Missing Jack Michel One Year Later

May 27, 2019
Written By Ken Hemphill

On this Memorial Day, while we honor those who sacrificed for their country, it's fitting that we also recall and honor the memory of a local hero, Jack Michel, our Beaver Valley champion who left us one year ago today. Without Jack's (and his wife, Diana's) financial and personal sacrifice, the taxpayer-subsidized wildlife refuge everyone thought was already protected would have been lost.  

After a massive two year grassroots campaign galvanizing the entire Brandywine Valley failed to convince the Concord supervisors to reject the "Vineyard Commons" development in Beaver Valley, Jack, Diana, and their neighbor Eileen Mutschler took up the mantle by organizing and financing Beaver Valley's legal defense at considerable cost. They assembled a formidable team of attorneys and nearly a dozen consultants in several areas of expertise who presented irrefutable evidence that political donor Frank McKee's development failed to conform with at least 50 of Concord's ordinances but more importantly that Vineyard Commons ran afoul of Pennsylvania's Environmental Rights Amendment.

Passing unanimously (twice) in the PA General Assembly as an amendment to the PA Constitution and then ratified by more than 80% of the electorate in 1971, the amendment was written to protect every citizen's right to clean air, pure water, and the aesthetic and historic values of the environment. So it was primarily on that basis that 18 months after the supervisors approved Vineyard Commons that Common Pleas Judge Michael Green ordered them to start over by conducting new evidentiary hearings as "trustees for the [township's] natural, historic, and scenic resources" and to take into account Vineyard Commons' environmental, aesthetic, and historical impacts. Shortly thereafter, we learned that the Conservation Fund had successfully negotiated a purchase price for the 270 acres from the developer who faced an otherwise very uncertain road forward.     

In September of 2012 at the first meeting of neighbors who quickly came together to oppose the development in Beaver Valley, Jack said that “this would be a long fight.” He wasn’t kidding. Almost seven years later, the work to save the Woodlawn Trustees’ land is not done. They still hold title to 60 acres in Pennsylvania adjacent to the 270 acres the Conservation Fund and Mt. Cuba rescued as well as 350 acres in Delaware along Thompsons Bridge, Beaver Valley, and Ramsey Roads. History has shown that asking Woodlawn nicely to save their land is an exercise in futility, so Diana continues the legal fight that she and Jack started. Her attorneys and consultants are lined up against the latest comedians – Wolfson and Kaplin – who would turn a large slice of your wildlife refuge into three five story apartment buildings plus a metastatic lump of 29 plastic townhouses.

Since Jack’s passing last May 27th, Diana has also been working to build a monument to Jack's legacy by financing the restoration of an historic barn in Beaver Valley at the entrance to the national park on Beaver Valley Road. Jack, of course, knew the Boulden family who in the 80s sold that property to Woodlawn who naturally promised them (as well as the Brubakers up the road) that they would protect their land. Telling people one thing and doing another has defined this organization ever since self-interested Wilmington political insiders hijacked William Bancroft’s legacy.

We’ve heard Woodlawn say repeatedly that they needed to sell land to finance their “affordable housing mission” in the City of Wilmington even though their 450 rental “Flats” along Bancroft Parkway earn upwards of $4 million each year (from the not-so-affordable rents they charge). Yet the millions they claimed to need are still sitting in the accounts of two different nonprofits (Todmorden and Rockford-Woodlawn) years after receiving those funds from Mt. Cuba. The latest 990s for those two Woodlawn nonprofit affiliates show that they’ve done nothing with the $21 million they received for the land that became the Beaver Valley unit of the First State National Historical Park, or the $7 million they received (?) for the 270 acres in Concord. It's been a year since these latest IRS documents were filed, so it's not known if they have since used any of these funds for the reconstruction of the Flats for which they're receiving enormous grants from various government agencies. 

Growing up in Beaver Valley, Jack had seen the other side of Woodlawn’s face. He saw them voluntarily shed their nonprofit status in the late 60s after the IRS investigated them for running a dubious charity. He knew they had been sued by the federal government in 1970s over housing discrimination. Everyone who lived in Beaver Valley knew Woodlawn had really become a developer, headfaking everyone with their “conservation mission” as they slowly liquidated their land for the benefit of politically connected people in Wilmington.

To enjoy the tax benefits from PA's Act 319, Woodlawn posted probably a thousand wildlife refuge signs every 100 feet or so around the perimeter of their thousands of acres in the early 70s (which you can still see everywhere you go in BV), yet by that time, Woodlawn had already quietly drawn up housing development plans for all of their land. The group of us who sifted through Woodlawn’s records at the Hagley Museum were by that point in 2013 not all that shocked to see these plans. After all, two months earlier, we had heard Vernon Green of Woodlawn claim at the May 2013 meeting at Garnet Valley Middle School that "Woodlawn transferred over their land to the National Park Service." Disclosing that they had actually sold their land for $21 million to Mt. Cuba didn't fit the official Woodlawn narrative.Jack Michel’s story also intersected with the Woodlawn story prior to the Concord Township episode. Jack told us that when he was a boy his parents had been involved in a lawsuit against the Woodlawn Trustees who had somehow been able to force a road easement across their 40 acres in the Valley. Thank God the Michel's attorney didn’t prevail against Woodlawn because it was a seminal and motivating experience for Jack who always said he would have won that case in court. This may have been one of the reasons why he went to law school. He certainly never forgot Woodlawn’s arrogance and bullying tactics. 60 odd years later, it was Jack’s turn to face off against Woodlawn, and all of us are now the richer for it.

Jack's Beaver Valley legacy will benefit all future generations, so on this Memorial Day, we should honor him by resolving to continue his work and to live by what another Jack once said: "ask what you can do for your country."