Flint's fight to the finish; GM was trying to KO Honda and Toyota. It wound up in a courtroom with Flint and Saginaw.

• Author: Kerson, Roger
• Position: General Motors Corp.

GM was trying to KO Honda and Toyota. It wound

up in a courtroom with Flint and Saginaw.

"They don't want to be raped anymore," says Michael Shapiro, his voice tight with anger"They are saying, 'You raped us before, but you can't do it anymore. There will be no more raping.' "

Shapiro's plan for rape prevention does not include better street lighting, quicker police response, or karate lessons for women. His particular brand of jujitsu is practiced in a courtroom, not on a wrestling mat. And the "rape" victims he's talking about are some of the largest corporations in Americaincluding the giant General Motors Corporation.

For the past six years, Shapiro has been suing Michigan cities and townships on behalf of the nation's number one automaker, demanding dramatic cuts in property tax payments. GM is issuing tax challenges in 20 Michigan communities, protesting the tax on 36 of the 65 manufacturing and warehouse facilities that it operates in the state. In doing so, the company is locking horns with local governments in battles that will cost millions of dollars and involve some of the best legal talent money can buy.

GM isn't the first Michigan company to sue for lower taxes. In 1983, Shapiro won a $32 million judgment for Ford against the city of Dearborn, and he has also sued the city of Portage on behalf of the Upjohn pharmaceutical company. GM itself has filed similar suits against cities in Ohio and New York. But it's unprecedented for a company like GMwhich has long been the anchor of the Michigan economy-to dispute the values of so many properties in so many different parts of a state that has served as its home for 75 years.

The stakes in these cases, which often take years to complete, are enormous. If GM wins, it receives an annual reduction in its property tax bill and a hefty refund-plus interest-for excess taxes paid in years past, dating back to the first year the appeal was filed. The city of Flint, for example, could wind up owing GM as much as $70 million if the company wins in court. The city of Pontiac could get hit with a bill of more than $50 million.

Numbers like those tend to get people's attention, and Michigan Treasurer Robert Bowman has taken the unusual step of providing state funds to local communities to help finance their legal battles. Because GM has vastly superior resources, he says, cities and townships might not have had a fair chance to present their case without some outside help.

"We had a philosophical concern-that money should not buy justice," Bowman says. A former Wall Street whiz kid who served in the Carter Treasury Department and played a key role in rescuing Chrysler from bankruptcy, Bowman is not especially comfortable in the role of corporate critic. Stepping gingerly around GM, he says he has no firsthand information but that he's been told that the company's strategy is "to drag these things out, churn out billable hours, until the commununity cries uncle.

"We do want a fair fight," he says, "and you don't have to be an MBA to see that it wasn't going to be a fair fight."

GM's effort to slash its taxes comes at a particularly bad time in Michigan because the company has also been cutting back its work force due to increased foreign competition and a loss of market share to domestic rivals Ford and Chrysler

In November 1986, GM announced plans to close 11 factories, and six of them were in Michigan. The company laid off a total of 29,000 workers, 17,000 from its home state. Since then, the news from GM has offly gotten worse. Bauered by a 20 percent drop in sales between 1985 and 1987, and an ever-shrinking market share, the company has aggressively pursued a policy of planned shrinkage, announcing more and more layoffs. Exacerbating the resentment of Michigan residents, GM has expanded its overseas operations in South Korea and Mexico. As of April 1987, according to The Detroit News, no fewer than 50,000 Michigan workers had been told that they would no longer be GM people by the end of 1989.

Nearly 30,000 of the GM layoffs announced so far in Michigan have taken place along the so-called "1-75 strip," an industrial belt that stretches from the northern Detroit suburbs, past Pontiac, then Flint, and up to the mid-Michigan cities of Saginaw and Bay City.

Flint used to be GM's flagship city. These days, it is a picwre of urban decline, a city of abandoned homes and boarded-up stores. Its last major development was a theme park called "Autoworld." Envisioned as a celebration of the American automobile, the park opened in 1984 with the help of $25 million in public funds. A million people a year were...