“I understand, like, less than 50% of it”
ELIZABETH NELSON:
Welcome to Episode 8 of Hollow Hype. In Episode 7, Ann Arbor City Council unanimously approved Heidi’s request to rezone a whole city block for Southtown. City staff recommended an exclusive deal for Heidi, instead of a competitive bidding process. When one resident questioned that deal, Heidi threatened her.
[MUSIC]
The converted grocery store at Venue was a networking opportunity for Heidi.
[2021 recorded presentation]
HEIDI:
We're working on this uh great project across the street. My wife and I approached the Ufers and we said hey we have this really interesting idea to create a new kind of flexible space that includes different elements.
That space is going to be a 8500 square foot restaurant that's going to have five kitchen lines there's going to be co-working space. One thing that I think all of you probably are going to be really interested in is there's going to be a digital production studio there and we're going to really make an effort to reach out to creatives, designers, any form of XR to get into that space so that that is a digital production space that can really host events and expose our business community and our startups to what the possibilities are for those kind of enterprises. But a bunch of co-working space, a bunch of socialization space.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
Almost as soon as it opened as a restaurant and event space, Heidi and Marge began hosting meetings for a group called A2 New Tech. At Venue, the A2 New Tech group shared pitches for new businesses and new products. The meetings were designed to bring together local entrepreneurs and potential investors.
In August 2022, Heidi announced her own idea at the A2 New Tech group
[2022 recorded presentation]
HEIDI:
We also have a little software project that we've been working on here and it is a e-commerce platform. It is the front end of - it is becoming the front end of - pretty much every transaction that we manage in our real estate and hospitality company
In essence what it is is it's a e-commerce platform that has stripped functionality off the front end of Toast so we have our own food service front end which is a lot more flexible than all than the kind of standard out-of-the-can food service offerings that come with a solution like Toast. We front-end Airbnb, we front-end our Tesla service provider fleet, we front-end May mobility so this is a combined hospitality suite that basically allows us to manage all transactions, gamify, create a differentiated experience for our customers so it will be live next week.
[MUSIC]
ELIZABETH NELSON:
My name is Elizabeth Nelson. From 2018 to 2022, I served on Ann Arbor City Council. That experience taught me a lot. Mostly, I learned: people will say just about anything if they think you’ll believe it. This is HOLLOW HYPE.
2024 was a big year for Heidi. She represented the City of Ann Arbor at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. City staff offered her an exclusive deal to buy city property, which City Council approved with enthusiasm. In her day job as Director of the Ann Arbor Art Center, City Council Member Jenn Cornell planned the Center’s Annual Gala at Venue, rather than using the Center’s own event space. At the Gala, Heidi drank cocktails with other Council Members Erica Briggs and Dharma Akmon. Ann Arbor leaders now openly boasted about their collaborations with Heidi. They scoffed at any skeptics.
Heidi’s plan to redevelop the block at Henry, White, State, and Stimson continued. The project called Southtown would replace modest homes, duplexes, and small scale apartment buildings with over 200 luxury units and full time Airbnbs. Heidi had chosen Lisa Sauve, a member of the Ann Arbor Planning commission as architect for Southtown– at the planning commission meetings, Lisa would be recused from discussion and voting on Southtown. Outside of those meetings, Sauve publicly blasted her colleagues for questioning anything about the project.
[MUSIC]
KEN GARBER:
I'm a longtime Ann Arbor resident. I'm a science reporter, and I'm a climate activist.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
That’s my friend Ken. He’s a regular fixture at Ann Arbor City planning and City Council meetings, offering public comments about new developments. Ken studies zoning plans and agreements closely, assessing how and where each project could be more environmentally sustainable. He consistently supports new development and new housing, while also urging local leaders to demand more when they should. He is widely respected for his commitment to the environment and attention to detail.
KEN GARBER:
Well, they were approved in 2023 for their Southtown project. I think it was 216 units, and it was going to be an all-electric project with no natural gas connection with mass timber construction. So as far as sustainability elements, this one is pretty good.
I think it was late 2023. Lisa Sauve invited me and John Mirski and Sarah Lorenz to Synecdoche, their design studio, to talk about their work on Southtown. And at that time, it was still going to be all-electric, no gas. And they were working hard on the mass timber portion of it, too. And all this sounded good to me, but in the course of the meeting, it was brought up that DTE was causing problems in terms of saying they did not have the capacity to meet the power needs of this building. They were going to have to do extensive upgrades and they were going to charge 4M or Southtown for those upgrades. And this was a big worry for the development team, for the Synecdoche people, and presumably for Heidi and Marge.
