You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2011.
This article is by TC planning commission chairman Fred Wilmeth and me. It is appearing simultaneously in this month’s Traverse City Business News.
This year Traverse City is working with the neighborhoods and the investment community to implement our new master plan, and make the 8th Street corridor the city’s next great place.
The Traverse City Master Plan is both a quality of life tool and an economic development tool. It is organized around two ideas.
First, we are a city of interwoven neighborhoods. The characteristics of these neighborhoods are what residents value about living in the city.
Second, the best way for land use planning to protect what we value about neighborhoods is to focus regulation on intensities. More specifically, on containing nuisance effects from spilling over from one neighborhood to another – impacts like noise, traffic, lighting, and size.
The right kind of regulation protects assets and therefore property values, while the wrong kind inhibits creativity and stunts growth. By focusing on intensity and being less prescriptive about use, the Master Plan promotes the location of jobs, goods, and services near residences while protecting residential quality of life. The aim is to protect what we care about, and build on it.
The success of any plan is measured by what we accomplish. With that in mind, we are focusing on 8th Street between Garfield and Union Streets as the place to launch this new approach. A demonstration project, if you will.
Why 8th Street? Because of the challenges and opportunities it offers. On one hand, portions of the corridor look like the “before” picture in a redevelopment success story. The physical street between Old Town and Woodmere is in rough shape, traffic speeds are high, and occupancy rates are low.
But there are also bright spots. There are businesses succeeding by simultaneously serving the high density of nearby residents and the high number of vehicles passing through the corridor. These businesses exist in harmony with adjacent residential neighborhoods. They offer goods and services to the neighborhoods and the many people passing through.
We’ve made infrastructure investments at both ends of 8th Street, with the stimulus project on the east and the Old Town parking deck on the west. At the center are public improvements including the library, Hull Park, the reconstruction of Woodmere as a complete street, and the Boardman River pedestrian bridge.
The Front Street Central Business District still stands as the model for the city supporting redevelopment with public improvements that support private investment. The success of most of our redevelopment efforts is a product of a successful CBD. Old Town, Garland Street, and the bayfront (coming soon) owe portions of their success to their proximity to the CBD. Given the public investments already made in and around 8th Street, it is the logical next place to extend and continue these successes.
Starting in April, the city plans to put significant resources into implementing the Master Plan on 8th Street. We’ll start by using a $100,000 federal grant to design and engineer a “facelift” for the stretch west of last year’s stimulus project, and a zoning overlay for the whole corridor based on intensity. The idea behind the facelift is to make 8th Street a pleasant place where people want to be. The idea behind the overlay is to foster creativity while protecting the neighborhoods from impacts beyond those they experience now.
There are other resources out there, if our partners want to play. The city has $750,000 from MDOT for reconstruction of the bridge at Boardman Street, as well as sale proceeds coming from the Depot property. TCLP could work with us on pedestrian scale street lights and utility undergrounding.
The County Brownfield authority has almost $1 million in unused grant money coming back from the Old Town deck that could be put to work along the 8th Street corridor. The six neighborhood associations that touch 8th Street can help design the project. The TC Chamber can help make the business case.
It is a simple strategy, really. Take what has worked and build on it. If we do it right, we get a refurbished mixed-use corridor at the heart of the city – our next great place. And a template we can repeat in other parts of the city.
The Planning Commission will be discussing the first step in the 8th Street project – hiring the design/engineering firm – in April. The master plan can be found at http://www.ci.traverse-city.mi.us/departments/planning/20090715approvedmasterplan.pdf
A few quick updates for a sunny week -
TCLP strategic planning is continuing Wednesday starting at 5:30 in the training room on the 2nd floor of the governmental center. Two topics are up for discussion: local generation and renewable/low-carbon generation. More info at http://tclp.org/strategic_plan.php
TART Complete Streets meeting. Traverse Area Recreational Trails is hosting a community conversation about Complete Streets next Tuesday April 5th, from 5:30-8PM at the Traverse City Area District Library. Learn more about the State’s recent legislation, what it means to local communities across the State and how Complete Streets is a building block to a well connected community. Traverse City based writer, photographer and instructor Gary Howe will facilitate the discussion. Nancy Krupiarz, Executive Director of the Michigan Trails and Greenway Alliance, will talk about how other communities are coming together and creating complete streets, and how these actions are interconnected. There will pizza and time to mingle and talk about how to bring Complete Streets to Northern Michigan.
