Facing the Future
Considering the evidence about what promotes and sustains sprawl, it is astounding how much of the nation's discourse about it is predicated on the notion that nothing can be done to stop it. The Institute's findings make it clear that sprawl is neither an accident, nor a product of the free market, but is fundamentally influenced by public policies and public investments. And in a departure from previous eras, when development decisions were made by a handful of men working largely in private, the disputes over what will be built and where are now the most closely followed and visible public debates in local communities throughout the nation.
What sounded good in the late 1940s has turned out to contain a host of unforeseen and debilitating problems. It's time to end the binge, take a clear look at the realities, and break the addiction to business as usual. Here's the Institute's 12-step program:

In 1974 Garfield approved a land use plan that stressed economic development above any other social value. The flatlands along the busiest roads in the township's center were divided into districts for industrial parks, commercial and retail businesses, and professional offices. The slopes and summits of the ridges that ringed the flatlands were slated for subdivisions of half-acre and one-acre lots. And while the master plan mentioned protecting the environment and preserving open space, the zoning ordinance allowed for development of more than 95% of the township, including every acre of farmland. The ordinance also mandated that business could not be conducted in a residential area, and vice versa. It required a super abundance of parking, set new businesses at least 40 feet back from roads, and limited most buildings to two stories.
In approving this conventional template for economic growth Garfield joined a host of other rural American communities rushing to suburbanize in the second half of the 20th century. But the question many residents of Garfield and neighboring townships now are asking is, what kind of civic desert did all that growth really produce? Strip malls, subdivisions, big box stores, and immense parking lots marched across more than 2,000 acres, demolishing the equivalent of almost four square miles of wetlands, farms, and forests. Traffic is heavy and growing worse. The quality of the region's streams is diminishing as erosion from construction and runoff from roofs, roads, and parking lots increases, despite a model stormwater ordinance Grand Traverse County enacted in 1992 (see related story, Working Together Makes Sense). Municipal expenses are rising along with crime rates. The newest jobs tend to be in the low-paying service industry, increasingly dominated by national chains that funnel profits out of the area. Housing costs are rising, and working people find it increasingly hard to live close to their jobs.

Though the cacophony of sound and motion appear random and unsettling, the steady march of capital, emigration, and construction that produced the frenetic landscape that is now Garfield Township was quite deliberate. It began in the mid-1960s with the decision by Traverse City leaders to move manufacturing plants off West Grand Traverse Bay in order to clean up the waterfront for recreation and tourism. They then formed two organizations -- an economic development corporation and an industrial fund -- to make loans, grants, and bond funds available for roads, sewers, electrical infrastructure and other services to attract new businesses.
Garfield turned out to be the primary beneficiary.The leaders of the economic development corporation looked for large blocks of open land close to the main north-south highway (US31/M37) as prime sites for industrial parks. The idea was that building a larger manufacturing base would enhance the entire regional economy, including Traverse City's.
In 1967 Airport Industrial Park along Garfield's main east-west route, South Airport Road, opened for 10 tenants. During the next 23 years seven other industrial parks opened in the township, with the newest and largest constructed in cornfields and forests near the corner of Garfield (another main north-south) and Hammond (east-west) roads.
Charles Blankenship, president of the Traverse Bay Economic Development Corporation, champions this approach. From 1988 to 1998, he said, the corporation obtained $2.4 million in local, state and federal grants to improve infrastructure in the industrial parks, several of which are privately owned; arranged $35.4 million in private and public financing that assisted 52 companies to build or expand their plants; and produced 2,340 jobs, most all of them in Garfield Township. "This is an example of how good planning and smart investments by this community had a pronounced effect on the region," Mr. Blankenship said.
But almost no consideration then was given to how the new industrial parks would affect commuting patterns, roads, and schools inside and beyond the township. By locating the industrial parks miles from the city center the Economic Development Corporation ensured that cars and trucks would be the only way to reach them. Moreover, few of them have affordable housing close by, requiring workers to commute many miles between their homes and jobs. One result was that traffic congestion began to increase, and northwest Michigan entered an era of having to deal with worsening traffic congestion.

One of the unexpected trends associated with sprawling development is that the number of vehicles grows much faster than the number of people. From 1984 to 1998 Grand Traverse County's population increased by 15%, or 10,000 people, to a total of 74,000 residents. During the same period, according to figures from the Secretary of State, the number of registered vehicles in the county grew by 55%, or 28,000 cars and trucks, to a total of 80,000.
The trend is firmly tied to how communities grow. Garfield's master plan and ordinance, for example, ensure ample entrances and exits onto major highways, and so much distance between residential, commercial, and industrial districts that driving is the only safe way to get around. Walking is such an afterthought in Garfield that today there are just fragments of sidewalks totaling less than one mile in the entire township.
Garfield's landscape simply would not exist as it does today without the more than $14 million that taxpayers spent to expand several two-32,"For citizens with disabilities, public transit often is the only choice for travel. As tested consumers, their experience reveals what is best and worst about transit across the country. While smart growth and transportation planners identify what is needed, current riders know what works.

The following list of resources includes leading state and national organizations working to promote and implement successful public transit programs.

National Transit Resources

American Public Transportation Association
APTA represents public transit professionals across the country through advocacy, innovation, and information sharing to strengthen and expand public transportation.

Community Transportation Association of America
CTAA is a national, professional membership association of organizations and individuals committed to removing barriers to isolation and to improving mobility for all people. CTAA conducts research, provides technical assistance, offers educational programs, and serves as an advocate in order to make coordinated community transportation available, affordable, and accessible. Its National Transit Resource Center contains a vast resource library of current news and reports on accessible transportation issues.

Easter Seals Project ACTION
Project Accessible Community Transportation in Our Nation provides training, resources, and technical assistance to thousands of disability organizations, consumers with disabilities, and local transportation operators. This technical assistance program was created under the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act.

Society for Accessible Travel & Hospitality
SATH promotes awareness, respect, and accessibility for people with disabilities and mature travelers and employment for people with disabilitites in the tourism industry. SATH advises government officials, agencies, and tourist boards in the U.S. and abroad on travel-related policies.

Surface Transportation Policy Project
STPP promotes transportation policy and investments to help conserve energy, protect environmental and aesthetic quality, strengthen the economy, promote social equity, and make communities more livable. STPP emphasizes the needs of people, rather than vehicles, in assuring access to jobs, services, and recreational opportunities.
[mienvcouncil@igc.apc.org.

""Okay, so my question is, who in the h- -- stands for the public health? What do we have? A total abdication in this state?"" asked Manistee Circuit Judge James M. Batzer. Declaring also that he was ""amazed and flabbergasted"" that neither state government nor the energy industry ""stands for the public health,"" Judge James M. Batzer ruled in April that a lawsuit brought by Filer Townshi",6/1/1997 0:00:00 00 oil and gas industry or state regulators. These releases represent a significant public health problem that essentially has been ignored by state authorities.

Hydrogen sulfide is routinely brought to the surface from wells drilled into the mile-deep, energy-bearing Niagaran Salina formation. The formation runs in a diagonal strip across the northern Lower Peninsula. Hydrogen sulfide, a common byproduct of oil and gas development, is an explosive gas, similar in toxicity to cyanide, that attacks the nervous system. Recognizable in trace amounts by its distinctive rotten egg odor and often referred to as "sour gas," it can be lethal.

The so-called "safe" exposure limits for hydrogen sulfide are based on the theoretical amount a healthy, 160-pound male worker could tolerate. The H2S occupational limit is 10 parts per million (ppm) over a normal 8-hour work day. In the real world, people do not react uniformly to H2S. Among the most vulnerable are adults with chronic illnesses, and children. Even someone with a cold has a weakened immune system, and consequently a lower tolerance for H2S exposure.

Jim Bedford, the acting chief of the Division of Environmental Epidemiology at the Michigan Department of Community Health, recommends an exposure limit guideline for the general population of 0.1 ppm, although no standard is yet in place. In comparison, California has a recommended public exposure limit of 0.03 ppm, and Alberta recommends a limit of 0.02 ppm. Even at these levels, however, some people can experience headaches and other symptoms of H2S poisoning.

Serious Accidents

Long a source of concern due to its toxic properties, H2S is attracting even more attention since an accident last summer in Manistee Township caused 11 people to be rushed to the hospital. The accidentoccurred after a cloud of hydrogen sulfide, intentionally released by a work crew during a maintenance procedure, drifted from a gas well into nearby businesses.

The research by the Institute and the H2S Committee found that the Manistee Township accident was not an isolated event:

* Since 1994, at least 22 people, four of them children, have been seriously injured during four H2S releases in Manistee and Mason counties. All of these people required hospital treatment.

* Since 1980, at least 10 separate accidental releases of H2S are known and caused at least 262 people inManistee and Mason counties to evacuate their homes. Five of the accidents occurred since 1995.

* Since 1994, releases of H2S from pipelines and processing plants have killed at least 35 head of cattle in Mason County.

Given the documented health effects of H2S releases in Manistee and Mason counties, the installation of a pipeline from Oceana to Manistee that will carry at least 20,000 ppm H2S should give state officials reason to take a much harder look at what is occurring here. A major failure in this pipeline could cause a calamity.

Although the circumstances of each H2S release are different, a central fact is common to all: official indifference. An energy company was cited and penalized by state authorities in just one of the accidents.

The Comprehensive Plan

This comprehensive plan represents the work of local leaders, legal and technical experts, and citizens who in some cases have lived for years with the threat of H2S in their neighborhoods. It outlines the reasons77,"More than 6,000 Antrim Shale gas
wells, with their accompanying roads,
pipelines, and processing stations,
have been installed in the northern
Lower Peninsula. The Legislature is
expected to hold hearings this fall on
a bill to require careful planning for
fut",8/1/1998 0:00:00 contain H2S is fragmented, and thinly spread across four agencies of state government.

In some cases, state agencies have no oversight for health and safety. Some rural pipelines, for instance, are essentially unregulated by the Michigan Public Service Commission. Until June, the Department of Environmental Quality said it had no jurisdiction for health and safety when reviewing new drilling permit applications.

In other cases, key pieces of information have been denied to citizens and local leaders. Last January, for instance, some Filer Township citizens were forced to evacuate after H2S was released from a new well being drilled in a neighborhood. When citizens and local emergency response chiefs wanted to know the quantities of H2S that were released and the causes of the accident, they were told by a state inspector that such information is privileged. State law allows companies to maintain a 90-day confidentiality period for all data.

Recommendation

After careful consideration we make the following workable, useful, and cost effective recommendations for ending this public health problem:

* In order to establish an effective system for managing oil and gas operations, and to protect the health and safety of citizens, there has to be consistency and uniformity among the agencies. An interagency task force should immediately be formed to develop a coordinated oversight framework for oil and gas development. Health and safety standards must be uniform and consistent. The public should be invited to participate on the task force.

* The evaluation of health hazards to the general public should become an integral part of the siting, permitting and regulating functions served by DEQ with respect to the oil and gas industry in Michigan. To do so in a credible and responsible fashion, the assessment of health hazards should be based on the best of medical and engineering technology.

*The public exposure limit must be based on the Department of Community Health general ecommendation for hazardous emissions, which takes 1/100 of the occupational limit as acceptable for a public exposure limit. This would be 0.1 ppm for hydrogen sulfide and takes into account the very young, individuals of average and poor health, the elderly, and the infirm. If wells pipelines or processing facilities can not meet this standard, they should not be allowed. *The Michigan Public Service Commission should develop a binding agreement with the DEQ that also includes a role for the Air Quality Division in evaluating the siting of pipelines that contain H2S.",7/22/1997 0:00:00 m communities of Romulus and Wayne to slow the tide of floodwater in Ecorse Creek with limits on pavement and protections for wetlands.

Last September sewage flooded the basements of 500 homes along the creek in Dearborn Heights, which is part of two watersheds. Ecorse Creek is not in the Rouge River watershed and thus not subject to Judge Feikens’ authority. Ruth Canfield, the Mayor of Dearborn Heights, said without the authority of a federal judge, there is nothing she has been able to do to convince her upstream neighbors to help. “Every time it rains, I get down on my knees and pray the creek doesn’t flood,” she said.

But the success of the Rouge River project is gaining notice across the state and nation as nonpoint water quality problems escalate and voters demand cost-effective solutions and livable cit79,"Keith Bartholomew, staff attorney at 1000 Friends of Oregon and one of the nation's foremost authorities on alternative transportation and land use strategies, spent a busy day in northwest Michigan last October. As residents involved in the debate over Traverse City's costly proposed highway bypass soaked up every word, he described how Portland is strengthening the economy of its urban center and reining in suburban sprawl by purposely not building new highways.

Mr. Bartholomew's day included an hour-long interview on the popular Ron Jolly morning radio program, an afternoon technical session for nearly 40 land use professionals, and an evening lecture and slide show attend- ed by more than 170 people at Northwestern Michigan College. Organized by the Institute, Mr. Bartholomew's visit was funded by New Designs For Growth, and co-sponsored by the Leelanau Conservancy, the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy, and the Coalition for Sensible Growth.

Throughout the day, Mr. Bartholomew's message -- that new highways accelerate sprawl and damage both the economy and the environment -- was firmly based on his experiences in Portland.

Until the late 1980s the planning for new freeways in Oregon, just like in most other states, was a "top down" process. Engineers with the state Department of Transportation (DOT) identified where the corridor would run. The department chiefs lobbied the Governor, Legislature, and Congress for money. Meanwhile, the DOT gradually purchased the rights-of-way along the route. "By the time ordinary people were actually allowed to make comments, it pretty much was a done deal," said Mr. Bartholomew, a Chicago native who attended northwest Michigan's Interlochen Arts Academy in the late 1970s.

Mr. Bartholomew is the director of the Land Use, Transportation, and Air Quality project (LUTRAQ), an innovative program to improve the quality of life throughout the Portland metropolitan area. (See "Oregon Leads the Way" in the Summer 1997 Great Lakes Bulletin).

Mr. Bartholomew said his first task when 1000 Friends launched the project was to help defeat a $1 billion highway bypass west of Portland. He and his staff then worked with public officials to shape a new transportation plan that provided residents with more choices than just the car for how to get around.

The Portland region now has:

• Enlarged a highly-successful light-rail network.

• Enacted new zoning provisions that encourage homes to be built on smaller lots in pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods within walking distance of rail and bus stations.

• Invested in new parks, bus and light rail stations, recreation and arts centers, new sidewalks and recon structed streets that have turned downtown Portland into a magnet for entertainment, businesses, and jobs.

Throughout his day in Traverse City, Mr. Bartholomew emphasized that bringing modern transportation choices to a community requires activists to:

• Build alliances among non-traditional allies.

• Undertake complex research that leads to a coherent land use and transportation vision.

• Market the vision successfully to local governments.

• Establish advisory committees composed of local and state agency officials to guide the project, and provide political support.

• Ready legal action to stop bad ideas and give the workable alternatives a chance to take hold. During his speech at NMC, Mr. Bartholomew encouraged his audience to stay focused on their goal. "I joined 1000 Friends in 1988. In June 1997, our regional government made the final decision not to pursue the bypass. Probably the most valuable lesson I learned was that it takes 10 years to kill a freeway."

CONTACT: Keith Bartholomew, 1000 Friends of Oregon, 534 SW Third Ave., Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97204-2597. Tel. 503-497-1000, fax 503-223-0073, kab@friends.org.",9/1/1997 0:00:00 ageView URL -->http://www.wcdoe.org/rougeriver/>.

",8/1/2001 0:00:00 d regulations. These programs typically contain standards that are more restrictive than state and federal wetland laws.

Such programs require the strong support of citizens, so that adequate funding can be allocated and local officials have the community support needed to enforce the ordinance. Many communities across Michigan already have successfully implemented local wetland programs that enjoy broad public support.

Do I Have A Wetland On My Property?

Many property owners are confused about the technical definitions of wetlands. This is understandable given the variety of wetlands in Michigan and the fact that many wetland types look different than our traditional conception of a wetland (which is typically a cattail marsh). Below are a few questions that you can ask yourself about your land. A YES answer to any of the questions may indicate that you have a wetland on your property.

YES

Is the ground soggy underfoot in the spring?

Are there depressions where water pools on the ground surface during the spring?

Do you avoid the area with heavy equipment for fear of getting stuck?

Would you need to ditch the site to dry it out?

Is the site in a depression that has a different vegetation community than the higher ground around it?

Are there groundwater seeps or springs present?

Are fallen leaves black or very darkly stained and contain sediment deposits on their surfaces?

Dig a hole. Is the soil gray, or contain bright mottles (red or orange) against a gray background?

If farmed, is there crop stress due to excessive water?

Does the National Wetland Inventory map, U.S.G.S. topographical map, or locally produced wetland inventory map show a wetland on your property?

Does the NRCS Soil Survey for your county show the soil on your property to by hydric, poorly, or very poorly drained?

Reporting a Wetland Violation

The Department of Environmental Quality does not have enough staff members to monitor all of Michigan’s wetlands. In many instances, citizens play an important role in reporting violations.

If you suspect a violation, first find out as much as possible about the wetland activity before making a report. If you have reason to believe that there is a violation of wetlands law, contact the Department of Environmental Quality. Follow the phone call with a letter to make sure you have a written record of the report. If you wish, you can make your complaint anonymously. The contact for Benzie County is:

Matt Johnstone

Michigan Department of Environmental Quality

Land and Water Management Division

120 West Chapin Street

Cadillac, MI 49601

616-775-3960, ext. 6362

For Further Action

As part of the Benzie Wetland Protection Project, the Michigan Land Use Institute will sponsor public meetings, educational workshops, and field trips. Stay tuned to the local media for dates and times.

In addition, citizens can call on the Institute to find out more about wetlands, how to take initiatives to protect them, and how to handle suspected violations.

Michigan Land Use Institute

845 Michigan Avenue

P.O. Box 228

Benzonia, MI 49616

616-882-4723

email: mlui@traverse.com

The Benzie Coun152,"

A century and a half ago, park-making was a tape and toe affair. The great park makers of the mid and late-nineteenth century measured and paced and mapped green spaces to enhance city life. Thus was born Central Park, the masterwork of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, launching the movement l50 years ago.

Inspired by this luminous expanse of country park dotted with sparkling lakes, meadow vistas, natural outcroppings, and entwining parkways, a legion of progressives and park makers continued to further the growth of city park space. Fusing the green and the grid, they reinforced community and livability in the romantic l9th century park. And, as the 20th century approached, the playground movement brought recreation to these neighborhoods as well.

Sadly, such park visions languished. In the car-bred flight from the mid-20th century city, public parks took a shabby second place to the lawn and private yard.