There was a geothermal…two geothermal wells, I believe, extensive solar panels.
But if you're going to go off-grid, so to speak, from DTE, those solar panels aren't going to be enough to provide all the electricity you're going to need. And you're going to need an extra amount of electricity to power the geothermal heat pumps, which are designed to heat the building. So you're really increasing the electric demand on this building. And if you're going to disconnect from DTE, then you're going to have to find another source besides these solar panels. And what they hit on was to use fuel cells.
ELIZABETH NELSON
Heidi and Marge brought this idea to the Planning Commission in May 2024. By then, Lisa Sauve had resigned from the commission. In the video of the meeting, Lisa can be seen nodding her head in support of Heidi and Marge.
[2024 recorded meeting]
MARGE POSCHER:
I'm Dr. Margaret Poscher and I am the developer and we are, as you said, requesting a restatement of conditions so that we can provide the city with a much more sustainable project and with that I will turn it over to my right hand and energy expert Heidi Poscher
HEIDI:
The fuel cells will be powered by renewable natural gas, which we're going to get directly through contracting with farming operators and I'm going to talk in the next slide about what that looks like specifically, but the outcomes that we're trying to support are carbon intensity reduction. So by our measurement we think that we can actually reduce the amount of CO2 or greenhouse gas that's put out into the environment by about 7,000 metric tons which is over on a year-over-year basis which is pretty substantial.
KEN GARBER
Well, instead of being an all-electric development with no gas connection, they kind of flipped it.
So there was going to be no electric connection with DTE whatsoever, but there would be a gas connection. And I can only speculate on why they made that switch, but it was a major change.
Apparently, this had been a topic of discussion between the Poschers and the Office of Sustainability Innovations for a while before it reached Planning Commission. So I don't know when those discussions with OSI started, but at the meeting, I was impressed.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
At the Planning Commission, Heidi explained how Southtown would be fueled by methane from large scale farms. This fuel was called “renewable natural gas” or RNG. Heidi referred to her conversations with Dr. Missy Stults, head of the City’s Office of Sustainability and Innovations, OSI.
[MUSIC]
[2024 recorded meeting]
HEIDI:
I mean you know Missy Stultz makes a point that there's plenty of feed stock available where that came from so you know like maybe we'll do a project with the city to do some other form of digester. The objective though is to get below the line of sustainability and there are many many reasons to do that. It's an opportunity in terms of sustainability, it's an opportunity for our company as well in terms of pushing the envelope in terms of creating value and it doesn't take very long in terms of studying the climate economy to to understand how true that is. So it's both an objective in terms of meeting the objectives of the city but it's also an objective for good business and figuring out ways to take advantage of the climate economy.
Missy and I might might do something crazy and just partner with the wastewater facility like our biggest problem will be the supply chain
ELIZABETH NELSON:
Members of the Planning Commission were enthusiastic and supportive
DAN ADAMS:
01:12:40:00 - 01:12:52:00
I'm inclined to support it as presented. It projects fantastic and I don't want to tie up and it's such an innovative proposal and it's an innovative project and it's great.
SARA HAMMERSCHMIDT:
This is super cool. I understand, like, less than 50% of it. But like I'm really excited to hear like innovations, and you know, sustainability.
RITA MITCHELL:
They did not understand the issue.
There weren't enough questions asked. There wasn't enough detail provided for anyone to really understand what was going on.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
That’s my friend Rita.
RITA MITCHELL:
I've lived in Ann Arbor since 1980, so that's 45 years.
I chaired the Environmental Commission from June of 23 to May of 24.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
Rita has been an environmental activist in Michigan for decades, working with the Sierra Club on issues like opposition to an oil pipeline. Locally, she’s served on committees related to urban forestry and protecting the city’s tree canopy.
RITA MITCHELL:
The plan for Southtown was to have this hydrogen fuel cell established, that would use, I'm going to call it manure gas, from a pipeline that would come through DTE. So the manure, the gas from the manure pit could be pushed into the pipeline and then it would come to Ann Arbor.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
The repurposing of that manure gas has been marketed as a sustainable practice. It’s called “renewable natural gas” because it redirects waste. Rita and others are offended by this reasoning, because the source of that waste is large scale factory farms sometimes called concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs.