8th St Master Plan Demonstration Project. Coming to this space, and the TC Business News, on Friday.
Monday night the city commission will hear a presentation from Dr. Alexander Weiss, who has been studying the police department for six months and recommends moving to a workload driven staffing model and a new emphasis on data analysis. If implemented, his recommendations could save us money and improve the effectiveness of the resources we commit to this vital service.
One of the things I’ve been advocating for a while in this space is that we should run the city more like a business. By that I mean in a way that is more focused on value (level of service x cost), and more data-driven. Dr. Weiss has produced an analysis of city policing that gives us that opportunity.
The police department is a focus because of the importance of their work and the size of their budget – which at $4.1 million is the highest total cost center in the city. That is up from $3.8 million total cost just a couple years ago. It was also the most per capita of 20 Michigan cities we looked at a few years ago. In 2009, there were 29 violent crimes within the city limits.
Dr. Weiss has served as the director of the Northwestern University Center for Public Safety, and a professor of criminal justice at Indiana University, as well as a member of and advisor to police departments in Indiana and Colorado. http://www.alexanderweissconsulting.com/About_Us.php
Workload analysis
Dr. Weiss’s report can be found here: http://www.ci.traverse-city.mi.us/agendas/packet20110328.pdf
The starting point for his analysis is that the best way to staff and run a police department is based on the actual workload of the officers. This is a departure from the approach currently used, which is based on minimum staffing. Minimum staffing dictates that a certain number of officers be on duty each hour of the 24-hour day. The problem with it is that it does not ensure optimization of resources and does not improve overall public safety.
Workload analysis does optimize resources, and if the “unobligated” time is allocated with better direction, it improves public safety. (more on that second point later). The steps Weiss outlines for performing workload analysis are:
1. Examine distribution of calls for service over time - Weiss notes that calls peak in TC in the late afternoon, are highest in the month of July, and on Fridays. During the year studied there were 6,449 calls during the six am to six pm shift, and 4,364 calls during the six pm to six am shift.
2. Examine the nature of the calls – citizen assist, traffic accident, alarm, etc.
3. Estimate time consumed on calls for service – in TC, the average is 26 minutes from dispatch to clear.
4. Calculate agency relief factor – this is the relationship between the maximum number of days an officer could work, and the number of days that they actually work, due to vacations, comp time, and the like. In Traverse City, for each 1 officer we want on duty during a 12 hour shift, the department must employ 2.4 officers for that shift.
5. Establish performance objectives – this is done by determining what fraction of an officer’s shift should be devoted to calls for service and what portion to other activities. Also factored in is an estimate for the number of calls that require backup.
6. Provide staffing estimates – Weiss determined that during the study period, there were 10,813 calls for service, averaging 26 minutes per call. The total time consumed on calls is 4,685 hours. The average TCPD officer works 1812 hours per year. Using just the 14 officers assigned to road patrol, this results in 25,368 available hours.
That means officers currently spend about 18% of their available time on calls for service. Weiss reports based on data from other jurisdictions that this is quite low.
Designing a workload-based staffing plan
Based on conservative assumptions (i.e. those that tend to overstate rather than understate demand for officers), Weiss determined that with 50% of patrol officers’ time obligated and 50% unobligated, and with 25% of calls during the day shift requiring backup and 50% of the night shift calls requiring backup, workload-based staffing is 4 officers on the day shift and 4 on the night shift. The reason the number is the same despite the backup percentage being higher at night is because 60% of the calls occur during the day shift and only 40% at night.