Love of Green Spaces
Happily, America’s green sensibility has heightened in the 21st century as citizens celebrate the human joys that come with sharing the camaraderie of such elegant and spacious public parks. Central Park, which has undergone tens of millions of dollars in repair and renovation in recent years, sparkles with vitality to match any period in its long history. Every day, and above all on weekends when roads are closed to traffic, New Yorkers by the thousands spend endless hours running, walking, playing softball and soccer, and indulging in park and people watching in one of the great public spaces in the world.

Many of the Olmsted Brothers’ master parks and interconnected systems, deteriorating after World War II, have followed suit. From Louisville to Seattle, Chicago to Atlanta, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to Boston’s meandering “Emerald Necklace,” such urban oases have become magnets for park goers.

The welcome revival of America’s romance with parks parallels citizen concern to design our communities to be more deeply ecological, more efficient, and more livable — to paint the urban values of the Smart Growth movement a deeper shade of green. Local elected leaders, citizen activists, environmentalists, and enlightened business owners have not only done housekeeping on worn public spaces but shaped new ones to advance back-to-the-city and anti-sprawl approaches. From countless urban foot trails to mountain paths, along waterfront edges and former brownfields, walkable neighborhoods with green space have reinvigorated their economies and retained their populations.

A Window Into America's Spirit
In fact, the condition of America’s parks reflect in a real way the vigor of the larger society. As the park goes, urbanists have begun to realize, so go the cities. Cities may be landlocked or land poor, and their citizens downtrodden or departing. Budgets have shrunk and staffs with them. But mayors from coast to coast have begun to comprehend that urban landscapes are essential oases that maintain and enrich the lives of their citizens.

For all the economic problems of the day, Tupper Thomas, administrator at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, cites New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s refusal to extend his budget-cutting spree to New York parks as evidence of the trend in the midst of hard times. Detroit is building a waterfront park along miles of the Detroit River. Chicago’s renaissance as a well-tended city hinges on the care devoted to restoring its Lake Michigan shoreline, which now boasts clean water, sandy beaches, miles of playing fields, magnificent gardens, and a network of bike and walking trails.

In the nation’s capitol, too, the thesis is becoming clear, even circular: Fix parks, build community, cut crime. Build community and you keep cities strong — and stem sprawl.

Around The Nation, A Parks Revival
Washington Parks and People, a neighborhood advocacy group that covers the entire National Capital region from the Anacostia River to the Blue Ridge Mountains, 14 years ago transformed the menacing Meridian Hill’s Malcolm X Park in Northwest D.C. into a safe haven. The park, a node of crime and violence in the l960’s, became a symbol of safety in the ‘90s when the Friends of Meridian Hill, with its crime patrol and landscape stewards, allied with the National Park Service. Now Washington Parks and People is turning a ragged l927 mansion into a community center and transforming a trashed neighborhood park near a housing project into an asset.

Such farflung parkmaking now boast a new coalition, the City Parks Alliance, launched in New York City with a new director and affiliates around the country. Even as Central Park celebrants clicked wine glasses at Manhattan’s Gracie Mansion in June, they tallied the new organization at 88 members: From San Francisco’s Adopt-a-Watershed to the Bronx River Alliance; the Friends of the Park in Chicago’s massive system to the American Community Garden Association.

However essential such green spaces are to insuring that people choose to live in cities and care to stay there, maintaining them is no easy chore. Plans for a four-lane bridge and highway across a splendid river valley in Michigan’s Grand Traverse region threaten to significantly diminish the l.5 mile extension of a new township park wild enough to be home to bobcat, bear, and otters. In Washington, Frederick Law Olmsted’s splendid grounds for the national capitol have fallen under the bureaucratic hatchet for a pricey, mammoth visitor center and security check-in facility. And everywhere, hard times cut maintenance and staffing budgets.

Still, a more enthusiastic, if leaner, park movement has slowed the flight to the boomburbs. In this green anniversary year, a new ethos, a new generation of urban parkmakers are extending the almost lost legacy of city green spaces.

Jane Holtz Kay is architecture/planning critic of the Nation, a contributing editor for Landscape Architecture and author of Asphalt Nation and Lost Boston. Reach her at jholtzkay@aol.com

",10/29/2003 23:05:37 surprise when told of the risk to federal funding for the county’s transportation needs. “That might mean going against the Hartman-Hammond, but I don’t know yet.”

County Administrator Dennis Aloia agreed: “We have to concentrate our efforts on practical solutions and if Hartman-Hammond turns out not to be practical, we need to know that now.”

The Long and Bumpy Road
The road commission’s proposal began encountering serious resistance from federal and state agencies almost seven months ago. Since July 2003 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have objected to the road commission’s application to fill wetlands, degrade wildlife habitat, and bury the headwaters of a prized trout stream.

In October, the road commission withdrew its application, prompting the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, which is charged with issuing the wetland permit necessary for building the bridge, to instead issue a written rebuke. The state DEQ warned the commission that poor project design and possible glaring inaccuracies in its $1 million environmental study “undermined” the process of selecting the best plan with the least impacts.

In November, the road commission polished its road-and-bridge plan and resubmitted it to the state DEQ and EPA. Then in December the EPA again strongly rebuffed the road commission, which responded by withdrawing the project from further consideration. Officially, the county road agency is now seeking “guidance” from the EPA and the state. A 157,"

GRAND RAPIDS — Now that a high-tech life sciences corridor is booming on this city’s east side, its leaders are turning their attention back to the arts, which are already transforming a once seedy thoroughfare on the city’s south side into the new Avenue for the Arts.

This spring developers will begin a $7.5 million renovation project that will transform four vacant, decrepit buildings on gritty South Division Avenue into low-rent living and working spaces geared specifically to artists. The project, the Division-Oakes Arts Initiative, will intensify the ongoing rejuvenation of the city’s historic Heartside District by adding 23 affordable loft apartments and some 15,000 square feet of studio, gallery, and other retail business space.

The project, along with a similar initiative in Jackson, Mich., would fit squarely into Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm’s “Cool Cities” campaign, which hopes to someday offer new state policies and tax incentives to encourage such projects in depressed downtowns. But in a state whose Legislature has yet to recognize and assist such affordable housing opportunities, the Division-Oakes project is instead relying on other unrelated, innovative financing to house the creative class that is any cool city’s lifeblood.

The arts initiative’s manager went through what he calls a “highly challenging” process to assemble an exceptionally eclectic mix of existing state tax credits, local tax dollars, and philanthropic support to finance the project. But even that effort will leave a small, non-profit housing management company several million dollars in debt when the project is completed, which will make rents on the project somewhat higher than preferred.

If it succeeds, the Division-Oakes project could help earn the term “affordable housing” a better name in Michigan, which has lagged far behind other states in establishing a trust fund that would encourage similar projects in urban and rural areas. The project’s leaders seem confident that their effort will accelerate, in a very colorful way, the comeback of an area here that once seemed permanently stuck in hard times.

“The idea is to have artists of every kind,” said Chris Velasco, vice president of Artspace, the Minneapolis-based real estate development organization serving as a consultant for the project. “Painters, sculptors, actors, musicians, dancers, writers, poets, and people whose art defies description will all be part of this.”

Art: Good for Business
Mr. Velasco’s vision is well rooted in reality. Once infamous for its poverty, brothels, and drug deals, Heartside continues to emerge as Grand Rapids’ unofficial hub of arts and culture. The area is now home to the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts and the Van Andel Arena, which hosts megastars ranging from Bette Midler to Kid Rock. Nearby, the Civic Theatre celebrates the small stage and Kendall College of Art and Design cultivates aspiring young artists.

The Division-Oakes Arts Initiative would further rev up a creative engine that is an increasingly powerful sector of the local and national economy, Mr. Velasco said.

“We used to say these arts projects are good for the city because ‘Art is a good thing,’” he said. “But in 2001, the economic impact of the nonprofit arts in the United States was $134 billion. The total trade between the U.S. and China in that same year was $9 billion less.”

Communities from Seattle to Philadelphia have realized that public investments in projects like the Division-Oakes Arts Initiative — which will provide respectable and affordable housing options for a targeted population — can spur job creation and economic revitalization, according to Mr. Velasco. In Lowertown St. Paul, Minnesota, for instance, a similar project turned a nearly deserted neighborhood, with 50 inhabitants and a 90 percent vacancy rate, into a vibrant urban center with 5,000 residents and a 10 percent vacancy rate after just eight years.

Michigan’s Misconception
Michigan struggles to replicate such striking success partly because it lacks a funding strategy for increasing housing options for low-income earners. Evidence is growing that without such a strategy the state will continue missing significant opportunities to strengthen its communities and commerce.

The Michigan Land Use Leadership Council, established by Governor Granholm, a Democrat, with support from Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema and House Speaker Rick Johnson, both Republicans, directly addressed this problem in August 2003. The bipartisan leadership council’s final report recommended establishing a Michigan Housing and Community Development Trust Fund to expand housing options and encourage diverse, vibrant communities “where people want to live, work, invest and grow business, learn, shop, and recreate.”

Three months before the council released its final report, several state senators and representatives used the emerging recommendation to propose legislation to establish the special trust fund. But despite broad bipartisan support, the bills languish in committee. Meanwhile, more than 30 other states already have similar funds.

“I think people have misconceptions of who needs affordable housing,” said Carol Townsend, the urban community development agent at Michigan State University Extension in Kent County. “Generally, we are talking about working people who cannot find safe and decent housing. And we are talking about young professionals who cannot afford a house in the area where they work.”

A Necessary Ingredient
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines “affordable housing” as costing no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. Nearly 750,000 Michigan residents live in housing they cannot afford, according state housing experts. The proposed trust fund would encourage both nonprofit and for-profit developers to create more housing opportunities for low-income residents.

Ms. Townsend projects the proposed trust fund could annually support the development of more than 1,000 affordable housing units and expand residential opportunities for all citizens. In Grand Rapids, where inner city property values are rising, a fund would help factory workers, teachers, and even medical students and researchers attracted to the thriving life sciences corridor along Michigan Avenue.

“Inc. Magazine recently rated over 200 metropolitan areas as the best and the worst cities to live and work in,” Ms. Townsend said. “And Grand Rapids was rated one of the worst. This is due to a variety of reasons, like the loss of manufacturing jobs. But a prime reason why cities like Atlanta were rated among the best was due to the affordability of their housing.”

“Clearly we need a range of housing opportunities for all income levels if Grand Rapids and other communities in the state intend to prosper and progress,” she added.

Ms. Townsend and members of United Growth for Kent County, a nonprofit citizen coalition that promotes urban revitalization and rural preservation, plan to meet with state Representative Jerry Kooiman, a Republican from Grand Rapids, to discuss the trust fund proposal he is sponsoring.

Dennis Sturtevant, who led the assembly of the financial package that is launching Division Oakes, is the executive director of The Dwelling Place, Inc., the Grand Rapids-based agency that is managing the project. He emphasized that a state trust fund will do more than help people of limited means.

“This is part of an overall strategy to encourage the revitalization of our downtowns and small towns,” he said.

Success Stories
For every dollar governments invest in projects such as the Division-Oakes Initiative, eight come back into the community, according to Artspaces’ Chris Velasco. Philadelphia, for example, launched its Avenue of the Arts initiative in 1983 with an initial investment of $8 million. Today, the project has leveraged a total investment of approximately $650 million and created 4,000 full and part-time jobs; businesses there annually generate some $200 million in revenues. Seattle, Reno, and Minneapolis, have experienced similar results.

The economic benefits of public investment in affordable housing are hardly limited to the arts community. A May 2001 report from Public Sector Consultants, a Lansing-based research group, concluded that most housing trust funds leverage an additional five dollars of public and private money for every trust fund dollar expended. The report said that affordable housing initiatives save millions of taxpayer dollars by reducing emergency care needs, particularly for the homeless, and increase tax revenues for cities and states through increased wages, retail sales, and property values.

The report acknowledged that the sluggish economy makes funding new initiatives difficult but said that, “now is the time to lay the groundwork for an affordable housing plan in Michigan, in order to be prepared when the economy improves.”

To fund the Division-Oakes Arts Initiative, Mr. Sturtevant devised a complicated formula that leverages state and federal Historic Preservation Tax Credits, Michigan Brownfield Redevelopment Tax Credits, New Markets Tax Credits, and funds from private donors. Still, Dwelling Place will assume several million dollars in debt, which ultimately drives up the cost of residential and commercial space.

“These core city initiatives are highly challenging,” Mr. Sturtevant said. “The proposed trust fund, on its own, likely will not pay the total cost of a given project. But it might make the numbers work better.”

Construction on the Division-Oakes Arts Initiative begins this May and is already luring the creative class. Colorfully intense murals brushed on boarded up windows signal the transition from decay to revival. Local painter Reb Roberts’ Sanctuary Folk Art gallery is already open for business. And some 125 individuals have expressed interest in the 23 two-bedroom apartments Dwelling Place plans to lease.

“As we strive to make Grand Rapids one of Michigan’s cool cities, it is projects like the Arts Initiative that will help us make that happen,” said Mayor George Heartwell. “This project will provide a reason for artists, especially recent graduates, to decide to stay in Grand Rapids rather than move to Chicago or New York. The residential units for artists and others will add to the 24/7 atmosphere that we are promoting for downtown Grand Rapids.”

Andy Guy, who is chronicling the rise of Grand Rapids as a center of Smart Growth innovation in the Midwest, directs the Institute’s Grand Rapids field office. Reach him at aguy@mlui.org, or 616-308-6250.

",3/16/2004 14:12:35 Township took the first important step to address the sprawl problem. It elected Rob Manigold, a cherry farmer, as supervisor. Mr. Manigold then hired Gordon Hayward, a former dairy farmer, as planning director. With the help of dozens of residents, the two set to work on a program to manage growth and preserve the farm economy by protecting 9,700 acres of prime farmland.

The foundation of the plan was to provide growers with an economic incentive to continue farming by buying the development rights to their land. The "purchase of development rights" or PDR program would pay farmers the difference between the value of their land for agriculture, and the value for housing developments. In 1994, the township sponsored a remarkably effective public education campaign, complete with posters and brochures. It helped to convin159,"

One of the most sought-after entrees at fancy restaurants from San Francisco to New York City is a juicy, old-fashioned pork chop that, luckily, some pig-headed farmers in southwestern Michigan still produce. While the industry may consider them backward, these farmers are actually on the cutting edge of new markets for safe, succulent foods that offer a profitable way forward for Michigan communities struggling to keep farmers and farmland in business.

Over the past 10 years, Dave and Tena Warkentien, John and Beverly Stamp, Steve and Jan Petersen, Andy and Amy Pachay, and many of their farm neighbors in Cass, Van Buren, and several other adjacent counties resisted the industry rush to build and operate large animal confinement buildings, where most pork in Michigan and the nation is produced today. “I couldn’t work in one of those things, and I don’t think the hogs like it much in there either,” said Mr. Warkentien, his blue cap and earflaps framing his wind-chilled face.

Their stubbornness is paying off now that Niman Ranch Pork Company, the nation’s leading marketer of natural pork, has discovered their small-scale operations in this region, where it’s still common to see pigs rooting around outside and sows building deep straw nests to farrow their young. The company pays top dollar for pigs raised outdoors without the use of feed laced with animal byproducts, growth-promoting hormones, or antibiotics — routine ingredients in confinement systems. Such outdoor-raised pork has more fat in it than the confined variety, which makes the meat both juicy and very popular with high-powered chefs desperate to find it in a market where lean is king.

With hundreds of accounts at restaurants and stores in nearly 40 states, and sales growing at 35 percent per year, Niman Ranch Pork’s success is evidence of a widespread and fundamental shift in food markets. While still small in relation to food sales at Wal-Mart and other superstores, indicators suggest Niman Ranch Pork and other local and national sellers of natural foods are just beginning to tap a potentially huge and profitable market.

It is an opportunity that challenges Michigan’s small and mid-sized farmers to take stock of their resources and develop new strategies. Under the longtime influence of consolidating global food markets, financial and technical assistance to Michigan farms has been geared to helping them expand to factory size even as other, similar, ever-expanding farms elsewhere flooded the market, depressed prices, and eventually pushed many of them out of business anyway. In just five years, from 1997 to 2002, Michigan lost 700, or nearly a quarter, of its hog farmers. The change has hurt more than the hog farmers, according to Mr. Pachay.

“When more people were raising hogs around here, the stores and restaurants in Marcellus and other towns were busy,” he said. “Now everybody’s working in Indiana and buying their gas there.”

Stay Small and Stay In?
The idea of building local economic opportunity from a base of small and mid-size farmers selling natural and specialty farm products does not fit the “get big or get out” past. Yet it may well be the path to a future in which more families are able to make a living in farming, and more local businesses — from specialty food processors to restaurants and feed stores — benefit from family farm business growth.

As a result of their opportunity with Niman Ranch Pork, Amy and Andy Pachay are now investing in breeding stock and excited about continuing to raise their two young children on the farm. “It’s been a really tough market the last several years, and we were ready to quit.” Andy Pachay said. “We couldn’t justify keeping the farm if we couldn’t make a living with it. But now we’ve found a market that values the way we raise pigs.”

It was the Pachays who convinc167,"

Unlike many of his Republican colleagues in the Michigan State House of Representatives, Jerry Kooiman strongly believes that the state government should help finance the building and efficient operation of municipal and regional public transportation systems. Representative Kooiman can point to his own experiences to buttress his side of the debate: The professorial-looking Mr. Kooiman represents the state’s 75th House District, in Kent County, which is home to metropolitan Grand Rapids and to one of the best intra-urban bus systems in the state. That public transit system has, in the past few years, gained the kind of countywide voter support for operating millages that is the envy of every other transit-strapped municipality in Michigan.

The Wisconsin native first became active in Michigan politics as a staff assistant to U.S. Congressman Paul Henry in 1984. He served as Congressman Peter Hoekstra’s district director from 1992 to 2000; in 1994, he was elected to the Kent County Board of Commissioners. He won his current House seat in 2000, gained a coveted appointment to the powerful state House Appropriations Committee, and won a second two-year term in 2002.

Representative Kooiman wound up his career as a county commissioner in the same year that voters in metropolitan Grand Rapids, by a startling two-to-one margin, approved a regional transit millage and a new regional transit authority, the Interurban Transit Partnership. “The Rapid,” as the natives call it, connects Grand Rapids, East Grand Rapids, Grandville, Kentwood, Walker, and Wyoming and has significantly improved the service provided by the original, already-existing Grand Rapids bus system. Pleased voters responded by approving a millage increase last fall by an even wider margin, including in the Republican suburbs around Grand Rapids; now the ITP is studying whether it should add light rail, urban rail, or so-called “rapid busses” to its service. Whatever the decision, it’s clear that metro Grand Rapids is a state leader in public transportation services and that Representative Kooiman thinks this is good for his region’s citizens and economy.

