Boardman Neighborhood Association Meeting, November 17th @ 7 pm, 2nd floor, City County building

Old Town Neighborhood Association Meeting, November 19th @ 7 pm, St Francis

Address to the City Commission, November 9th:

First I want to thank my family, who are here tonight: my wife Colleen, my parents, and my brother. I also want to thank my co-workers at Olson, Bzdok & Howard, who for 15 years have been my second family, and especially my mentor, Jim Olson. I also want to thank my advisory board and the volunteers who helped put our public outreach project together. We did not have an opponent, but we worked hard anyway.

I am going to try something new tonight, and if it works I hope future mayors will feel obliged to do it, and it will become a tradition. I think a new mayor ought to stand before the public and the commission and lay his or her cards out on the table: here is what I think we ought to be doing, here are what I think our goals should be.

 When I was looking for inspiration this weekend, I looked at the Michigan Constitution, because the city is a creation of the state and all our power comes from the state. And what I found there struck me. The first sentence of the Michigan Constitution says:

All political power is inherent in the people. Government is instituted for their equal benefit, security and protection.

All political power is inherent in the people. When it comes down to it, we in city government do two things for our residents: we decide how to spend their money, and we decide what rules everyone has to follow. We do these things because we believe they further the common good – because we believe we are better off, on balance, if we do these things than if we don’t do them. But we only do these things because our residents consent to us doing them. The two questions we must return to again and again are, are we working for our residents in the things we do, and are we working for them as effectively as we can be?

My observation the last three years has been that most of our projects follow the same general course. They start with an idea or a proposal. The idea or proposal originates from staff or a component unit or advisory board. From there it goes to the city commission. Through the news and other sources, the public learns we are considering it. Here I call the public “the neighborhoods,” but you could call them the residents too. Then those residents who want to do so let us know what they think of the proposal. If they embrace it, we usually embrace it, and off we go.

If they push back against it, however, one of three things happens. The first is we reject it, in which case we lose staff time and resources, plus lost opportunities represented by the fact that staff time and resources could have been spent on something else.

Or we micro-manage it, changing things in small ways at the end of the process in an effort to address resident concerns. That is a safe course of action – it is always safer to criticize details of someone else’s idea than to advocate your own, knowing that others will criticize you. But micro-managing is not our job and I don’t really want to spend the next two years focusing ever more time on ever smaller issues. I hope we’ll work on the forest, not individual trees.

Or the third thing we do is we go forward with the idea in spite of the public’s opposition, and that – when it has happened – has not turned out well.

 The question is, can we flip this upside down? Not on all projects, but on some of the big ones? Can we take an idea to the residents at the beginning of the process, before it is fully formed, and find out what they think, and then make a decision about whether and how to go forward? Can we generate ideas from the neighborhoods and assign ourselves the task of making them happen?

The difference is between reacting to the public and being directed by the public. We can generate fully formed proposals and then react to the public’s input on them. Or we can work harder to get direction from the public at the outset.

 My friend Bill Kurtz did this in Acme a few years ago. He called it “Citizen Driven.” He created an advisory process for most aspects of township government. That process was the inspiration for what became the COFAC group.

Traverse City also did this about 20 years ago, before I lived here, with something called the Residential Retention Task Force. This group went to the neighborhoods and asked four questions:

Why do you choose to live in the city?

What is it about your neighborhood that attracts you?

What problems do you experience?

What is your “wish list” for the future?

Some of the resulting answers were implemented. Some the neighborhoods are still waiting for.

This is why I created the website, www.planfortc.com. To re-start the dialogue on those four questions from the Residential Retention Task Force. It ought to be feasible, in a city of 14,500 people, using 21st century communication tools, to hear from most of our residents at one time or another about what they want us to do. We already have received helpful comments on the site, and some new ideas I never thought of.

One of the focal points of the site will be a question of the week. This week’s question is about spending up to $3 million from the Brown Bridge Trust Fund to implement elements of the bay front plan: safe crossings of the parkway, restrooms, improvement of the west end beach, and park and playground amenities on the former zoo property. I think it’s been the former zoo property long enough; it’s time it became something new that our residents and visitors can enjoy.

 I plan to highlight the question of the week during announcements at the beginning of each city commission meeting. Future question topics this fall will include community policing, traffic calming on local streets, and a cross-town bike route from the east side over to Munson and the Commons. I’m open to suggestions about what we should be asking in the question of the week.

 The idea is simply to turn things around, to make city government work at the direction of city residents instead of reacting to the input of city residents. To do this, we have to constantly ask the residents what they want us to doing. Plan for TC is not the only way we can do this, but it is a start. We have to start somewhere.

 We have a lot to work on. We have to maintain and, I would argue, increase our infrastructure program. Repairing and improving streets, sidewalks, bike lanes, bridges, and storm water systems is a long-term, expensive project that is not going to be completed on any of our watch. But we have more buying power right now in this economy than we will have in the future. And we need to include traffic calming in the resurfacing of the neighborhood streets because the city has been promising that to the neighborhoods for 20 years. And we need to make our streets complete, so they serve pedestrians and bicycles not just cars.

And as Commissioner Budros has pointed out, the experience on Woodmere suggests that improving corridors outside of downtown could help attract new development to those areas. Perhaps by investing up front in those corridors we could avoid creating new tax capture programs, and the resulting revenues could go straight to the general fund.

We have to work on the COFAC recommendations for making city services more efficient. We have to collaborate with the County and the townships to find economies of scale that will maintain our levels of service while lowering the price. We have to find a solution for Division Street. We have to support our local economy. We have to work with Light and Power to make choices about our energy needs that will sustain and protect us in the future.

In all these things, we should start and end with the neighborhoods.

I look forward to working with this commission on these and other issues. I have met with each of you, I appreciate your talent, and I respect your dedication. Together with our outstanding city manager and our capable professional staff, I think we should be optimistic about what we can get done.

I hope we will think big. I hope we will stay focused. I hope we will not pander to the grouchiest common denominator. I hope we will put ourselves out there and take the risks that putting yourself out there entails. I hope the residents of Traverse City will believe in us enough to tell us what they want, because that is the only way this experiment will succeed, the only way city government can be better and more progressive and more relevant than it has ever been before. I look forward to working with all of you, and I see great things ahead.

Chris Bzdok, Mayor

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