These numbers do not include sergeants, who would continue to be assigned at two on days and two on nights. Sergeant time is devoted to backup, supervision, etc.
TC currently staffs assigns six officers and two sergeants to the day shift, and eight officers and two sergeants to the night shift. This is a significant overstaffing based on an analysis of their actual workload.
Unobligated time
One of the most interesting aspects of Weiss’s study in my opinion is his focus on officers’ unobligated or discretionary time. Currently this is spent primarily on patrol, but there is little direction from the department to officers about what to focus on and the direction that is given is not based on data analysis. Weiss recommends that the department use one of the excess road patrol positions to create a full-time data analyst. The data analyst would analyze patterns – where and when are crimes occurring, where and when are accidents occurring – and the department would use those patterns to give more direction to the officers’ use of unobligated time.
Weiss also recommends that some unobligated time be spent doing direct investigation, particularly followup investigation of incidents an officer initially responded to.
Community policing
TC has traditionally had a sector patrol program in addition to its regular road patrol. This program assigned sector officers to particular neighborhoods where they were cross trained in problem solving and community policing. The sector patrol program used to have 4 officers, but we have cut that back to two as a result of a reduction of the department size by two officers through retirements.
Weiss notes that while sector patrols are often popular, there is no evidence they have additional public safety value. He suggests one of three options. (1) Use some of the excess road patrol capacity to restore the sector program to full strength. (2) Assign to the sergeants community policing responsibility. (3) Cross train all officers in community policing, use technology to have a single number citizens can call, and dedicate a portion of the officers’ unobligated time to community policing duties. Weiss calls the third approach a “virtual” community policing program.
Overtime
Weiss also notes that the police union contract requires that officers be on an 84 hours biweekly payroll period, which means the city incurs 4 hours of scheduled overtime for each officer each pay period. 32% of the officers take this time as overtime pay, and 68% take it as comp time at a multiplier of 1.5 (4 hours of scheduled overtime gets you 6 hours of comp time).
Weiss writes, ”This is, in our view an unusual approach to this issue. Most police departments using 12-hour schedules will reduce the number of hours worked during the two-week cycle to maintain a 40-hour workweek. This can be done reducing staffing during off-peak hours, (e.g. between 3AM and 8 AM). Some agencies restructure their schedule so that all shifts on Sunday are eight-hour shifts.
“The TCPD approach is particularly inefficient, particularly in light of the excess capacity in road patrol. Each week the eighteen members of the road patrol unit earn 36 hours at overtime rates. This results in 54 hours of straight time per week, or 2808 hours per year. Recall that a TCPD officer, on average works 1812 hours per year, so this overstaffing is the equivalent of 1.6 police officers. This would make more sense if there were a demonstrated need to staff at this level, but in the absence of such need this seems unnecessary. Even more importantly, officers that use compensatory time in lieu of overtime pay may be taking time off at times when it really does affect performance.”
Regionalization, public safety
Weiss also has longer term recommendations about possible regionalization of policing or a shift to a public safety model that cross trains police to respond to fire calls as well. Each of these topics is a whole discussion unto itself, and we’ll get to them later. The reader is referred to the report itself for more info.
We are looking forward to these discussions.
An important trend reversed today: the number of people living in the TC city limits started increasing.
The population of Traverse City proper has been declining for about 50 years now.
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
18,432 18,048 15,516 15,116 14,532 14,674
The reason for the long term decline is because we have fixed boundaries which are mostly built out or unavailable for development (like parks), and we have been subject to national demographic trends in which the number of people per household is going down.
For example, we lost almost 600 people from 1990 to 2000. A downtown market analysis four years ago noted that the city would need to add about 50 housing units per year in order to maintain a stable population in the face of the general demographic change.
Census data out today says the population of TC grew by 142 people this decade. We don’t know yet if this is because of increasing numbers of housing units, a reversal within the city of the demographic trend toward smaller household sizes, or both. We’ll have more data later.