He also thinks well run public transit would be good for other Michigan towns and the state’s economy. So, faced with a state Legislature that seems bent on slashing the public transportation budget — and with a governor that has supported some of those proposed cuts as one way to eliminate the state’s gaping deficit — Mr. Kooiman is forming a House Transit Caucus. He is fighting an uphill battle; many of his Republican colleagues oppose most transit funding. But by pointing to Grand Rapids’ model bus system, which is thriving in a heavily Republican area, Mr. Kooiman clearly hopes to change some minds. He readily admits that nothing much will happen until someone converts more state lawmakers to public transportation’s cause.

Charlene Crowell, the Institute’s Lansing policy specialist, interviewed Representative Kooiman in his Lansing office last month as he was finalizing plans for the House Transit Caucus.

INSTITUTE: Why did you organize a transit caucus?

REPRESENTATIVE KOOIMAN: It was my concern about the need to educate members of the Legislature on the importance of transportation — for the state and in their own communities. Obviously, we have different types of transit systems in different parts of the state. Some are more efficient and effective than others; some are better funded by local resources than others; and those two things are usually connected. I want to keep the focus on public transit as an alternative to vehicular traffic and as a necessity for some segments of our society.

INSTITUTE: How do you envision this caucus advancing transit issues and funding here in Michigan, particularly given the state’s financial stress?

KOOIMAN: We are up against a situation where we need to resolve our current budget difficulty. And my hope is, again, that we can first educate our members on the importance of transit as a partner with all the other things we do in that transportation budget. That education has to happen first and primarily.

The second part is developing a strategy to at least hold the line on public transportation funding so that we don’t lose the gains we’ve made over the last number of years. I’m not holding out much hope that we are going to see an increase this year in public transportation, simply because of the current budget situation.

One disappointment I’ve had is the governor’s budget not reflecting a need to seek additional funding for mass transit. For example, her first budget reduced money for the Comprehensive Transportation Fund, which finances public transit, by $10 million by diverting money that would have come from the use tax, which is the sales tax on vehicle sales and on auto parts sales, to the general fund. I’m trying to reverse that trend with legislation that would move a percentage of the use tax on automobile leases to the transit fund. We’ve had a huge shift: More auto drivers are leasing their vehicles today than they were ten years ago.

INSTITUTE: The Institute’s Top 10 list from the Michigan Land Use Leadership Council’s recommendations included funding public transportation at 10 percent of the state’s overall transportation fund. If the state economy improves, do you think that 10 percent goal is achievable in the next couple of years?

KOOIMAN: I’m not sure that it is. But I believe we have the potential, if we don’t continue to backslide, to increase funding for transit by attracting additional federal dollars. That’s the biggest issue. Michigan gets about 47 cents on a dollar back in the public transportation program from the gas tax money it sends to Washington, D.C. The reason is that, traditionally, Washington supported light rail as opposed to bus transit and Michigan is almost all bus transit. So if we could increase those federal dollars, and if we can divert some of the state moneys from the auto use tax, that would be another $30 million a year or so that could go into the state’s public transit fund. And if we can keep the dollars that are going into that fund now, I think there’s an opportunity to grow the public transit budget. But it isn’t something that will suddenly, dramatically increase.

INSTITUTE: Why are you attempting this change through a caucus?

KOOIMAN: We’re all very busy. Most of us become specialists in a few things. The whole idea is to get members to focus just for one hour on one issue that they’re not normally involved with. Caucuses are set up to educate legislators. Remember, we’re in an era of term limits. We have a lot of new legislators new to the Lansing scene. The caucuses zero in on particular issues on maybe a quarterly basis to keep us all up to speed on what’s happening in that area: If I’m interested, how can I be more involved as legislation goes through? Generally you do quarterly meetings and caucuses are bipartisan.

INSTITUTE: Will the caucus address passenger and light rail? There’s been so much talk about the future of Amtrak in Michigan.

KOOIMAN: Well, there’s already an Amtrak caucus for passenger rail. I don’t see us duplicating that; I’m a member of that caucus. I think this first year the transit caucus will educate people on the importance of transit: Who supports transit, who needs transit. Some legislators think that transit is just for poor or older people. But in Grand Rapids, there’s the Chamber of Commerce leading the way on transit, recognizing that it’s an economic development issue. It’s a pro-jobs, pro-growth issue.

The faith community in Grand Rapids is also leading the way, recognizing that it’s a justice issue, providing opportunity for all folks. Welfare-to-work programs have proved that transportation is one of the barriers to people moving into self-sufficiency. And it is a necessity for the elderly and the handicapped, providing the opportunity to go shopping or go to work or get their medications.

INSTITUTE: Sometimes I’ve heard transit framed as a class issue — the poor, the elderly, minorities, or all three. Has transit been embraced by a wider segment than that in Grand Rapids?

KOOIMAN: I tell my Republican colleagues that in my legislative district transit out-polls me. The recent increase in the transit millage in Grand Rapids passed by wide margins in every community, even in strong Republican and suburban communities, which don’t rely nearly as much on transit. In my district, it passed in every precinct by more than 57 percent. I was elected with 54 percent, so it out-polls me. I think that the public, at least in Grand Rapids, is becoming more aware and receptive and understanding of the need for public transit. It does more than just serve your own population.

INSTITUTE: Comparing Grand Rapids’ tremendous transit success stories with southeast Michigan’s tremendous transit horror stories, what made things work so well?

KOOIMAN: First, cooperation. We have six cities in the urban core of Kent County that came together and said, “We’re going to do this.” I was on the county board when we first tried to do a countywide transit millage. It didn’t gather the support because so many townships didn’t see a benefit for their citizens. Some of those townships are now contracting for service with the six cities.

Number two would be making it an effective system. And that would require number three — local dollars to be dedicated to transit. So you have a chicken-and-egg syndrome: You need money to make your system efficient, but you need to make the system efficient before people will give you more money.

In Grand Rapids, the six cities said, “We’re going to put faith in a revitalized system and we’re asking out citizens to attach dollars to that.” They had six promises and they fulfilled all six. Then they went back to the taxpayers and said they wanted an increase to expand further. And the voters, by larger margins, said yes. That means to me that they’re on the right track, that they delivered what they promised. And so we have a better system, a more efficient and effective system. And people are buying into it. But the very first thing that was needed was the cooperation. They did that.

INSTITUTE: So what is your advice to southeast Michigan – with its long-standing Hatfield-and-McCoy feud over transit? How can they get beyond that to the cooperation Grand Rapids has?

KOOIMAN: Obviously it’s a much different picture because it’s a much bigger system. The bigger you get, the more difficult it is to bring everybody to the table. But, really, you need the political leadership in each of those communities to come to the table willing to discuss ways to make their system better, willing to talk about “How do we cooperate for the common good?” I think they need a single system in southeast Michigan, not two — one system supported by all and maybe funded at different levels because there will be different levels of service. But it’s going to take cooperation from those communities’ leaders to pull together a system.

They’ve got to build a system that people can trust. I can’t wait because the bus is 30 minutes late. It’s got to deliver on its promises. But the first step is cooperation. The communities must come together at the table. I don’t think the state can impose it; it has to come from within. I thought we had some opportunities over the last two years for that to happen and, unfortunately, each time it’s fallen apart.

INSTITUTE: Is there a chance for a greater use of transit to lessen road rage?

KOOIMAN: I don’t believe Michigan will ever become dominated by transit. We’re too independent. And we don’t have the very costly infrastructure that could improve that. I opposed the governor’s elimination last year of the 34 road-widening or expansion projects. Roads and highways, I believe, are a fact of life. They are also economic development tools. Can we have better balance and make transit systems more effective? Yes. And I think you’re going to see some regional transit things happen.

I think in west Michigan there’s a potential for maybe not light rail, but express buses from one side of the county to the other, from one county to another. When you look at the triangle between Holland, Muskegon and Grand Rapids, there are perfect opportunities to look at regional transportation from a standpoint of community-to-community, not just within a community.

INSTITUTE: Will this caucus work with Michigan’s Congressional delegation to get more federal dollars to do a better job? Right now we send more gas tax dollars to Washington D.C. than we get back in transportation dollars, whether it’s roads or transit.

KOOIMAN: I won’t prejudge what the caucus will do. But I think we will have to work with our Congressional delegation on that “donor issue.” I went to Washington last year for the Michigan Transportation Team that met with our state’s delegation, key committee chairs, and subcommittee chairs. We argued, debated, and requested more road and transit money. I wanted to be there so that there would be a balance between asking for both. We need a fair return on the dollar for roads, but also for transit. If you bump that federal 47 cents on the dollar that we get back now to 55 or 60 cents, that means major new investment in transit in Michigan. I’d ask for 95 cents on every dollar; but even if we got 60 instead of 47 cents, we’d be doing much better.

INSTITUTE: Last year during the summit held by the Michigan Department of Transportation, there was much discussion of next steps; the different breakout groups have continued those discussions. Will those discussions ever intersect with the caucus?

KOOIMAN: First, the caucus has to decide its agenda. But there’s certainly potential for a caucus meeting where some outside groups present information and allow for dialogue.

INSTITUTE: If you got your wish, how would Michigan’s transit be different two years from now?

KOOIMAN: Maybe my goals are too low, but very honestly, my one-year outlook would be that we don’t have a reduction in funding for transit below where we are today. I think we’ll be doing well if we can hold that line. But if we look at how we fund transportation in Michigan, if we look at the auto use tax, at state House Speaker Rick Johnson’s idea of going to a sales tax for road funding in its entirety with a portion set aside for public transit funding, and at other possibilities like additional federal dollars — if we can add to it over the next two years, I would be very happy.

And if there was strong support in the Legislature overall for transit programs, that would be a success. Right now I don’t think we have that, and that goes back to some transit systems in Michigan not performing at peak efficiency. People look at those examples and think all transit systems are the same. And there are others who look at transit users as a very narrow set of people. They don’t look at the broader picture of economic development: Job creation, meeting the necessities of elderly and handicapped individuals.

Charlene Crowell is the Institute's Lansing-based policy specialist. Reach her at charlene@mlui.org.

",6/2/2004 11:18:24 168,"

Two years ago builder Rob Mossburg moved to Harbor Springs with one of his characteristically insightful ideas that generally startle people who first hear it, but nevertheless have defined his entire career. Mr. Mossburg proposed to build 18 homes set 15 feet apart on an acre of land in town and priced at around half a million dollars apiece. It wasn’t just the price that set people aflutter. It was the size of the buildings. Half would be 975 square feet; the other half 1,200 square feet. Why, folks wondered, would any right-thinking buyer, especially those in Harbor Springs who could afford to build big and fabulous lakefront homes, even consider something so small in a downtown neighborhood?

But small, it turns out, is indeed beautiful, especially when it comes in the environmentally sensitive and architecturally distinguished package that Mr. Mossburg and his industrious family of builders and designers put together at the corner of Bay and Zoll Streets at the eastern edge of Harbor’s Spring’s tony downtown. Mr. Mossburg’s Bay Street Cottages project is an enclave of compact fairytale homes carefully set around a common lawn and walkway, like fine furniture in an airy living room. Though there are just two interior floor plans for the two-story cottages, the exterior gabled roof lines, windows, mahogany Dutch-style doors, porches, and siding are all different, giving the development the warmth and charm of a 19th century hamlet. And because of the family’s commitment to conserving the land and natural resources of their newly adopted hometown, a portion of the profits from each cottage sale are donated to protect open space around Harbor Springs.

“It’s a way for us to give something back to a place that we love,” said Mr. Mossburg, who was raised in Monroe, the oldest son of a builder.

Buyers, most of them wealthy couples making investments in second or third homes, have been snapping up the cottage concept since Mr. Mossburg opened the first one on Bay Street last summer. Eleven of the eighteen have been built, and eight sold. “People were a little nervous when Rob first brought the idea to the planning commission,” said Fred Geuder, Harbor Springs’ city manager. “But the comments I hear now are largely positive. You don’t hear negative. It looks good. It’s quality work and an asset to downtown. What’s gone up there has surprised a lot of people.”

Prosperity In The Right Package
It really shouldn’t. Essentially what the 42-year-old Mr. Mossburg did was take the luxury condominiums and undistinguished apartment-style building the city’s zoning code would have allowed on the 1.25-acre lot and break it up into freestanding homes that have more character and are likely to be more valuable. It took Mr. Mossburg six months to convince the city to change its zoning code in a way that would encourage such innovations. He argued that giving builders more flexibility to construct small houses clustered together would be great for homeowners, good for downtown businesses they could walk to, and would generate substantial revenue for city coffers. When Bay Street Cottages is completed it will be valued at roughly $9 million and generate more than $150,000 a year in city, county, and school property taxes, almost 15 times more than the declining motel that used to occupy the site.

It also helps that the cottages are exquisitely detailed inside and out. Both the larger three-bedroom version ($575,000) and the smaller two-bedroom model ($455,000) feature two baths with subway-style white tile walls and custom tile floors. The kitchens have granite counters, distressed French country cabinets, and top-of-the-line appliances. Both models also boast hardwood floors, solid wood doors, waist-high beadboard walls, magnificent moldings and other woodwork, period-style windows, and cathedral ceilings in the living area. The mood of the light-filled homes is calm and feminine, as though the lady of the house has been busy all morning putting out cut flowers and rolling dough for fresh-baked apple pies.

“In general, and especially in summer cottages, I love a soft, feminine feel,” said Volitta Mossburg, Rob’s wife, who everyone knows as Vee and the decorator who designed the interiors. “I believe a summer home should be a retreat from the world, a nurturing place to relax and rejuvenate. An Up North cottage should be an escape from all that is mundane.”

Design, Design, Design
Along with their approachable size, another innovation is how the Bay Street cottages effortlessly enclose the outdoor space, like children holding hands in a circle. The concept is inspired by a decade-old national movement of architects and builders known as the New Urbanism, which counts the Mossburgs among its growing flock in northern Michigan. New Urbanism is reviving the building design and land planning principles of what used to be called plain old “urbanism,” and which in the late 19th century produced the distinctive village centers and walkable neighborhoods of Harbor Springs and dozens of other great small towns of Northern Michigan.

But after World War Two old urbanism succumbed to suburbanism and then to the ugly sprawl that is engulfing the region. Now a handful of northern Michigan builders, like the Mossburgs, are pushing back. New Urbanist neighborhoods and developments have been built in Traverse City and Manistee. More are under construction in Empire in Leelanau County, at the site of the old state hospital on Traverse City’s west side, at Crystal Mountain Resort in Benzie County, and in other communities.

“I’m a builder. I keep my ears open and I kind of got it as soon as I heard it,” Mr. Mossburg said in an interview. “I looked for opportunities to make New Urbanism work.”

Vee, a trim and attractive dark-haired woman who joined her husband during the interview, cast a knowing glance his way and explained that “looking for opportunities” is Mr. Mossburg’s code for making things happen. She was raised in Ohio and met her husband in Atlanta 20 years ago, where he’d briefly alighted early in a hotel development and management career that also took him, and them, to Los Angeles and Wichita. He made his fortune by helping to refine the concept of the extended-stay hotel. He joined a development and investment group that built and sold two of the best-known hotel chains in the country – Residence Inns and Summerfield Suites.

Throughout their journey Vee and Rob held fast to his boyhood dream of living in northern Michigan, where he’d spent summer vacations. One day, after the sale of Summerfield Suites, the Mossburgs looked at each other and she suddenly knew the family’s next move, to Harbor Springs, was imminent.

“When Rob gets something in his mind it’s only a matter of time before it happens,” explains Mrs. Mossburg. “He’s like a snowball rolling downhill. Once it gets started it just gets bigger and bigger.”

Family Values Include Innovation, Hard Work
Big enough in fact to include most of his significant others. The senior staff of the Cottage Company includes Mr. Mossburg’s wife, parents, sister, and brother-in-law, all of whom he convinced to join him in Harbor Springs. Jill Nuding, who is Rob’s sister and left her own successful hotel career in Atlanta to oversee customer services for the Cottage Company, describes the experience of living and working with her family in Harbor Springs, as “almost like a dream come true.” And why not? The scenery is gorgeous. The market for luxurious homes is strong. And the Mossburgs seem like warm, sincere, earnest people who actually like each other.

Rob especially seems nothing at all like a business barricuda, though his career is testament to an instinct for understanding markets and a fearlessness in pursuing them. In fact Mr. Mossburg, who has a square face, strong shoulders, thinning blonde hair, and an open and friendly demeanor, seems more like the easygoing golf pro at an upscale country club. Only his startling eyes, which are robin's-egg blue and as striking as a raptor’s, reveal what is so obviously a proven talent and fierce ambition.

Indeed, Bay Street Cottages is just the latest manifestation of an unfolding vision that, midway through a productive life, Mr. Mossburg is developing for himself and his family. The giveaway that more is afoot than making a profit is how he and his wife are linking an ethic of conservation and environmental integrity to the Cottage Company’s projects.

For instance, some of the Bay Street Cottages were built with flooring and other construction materials that Mr. Mossburg salvaged during demolition of the motel that stood on the property. He installed an underground filtering system to cleanse runoff from the development before it reaches Little Traverse Bay, about a block away. A selling point for the cottages is their energy efficiency, and the hardwood floors are milled in Pennsylvania from timbers salvaged from old barns and buildings.

Land Conservation Included
But the most important conservation measure, by far, is the agreement that the Mossburgs reached with a local farm family and the Little Traverse Bay Conservancy to buy the development rights and permanently protect 35 acres of open space in a greenbelt that the conservancy is establishing to prevent sprawl from enveloping Harbor Springs. The amount of protected acreage represents how much land would have succumbed to development if 18 homes had been built on conventional large lots. The Mossburgs won’t say how much they are donating from the sale of each cottage to finance the purchase of the conservation easement out of respect for the privacy of the landowners.

“I’ve never worked with any people who are so positive,” said Mary Kay O’Donnell, director of land protection for the Little Traverse Bay Conservancy. “You know, sometimes you meet people like that and you wonder, is it for real? It’s real with Rob and Vee and their entire family. They always have smiles on their faces. They go into a project and they ask how can we make this work? How can we make it better? They have a real concern about the community they’ve chosen to live in, and they are making it better.”

Keith Schneider, a journalist and editor, is deputy director of the Michigan Land Use Institute. A version of this article was published in the May 2004 edition of Traverse: Northern Michigan’s Magazine.