RITA MITCHELL:
Treating that as a renewable energy source is not a good thing. It's not good because the pollution that's associated with the manure pits is horrendous. It goes into the water, the streams nearby. And it goes into the air. There's ammonia and other noxious gases that pollute the immediate countryside around these factory farms. It’s just… there's nothing that I can think of that's good about having factory farms and encouraging farmers to increase the number of animals that they put in a particular place. We need to go as a country in a different direction.
KEN GARBER:
She wasn't proposing using green hydrogen, at least initially, for these fuel cells. She was proposing using methane that was extracted from basically cow poop, right?
And that's a separate issue, but the technical issue is that when you're feeding methane into these fuel cells, you've got to separate the hydrogen from the carbon in the methane. And that requires a lot of energy. The process is called steam reforming or methane cracking. So that was going to be energy intensive. And then on the back end, you're not producing just water, like you would if you were feeding hydrogen into the fuel cell. You're producing CO2 as well. So you've got to deal with that. And Heidi proposed capturing that CO2 and either selling it or sequestering it underground. And that – the capture of that CO2 - is also an extremely energy intensive process. So I had concerns whether the numbers were going to add up, whether you're going to be spending so much energy getting the current, the electrons out of this methane, that you're not going to be able to support the demand, the load of this project.
Clearly, Heidi and Marge went to Planning Commission in May 2024 already having worked out a lot of this with OSI.
[2024 recorded meeting]
MAYOR CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR:
The June 18 meeting of the Ann Arbor City Council if you're able please rise and join us for a moment of silence
ELIZABETH NELSON:
A month later, City Council considered the plan for Southtown to use renewable natural gas and fuel cells. Dr. Missy Stults advocated for it.
MISSY STULTS:
And when I spoke with the developer about this project, which I did have an opportunity to do many times, one of the concerns that they raised about a traditional connection to the DTE grid was their concern about reliability. In particular, they told me that one of the goals of this project was to ensure the resilience of their residents, including the potential need for residents to shelter in place should a disaster or an emergency occur. The ability to generate all of their power on site, including using this fuel cell, means that they can control the reliability and thus the resilience of their energy system. I did want to say that I found it really refreshing to be in a conversation with the developer that was actively thinking about sustainability and resilience as key attributes of their design work early in the process.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
When Council Members pointed out the well-documented issues with factory farming, Dr. Stults doubled down in her defense of the project. She emphasized commitments from Heidi that in the future, the development would transition away from methane, to green hydrogen.
MISSY STULTS:
It is my understanding that the developer is open to exploring any type of RNG. And as you will see in the development agreement that Ms. DiLeo can speak to, the developer has agreed to move off of RNG as quickly as possible and move to green hydrogen to power that fuel cell. So put another way, I view this project as being largely in support of our sustainability goals and fully in support of our innovation goals.
This is a bridge to something that truly is more innovative.
KEN GARBER:
You know, green hydrogen is very expensive. And so I think that's why they settled on this so-called solution, but she called it an interim solution.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
When Dr. Stults was asked about the impact of this new technology, and how that impact would be measured, she described a task of figuring it out that would also involve Heidi.
[2024 recorded meeting]
MISSY STULTS:
This is new in many ways. And so we are going to have to learn and candidly this is part of the innovation work in our office is figuring out exactly how are we going to determine the impact of these practices. So I believe the developer has thoughts on what that could look like too. But I don't want to pretend that I can tell you right now exactly all of the details of that accounting methodology.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
City Council unanimously approved the new plan for Southtown, as requested by Heidi and 4M.
[MUSIC]
Aspects of Heidi’s plan were unclear and undefined. Dr. Stults framed those uncertainties as learning opportunities, proof that the idea was truly innovative. Moving forward, Heidi would work with the city to help figure these things out.
The Southtown project attracted attention within the energy industry. Heidi partnered with a new company called Resset, based in Tennessee. In 2024, Steve Pullins, founder and CEO of Resset, described the use of renewable natural gas at Southtown, including the plan to source from cow or pig CAFOs.
