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Turkia Awada Mullin: Resilient Lawyer Gets Deals Done
Pinnacle Aeropark was the 1,300-acre economic development project brainchild of former Wayne County Executive Edward McNamara in 1999, but the land near Detroit Metro Airport sat empty for year after year after year.
Cobo Center expansion was another project with powerful supporters. But repeated failure to do a Cobo deal became a sorry symbol of a politically dysfunctional Detroit region.
Pinnacle and Cobo appeared to be cursed projects destined to be forever frustrated by one obstacle or another. Fortunately, no one told Turkia Awada Mullin.
Mullin, 40, a Lebanese immigrant as a toddler, a Free Press newspaper carrier as a youngster, a U.S. Army recruit, a graduate of Wayne State and Detroit Mercy universities and then a real estate lawyer, played a key role as assistant Wayne County executive in recent deals to open the Pinnacle Race Course and to advance a plan for the first expansion of Cobo since the 1980s.
Tenacity is rewarded
The tenacity and creativity that helped Mullin put together previously undoable deals for Cobo and the Pinnacle track played a key part in Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano’s decision to appoint her last month as the country’s new director of economic and neighborhood development. She replaced Mulugetta Birru, who resigned the post in December but still is consulting on relationships he helped establish for Wayne County in China.
“Everything we do today is about jobs,” Mullin told me over lunch last week.
“We will be much more aggressive about business attraction,” she said, almost willfully defiant of the worldwide economic slump that has stymied growth in much more bustling regions than metro Detroit.
What’s refreshing about Mullin is that she’s new enough at the development game that she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know yet. And she’s not afraid to speak her mind about it.
Most everyone in the automotive industry, for example, assumed that Michigan had little if any chance of landing a new assembly plant for Volkswagen AG, which last year chose a 1,000-acre site in Chattanooga, Tenn. But still, Mullin said she was irked at the fact that Michigan’s development officials didn’t ask Wayne County for potential sites.
Eager to learn
She later found out that VW looked at turnkey sites certified as “development-ready” by the McCallum Sweeney consulting firm in South Carolina. Mullin now has Wayne County pulling sites together to be certified as development-ready.
“She’s a very assertive, creative person,” George Jackson Jr., Detroit’s chief development officer, said of Mullin. “She played a key role in leading the charge to establish Wayne County as a leader in the use of a land bank to return state-owned properties to private use and back on the tax rolls.”
Mullin was recruited in 2003 from private practice to become Wayne County’s lead real estate attorney.
The second oldest of six children in an immigrant family that came to Detroit when she was 2, Mullin said, “I’m a big fan of the private sector. I believe in survival of the fittest.”
Wayne County will need that kind of Darwinian spirit to compete for job-creating companies.
Tom Walsh
Detroit Free Press