",6/11/2004 16:25:49 169,"

GRAND RAPIDS — Making a crucial connection between creating new jobs and protecting the planet’s water supply, a partner in an environmental engineering firm has applied for a grant from Michigan’s top economic development agency to transform the vacant and vandalized Monroe Avenue Filtration Plant here into a cutting-edge water technology research laboratory.

The large research facility, to be known as the Global Enterprise for Water Technology, would house the development of better ways to treat, distribute, conserve, and reuse water. In an interview, Tom Newhof, president of Prein and Newhof, told the Great Lakes Bulletin News Service that the Enterprise would help meet what he says is a rapidly rising demand for new technologies and management expertise that guarantee citizens and businesses affordable, sustainable, safe supplies of the increasingly scarce natural resource worldwide.

“The historic treatment plant has the potential to attract researchers, scholars, and entrepreneurs from all over the world,” said Mr. Newhof, who is president of the Enterprise. “We’ve had numerous contacts with companies expressing interest in coming to the facility. One is U.S. Filter, a giant in the water treatment technology industry. Another is Osmonics, a leading filter manufacturer recently acquired by General Electric. The challenge is finding the financial resources to get the project started.”

Avoiding a Water War
The proposal comes as Michigan struggles to balance the need to compete in the global economy with the need to protect the lakes, streams, and aquifers that define and nourish the region’s economy and culture.

Great Lakes communities historically have prospered by extracting and exporting natural resources such as fur, timber, copper, oil, and natural gas. That tradition is one reason why Michigan officials permitted Nestle Waters, the world’s largest purveyor of bottled water, to extract and sell spring water from the Muskegon River watershed despite an intense public outcry against the proposal. The extraction fit a familiar economic development formula that officials have used for centuries to create jobs and build economies.

But today’s marketplace uses information, rather than copper or timber, as the defining raw material. And a region’s competitive advantage is now determined by its ability to attract talented workers, generate innovative ideas, and turn them into goods or services. Mr. Newhof essentially said his proposal offers Great Lakes Basin lawmakers, economic development officials, and entrepreneurs an opportunity to protect the world’s dwindling water supplies and solve its growing water pollution problems by developing and exporting water protection technologies rather than selling off Great Lakes water — something the region’s citizens and lawmakers have feared for a century.

“The Enterprise can be an exceptional educational facility,” Mr. Newhof said. “There’s room for serious scientific research, classrooms and industry training, and conference rooms and technology demonstrations. Anything that’s generated here in the way of knowledge certainly could be transmitted to the academic community, the technical community, and the broader global community.”

Reviving an Innovative History
The Monroe Avenue Water Filtration Plant once set the standard for how modern society provided safe water for citizens and businesses. The red brick fortress of pumps and pioneering filters began operating in 1912 and quickly eradicated the epidemic of typhoid fever that plagued this city. Its new technology spread to other cities as well, helping them defeat the dangerous disease.

Then, in 1945, the plant became the first in the nation to treat the public water supply with fluoride to combat tooth decay. In 1999 the American Society of Civil Engineers voted the plant, which was decommissioned in 1992, one of Michigan’s top ten 20th -century engineering achievements

Mr. Newhof’s plan for the building would mark a revival of its highly innovative history. But instead of attacking typhoid or tooth decay, the newly restored and drastically updated Enterprise would address freshwater pollution and scarcity problems in communities around the world.

A ready market for such expertise already exists, according to the World Commission on Water for the 21st Century, an international association of Nobel laureates, policymakers, and scientists. The Commission found that 1.4 billion people on the planet now live without clean drinking water and that seven million people die each year from water-related diseases. What’s more, the problem is accelerating: Water waste and misuse are depleting more than half of the world’s lakes and rivers, according to a brochure promoting the Enterprise.

Encouraging A Fundamental Shift
The vast Great Lakes ecosystem itself faces similar challenges. But the traditional attitude toward managing freshwater resources is evolving.

This changing notion is apparent in highly industrialized Great Lakes cities like Gary, Ind., where local governments now work to clean up a dingy steel-strewn shoreline, raise the standard of living, and compete for new businesses, workers, and families. And the new philosophy is evident in the boardrooms of venerable institutions like Ford Motor Company, where leaders now embrace voluntary water stewardship measures as a way to reduce operating costs, increase profits, and imbue its corporate culture with more mainstream, eco-friendly values.

“A fundamental shift is taking place right now in how we view the value and role of water in our economy and society,” said Rich Bowman, executive director for the Michigan Council of Trout Unlimited and a candidate to become the new director of the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

“The last big evolution in thinking about natural resources occurred in the 1970’s with the passage of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which were all about stopping pollution,” Mr. Bowman said. “But that view didn’t really look at the environment as a dynamic system where everything — the land, air, water, fish, etc. — interacts. The next logical step is to have a much broader understanding of environmental dynamics and realize that there are lots of things we can do — like withdraw water — but we have to do those activities in a way that fits into the environmental system and doesn’t degrade its functionality.”

“Our public agencies and officials are really struggling with that concept right now,” he added.

The Michigan Legislature, for instance, recently resisted attempts to finance water pollution monitoring, regulation, and prevention efforts by charging fees for the permits the state issues to facilities that discharge toxic waste into lakes, streams, and sewers. The reason? Legislators claimed that new fees could reduce the state’s ability to attract and retain business.

The Best of the Best
The Enterprise would upend such logic by incubating what could be a large number of highly profitable, employment-intensive businesses focused on protecting, rather than harmfully exploiting, freshwater supplies. The project, which has sought public and private financing since 2000, requested approximately $3.5 million from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, according to Paul Krepps, managing director of communications for the agency.

The proposal is one of 131 separate projects now competing for $24 million in the state’s Technology Tri-Corridor initiative, an economic development strategy designed to foster the life sciences, automotive technology, and homeland security industries.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science will peer-review the proposals and make recommendations to the Technology Tri-Corridor Steering Committee, which is made up of academics, public officials, and business representatives. That committee is expected to make final decisions this summer.

“This is really a situation where the best of the best receive funding,” Mr. Krepps said.

Andy Guy, a journalist, directs the Michigan Land Use Institute’s Great Lakes Water Security Project and manages the Institute’s office in Grand Rapids. Reach him at aguy@mlui.org.

",4/1/2004 13:25:32 170,"

As the effects of global climate change increase throughout Michigan, particularly in the northern Lower Peninsula’s snow sports industry, the Bush administration and Congressional leaders from both major parties continue to r171,"

Joined by farm interests and business leaders, the Michigan Land Use Institute has introduced Select a Taste of Traverse Bay, a five-county print and on-line guide that links people who want local high-quality meats, milk, fruits, and vegetables with growers in the greater Grand Traverse Bay region who produce and sell them.

The guide includes more than 140 farms in Benzie, Leelanau, Grand Traverse, Antrim, and Kalkaska counties that rep",6/21/2004 9:14:42 s decade. “When I first came here in 1985 we had more natural snow earlier in the season,” said Jim MacInnes, the general manager and chief executive officer of Crystal Mountain, which attracts thousands of skiers each year to its slopes in Benzie County. “It got cold earlier in the season. Normally we’d be open in the first week of December. Now it’s usually a week or two later.”

The effects of climate change go well beyond fewer skiing days. Snowmobile retailers say that sales in Michigan have fallen, a fact confirmed by the International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association, which reports that 14,353 new sleds were sold in Michigan this year, down by almost 50 percent from 27,000 in 1995. Owners of motels, restaurants, and other services in northern Michigan resort towns confirmed in interviews that their snow sports business is declining. In some cities the change is dramatic: The number of winter visitors to Cadillac, for instance, fell to 23,000 this year from more than 50,000 in the 1980s, according to the Cadillac Area Chamber of Commerce.

Local Effects of a Worldwide Problem
Global warming, according to a well-established international scientific consensus, results from increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that are absorbing more of the sun’s warmth and radiating it back to the earth’s surface. Because the effect is analogous to how glass prevents heat from leaving a greenhouse, those pollutants are frequently called “greenhouse gases.”

A report last year by the Union of Concerned Scientists predicted that by the end of this century, winter temperatures in Michigan would rise six to 10 degrees and summer temperatures would climb seven to 13 degrees. Michigan summers would be drier, winters would be wetter, agriculture might benefit from longer growing seasons, and snow sport industries would be “hard-hit,” said the report.

Scientists say that increased fossil fuel use by industry, transportation, and electric generation plants is slowly raising greenhouse gas concentrations around the world. According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2000 the United States generated ten times more electricity than it did in 1950 and most of the increase came from burning more coal — a very high emitter of greenhouse gasses.

Business executives and scientists agree that the effects of global warming are now unmistakable in northern Michigan. Records kept by county road commissions and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirm that average snowfalls are steadily diminishing. Last year, the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, a unit of NOAA that monitors ice conditions in Grand Traverse Bay, said that for “the first time in at least 150 years…the bay had five consecutive winters without freeze-up.” NOAA added that higher winter temperatures and less snow are also contributing to lower Great Lakes water levels.

Few Business Leaders Push for Action
In interviews, northern Michigan executives said that global warming was making it harder to do business during the winter and urged the federal government to take action. “Global warming is a real problem and we think there needs to be movement on it,” said Mr. MacInnes. His resort, Benzie County’s largest private employer, counts on win179,"

Bob Hoffman is 56, an engaging, stout native of Detroit who moved to Charlevoix, Michigan in 1987 to open an accounting office. He also is a dedicated Republican, which lands him dead center in the majority of voters in this picturesque rural county of 26,000 people along the northern coast of Lake Michigan. Mr. Hoffman, in short, does not fit the conventional image of an ardent grassroots agitator bent on defending small-town values and world-class natural resources from the depredations of global corporations.

But last week, just six months after Mr. Hoffman and a resolute group of residents launched a citizen movement to prevent Wal-Mart from damaging their area’s economy and neighborly way of life, that company — the world’s largest — threw in the towel in Charlevoix Township. In an almost blithe three-sentence email, Wal-Mart said it was abandoning its nearly year-old plan to build a 155,800-square-foot supercenter on a wooded 24-acre parcel just beyond the city limits.

Naturally, the news elated Mr. Hoffman and the other leaders of This Is Our Town, the non-profit group they formed to stop the supercenter. Wal-Mart’s abdication, though, drew cheers from far beyond Charlevoix County. Like so many other grassroots struggles to defend community values and advance Smart Growth in northwest Michigan and throughout the nation, victory was attained because untraditional allies found common political ground in the hard work of halting sprawl.

Different Views, Identical Goals
Indeed, the national movement to invent new patterns of development that strengthen rather then spread out communities, protect rather than exploit natural resources, and build rather than drain cities is one of the rare arenas in national political life where people of differing views are eagerly working together.

Examples are legion. Proposals for a new light-rail line in Seattle attracted broad support from all sectors of the community and helped to elect a new mayor. Republican governors in Massachusetts, South Carolina, Utah, and California have sought and gained help from Democrats to improve state programs for housing, schools, transportation, and the environment. House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois just formed a "Saving America's Cities" task force, taking a cue from Chicago, which remade itself as one of America’s choicest places to live and work because blacks and whites, suburban and urban residents, liberals and conservatives agreed to invest in public transit, public schools, parks, housing, and new businesses.

The same untraditional alliances are forming in Charlevoix County and throughout the thinly populated, 10-county region of farms and forests at the top of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. A confluence of demographic, cultural, and environmental trends have turned these counties — the fastest growing in the Middle West — into a crucible of grassroots activism with one objective: Managing growth to build a cleaner and greener economy. Defying conventional right-left, business-environmental, wealthy-working class divisions, dozens of campaigns in recent years have succeeded precisely because the participants have been so diverse.

A String of Victories
Few rural regions of the nation have made so much progress. Along with the victory over Wal-Mart, in recent weeks northwest Michigan citizens halted a $700 million coal-fired electric generating plant in Manistee County and are now developing a regional energy strategy based on promoting renewable sources of power.

The Traverse City Convention and Visitors Bureau, which represents the region’s tourist-based businesses, hired Wi185,"

Responding to Michigan’s growing need for affordable housing, the faith-based organization Habitat for Humanity International announced that next June it will coordinate the construction of approximately 220 quality houses in the state that are modestly priced. Reflecting the ubiquity of the state’s affordable housing shortage, the intense weeklong marathon of home building occurs simultaneously in 61 of Michigan’s 83 counties and will be powered by hammer-swinging volunteers, housing activists, and future residents of the new structures.

Habitat for Humanity said the project will begin on June 19, 2005 and focus very heavily on two of the state’s most troubled cities, Benton Harbor and Detroit. In a taped message former President Jimmy Carter, the leader of Habitat’s signature program, explained why the two cities are receiving special attention.

“The cities of Benton Harbor and Detroit face many challenges,” Mr. Carter said. “Both communities suffer from social and economic tension and decaying neighborhoods. Both have areas people would rather drive around than drive through. There are good people in Benton Harbor and Detroit who have lost hope and need our help.”

Poverty and unemployment rates in both cities are extremely high; last summer Benton Harbor was the scene of rioting that reflected deep racial tensions between city residents and local police. But experts say that Michigan’s affordable housing shortage extends far beyond the two cities and their particularly desperate demographics, and note that the state’s continued inaction on the problem slows urban revitalization efforts and, by extension, also worsens the state’s severe sprawl problem.

Widespread Problem, Little State Response
One study, by the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, estimates that 18 percent of the state’s 3.8 million households are “housing needy,” which means they live in dwellings that are overcrowded, severely deteriorated, or too expensive for them. A recent study by the National Association of Counties and the National Housing Conference found that many workers living in metropolitan Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Saginaw, and Lansing don’t earn enough to own homes in the communities where they work. This is true, the report said, even though these workers serve as elementary school teachers, police officers, practical nurses, or in other professional positions. And a federal study places Michigan near last place in two key measures of state spending for affordable housing.

Despite such findings and last year’s recommendation by the bi-partisan Michigan Land Use Leadership Council that the state strongly support affordable housing to revitalize the state’s many troubled cities, the Republican-led state Legislature is stalled on the issue. Republican State Representative Jerry Kooiman, cosponsor of legislation to establish the Michigan Housing and Community Development Fund, said this spring that he hoped to see action on his bill before the summer recess. He and Republican State Senator Tony Stamas introduced twin bills in their respective chambers in May of 2003.

Their proposals would establish a $25 million fund to help people with limited incomes buy or rent quality housing. Although they have attracted strong support from fellow Republicans such as State Senator Patty Birkholz of Saugatuck and State Representatives Joanne Voorhees and Barb Vander Veen of, respectively, Wyoming and Allendale, the relevant House and Senate committees have yet to schedule hearings on the bills.

With affordable housing legislative proposals languishing in Lansing, Habitat for Humanity will make only a small dent in Michigan’s formidable affordable housing problem. Mr. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, w187,"

TRAVERSE CITY — Little more than a month after authorities indefinitely suspended a long and hotly disputed proposal to build a new Boardman River valley crossing south of here, the project’s leading supporters and opponents have laid down their differences to work together on a comprehensive land use and transportation study to better respond to this region’s accelerating growth.

A meeting last week at the Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce convened members of the business community, local government, and environmental organizations who have been at odds since 1987 over a plan by the Grand Traverse County Road Commission to build a new bridge and highway across one of the wildest and most scenic metropolitan river valleys in the United States.

The participants are forming a novel alliance to look beyond the highway and bridge dispute and develop what could be an unconventional solution to traffic congestion in this region, the fastest growing in the Midwest. The process, which reflects a new level of official diligence to limit the consequences of sprawl here, will start with a regional land use and transportation study. The participants believe such a study will more clearly define demographic, economic, and environmental trends. It also will provide clearer guidance for how best to conserve natural resources and small town culture while also embracing the nearly 500 new residents who arrive in the five-county region every month.

Sage Eastman, the spokesman for Republican Congressman Dave Camp, who represents Traverse City, said his office is actively seeking $3.3 million in federal funds to pay for conducting the Grand Traverse regional study. The money was originally appropriated for an earlier, now discarded plan for a highway bypass around the city. Some local groups also are asking Representative Camp to redirect an additional $3 million he secured for the bridge project toward the study and eventual implementation of its recommendations.

Open Minds, They Say
“I’m going into this with no preconceived idea of what the land use and transportation study is going to come up with,” said Jay Hooper, chairman of the Grand Traverse County Road Commission, which proposed the $55 million highway and bridge across the Boardman River valley. “Frankly, most of the groups, especially the environmental groups, were insistent on this process, and I agree with them. I think we need to do a better job of getting the citizen input so that we can come up with a plan that’s more readily accepted by the entire community.”

Ken Smith, a leader of the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council, a prominent citizens groups that strongly opposed the bridge, concurred. In an interview with the Great Lakes Bulletin News Service Mr. Smith said: “Many people have learned some important lessons about citizen participation along the way. Those who thought they could get by with just going through the motions now see they can't. Those who thought the Hartman-Hammond bridge was a done deal have seen the power of sustained citizen involvement. I think we are seeing an appreciation of citizen power among the more thoughtful leaders in our region.”

The new alliance and the proposed study have the potential to be capstone events in this region’s ever more urgent search to reduce the costs of sprawl and runaway growth. As its name implies, the Grand Traverse region of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula is a wondrous but increasingly well-traveled part of the state. Residents and public officials have sparred for a generation over how best to protect its bounty of gorgeous vistas and clean, clear lakes while facilitating the modern mobility people depend on.

The struggle, just as it’s been in other beautiful rural regions of the nation, has been intense. Citizen movements not only stopped progress on the Boardman River bridge, they also halted an earlier bypass proposal in order to protect the region’s wild places, even as the number of people in the five-county region more than doubled over the past 34 years to 165,000. In that same period, the number of registered vehicles tripled, to nearly 153,000.

As Doug Luciani, president of the Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce, put it: “The chamber's goal for the study is two-fold. First, that a vision for the region be identified in terms of growth and development, incorporating the previous and existing efforts of other organizations. And, equally important, that a definitive land use and transportation plan be developed for Grand Traverse County that addresses the area's transportation needs, has unprecedented public input, and that stems from a collaborative process.”

Great Expectations
In interviews, members of the emerging regional alliance said they are approaching their work with a common set of core values and principles:

The desire to engage the broad public early, deeply, and continuously as the only true means of ending historic impasses on development and stewardship issues.
The hope that effective and popular transportation solutions can emerge after a comprehensive vision is established for where and how the region should grow and where rural character and environmental features should be preserved forever.
The conclusion, in a home-rule state, that managing growth and natural resources, strengthening economic competitiveness, and enhancing social equity will likely require regional, intergovernmental cooperation and new public-private partnerships.

Ironically, the alliance’s inaugural gathering last week was private so that participants could broach their doubts and establish the roots of genuine trust.