For now, the change, while small in real numbers, is a significant step in the right direction. It signals a future in which the residential sector of our city is growing again.
In the next few days the city discusses streets and sidewalks, the region talks about what we want from Lansing to help our economy, and the second community meeting on Boardman Lake Avenue happens.
Infrastructure
The city is about to start its spring street projects again, and Monday night we’ll approve a contract for almost $1 million with Elmer’s for the reconstruction of Elmwood St, paving Shawnee St (now a gravel road), and fixing several alleys.
The Elmwood and Shawnee projects are worth mentioning because Elmwood is a good example of the city’s new approach to streets – one that follows the master plan, works through the volunteer citizen Planning Commission, and reaches out to the neighborhoods to address a new sidewalk section and an enhanced pedestrian crossing of Grandview Parkway.
Shawnee represents the city getting around to the unfinished business of upgrading the few gravel streets and alleys in our city to pavement, with the support and longtime efforts of the residents of that street.
Also on tap for Monday is another step in the right direction for traffic calming. A couple weeks ago, this site – with the support of readers - advocated changes to the city’s draft traffic calming policy that would require a simple majority to advance projects instead of a supermajority, and more importantly would involve the city contributing 75% of the cost of the projects with the neighbors contributing 25% through special assessment on their tax bills. These changes were proposed here – http://planfortc.com/2011/03/06/the-traffic-calming-we-deserve/
Two weeks ago, the city commission not only endorsed these changes, they took it a step further – suggesting a change in the general policy on special assessments so that the 50% majority required to move a project forward was 50% of the homestead owners (full time residents in the homes), instead of 50% of the property owners in general on a block or street.
This proposed change, which will be voted on Monday, is important because prior to now there are streets and blocks where projects do not move forward because the majority of the properties there are rentals and the landlords almost never agree to assessments. With this new change, the people whose home it is will have the ability to advance projects even if the landlords are not in favor. If this change moves forward Monday, the traffic calming policy will be up for final vote on April 4.
Business Leaders for MI
A couple years ago, a group called Business Leaders for Michigan developed a Michigan Turnaround Plan which can be found here: http://www.michiganturnaroundplan.com/.
This group cites statistics that have become familiar – MI is 50th in per capita income growth the past 10 years, 50th in private sector job growth, its public sector spending growth has outpaced inflation in 8 of the past 10 years, and we rank in the bottom 5 nationally as a place to locate a new business.
The group advocates not only the traditional conservative solutions of cutting government spending and reducing business taxes, but also recommends increasing spending on higher education and transportation – as well as emphasizing regional delivery of services like police and fire. They also argue that the state of MI will rise or fall with the success or failure of its cities.
In that spirit, they have invited me and a bunch of other mayors and directors of local chambers of commerce to an Urban Visioning workshop in April. They want to know our best strategies for local economic well being, and the things we want from Lansing in order to thrive and succeed in our local economy. I have asked the supervisors of the metro townships in our region and the TC chamber of commerce to get their heads together and help come up with these lists. If you have ideas, I would love to hear them.
Boardman Lake Ave
The second Boardman Lake Avenue/development district community meeting is Tuesday night at St. Francis high school. An invite to the meeting is here: http://www.ci.traverse-city.mi.us/boardmaninvite.pdf. The meeting promises to review the feedback from last time, and to propose some ideas and designs to consider and discuss. The raw data from the last meeting’s input and idea session is here: http://www.ci.traverse-city.mi.us/boardman02232011.pdf
The brownfield budget for the total BLA project is:
RR Wye Relocation $1,190,000
ROW Acquisition $ 990,000
Trails $ 858,500
Road & sidewalk $ 875,000
Contingency 15% $ 587, 025
Total $4,500,525
Without trying to sound like I want to convince anyone of anything, a couple things are important to note here.
First, this is not a $4.5 million road. About $1.2 million is to purchase and relocate the railroad wye, a large piece of developable property that most participants seem to support doing whether the road gets build or not.
