got to be realistic about the footprint of all of our municipal services. And listen, I think consolidating may be a good idea. I think there's a number of buildings downtown that could be used for it. You talked about the Comarica building. That could be one of them or the old Comarica building, I should say, the very Comarica heavy show today. But especially for a brand that no longer exists. Exactly. I mean, wow, they are getting a lot of free promo for months if they were still around. But the point is, I think also at the same time, we just got to look at what is going on in the national landscape, which is everybody's going to have to consolidate. I talk a lot about this concept of reorganization. Detroit's going to have to do that even within itself, get centralized as much as you can possibly can. And I think that's a good way to turn here because it's 675,000 square feet. That's quite a lot of rents and but is that what you want to put there? Or even then the shorter towers, which are not part of the bedrock plan, but also are

8:19now empty with Blue Cross Blue Shield leaving. Yeah, I think there's options, right? Like I think that's the thing about it is that there are options you could do the Comarica building. You could do parts that are rents and you could do a lot of things. You know, I think about that too because the rents and has those larger floor plates that they're saying aren't great for residential, but maybe they could be good for a courtroom. There you go. So you know, you put the courtroom and rinse in and then there you go. They had to redo it because I don't think you have like those kinds of windows and court rooms. So they just have to cover it. It would make for a heck of a movie scene. It would make for a heck of a movie scene. You know, you already think about diehard or something. So kind of always wanted a shootout to happen, a shootout movie to happen in the big rotunda of the rents and in that center area because it would be so wild with a circular nature, like some kind of James Bond, you know, Hayden Tents. You know, another place would be great for that is the some of the corridors of the DIA. Oh, yeah. Where you're like hiding behind art and like, you know, of course you put in like fake art. Right. But like, you know, the art takes the bullet and you barely live.

9:20There's a library. Like you put it, put some in the library and do something like that. But listen, I get your point, you know, a thousand percent. Maybe they could put something cool or put the court services and the county services in the rents and but, you know, we got to consolidate. Tax payers are paying for these massive buildings that are 10% full. Well, if you look at some place like the Panopscot, frankly, that place needs an Eulice on life. The whole I did not realize how many people don't know that it's mostly vacant at this point. Yeah. And, you know, maybe that would be a little bit easier to do a residential conversion on than the rents and probably would be significantly cheaper. So who knows that speculation on my part. But I know that our taxes are still being used to maintain a lot of buildings that in other towns would have been knocked down and moved years ago, maybe a decade ago or other uses found. Yeah. Let me know daily Detroit at Gmail dot com. All right.

10:27Let's land with a little Detroit city. I've seen we went to the game out on Saturday, a one nothing win over the Pittsburgh River Hounds. This is good news for LaRouche. Yeah. It's great news. You know, they are looking to lock down that second spot in the playoffs and they are only three points behind Charleston battery, but we have a game in hand and they've played an extra game than us. But we got an interest to into the interest to into the season, the goal over the weekend was scored by kind of Williams, his first goal for the clubs and his joint at earlier this season. And for the most part, and Jerry, you could bat me up on this. The team just generally looked better in most phases of the play. Now, near the end of the match, I feel like the additional size by our new signing really helped. So, Yang, he was really great. His hold up play is amazing. When you six foot six, you just kind of put them all in the air and he'll just go get it because he's just bigger than everybody. It made a difference. I oftentimes felt like our squad was a little undersized and sometimes you just need that big

11:29man. You just need a big guy. You just need a big guy sometimes. It doesn't need to all be big guys, but you need a big guy. You need at least one. You know, so I think he will work out. He hasn't necessarily found the back of the net quite yet, but it's going to be really cool to kind of see these last four or five matches of the season as we get to the mid-a-griddy here. They will be playing again back at home 7 p.m. on Saturday against the Colorado Springs Switchbacks. Norse Howard, so good to see you. So he's good to be here. You already know. I'm really glad too we're able to talk about the ballpark name in real time because man, it's bad. I really wanted better. It's just so bad. We need to call up the guy that was on the show. Yeah, we definitely call him up because we told him what to name it. It didn't take our ideas at all. No, no. They just don't listen to us Norse Howard. No, they don't. They know, but you know how to suit to do. All right, well, as always, thank you so much to our members on Patreon.

12:31Patreon.com slash daily Detroit. Local support keeps local media alive and thriving until tomorrow. I'm Jare Stays. And I'm Norse Howard. Thank you so much for listening. Remember that you are somebody and I'll see you around Detroit.