The process, said participants, will be as inclusive as possible. That may require spurring public involvement in multiple, even nontraditional ways, certainly including night meetings but also perhaps involving workshops in schools, sessions at senior centers, and maybe even a cookout for the community at large. And leaders must reach out and listen to people who can easily get overlooked or left out — including the area’s on-the-run parents and workers, seniors, young people, people with disabilities, and low-income residents.

“When I called for the formation of the transportation study committee, it was very important to me to make sure that as many interested parties as possible were represented,” said Pete Strom, chairman of the Grand Traverse County Board of Commissioners. “This will allow for a broad-based vision of transportation goals and how to implement them.”

Surprising U-Turn
Board Chairman Strom plays a central role in the new planning drama that is unfolding here. Last summer the Grand Traverse County Board and, in turn, its appointed road commission surprised the public when they decided on August 4 to suspend the proposed Hartman-Hammond road and bridge project through the Boardman River Valley. The pitched battle over the bridge began in 1987 when voters overwhelmingly rejected county plans to buy land for the river crossing as part of a broader road expansion proposal. In 2001, in the face of fierce public opposition, the state canceled most of the bypass.

Environmental groups, including the Michigan Land Use Institute, sued in 2002 to stop the Boardman River bridge, contending it would make congestion worse and ruin a magnificent nature reserve at the center of the Traverse City metropolitan region. Former Michigan First Lady Helen Milliken, a member of the Institute’s board of directors, served as the campaign’s lead spokesperson.

In 2003, state and federal environmental agencies sided with the citizen critique, objecting to the highway and bridge because of the damage it would cause to habitat and wildlife. Earlier this year the Michigan Departme195,"

TRAVERSE CITY — When surgery forced resort cook Jeanette Albert to stop working this past July, she found herself in a position she never imagined. With only her husband Gary’s income, the couple, who live about 20 miles west of here, near Rapid City, couldn’t afford the healthy, low-fat, low-sugar foods they need because of her diabetes and his gastric bypass surgery.

So Mrs. Albert reluctantly went to a food pantry “for the first time in my life” and found not only the canned foods typical of charity food drives but also the freshest whole foods imaginable — fruits and vegetables harvested that day by farmers right in her own back yard.

“Green beans, yellow beans, Bibb lettuce, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, peaches, pears, apples,” she recounted. “They even had corn on the cob once in a while!”

The Alberts could eat such high quality, fresh food because another local couple, Bronwyn Jones and Joe VanderMuelen, who live about 20 miles east of here, near Empire, brainstormed a way to feed the hungry while also supporting small family farmers facing their own economic woes. Their project, which they call the Fresh Food Partnership, is one of a small but growing number of efforts nationwide that are tackling two issues: The chronic hunger and nutrition challenges of people who can’t buy quality food, and the need of many family farmers for strong, stable markets in the face of low prices in the global commodities market.

Building a good-food bridge between people who need it and people who grow it can help to solve both of these problems, which are severe in Michigan. The state has the second-highest rate of obesity in the country, and that is costing it an estimated $12.3 billion annually in direct and indirect cardiovascular costs. And Michigan lost 17 percent of farms with sales of $25,000 to $100,000 between 1997 and 2002, putting 1,432 small operations out of business, a loss of eight acres of farmland per hour.

Old Story, New Ending
A common newspaper story in northern Michigan in recent years tells of farmers making the hard choice to not harvest their cherries or apples because it cost more for labor and equipment to pick the fruit than could be earned by selling it. Instead of letting the fruit rot, however, some farmers invited food pantry volunteers to pick the fruit languishing on the trees.

The Fresh Food Partnership, launched in 2003 by Ms. Jones and her husband, takes a strikingly different path. Instead of asking local farmers to donate their products, the partnership raises funds to buy it from them. Volunteers then distribute the food through the Northwest Food Coalition, which works with 34 food pantries and soup kitchens in a seven-county area that stretches from Antrim County to Wexford County in northwest Lower Michigan. This year Fresh Food Partnership raised and spent $21,000 purchasing 13 tons of fresh food from 26 farmers and served 6,500 people in the seven counties. That’s up substantially from the $4,500 used to purchase nearly four tons of food in the program’s first full year.

Val Stone, long-time facilitator of the Northwest Food Coalition, called the Fresh Food Partnership a “wonderful gift” for low-income residents who often have diabetes or hypertension and must steer clear of the pre-packaged, high-salt, high-sugar, and high-starch foods that typically find their way into food pantries.

But Ms. Stone said she is also glad to have a program that pays farmers. She grew up helping her mom run a summer fruit stand on Old Mission Peninsula, directly north of Traverse City, selling cherries from her grandparents’ and uncle’s farms. On Old Mission, as elsewhere in this fast-growing corner of the state, farmers face tough markets and are tempted to sell to developers who covet the orchards’ prime views of Lake Michigan and its bays.

“The only way for farmers to hang on to that land is to keep farms profitable,” Ms. Stone said.

Hunger: An All-American Problem
The kind of hunger and nutrition problems that the Fresh Food Partnership combats are hardly confined to Michigan. This October, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 36.3 million people in 12.6 million households had to worry about running out of food before they had money to buy more. The USDA study indicates that those worries sometimes became realities: About two-thirds of those households avoided actual hunger by eating a very poor diet of only a few basic foods to keep their stomachs full. And almost four million of the households had family members — including up to 6.6 million adults and 420,000 children — literally go hungry at least sometime during the year.

The problem is worsening. Last week the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported that overall requests for emergency food assistance in major American cities increased by an average of 14 percent in the last year, thanks largely to under- and unemployment. In addition, many low-income families can’t easily shop for healthy food because quality grocery stores have abandoned their neighborhoods for more lucrative locales. A recent University of Houston study funded by the American Heart Association Heartland Affiliate, for example, found that people living in low-income, urban neighborhoods had much easier access to convenience stores and liquor stores than to supermarkets or grocery stores.

So it is not surprising that, across the country, other groups are also trying to help poor people get better nutrition and, at the same time, help the small farms that are ready to provide it but are having a hard time in today’s globalized food economy. They are using a wide range of tactics, including:

Sliding-scale fees or special payment plans that allow low-income families to buy from community supported agriculture farms. CSA farms provide weekly baskets of produce throughout a growing season for a single, upfront fee.
The purchase of a season’s share in a CSA farm for food pantries and soup kitchens by nonprofit organizations like United Way.
Inner-city programs that employ teenagers to grow produce for food pantries. This can also help develop the next generation of farmers.
A federal program, Project Fresh, which provides $20 coupons redeemable at farmers markets to low-income pregnant women and moms with infants. In 2003, 2.3 million women redeemed $24.2 million in coupons with more than 16,000 farmers.
Placing farmers markets, produce stands, and “mobile market” fresh produce trucks in low-income neighborhoods.

The Fresh Food Partnership
Ms. Jones, a college communications instructor, knew only a little about any of this when she first explored the hunger problem in her rural community. She and husband Joe discovered the depth of the problem because they were members of Sweeter Song Farm, a community supported agriculture farm near here. The farm’s owners, Jim Schwantes and Judy Reinhardt, told Ms. Jones that they wanted to provide a free, season-long share of their products to someone in need. They asked her if she knew how to locate a family.

After she took a crash course in the local social service system, Ms. Jones discovered to her surprise that there were in fact thousands of people in the Traverse City area who were not eating very well. The next thing her husband knew, she was telling him: “You need to do something.” And thus was born the Fresh Food Partnership.

Ms. Jones tagged her husband because Mr. VanderMuelen runs a nonprofit agency here called Land Information Access Association, or LIAA, which offers planning and computer-oriented data and mapping programs. She correctly figured that LIAA could assemble a computer map based on her research. LIAA assembled a map with the location of food pantries, shelters, and community meal programs across the region; the location of volunteers near each of these sites; and the location of farmers who agreed to grow food for them. LIAA also began providing office space for the Fresh Food Partnership.

Now, each Sunday night during the growing season, participating farmers check a Web site with their computers and tell the Fresh Food Partnership how much of what kinds of food will be available that week and when and where to pick it up. Volunteers log onto the same site and list when they can make deliveries, while pantries record how many families they anticipate will need food. On Monday mornings, a LIAA employee coordinates the distribution.

The other partners in the project — United Way, the Northwest Michigan Human Services Agency, and its Northwest Food Coalition — provide the volunteer network. Michigan State University Cooperative Extension provides nutrition literature and links to farmers, and the Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce promotes the project.

Positive for All
Mr. VanderMuelen sees it as a way to build both community and future markets.

“You have to think that people aren’t poor forever,” he said. “If you introduce people to fresh, local produce they will see that it is as good as you get. So, when they can buy food, they will buy local food. We actually bought enough to make a difference for some farmers. We will have to raise more money to really make a difference.”

Marvin Blackford, one of the participating farmers, sees plenty of potential.

“It definitely adds dollars to farmers’ incomes,” he said.

Mr. Blackford, one of the busiest farmers at the Traverse City Farmers Market, grew up poor himself, so he’s particularly glad to know the dozens of different varieties of vegetables he grows are reaching people in need. Mr. Blackford said he doesn’t mind donating some food. But he’s also glad to have another market to sell to and plans to explore whether people who use the food pantries would like him to grow anything special, such as ethnic vegetables.

Mrs. Albert of Rapid City, meanwhile, expects to be back at work soon and, by next summer, growing her own vegetables in her own garden, which she physically couldn’t tend this year. She says she won’t forget the help she got from the Acme Christian Thrift Store and Food Pantry, a member of the Northwest Food Coalition, and the fresh food she received as a result of the Fresh Food Partnership.

“As soon as I get back to work, I will start donating back,” she said.

Diane Conners, a veteran journalist and farm-market manager, is the Institute’s coordinator for its Entrepreneurial Agriculture project. Reach her at diane@mlui.org.

",12/24/2004 21:20:31 to David Gard, a policy specialist for the Michigan Environmental Council, and a workgroup member, who said he wants to figure out what is technically feasible and how soon. "We really thought the charge should have been what does the technology look like for the next couple of decades?"

Representatives of the utility industry, though, interpret their role a bit differently. They worry about the availability of new technology to control mercury and the cost. "As a representative of Consumers, part of what I have to do is an education process. There are a lot people who are coming into this process not knowing what it means to actually put these types of controls on electric power plants," said Mr. Pocalujka.

Mr. Gard acknowledges that reducing mercury will come at some cost to consumers who he estimates will probably pay one tenth of a penny more per kilowatt hour for electricity. The average consumer today pays about eight cents per kilowatt hour. "It’s a pretty small percentage of the overall bill," said Mr. Gard.

Stephanie Rudolph, a student at Haverford College and managing editor of the Bi-College News, report199,"

As a state-sanctioned policy group concludes two days of frank discussions about how Michigan might protect itself from large and potentially damaging water withdrawals, one hopes that its members have Wisconsin on their minds. The so called Water Policy Work Group could garner some important lessons from the parallels between Michigan’s and Wisconsin’s water politics and problems, as well as the steps Wisconsin is now taking to deal with both.

In Michigan, as in Wisconsin, a clear majority of residents view protecting the state’s streams and aquifers — and the Great Lakes that they feed — from harmful water withdrawals as utterly important. But in Michigan, unlike Wisconsin, precious little has happened on the issue, despite repeated attempts by top state leaders in recent years to update water policy. In fact, Michigan’s biggest step has been establishing work groups. It now has two of them treading on similar tracks.

The original Groundwater Conservation Advisory Council, established in 2003 by a Republican-sponsored state law, is a group of representatives from agriculture, academia, industry, and other sectors charged with deciding whether the state should regulate groundwater withdrawals. That group has met regularly since January 2004 and is conducting some remarkable and groundbreaking work on the concept of sustainability.

Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm’s Department of Environmental Quality established in 2004 the second, less formal committee — which met yesterday and is meeting again today at Camp Michigania, near Walloon Lake in northern Lower Michigan. This group of farmers, environmentalists, speculators, public officials, paid lobbyists, and industrialists is focused more specifically on negotiating the details of a new water withdrawal law. But its members are struggling to find common ground.

Been There, Done That
Wisconsin state Senator Neal Kedzie remembers that a similar impasse occurred in the Badger State four years ago. He says that what broke the gridlock in Wisconsin was a highly unusual alliance of farmers and environmentalists, traditionally dogged adversaries who formed to advance a smarter water withdrawal policy in Wisconsin.

“[That alliance] was enough to move me," said the rough-riding Republican from Elkhorn, who chairs Wisconsin’s Natural Resources and Transportation Committee. “It showed us that there was a willingness between diverse interests to have a serious dialogue on this issue.”

The alliance did not happen overnight. It began in 2000 when people across the state, galvanized by the Perrier company’s plan to bottle and sell water from the Mecan River, one of Wisconsin’s hallowed trout streams, began asking tough questions about Great Lakes sustainability.

As in Michigan, the search for answers led to dusty stacks of white papers and conference proceedings. In Wisconsin the research confirmed plummeting groundwater levels beneath major metropolitan centers, startling human health issues, and escalating municipal costs linked to heavy pumping. One report bluntly stated: “Groundwater that once flowed toward Lake Michigan is now intercepted by pumping.”

By that time the tradition-shattering farmer-enviro alliance had built up considerable trust and momentum and Senator Kedzie decided the Wisconsin Legislature needed to act.

A Snail’s Pace
Today, Michigan stands at a place in its own epic story of water reform that is very similar to the one Wisconsin occupied just before officials like Senator Kedzie took decisive action. The debate here has yet to unite a committed, strategic, and broad-based coalition able to motivate the state Legislature to act on a meaningful policy proposal. The snail’s pace has persisted for years because the state’s biggest water users revolt whenever some brave state politician — Republican Senator Ken Sikkem203,"
Visitors to northern Michigan these days know that the Grand Traverse region is gradually losing its Up North character to sprawling development and out-of-date traffic planning. Now the Grand Traverse County Road Commission is pushing hard to complete another bad idea – the $30 million Hartman-Hammond bridge and four-lane road through the Boardman River valley.

As Michigan citizens consider what’s happening to the most beautiful areas of this state, they would do well to consider this illogical project and join hundreds of Grand Traverse county residents who are doing everything they can to make sure the bridge never happens.

Why? Because building the bridge will permanently ruin one of the last unspoiled places in the Traverse City metropolitan region.

The road commission says the bridge will solve congestion. It’s not true. Communities in Michigan and every other state have spent tens of billions of dollars building new bridges and highways, and congestion is worse than ever. With the vehicle population increasing two times as fast as the human one in Grand Traverse County, there is absolutely no chance that a new bridge and road will do anything to relieve congestion.

What is true, though, is that citizens are being pushed to trade a natural treasure for another corridor of sprawl like the infamous, strip-malled South Airport Road outside Traverse City.

Indeed, according to mounds of technically sound evidence developed by citizen organizations in the region, the proposed new bridge and road:

• Utterly fails to solve regional traffic snarls. The project will not relieve congestion on South Airport Road while directing even higher volumes of traffic to other boulevards, including the new bridge. Meanwhile 25 percent more traffic than today will inundate Traverse City’s main streets.

• Harms the Boardman River valley. The four-lane bridge would sit on an immense wall of earth higher than the cedars that are there now. It would ruin wildlife habitat and at least five acres of wetlands, including a rare cedar and black ash swamp that cannot be recreated anywhere else.

• Ignores public support for a simpler solution. Many effective, less costly, and less damaging alternatives exist. But the road commission is intent on building its bridge regardless of the damage it will cause and convincing technical evidence that it won’t work.

Guess what? There’s a better way. And it costs $20 million less. Since 1996, hundreds of people who live in the Traverse City region helped to develop effective ideas for easing congestion that cost less and protect natural resources. These proposals successfully balance the need to ease congestion with the commitment to preserve the natural environment that defines the Grand Traverse region.

Here are better alternatives that can be built right away:

• Improve South Airport Road. Enhance traffic flow on congested South Airport Road by re-timing traffic lights, combining commercial driveways, and adding turn lanes to separate fast and slow-moving vehicles. Anticipated cost: $5 million.

• Restore the Cass Road Bridge to two lanes. The road commission has allowed an important Boardman River crossing to deteriorate to a single lane. Fixing it would avoid slicing in half a prized portion of the Boardman River valley. Anticipated cost: $3 million.

• Connect Keystone Road to Hammond Road. This simple new connection would provide greater east-west movement across the region. Motorists could easily reach Acme or Interlochen, and points beyond, without using busy South Airport Road. Anticipated cost: $2 million.

The bridge’s opponents argue that the best communities in the nation are revitalizing their waterways, not paving them. The Traverse City region is still one of the most beautiful places in America. Bridge opponents vow to do everything they can to keep it that way.

On March 15, 2002, five citizen groups filed suit against the Grand Traverse County Road Commission to block construction of the new road and bridge. The citizen groups are All the Way to the Bay, Coalition for Sensible Growth, Michigan Land Use Institute, Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council, and the Sierra Club. These organizations are dedicated to managing traffic and growth in the Grand Traverse region to enhance the quality of life and protect the greatest natural treasures, especially the Boardman River valley.

Abundant open space. Clean water. Great recreation. A small town atmosphere and a family-friendly environment. These are the very qualities that give northern Michigan its unique character. They also are values every citizen in Michigan should do everything in their power to preserve.

Keith Schneider and Kelly Thayer are journalists at the Michigan Land Use Institute. Reach them at keith@mlui.org and kelly@mlui.org.
",6/7/2002 0:00:00 and the rights of communities and natural places to remain unique and unfettered.

Martha MacFarlane-Faes, an official at Michigan’s State Historic Preservation Office, said the history of transportation policy across America teaches a basic lesson about what’s at stake if Michigan does not choose a new course.

“Transportation policies that have little regard for basic quality of life issues have consistently proven detrimental to communities,” said Ms. MacFarlane-Faes, also an active member of the MDOT policy reform effort. “For example, the intrusion of truck routes into historic downtowns after World War II resulted in the degeneration of these areas. Four lanes of truck traffic on a community’s main street is not only unpleasant and damaging to adjacent buildings, it terrifies residents, who end up shopping at strip malls where they feel it is easier and safer to maneuver.”

Ms. MacFarlane-Faes points out that before the auto era traditional community design brought downtowns and neighborhoods close together, making walking and bicycling safe and convenient. But the rise of the automobile demanded more and more space and literally cast aside people who were not on four wheels. Today, things have begun to come full circle, she said, pointing to Governor Jennifer M. Granholm’s Cool Cities initiative, which seeks to enhance the singular character and economic competitiveness of select Michigan communities, in part, by strengthening basic things as sidewalks, bicycle routes, and historic structures.