Another $860,000 is for the west Boardman Lake trail. The city plans to move ahead with the trail – again with or without the road. We are submitting a grant application Monday for $210,000 with a $210,000 brownfield funds match, which could extend the trail to 14th St and set us up to do the rest soon after.
Second, this budget does not currently include any traffic calming on Union and Cass. The reason is because they are not in the brownfield redevelopment district. The need to calm these streets as part of a potential project needs to be kept in view, however.
Some of the best questions I have seen about the project to date include:
- Induced traffic – If we add this road to our traffic capacity, will it lead to additional traffic that will use up the relief we intended to give on Union and Cass? This is a very real concern. On the other hand, I also think we need to look at whether induced traffic - which is well documented in large metropolitan areas – would also occur in such a small micropolitan region such as ours.
- What will cause cars to use the avenue instead of Cass and Union? The old plan talked about a diverter of some kind on 14th. I think traffic calming needs to be looked at instead.
- What will be the effect on traffic in the rest of the city? This is probably more an issue of traffic through some kind of defined sub-area or portion of the city network.
- Can the road be designed in such a way as to minimize impacts to the 8th St entry, adjacent properties, trail users, and natural resources, and if so how?
I believe the city commission is determined to help the Old Town neighborhood mitigate the use of their neighborhood as part of a major east-west regional corridor (Silver Lake and Division to 14th to 8th to Munson/31). But I think we’re also determined to see whatever is done happen in a well-thought out way and in such a way as to do more good than harm. Hope to see you Tuesday night.
Traverse City has a sister city – Koka, Japan. Students and teachers from their city come here to live with host families and study, and vice versa. Koka is located a ways south of the earthquake and tsunami damage.
City Clerk Debbra Curtiss is the city’s liaison for the sister city program. She wrote this letter for me, which we are sending to the Mayor of Koka.
March 16, 2011
The Honorable Takeshi Nakajima, Mayor, City of Koka, Shiga Japan
Dear Mr. Nakajima:
To the people of the City of Koka and the Country of Japan, we are very saddened by the tragic events in Japan.
Although we understand that Koka is south of the epicenter of the earthquake and resulting tsunami, we are very disheartened by its effect on your great country and people. Words seem inadequate to show our feelings of sympathy.
During this time of great loss of lives and devastation to the beautiful Japan, please know that we here in Traverse City are thinking about you all in Japan.
May you find courage and peace to work through this very difficult time; our thoughts and prayers are with you.
Sincerely,
Christopher M. Bzdok, Mayor, City of Traverse City
Good news from our friends at Rotary Charities – Marsha Smith and Becky Ewing:
First-Ever Funder Collaborative Supports the Bayfront Plan
There will be a major groundbreaking ceremony this fall at Clinch Park, but something even more groundbreaking will precede the first shovelful of dirt.
For the first time in history, a group of regional funders has come together in a coordinated approach to provide support for the Bayfront Plan to the tune of over $260,000. Consisting of ten private, family and public foundations, these regional funders have been meeting over the past ten years. This is the first time they have come together to jointly fund a project.
“We have been meeting primarily to network and share knowledge. Last spring, we decided it was time to explore a funding collaborative and the group was most excited about the Bayfront Plan”, said Marsha Smith, Executive Director of Rotary Charities.
“It met a lot of our foundations’ criteria and was a great example of community-identified need. As funders, we often require our grantees collaborate with one another, but we rarely work together on projects. The result of our work here is being watched across the state as an example of how funders might come together to address community need.”
______
The funders’ contribution of $260,000, when added to $450,000 from the MI Natural Resources Trust Fund and $450,000 from the DDA, brings together a total of $1.16 million for Phase I of the bayfront plan, which will be concentrated at the former zoo property and Clinch Park Beach.
The city commission and the parks and rec commission will be having a joint meeting this Monday night to hear about the funders collaborative and to talk about this year’s implementation of the first phase of the bayfront plan. More to come.
Recent Comments