[2024 Podcast]
STEVE PULLINS:
We'll have a contract with a supplier, and our plan is to start out with DTE supplied RNG, because they have RNG feeding their system from a couple landfills, okay? So landfill gas cleaned up to pipeline standards, that's RNG, but it doesn't have the negative carbon footprint like a dairy. But our plan is to migrate to a dairy or swine based - or food waste-based - RNG in a couple years. Probably by 2029 or 30.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
In October 2025, Steve Pullins explained that Southtown could take advantage of new federal policy and investment tax credits provided by President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Under the Biden administration, Heidi’s plan for fuel cells were not eligible for tax credits. According to Pullins, the new Trump policy “took a load off our chest.”
Hindsight is 20/20. My friend Rita opposed the Southtown plan from the beginning, based on its reliance on manure pits at factory farms. Ken had some reservations, but wanted to believe that it could work.
KEN GARBER:
Yeah, I mean, I'm not… it's not good to create new demand for the products, even if they're the waste products of these very destructive and damaging CAFO operations. And there is methane leakage along the way. You have to take that into consideration.
So they're valid arguments against it. But on balance, I decided that this development was such a promising, different, innovative approach that I was going to support it despite that.
The whole thing seemed very elaborate and well thought out and unique. I'd never heard anything like this. And in fact, the Ann Arbor News later quoted me saying that and put it in the title of an article.
I was willing to overlook also the fact that they were leveling an entire city block of affordable housing, that they were proposing that 30 percent of their units be short-term rentals, which is very damaging to the whole idea of building out Ann Arbor's housing stock for long-term residents. I was just so glad to see a developer come up with something this innovative and I thought this constructive and this sustainable that I pushed all that aside and my technical doubts and I thought, I'm going to support this and I was very vocal about it.
I was okay with this at the time more than okay. I was a cheerleader. And now I feel kind of misled and duped, knowing what I know now about Heidi Poscher.
[MUSIC]
ELIZABETH NELSON:
The ambitious plan for Southtown has largely fallen apart. The block has been vacant for so long that it’s now growing tall weeds. The 4M company is in bankruptcy and has significant debts, including over $150,000 in unpaid property taxes on the empty lot. The future of that block now depends on attracting more funding and more investors willing to pursue Heidi’s plans there.
In 2023 and 2024, architect and former City Planning commissioner, Lisa Sauve was one of Southtown’s most aggressive advocates. In 2025, her firm, Synechdoche, stopped working with Heidi. Sauve told the Ann Arbor News that the energy grid model for Southtown wouldn’t work and that Synecdoche was owed more than $800,000 in unpaid invoices, contractual penalties and late fees.
KEN GARBER:
You know, I can't speak to her motivations, but having heard now the history of her broadband projects in West Virginia and Ohio, it does seem like she has a talent for identifying what a community needs and becoming expert, or at least sounding like an expert, in that area, and then positioning herself to become a player in those communities. So it seems to fit a pattern.
ELIZABETH NELSON:
In the last six months, I’ve been trying to understand that pattern. I’ve contacted dozens of people in Ohio and West Virginia who participated in Heidi’s schemes – they supported a project that led to federal indictments and convictions. I wanted to understand how that happened. I have a list of names, people who appear in newspaper articles, meeting minutes, archived government papers, and court dockets related to Heidi’s project. Some of these people won’t talk to me or they deny that they were ever involved at all.
Others are angry. Like Ken, they realize they were duped.
I talked to one woman who seemed genuinely sad. She described Heidi as a friend, someone she cared about. She admitted that, looking back on it, Heidi was probably just using her.
[MUSIC]
When I launched this podcast, I expected to hear from more people who knew Heidi before she came to Ann Arbor, when she was committing crimes in California, Ohio, and West Virginia. That hasn’t happened yet.
Instead, I’ve gotten emails and phone calls from friends of Dr. Marge Poscher, Heidi’s late wife. Last October, Marge was found dead in the home that she shared with Heidi. Marge’s friends are grieving and they want to understand what happened. Many of them knew very little about Heidi. They didn’t realize that their friend was married to a convicted felon.
Thanks for listening. Visit HollowHype.com to find more information about this episode.
Coming up in episode 9: when student journalists at the Michigan Daily publish Heidi’s criminal record, few people notice. Other local journalists ignore it and local leaders barely react.
If you have something to share about Heidi’s activities in Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, or California. Please reach out to hollowhypepodcast@gmail.com