The Grassroots, The Governor, The G-men
The synchronicity of Cool Cities and the emerging transportation design policy is not happenstance. In August of last year Governor Granholm’s bipartisan, sprawl-busting Michigan Land Use Leadership Council recommended creating a state context-sensitive design program, after residents from Marquette to Detroit testified to their desire for state transportation policy that protects communities while helping their commute. In response, the governor launched MDOT’s context-sensitive design policy effort with a directive last December — the same month that the state hosted its first “Creating Cool” conference to harness the ideas and talents of interested community leaders. When the new transportation design policy is complete, it’s a sure bet it will be added to the Cool Cities “toolbox,” which is a compilation of key state programs and financial resources essential to building vibrant communities.

But there is also a larger, national force that&209,"
Even after six years of participating in a Capitol Hill process that regularly grinds great ideas to partisan mush, Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer still has a streak of the idealist. He commutes to work on a bicycle, lives in a spartan Capitol Hill apartment, is superbly fit, and appears at committee hearings wearing polka dot bow ties.

When he arrived in SUV-guzzling, buy-your-way to influence, boom time Washington in 1996 as an unabashed progressive from one of America’s most livable cities, Mr. Blumenauer’s right wing opponents genuinely derided him as a wacky lightweight. His unconventional views about development — such as trying to convince the road-building lobby and its friends in Congress that killing urban freeways produces much greater economic and cultural benefits than building them — even drew a snort or two from friends

But the 53-year-old lawyer and lawmaker, who was born, raised, and educated in Portland, had irrefutable evidence that the seemingly illogical actually made sense. As a young Democratic state representative in the 1970s he helped replace Portland’s proposed Mt. Hood Freeway with a new light rail line. It was a crucial early step in Portland’s transformation from a tired Pacific Northwest river town to a glittering 21st century city with a quality of life so superior that people and businesses are flocking there.

Similarly, in post 9/11 Washington, Congressional colleagues are now viewing Mr. Blumenauer’s thrifty, energy-efficient, and healthy lifestyle — and his ideas about conserving the countryside and rebuilding Americas cities — with a great deal more respect. He’s emerged as Capitol Hill’s foremost authority on curbing sprawl and making cities more livable and is widely recognized as one of the national Smart Growth movement’s most articulate and tireless leaders.

He’s achieved such acclaim by being patient and strategic, which is one of the luxuries of being elected from Oregon’s third congressional district with nearly 70 percent majorities. Year by year, piece by piece, Mr. Blumenauer is returning the favor by serving up millions of dollars for useful projects in his district — $64 million for light rail in Portland this year, for instance — and simultaneously building the national Smart Growth movement’s political foundation in Congress.

As the founder and co-chairman of the congressional Livable Communities Task Force, which now boasts 50 members, Mr. Blumenauer promotes new federal policies to alter the tax code, conserve farmland and open space, establish more affordable housing, invest in cities, and provide federal support for better state and local planning.

One of the task force’s many achievements is convincing the House this year to invest $1 billion in farmland conservation over the next decade as part of the 2002 farm policy bill, up from $35 million in the 1996 Farm Bill. Another is Mr. Blumenauer’s Community Character Act, which would provide federal incentives and financial support to help cities and states plan better.

With nearly 60 cosponsors, the bill has gained enough momentum to attract critical attention from the White House and from Mel Martinez, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who in May attacked the measure as "infringing on local control." Mr. Blumenauer, unfazed, immediately responded, describing the bill’s benefits as voluntary, and accusing the President and other opponents as being out of step with the times and with voters.

"Being able to preserve quality of life and make a community more livable is really at the core of what’s driven so many social, economic, and technological revolutions throughout American history," said Mr. Blumenauer in a recent interview. "At its core, Smart Growth is a way to make our families safer, healthier, and more economically secure in a world that is at once larger than it’s ever been, connected to every corner of the world, but also smaller because we’re affected in ways we’ve never seen before. At its core Smart Growth expresses what most people want in connecting to their communities and their fellow citizens."

Mr. Blumenauer started the Committee for a Livable Future, a political action committee to finance congressional campaigns of like-minded colleagues. It has helped to elect new Smart Growth lawmakers. "LivPac is the only organization focused on electing proponents of Smart Growth policies and was there when I needed help the most," said Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat.

Mr. Blumenauer also is a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, where he’s been influential in convincing Congress to open transportation planning to much more public influence and oversight. He’s helped convince his colleagues to invest billions of dollars more in public transit, causing what has come to be popularly called a "railvolution" across the country. More than a dozen cities are either planning for or have begun construction on new light rail systems. A dozen more are enlarging existing systems.

"We’re finding out that benign neglect and some of the development policies of the past that are aggressively negative simply don’t work," he said. "There is not a single community that has paved its way out of traffic congestion. We’re finding, for instance, that areas that have moved to providing more transportation choices, particularly as it relates to rail and street car, are doing very well. People love it."

He added: "Salt Lake City. The Olympics would not have worked without the construction of light rail in Salt Lake."

Outside Washington, Mr. Blumenauer sees growing public support for halting sprawl and a flourishing Smart Growth movement. He noted that in 2000 there were 550 state and local ballot measures to conserve farmland, enlarge and modernize public transit systems, rebuild urban neighborhoods, clean up rivers and streams, establish state Smart Growth commissions, and take many other actions to improve the quality of life. Most were approved.

State governments also are enacting new legislation to improve community design, provide support for new conservation-based land use plans, and protect open space. Smart Growth candidates are running for local and state office. In Michigan, for instance, all of the major party candidates, Republican and Democrat, are promising new statutes and government programs to halt sprawl, improve transportation, and protect the Great Lakes.

Mr. Blumenauer has been working to make Smart Growth a national ideal for more than three decades as a state lawmaker, county commissioner, and Portland city commissioner. An accomplished runner and road biker, the divorced father of two is constantly in motion, traveling to dozens of cities every year to meet with Smart Growth leaders, speak to residents, and convince local leaders that the movement’s vision and goals are coming into sharp focus almost everywhere.

"In every community that I go to," he said, "I get that day’s newspaper and the next day’s. Everywhere the newspapers are filled with articles about water quality, air quality, health, affordable housing, transportation, open space. It is a mosaic of issues that relate to livability, which people in Chattanooga, Hartford, Saginaw, and Bakersfield can all relate to and all care deeply about."

Keith Schneider, a regular contributor to the New York Times, Gristmagazine.com, and the Detroit Free Press, is program director of the Michigan Land Use Institute. For more of the Institute’s first rate reporting and commentary on Smart Growth see www.mlui.org. Reach Mr. Schneider at keith@mlui.org.
",6/28/2002 0:00:00 roducers.

In the eastern Upper Peninsula, Rus and Amy Goetz have come home from jobs and commuter lives in Omaha, Nebraska, to raise their two young daughters close to their Goetzville roots on the Lake Huron shore. The Goetz’ were able to m210,"
The word sprouted last month, as if in time for Earth Day. At long last, planes could fly the now-friendly skies over Washington. To and from National Airport. Over the Pentagon. Over the Capitol. Over the White House. Great god of the airways, we’re free at last!

Well pardon me if I don’t uncork the metal-capped, water-thin red wine, the insipid white Bordeaux, or the Bloody Mary mix — no vodka — that keeps me from starving on the new food-free flights.

In World War II, we fought for the Four Freedoms. Now we’re blessed with the four freedoms of flight: freedom of filling the skies with noisy aircraft. Freedom for air personnel to search and seize our nail clippers. Freedom to pollute the airways with noxious, dirty fumes. And the last thing Americans need: freedom to support sprawl-breeding, habitat-wrecking airports.

Alas, while we have become a nation of nervous travelers, we have yet to contemplate the other knee-quaking environmental and urban consequences of our fly-drive society. For instance, Todd Hettenbach, a policy analyst at the Environmental Working Group in Washington, concludes that 2l9 volatile organic chemicals add poisonous smog to the air around Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

Pollution may triple at higher altitudes even as jet contrails alter the climate below, according to a University of Wisconsin report in May. Friends of the Earth, the Aviation Environment Federation, and others report that a one-way flight from Florida to the United Kingdom produces as much carbon dioxide as a year of driving by the average British motorist.

But that isn’t the worst of it. What about the damage to our cities, our suburbs, and ourselves as we spread way out yonder? Instead of supporting appropriate short-distance rail, the $40 billion given to build or enlarge airports under the federal Air Expansion Act of 2000 has fed more flying and more haphazard development across our "unused" farmland and fringes. The political reason? Some 71 percent of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives received PAC money from the air industry that year.

Not only do airports despoil the land and add to sprawl, they draw jobs outwards: a scenario that some find just fine. John D. Kasarda at the University of North Carolina Business School speaks positively about airport expansion. This air afficionado envisions airport gateways stretching l5 miles to airport entrances in a new study. Dr. Kasarda points to airports in Los Angeles, Dallas, Memphis, Miami, and D.C. as business and service "aerotropolises," regional economic engines for white and blue collar jobs. By his calculation "42 percent of the value of world trade" now goes by air and all business depends on the on time-sensitivity it supplies.

Other observers question the costs of runaway airport expansion, however. Preston Schiller, a prominent transportation consultant, calls it the "airport city phenomena." It isn’t just the clutter of mall-filled mega-terminals that hit the outburbs, observers note. It’s also the roads and parking lots for flyers and workers, the clogged eight and ten-lane freeways, the airport-convenient conference halls and edge city hotels that suck business from downtown. Airports far from city centers deaden the urban communities they draw from as they expand outward at mega-scale.

No wonder the neighborhood reaction all over the country grows ever more audible and palpable from communities fearing new airports and living under the flight path of existing or expanding ones. In Orange County, California airport rage contributed to voters nixing the development of El Toro military base for a new airport.

Earlier this month, a consortium of rail advocates from 55 organizations, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors, assembled in Washington to rally for rail. Union leaders joined manufacturers to lobby for new transportation policy that shifts investment away from roads and airways, and much more vigorously toward rail.

Their meetings with 50 lawmakers couldn’t come at a more opportune time. Some $750 billion in taxpayer funds has advanced the auto-air age since the airports set off on a building binge a decade ago. The result is ever- more congested roads, and airports and airlines relieved of gridlock only by the downslide of the economy and the disaster of September 11.

In contrast, a scant one-thirtieth of that sum has gone to Amtrak. Similarly, the annual $38 billion to roads has drained light and heavy rail lines, weakening the energy-efficient, cost-effective, car-free service essential to reinforce cities, unclog roads, and stop sprawl.

Why not spread such rail every place? Why not stop the inefficiencies of the auto-air age? Why not mimic Europe’s salutary trains for short and medium hauls of 200 to 500 miles?

And, hey, why not a high-speed, long haul, east-west, cross-continental line from, say, San Francisco to D.C.?

Let it run at 200 miles-per hour for 2,600 miles, says John Holtzclaw of the Sierra Club. It needn’t be a daydream. Set off at 5 p.m. by train from the west coast. Have dinner at eight. Snooze in a comfortable sleeper, and come 9 a.m. the next morning you reach Washington rested and ready to work. No red eye. No unfriendly skies. No battered landscape.

Jane Holtz Kay is the architecture and planning critic of The Nation and author of Asphalt Nation. Reach her JHoltzKay@aol.com.
",5/22/2002 0:00:00 211,"
DETROIT — Responding to growing grassroots clamor for the state to address long-ignored metropolitan problems, former Governor Jim Blanchard, a Democrat who’s running again for high office, has proposed a 50-point urban agenda that seeks to ensure the state’s neglected cities become attractive communities, not seedy places to avoid.

Appearing before a large audience on April 30, 2002 at the Focus: HOPE Center — a civil and human rights organization founded in the wake of the 1967 Detroit riots — Mr. Blanchard spoke passionately about the need to revitalize vacant properties, invest in inner city schools, and eliminate cultural barriers.

"It would be ridiculous to talk about improving life in cities without candidly talking about the need to improve race relations," Mr. Blanchard said. "It’s an unspoken issue that we have to deal with. What is a strength in Michigan — diversity — is far too often viewed as a handicap. It’s time to make our diversity an asset."

Mr. Blanchard’s Michigan Community Partnership initiative, detailed here for the first time, is one piece of what he calls a comprehensive economic plan to ensure that Michigan remains a center for innovative business and a competitive force in the emerging global marketplace. Andy Bowman, planning director for the Grand Valley Metro Council, a regional planning authority in Grand Rapids, said he could not recall an election when a candidate in Michigan packaged a host of urban issues and unveiled an agenda aimed specifically at improving the overall quality of life in cities.

Mr. Bowman, one of the state’s most prominent planning authorities, said attempts to solve urban problems generally have gone issue by issue in bits and pieces, with scant results. "The concept of Smart Growth was in its infancy the last time Blanchard was in office," Mr. Bowman said. "But to talk about vibrant city centers as a tool to manage growth, and curb sprawl, certainly elevates the discussion today."

To provide the quality of life necessary to lure economic investment, Mr. Blanchard said Michigan must also create state parks within metropolitan areas, offer a broad range of transportation choices, fix roads first before building new ones, and update the obsolete public policies that subsidize sprawling suburban development at the expense of a quality metropolitan lifestyle.

"We can’t keep building out and out and out," Mr. Blanchard said. "Seven of the last eight years were record and runaway prosperity in America and in Michigan. Yet in many respects our cities and neighborhoods have declined. Until we focus on maintaining and repairing what we have our cities are going to look like third world countries. It’s a disgrace."

Long Neglect
The plight of Michigan’s inner cities — like most throughout the nation —presents some strikingly obvious but tremendously complex and expensive problems, said urban authorities. Abandoned housing stock and polluted property hampers local real estate markets. Transit options remain limited while traffic is congested on crumbling roadways. Neighborhoods composed purely of low income families struggle to support even basic services such as grocers. And young talent flocks to new hotspots like Denver and D.C. while a spirited urban nightlife in most Michigan cities is virtually nonexistent.

In Michigan the challenges have united an unlikely critical mass of stakeholders — social justice advocates, corporations, environmental groups, farmers, and municipal officials — in a call for a modern urban strategy that’s now motivated the 2002 gubernatorial candidates to acknowledge that a strong Michigan depends on a thriving network of city centers.

"We need a candidate who’s not afraid to reprioritize," said David Bulkowski, executive director of the Grand Rapids-based Center for Independent Living, a disability rights advocate. "Right now the top priorities appear to be tax cuts and prisons. But the goals should be to provide good schools and enable self-sufficiency. Take transit for instance. Sure we’ve seen some funding increases. But if we keep looking at transit like crumbs from the table that we give to second class citizens then we’re going to have a system for second class citizens. We must make some fundamental changes."

What The Other Candidates Say
Lieutenant Governor Dick Posthumus, the leading Republican gubernatorial candidate and former state chairman of Habitat for Humanity, has yet to detail fully what those changes might include. But he has said regularly that successful cities must offer high paying jobs, safe streets, strong schools, and affordable housing. Lt. Gov. Posthumus has pledged, if elected, to commit the full resources of the governor’s office to transforming Detroit into a world-class city by the time the Super Bowl comes to the Motor City in 2006.

Congressman David Bonior, a Democratic candidate, supports forming a partnership between the Office of the Governor and local urban leaders to support urban revitalization. Mr. Bonior also says he would develop neighborhood credit unions to eliminate shady lending practices and provide financial assistance for citizens to renovate homes or start small businesses. Like Mr. Blanchard, Mr. Bonior is an outspoken advocate for decentralized, community policing and improved public transit.

Attorney General Jennifer Granholm, the current Democratic front runner, supports regional cooperation and creative partnerships between business leaders and local governments to manage growth and spur urban revival. Ms. Granholm’s top priority, however, is public education, which many say could be the single most important starting point to begin drawing people back downtown.

"If we had a strong public school system we’d probably have more families than we’d know what to do with," said Suzanne Schulz, a planner for the City of Grand Rapids.

Grand Rapids Experience
Grand Rapids, west Michigan’s economic anchor and the state’s Smart Growth leader, has not experienced the same level of population loss and disinvestment that devastated cities like Detroit and Saginaw. Nonetheless the city has similar problems — boarded up downtown storefronts, sidewalks hungry for foot traffic, and financially strapped schools.

Since 2000, officials have engaged in an exhaustive process &m212,"
Let me thank all of you for being here. This is a wonderful turnout on a beautiful spring evening.

Most of you, if not all of you are community leaders. We have elected officials, former elected officials, community activists, clergy, citizens that care. I want to thank you for being here.

We are interested in your ideas. We’re trying to craft a policy to improve neighborhoods and communities throughout our state. Certainly that includes right here in Detroit. Certainly it includes everywhere from Ironwood to Monroe.

We have people here who helped us develop ideas from my hometown of Ferndale, Saginaw, Bay City, Flint, Lansing, and obviously right here in the neighborhood.

Before we start I would like to introduce Janet Blanchard, my wife. I also want to thank everyone who has worked to craft ideas and thoughts. We’re trying to refine a platform for the future of our state, and the future of our cities and neighborhoods.

I especially want to thank the carpenters and millwrights because I saw some of you out front with signs letting people know where we are and that we’re here tonight. And I want to thank our coordinator of this whole effort, who’s put in an enormous amount of time. Chris, thank you.

Strong cities.Strong neighborhoods.
I think we all know that we can’t have a strong Michigan without strong cities and strong neighborhoods. We have been through record prosperity. Seven of the last eight years were record and runaway prosperity in America and in Michigan.

And yet in many respects many of our cities and neighborhoods have declined. It’s not just some of the neighborhoods that we care about. It’s communities as well.

The reality is the only way we’re going to lift our state to the greatness it deserves, and give our people the quality of life that they deserve — that we deserve — is for the state and the governor, and his or her administration, to be an active partner with neighborhood organizations, and community groups, and church groups that are working to improve their neighborhoods and their communities. That is the only way.

Having macro-economic policies are not enough. Many of you know that a couple of months ago I announced my new economic plan to deal with strengthening manufacturing, diversifying our economy, helping create jobs, save jobs, expand trade, improve education, and give us the talent pool for the jobs we need. But we also said at that time that we wanted to craft a new urban, a new community policy. That’s what we’re all about tonight.

The people here tonight that have helped me have generated several hundred ideas. I made a list of 40 and I realized if I even went through those it would take all night and I wouldn’t get your ideas and your input. We have an awful lot of people here with a lot of knowledge. So I’m going to try to abbreviate some of what they’ve suggested to me so we can get into some dialogue and hear what you have to say.

I simply want to say, though, that one of the things I am confident I will do is either at the cabinet or sub-cabinet level create a director for community partnerships. We are going to need that in Michigan. They’re going to need to work actively with cities, townships, and counties — but specifically with neighborhood organizations, nonprofit groups, and church groups — on everything from education, to race relations, to housing, to crime prevention, to environmental protection and recreation.

End racism. Diversity is a strength
It would be ridiculous to talk about improving life in cities or communities or neighborhoods without candidly talking about the fact that we need very much to improve race relations. It’s one of those issues that people don’t always talk about.

The reality is it’s an unspoken issue that we have to deal with. If we are going to be the strong state of the future then our government leaders, starting with the governor — but all of our public officials and 213,"
Unreliable bus service and hard-to-reach stops are some of the persistent problems with Michigan public transit that put thousands of people in danger of losing jobs and contact with friends and family, according to a study by United Cerebral Palsy of Michigan and the Michigan Land Use Institute.

According to the report, New Economic Engine, seniors and people with disabilities face transit challenges in Michigan that are many times more difficult and disturbing than in other states. Moreover, these populations are growing rapidly in Michigan.

The baby boom generation is inching towards retirement, and more people with disabilities are joining the work force and living independently. Michigan’s future plans for more efficient and effective transit systems must include strategies for better accommodating those who need accessible public transit to fully engage in everyday life, according to the study.

Availability and Accessibility
A well-functioning "paratransit" system — one that serves riders with disabilities — is literally the vehicle that many Michigan residents must have in order to live independently. Paratransit service varies from community to community and state to state. But in general, paratransit service is comparable to conventional bus service, includes lift-equipped buses for riders who use wheelchairs, and provides voice and visual cues for riders. It’s also simply a matter of making public transit available to all residents in all parts of the state.

This is particularly important in Michigan, where 34 of 83 counties have very little transit coverage. Universal transit services and paratransit accommodations are essential for seniors and people with disabilities to travel freely, join the work force, and take advantage of libraries, museums, parks, shopping districts, and entertainment venues. Optimal paratransit service is accessible, safe, convenient, and affordable for all.

But in Michigan and most other states, transit and paratransit services do not exist in many areas or are extremely limited and unreliable in scheduling and routing. In a 2000-2001 survey of people with disabilities in Michigan, for example, 61 percent rated their transportation service as "bad." Many transit and paratransit services arrive as much as two hours later than scheduled, and sometimes not at all. As a result, people with disabilities miss medical appointments and other important engagements. They also fail to find jobs or to keep them because they arrive late or miss work entirely.

National Leaders – Florida and New Jersey
Florida and New Jersey, however, are two states that have made a commitment to fully incorporating paratransit in their public transit planning. The result is greater system efficiency overall and exemplary service.

Florida, for example, recently won the Community Transportation Association of America’s state achievement award for its insightful and innovative paratransit planning. Florida’s greatest achievement was its success in overcoming one of the biggest barriers to successful paratransit: Service coordination.

Florida maximizes the use of its paratransit vans and buses by mandating that a central, local coordinating body brokers all paratransit services in an area. Most states provide transportation and paratransit services through a number of independent departments and agencies, which results in fragmented funding and uncoordinated efforts. The separate agencies do not work from the same plan or toward the same goal. A common result is that paratransit vans belonging to one service provider, such as a senior center, often sit idle while clients of another agency wait for their van to arrive.

Florida’s process requires all service providers, as well as public transportation agencies, to coordinate services. Local coordinating agencies maximize services by dispatching paratransit vans and buses according to an overall plan and 215,"
Traverse City, MI — Five local, state, and national groups filed a lawsuit this month to block the Hartman-Hammond road and bridge, a major construction project near Traverse City. The groups said they were opposed to the $30-million proposal because it pushes pavement into valuable wetlands, promotes haphazard growth, and fails to ease congestion.

The groups filed the suit on March 15, 2002 in Grand Traverse County Circuit Court against the Grand Traverse County Road Commission, which is proposing the massive transportation project over the objection of voters and the city commission in Traverse City. Plaintiffs include the Coalition for Sensible Growth, the Michigan Land Use Institute, the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council, the Sierra Club, and All the Way to the Bay. Together the plaintiffs have thousands of members in the Grand Traverse region and more than 23,000 members statewide.

"The Grand Traverse County Road Commission’s highway project would harm some of the premier waterways and parklands in our region and offer no solution to traffic congestion," said Helen Milliken, Michigan’s former first lady, a board member of the Michigan Land Use Institute, and a Traverse City resident for more than 50 years. "We need creative solutions that are effective and fit with our community’s up-north character and high quality of life."

Michael Dillenbeck, manager of the Grand Traverse County Road Commission, said he was disappointed but not surprised by the court action. "I kind of look at this as almost like taking a class," he told Interlochen Public Radio. "You’ve done all your homework. You passed all the quizzes. Now you’re going to have the final exam. They want the judge to look at the record and make a final decision. We have appropriately completed everything and, to my knowledge, we have done everything that we’ve ever been asked to do or required to do by federal or state agencies."

Since 1987 the Grand Traverse County Road Commission and regional planners have proposed the 4- and 5-lane Hartman-Hammond road and 200-foot-long bridge as part of various bypass concepts.

In 2001, after five years of citizen action by some of the plaintiff groups and others to stop a 30-mile highway bypass from bisecting Leelanau, Grand Traverse, and Antrim counties, the Michigan Department of Transportation canceled its proposed Traverse City bypass. Despite the defeat the Grand Traverse County Road Commission insists on building the Hartman-Hammond road and bridge, which is the sole surviving stretch of the proposed bypass.

The Hartman-Hammond project would cross a particularly wild stretch of the Boardman River — a designated blue-ribbon trout stream — that lies at the center of the fast-developing Grand Traverse region. The river and its undeveloped valley provide year-round enjoyment for residents and visitors who come to canoe, kayak, fish, hike, jog, picnic, and watch birds and other wildlife. Just south of the proposed Hartman-Hammond bridge, the Boardman River is protected by the state’s "Natural River" program. North of the bridge crossing, the river enters Traverse City’s Boardman Lake and re-emerges as it winds through downtown before emptying into West Grand Traverse Bay, on Lake Michigan.

"As an area paddler and a regular user of the Boardman River, I am well aware of what we have to lose by allowing the degradation of the river and its surrounding environment," said Susan Boyd, president of the canoe-racing group All the Way to the Bay. "The Boardman is a beautiful, diverse, and highly entertaining river, and there’s no justification for destroying something that adds so much to the uniqueness of the Traverse City area. I see nothing to be gained by the proposed construction — only way too much to lose."

"The Boardman River Valley is irreplaceable as a wildlife and public recreational area. To run 30,000 cars and trucks a day through it216,"
Forget red-breasted robins chasing worms and daffodils popping out of the ground. These days one of the sure signs of spring is a construction crew out on a farm field shooting nail guns into two-by-fours and pouring concrete for mini-mansions and convenience stores.

Yet like grass growing up through concrete, entrepreneurial small and medium size farms all across the country are successfully pushing back against suburban sprawl. They’re doing it by finding new ways to market their high-quality products to consumers eager for greater food choices and food security.

A Congressional agriculture conference committee, which is meeting this month to complete the 2002 Farm Bill, now has a chance to really strengthen the new entrepreneurial agriculture and keep farm families on their land. The Senate version of the pending farm policy law contains several proposals that would for the first time put significant money behind innovative, profit-seeking farmers. One provision would invest $75 million annually into helping farmers develop new markets and products. Another would limit the amount of taxpayer money that goes each year into propping up the nation’s largest, subsidy-dependent farms. Such mega operations flood markets with cheap food, which feeds the growth of companies that now dominate the nation’s grocery shelves.

But these historic provisions are in danger. The conference committee already has proposed cutting funding for rural development in half, threatening the $75 million market program and other investments to help family farmers produce products that people really want. The committee may also do away with the Senate’s cap on subsidy payments to the nation’s largest farms. Without this cap, Congress will not have enough to invest in the kind of entrepreneurial agriculture that is key to rebuilding rural economies, keeping families on the land, and protecting farmland and downtowns from sprawl.

What the conference committee members must hear this month is that consumers, farmers, and taxpayers want a different kind of agriculture policy. Rather than throw money into further overproduction of a few crops, Congress needs to support farm families as they switch from glutted markets to diverse production and profitable futures.

Such an investment can generate significant returns for the nation’s cities and vital green spaces, as well. Healthy rural communities are more able to stand firm against sprawling development, which sucks the economic life out of urban areas and spreads congestion and pollution in the countryside.

Putting entrepreneurial agriculture to work for America’s land and people, however, requires a new type of thinking about farming and economic development. The mindset must shift away from the prevailing picture of farmers interested only in high yields and government payments to a renewed vision of farmers as innovative small businesses.

Like hometown banks or specialty retail stores, small and medium size farms are succeeding despite mega mergers all around them. They do it by adding value to their products with a friendly face or specialty processing, by finding profitable market niches (anyone for goat’s milk yogurt?), and by finding new ways to consumers, such as selling shares in the next season’s harvest to consumers who want fresh food and farms nearby.

Net returns for entrepreneurial farmers — producing all-natural meat and milk, marketing family recipes, or supplying restaurants with fresh vegetables — are often 40 and 50 percent versus the conventional farm’s 15 to 20 percent.

"Even a farm with only $50,000 in annual sales may net $20,000 to $25,000 to support the small farm family," says Dr. John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri.

That’s a significant economic factor for local residents and leaders across the country who are working overtime to generate jobs and save farmland and open space. But farmers cannot fully capitalize on new 217,"
Urban sprawl is alive and well in Grand Rapids, my hometown.

The term refers to the insidious way that webs of suburbs, manufacturing plants, roads, and subdivisions are expanding in unplanned, ever-widening circles around our city. Other symptoms of sprawl include longer commutes, pollution, and the loss of undeveloped land. The American Farmland Trust reports that 70 percent of the country’s prime farmland is now in the path of rapid development.

On the list of 30 of the most sprawling cities in the entire United States, Grand Rapids, which has experienced a 48 percent increase in its urban area between 1990 and 1996, ranks right in the middle. Our rate of sprawl is behind such hyper-growth communities as Las Vegas, Austin, and Tucson, but well ahead of Cleveland, Chicago, and Portland.

Some sprawl apologists say that’s the American Dream and any problems are easy to fix. They say there’s plenty of land left in America. They say congestion would go away if we just build more roads.

But sprawl matters. Pollsters say it’s the most important issue in the country.

Distress about urban sprawl arises from many factors: Loss of open space, traffic congestion, economic segregation, a lack of affordable housing, and a lost sense of community. According to Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam, the longer people spend in traffic, the less likely they are to be involved in their community and family.

To solve these problems, it takes a combination of land conservation and real free market economics, which can actually provide smaller lots for those who want them. However, many communities try to maintain what they believe are high property values by allowing only large-lot homes to be built. This effectively excludes several types of households, including singles, some empty-nesters, single-parents, and the elderly, along with lower-income people.

And the favored "middle-class family" with kids today represents just 25 percent of new homebuyers. Only 11percent of U.S. households are "traditional" families with children and just one wage earner. One size no longer fits us all.

We need smaller houses in walkable clusters, town homes in real "towns," lofts in vital urban neighborhoods, and affordable housing just about anywhere. The development of compact communities that offer urban amenities and street life will show that the market actually supports more density and more housing diversity — not less.

For every 10 percent increase in new freeway miles, a 9 percent increase in traffic is generated within five years. You just can’t build your way out of gridlock. More importantly, today we can no longer afford to keep building new freeways. The key is building more walkable communities.

All this depends on promoting different land-use patterns and not just building new roads. Property rights advocates argue against regional planning, or any planning for that matter. They say that people should have a right to develop their properties as they please.

As a historic preservationist, I have heard that for years. But what if one person’s development decision adversely impacts another’s property, or the whole neighborhood, or the whole region? What if certain choices require more public tax dollars to pay for infrastructure and services than others?

At the regional level, it is public dollars that enable development on private property. Without highways, roads, sewers, water systems, and public services, development cannot occur. Therefore, we must seek out and implement the most cost-effective public investments which creatively and positively support growth but discourage sprawl.

My name is John Logie, I’m the mayor of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

John Logie, an attorney and political Independent, was first elected mayor of Grand Rapids in 1991 and has been re-elected twice since. Under his administration, Grand Rapids has achieved national recognition as a Smart Growth leader in the Midwest. Mayor Logie is reachable at logiejh@wnj.com
",4/25/2002 0:00:00 218,"An hour spent crouching behind a fallen log on a Montana mountainside left me realizing I live a life of great privilege. The house I built with my own hands sat a twenty-minute scramble down a slope almost too steep to walk. Sixty or so feet away, a couple of cow elk stepped from behind a screen of small trees. Further back in the trees an unseen bull elk bugled the fluty fall mating cry that says nothing so much as ""wild.""

That call was my reason for crouching. The bull was legal game, and I inten",1/30/2002 0:00:00 219,"After dozens of catastrophic and chronic manure spills into Michigan waterways in recent years, the state Department of Environmental Quality has decided it no longer will treat large livestock factories — which concentrate thousands of animals and millions of gallons of manure in one place — like small-scale farms.
In an historic agreement on January 14, the DEQ told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency it would begin complying with the federal Clean Water Act. The Act requires states to apply to livestock factories the same rigorous program to keep rivers and lakes clean that all other industrial-scale facilities, such as chemical factories and municipal wastewater treatment systems, must follow.
Until now, the lack of state oversight worried neighbors of large livestock factories, like Eric Case, who lives near a hog factory in Mason County.
As part of the agreement, the DEQ will consult with the agriculture industry and public interest groups to design a Clean Water Act permitting system for Michigan’s livestock factories. "This is a major victory for the people in communities that have had their air and water poisoned as a result of the animal factory pollution and state failure to uphold the law," said Anne Woiwode, Director of the Sierra Club in Michigan.
The DEQ’s new view is a complete reversal from its earlier position that a formal permitting system for livestock factories was unnecessary. The agency asserted that the costs of administering the program would outweigh the environmental benefits. The DEQ also contended that its practice of citing livestock factories for water quality violations after the manure contamination occurred was enough of a deterrent.
"Permits are not magic bullets," DEQ spokesman Ken Silfven told reporters. "Just because you are under a permit doesn’t mean there won’t be a problem."
The agency finally gave in to permits, however, after three years of public pressure, federal government scrutiny, and — ultimately — agriculture industry lobbying.
Late last year, the Michigan Farm Bureau put its support behind Clean Water Act permits for Michigan livestock agriculture after its leaders recognized the state’s self-policing system did nothing to stop chronic violators — called "bad actors" — from fouling the industry’s image.
"We acknowledge there are some bad actors who may benefit from a permit system that forces them to meet the high environmental standards followed voluntarily by their farm neighbors," said Michigan Farm Bureau President Wayne Wood.
Michigan had been the only Great Lakes state to rely on the ineffective self-policing system for livestock factories with more than 2,500 hogs, 700 dairy cows, or 100,000 chickens. Livestock operations this size have become the industry standard after a decade in which a few large companies — contracting with individual, factory-size "growers" — gained control of 81 percent of all beef slaughter, 57 percent of pork slaughter, and 50 percent of broiler production.
Michigan, however, had continued to handle large livestock factories with the same voluntary guidelines that it applies to small-scale farms, which have much less potential for killing thousands of fish in one manure-handling accident. Other states, in the meantime, began r226,"Three years after property rights ideologues forced the state to shelve a promising plan to permanently protect the forests, trout fishery, and wildlands along the banks of the magnificent Pine and Manistee Rivers, an alliance of conservation and angler organizations has developed a strategic plan to revive the state’s work.

The campaign, led by the nine-member Pine River Watershed Coalition and the Upper Manistee River Association, is part of a flourishing grassroots movement to protect and enhance Michigan’s world-class waterways.

"Urban sprawl and other development within the watershed is rapidly growing and will continue to increase in the coming years," says Dick Shotwell, president of the Pine River Association, a 30-year-old group of property owners living on or near the Pine River in central Michigan. "Unlike the rivers in southern Michigan, we have a unique opportunity to protect our rivers from harmful and unwise land use."

The Manistee and Pine rivers, which flow through miles of northern Michigan forests, are two of the most popular fishing and canoeing streams in the Midwest. Both, however, are threatened with logging, housing construction, and other development that can degrade fish and wildlife habitat. In the early 1990s, as part of the pioneering Michigan Natural Rivers program, the state Department of Natural Resources sought to introduce to both streams permanent safeguards to protect their wild and scenic character. That effort, however, was stalled when a small group of private landowners, arguing that new restrictions were unnecessary and a violation of their property rights, eroded local support for the plan.

Now support for implementing basic stream protection along the Pine and Manistee rivers again gains momentum. The Pine River Coalition has partnered with the Upper Manistee River Association and formally organized during the past year a regional campaign to pursue Natural Rivers designation for both the Pine and upper reaches of the Manistee. Currently, 11 citizen organizations, including the Pine River Chapter of Trout Unlimited, actively participate in the effort.

The campaign comes during an extraordinary period of restoration for Michigan’s waterways. The shift to a service-oriented, high-tech economy has prompted a fundamental change in the relationship between citizens and their rivers. In a sharp departure from 19th and 20th century thinking, citizens and elected leaders of the 21st century now understand that well-thought-out river management plans — initiatives that encourage recreation, scenic beauty, as well as fish and wildlife habitat — are essential to a community’s prosperity.

"There is so much to gain," says Rebecca Wodder, president of American Rivers, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit group founded in 1973 to protect and restore the nation’s waterways. "Escalating property values are only the tip of the iceberg. Businesses know they can get an edge if they are headquartered in an appealing area and the combination of sunlit waters, people fishing along the banks, and families canoeing is irresistibly positive. In the tough competition for talented employees, you can be sure companies are on the lookout for appealing water and recreation."

Simply put: People want fishable, swimable, enjoyable waterways. The trend is unmistakable in Michigan, where a river revolution appears to be shifting into high gear. Within the past year:

• Obsolete dams have been removed from celebrated sporting streams like the Pine, near Cadillac, and the Muskegon, as it winds through Big Rapids.

• The city of Jackson brought the Grand River back into the light of day by removing its "cap" — a cement cover built in 1937 that literally entombed the state’s longest river through the city’s central business district.

• Congress designated 18 miles of the Detroit River as North America’s first International Wildlife Refuge. Currently, at least 10 major clean up initiatives work to enhance the Motor City’s most important natural asset.

• And along the Rouge River, another historic southeast Michigan stream, a notable group of public and private stakeholders in the Detroit region continued to restore a once hopelessly polluted river and improve the surrounding land for recreation, preservation, and sensible industrial use.

These and many other ongoing restoration efforts throughout the Great Lakes state confirm that maintaining natural and healthy rivers is a top priority for Michigan residents. Lawmakers anticipated this change in attitude 32 years ago when they passed the Natural River Act. The 1970 law enables the state Department of Natural Resources to work with local communities and maintain pristine rivers by setting reasonable restrictions on home building, brush cutting, logging, and other uses of land along stream banks. As a result of the program, 14 rivers, including the Pere Marquette and the Au Sable in rural northern Michigan, remain unspoiled by pollution and haphazard development.

The Natural Rivers program also has enabled growing metropolitan regions like Grand Rapids to protect and showcase streams such as the Rogue and the Flat as attractive urban amenities, giving them a competitive economic advantage over other areas in the nation without comparable water resources.

And while regions such as west Michigan reap the measurable benefits of practical river protection, communities that neglect their waterways literally pay to restore local streams to something that resembles "natural." Along the Rouge River, for example, more than $500 million dollars have been invested in restoration initiatives since 1992.

Certainly water quality, wildlife habitat, and scenic beauty remain the traditional and central themes of such expensive river projects. But cities have a stake too. Detroit, for example, intends to revitalize its downtown, build stronger, more appealing neighborhoods, and even reverse urban sprawl through improved stream stewardship. By taking advantage of its rivers and its waterfront, as Chicago has already done, Detroit hopes to lure modern corporations and boost its troubled economy principally by providing more attractive places to live, work, and play.

But even as Michigan is in the midst of a river revolution, the future of the Pine and Manistee rivers remains uncertain. To advance Natural Rivers designation, the Pine River Watershed Coalition and the Upper Manistee River Association have drafted a strategy to promote a three-year-old draft Natural Rivers management plan as well as inform citizens, civic leaders, and the media of the challenges and opportunities confronting Michigan’s unique river systems.

Out of their work, they hope, will come a clear and powerful message about the need to curb and improve patterns of development along the state’s most beautiful and ecologically significant streams.

"Natural Rivers designation is the single most important thing we can do to benefit the Pine and Upper Manistee rivers," Dick Shotwell says. "Designation will help preserve the health and pristine beauty of our rivers for years to come."

Michigan has not designated a new Natural River since 1988, when the Upper Peninsula’s Fox River was last designated. Today, 25 streams initially proposed for protection more than three decades ago remain vulnerable to current development trends. But keeping rivers lined with trees, filled with fish, and accessible to the public is a top community priority in Michigan.

"We support designation of the Pine and Upper Manistee river systems," says Steve Sutton, manager of the state’s Natural Rivers program. "The department continues the planning process."

Indeed, protecting the Pine and Upper Manistee rivers with Natural River status is the next logical step in Michigan’s river revolution.

Andrew Guy is an environmental journalist and grassroots organizer based in the Michigan Land Use Institute’s Grand Rapids office. Reach him at <andy@mlui.org>. ",1/21/2002 0:00:00 onclusions drawn from them.

MDOT depends on a series of mathematical models to estimate future travel demand in the Year 2020 and then to calculate Level of Service. However, there are significant flaws in the modeling process that MDOT followed to project Year 2020 traffic volumes. MDOT then uses the models to conclude that the Far-South Alternative and the Intertown-South Alternative would cause traffic to be diverted away from US-31, thereby reducing traffic congestion and providing a better Level of Service on US-31.

The flaws in the models that I discovered are described below. MDOT did not provide either the Michigan Land Use Institute or New Alternatives, Inc. with sufficient documentation about the models to comment on them in a comprehensive manner. Therefore, my review was less that I would have liked and less than a peer review panel would have done. MDOT should prepare a report that describes the models in detail. Such a report would be valuable in Petoskey and throughout Michigan.

4. The Travel Analysis Zones are too large in some parts of the Study Area to satisfactorily project future traffic volumes and the amount of traffic that might be diverted from US-31.

The Study Area is divided into Travel Analysis Zones. In Petoskey, MDOT created 45 Travel Analysis Zones and later created a 46th zone in Resort Township.

In the Petoskey Study carried out by MDOT, the smaller zones are located in the City of Petoskey and the larger zones are located in the rural areas in Resort and Bear Creek Townships. The larger the zone, the more margin there is for errors. Bear in mind that the models assume that everyone in each zone lives and works at the centroid for the zone. Using a centroid for each zone is a simplifying assumption that makes the models easier to work with, but it also reduces the ability of the models to accurately represent real world conditions. The two beltway alignments proposed by MDOT (Far-South and Intertown-South) are located well south of Petoskey in rural areas where MDOT uses large travel analysis zones. Since MDOT wanted to estimate the diversion of traffic from US-31 that might be achieved with different alternatives, they should have designed more travel analysis zones.

Attachment A is a document prepared by MDOT that shows the location of the Travel Analysis Zones. I hand printed the words "Attachment A" on the document, but otherwise, it is unchanged. Notice the north-south length of Zones 13 to 17 and Zone 19. MDOT uses the zones to help analyze how traffic would be diverted from US-31 to the two Build Alternatives. The long north-south dimension of some zones reduces the ability of the models to accurately estimate diversion of traffic from US-31 to either Build Alternative.

5. MDOT’s calibration of the models shows some poor results.

The calibration step is intended to help determine the validity of the models. The basic idea is to use the models to predict a known year, so that the analyst can compare what the model predicts for a base year with the actual traffic volumes that were counted for that year. MDOT used 1990 as the base year. Attachment B is a copy of MDOT’s graphic that shows the ratio of 1990 equilibrium load (what the model predicted) with 1990 ADT (Average Daily Traffic based on actual counts). If this ratio is 1.0 (or close to 1.0), then the model predicted the actual traffic in 1990 with very good accuracy. If this ratio is well below 1.0, then the model under predicted actual traffic. If this ratio is well over 1.0, then the model over predicted actual traffic.

Attachment B shows some serious calibration issues. Intertown Road shows .08 for one link and 1.15 for the next link. MDOT’s Build Alternatives are located near Intertown Road. Having such poor calibration results on Intertown Road 227,"When New Yorkers felt the need to come together to share pain, to seek comfort, and to feel connected on September 11 and every day since, they didn't go to Times Square, the spontaneous gathering spot of great historic events of an earlier time captured in so many iconic photographs. Instead, they gravitated to the public places that have remained traditionally urban — parks, brownstone stoops, neighborhood shopping streets, the local coffee shop or bar. These are the spontaneous gathering spots of a genuinely urban city, the places nearby, around the corner, so accessible on foot, an integral part of our daily lives.

In fear, New Yorkers don't retreat in isolation behind gates and high fences. They seek face-to-face contact. They congregate in impromptu ways. This is one of the hallmarks of a more traditional and far more flexible and vibrant pattern of development. Call it the Old Urbanism. Now as New York springs back, it is proving again the value of Old Urbanism and why it endures.

As America responds to the terrorist attack and considers its full meaning, one lesson that can already be drawn is how the design of New York city’s traditional neighborhoods and intimate public spaces helped to serve a very human need to be together. This lesson is in sharp contrast to the sprawling, wasteful, and out of scale patterns of development that have dominated suburban and city design for half a century and which have the effect of keeping people apart. Moreover, as citizens, public officials, and architects ponder replacing the Twin Towers, it is already clear that a smaller, more intimate, more human-scale design will almost certainly prevail.

Though too much of New York City has been turned over to suburban malls, isolating office complexes, and suburban housing developments, most of New York City nevertheless remains a world class model of Old Urbanism. It is the secret of the city’s resilience, the reason for its endurance, and the heart of the spirit that has the world in awe after such a calamity.

Times Square, for instance, no longer represents the Old Urbanism with its new mall stores, overstuffed office towers, and formula hotels. The historic theaters are the only thing left that is truly New York and even they, like Times Square itself, need a scheduled event to bring people together.

The perfect contrast is Union Square Park, on 14th Street between Broadway and Park Avenue, where so many New Yorkers gathered after the disaster. Thirty years ago, Union Square Park was given up for lost, badly reconfigured to discourage easy access, and overtaken by petty criminals. Then the first Greenmarket opened in 1976, despite official skepticism and resistance.

The Greenmarket, of which there are now more than two dozen around the city, was an innovation of the best kind and remains a national model. The Greenmarket was the catalyst for rejuvenation of this downtrodden neighborhood by bringing a cross section of people to mix and mingle in old urban ways. It attracted first-class restaurants thrilled to have easy access to fresh produce. Lastly, it stimulated the upgrading of so many existing buildings for residential and commercial use and a redesign of the park to make it an even more pedestrian-friendly place. Union Square Park is now is the heart of Silicon Alley, the home and workplace for a generation of young people that might have been lost to the city.

And so at the time of the city's greatest need, people gathered in Union Square Park. Some came just to be in a public place, to express rage or to display their patriotism. A statue of George Washington served as a shrine where candles, flowers, photos, and notes could be left in honor and in memory of those lost.

Nobody except the terrorists could have predicted that the World Trade Center would become the tomb for 5,000 people. But well before the attack, the Twin Towers were widely viewed as the city's backdrop, not its heart. To many New Yorkers, those buildings were inhuman in s232,"NATURAL RESOURCES
COMMISSION
KEITH J. CHARTERS, Chair
JIM CAMPBELL
NANCY A. DOUGLAS
PAUL EISELE
BOB GARNER
WILLIAM U. PARFET
FRANK WHEATLAKE
STATE OF MICHIGAN
JOHN ENGLER, Governor

DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES

STEVENS T MASON BUILDING, PO BOX 30028, LANSING MI 48909-7528
WEBSITE: www.michigandnr.com
K. L. COOL, Director

Adoption of Procedures Related to Oil and Gas Leasing
Statement by: Director K. L. Cool
Date: September 14, 2001
Location: Natural Resources Commission Meeting at Waterloo Recreation Area
----------------------------------------------------------
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has an 80-year history of caring for this State's natural resources. Our employees are conservationists. They are scientists who have devoted their careers in public service to appropriate management of Michigan's natural resources. They are committed to making the "Right Decision" - not the politically correct decision. They care deeply about our public trust responsibilities to safeguard natural resources and assure outdoor users a quality environment.

The public respects this agency and supports our management decisions. In a recent poll Michigan Citizens gave our agency a 68% public approval rating (only 8 % disapproval) for our management of natural resources.

Today these same scientists and career conservationists recommend that we resume leasing of oil and gas by directional drilling under the Great Lakes. They cite science based experience and have worked hard to develop new state of the art procedures with the input of the environmental community and the oil and gas industry that ensure that best possible methods are used and regulations are enforced to insure public and environmental safety.

As you know oil and gas development under the bottomlands of the Great Lakes has been a successful ongoing regulated activity for decades. Records reflect that the first Michigan lease issued for the development of oil and gas under the bottomlands of the Great Lakes was issued in 1945. Currently the bottomlands leasing program including the seven producing bottomland wells have contributed more than $17 million dollars to the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund (MNRTF).

Hydrocarbon development from beneath the bottomlands of the Great Lakes is not a venture limited to the confines of the State of Michigan. Since 1913, Canada has drilled more than 2,200 wells in Lake Erie and continues to drill an average of 20 new wells each year in the Lake without negative environmental impact.

Revenue from the development of State owned minerals is the sole source of funding the MNRTF. Since the inception of the Trust Fund in 1976 more than $400 million dollars have been provided to State and local units of government to acquire and protect environmentally sensitive and special lands for this and future generations to enjoy.

Current projections indicate that up to an additional $100 million dollars could be deposited into the MNRTF from leasing and development of bottomlands. Our Department must, by Constitutional responsibility, manage the oil and gas leasing program in a sound, business-like manner as well as protect and manage the State's natural resources.

As you also know, the DNR ceased the leasing of Great Lakes bottomlands in 1997 to conduct a comprehensive review of our leasing process. At the same time, the Michigan Environmental Science Board (MESB), at the request of Governor Engler, initiated a study of the technical, environmental and social issues associated with directional drilling. The MESB report concluded "...that there is little to no risk of contamination to the Great Lakes bottom or waters through the releases directly above the bottom hole portion of directionally drilled wells into Niagaran Reef and deeper reservoirs." They did not recommend a ban on drilling under the Great Lakes.

The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore awes people with its rolling dunes, sweeping expanses of fields and historic farmsteads, and glittering blue water.

At issue is how to protect a truly unique maritime and agricultural landscape while providing the public access to towering freshwater dunes, clear water, and thick hardwood and conifer forests.

The Michigan Land Use Institute, in July, carefully evaluated the Park Service proposal and submitted its comments. The Institute recommends the National Park Service adopt Alternative 2, which emphasizes protecting the lakeshore’s stunning and unique natural resources above any other priority. The Institute is convinced that this is the best management strategy. As northwest Michigan becomes more densely populated, it is essential to protect unique wild places and manage natural resources thoughtfully, responsibly, and carefully.

The Institute supports alternative 2 because it:

• Gives prominence to the natural integrity of the landscape and protects the unique lakeshore environment.

• Discourages activities that would irrevocably alter the natural environment, such as constructing or paving new roads.

• Continues to promote public access but does so in more centralized, highly trafficked, and popular destinations — the Dune Climb, Platte River Campground and Picnic Area, D.H. Day Campground, and Glen Haven.

• Discourages high impact activities in sensitive and unique areas of the lakeshore.

Historic farmsteads in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore tell a story of the land and give visitors a strong sense of place and more intimate understanding of northwest Michigan.

The Institute urged the Park Service to carefully consider any action that alters the natural landscape and recommended that the Park Service not build or pave more roads, or construct more facilities. The Institute also made several more recommendations to:

• Protect the irreplaceable cultural and historic resources in the lakeshore, such as Port Oneida Rural Historic Area, the Tweedle and Treat farms, and the Bufka, Kropp, and Eitzen farms.

• Continue to improve and promote access to the lakeshore’s magnificent natural areas but ensure that this does not come at the expense or the degradation of the lakeshore’s unique ecological and historic resources. To maintain one of the largest remaining dune landscapes in the country the Park Service needs to consider how some of the alternatives — including paving parking lots, building more facilities, opening up access in natural areas — will affect air and water quality and the overall environmental quality of the lakeshore.

• Consider the use of hybrid or electric shuttles between recreation areas or through the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive. As greater numbers of people visit the lakeshore, alternative public transit opportunities are energy-efficient and cleaner means for bringing more people into the lakeshore without degrading its unique resources.

• Place a greater emphasis on finding creative ways to offer the public educational and interpretive opportunities in the lakeshore without constructing new buildings.

• Acquire as much property near the current park boundary lines as possible, such as the Point Betsie Lighthouse, the North Manitou Shoal Light, North and South Fox Island, Fishtown, etc.

The National Park Service is entrusted with preserving and protecting Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore’s majestic and irreplaceable natural landscape. This is an important and challenging respon235,"
One of metropolitan Detroit's remarkable qualities is its resiliency. The region's automobile industry, downtowns, and even its professional sports teams have gone through deep downturns only later to attain world-class status.

Likewise, southeast Michigan is strengthening its global competitiveness with plans for a 21st-century public transit system. Officials have gained substantial ground in advancing a regional rapid bus proposal that promises to better connect workers and employers, cut through congestion, and keep a lid on the escalating costs of maintaining roads and relying so heavily on cars.

The initiative calls for double-length buses running in express lanes, weatherproof shelters, and on-board technology to turn traffic signals green as buses approach. The challenge before leaders of the seven-county area is to stay onboard rather than halt progress out of funding fears and concerns about political control.

The rapid bus proposal, known as Speedlink, comes at an opportune moment in southeast Michigan and in Lansing. In the days before the state Legislature adjourned in December 2001, lawmakers in both houses approved several proposals that promote transportation options aside from cars and should improve Speedlink’s chances of being built. One measure, approved by both chambers and signed by Republican Governor John Engler, adds $7.5 million to the state budget for public transit. A second measure, which was approved by the House, would establish a southeast Michigan regional transportation authority to join the Detroit and Oakland county bus system and better coordinate public transit in the region.

Economic power — nationally and globally — is a key reason why the state and metro Detroit's political, business, and grassroots leaders have reached the final phase of the complex and promising initiative to build a rapid bus line. There really is no other choice, say many business leaders, if Detroit and its suburbs hope to remain economically competitive with other urban regions.

Indeed, cities across America have steered around thorny political obstacles and crafted convenient and cost-effective rapid transit systems to become more attractive to the world's workers, entrepreneurs and tourists. In the Midwest alone, Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and even Racine, Wisconsin, have built or are developing express bus or train service.

Detroit, however, remains the nation's largest metro area without rapid transit. As a result, the federal government transfers about $100 million of Michigan's annual federal transit taxes — paid by everyone who buys gasoline — to cities in other states that are building or expanding rapid transit lines.

Still, politicians in Oakland and Macomb counties worry that if property taxes become the only funding source for the proposed bus system, then the high-end suburbs would pay a disproportionate share. Early concepts, however, move away from a property millage and suggest some combination of local income, sales, and payroll taxes to get things rolling. Plus, voters in southeast Michigan will have the final say on any new taxes. With so much to gain economically and socially, suburban leaders have no reason to slam on the brakes.

Nearly everyone else sees the promise of the metro Detroit transit plan. The Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Metropolitan Affairs Coalition — an alliance of labor, government, and prominent businesses — are architects of the rapid bus initiative. Detroit's new mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was a strong transit advocate during his state legislative career. Even the Big Three automakers have endorsed the campaign.

Much of the credit goes to citizen groups — such as the Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES) and Transportation Riders United — who have promoted top-flight transit to revitalize neighborhoods and city centers.

Building a metro Detroit rapid transit system would cost about $2 billion over 25 years, plus $200 million annually to operate. The federal government would pay 50 to 80 percent of construction costs. The state and local communities would contribute the remaining amount to build and run the system. With the funding issue as the last major hill to climb, southeast Michigan is well on its way toward reaching its transit destination and solidifying its place as a world leader in taking people where they want to go.

In the last century, Detroit's fortune rose and fell with the strength of General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrylser. That interdependence indeed might thrive for another 100 years. It's all the more reason to heed this statement by the Big Three automakers:

"We want to reiterate our support for public transit in Southeast Michigan. An effective regional transit system is important in connecting workers with jobs, serving a rapidly aging population, and in reducing traffic congestion, which has a positive effect on the environment."

Kelly C. Thayer, an environmental journalist, is transportation project coordinator at the Michigan Land Use Institute in Beulah. A version of this article was published by the Detroit News on December 16, 2001. Kelly is reachable at kelly@mlui.org. For more insightful reporting and commentary on land use and transportation, see the Institute's Transportation Index.
",1/4/2002 0:00:00 ase language to ensure that it expressly provides that issuance of the lease, even after an environmental assessment, does not necessarily represent a final decision by the state that drilling in that area is environmentally or legally permissible and that the issuance of drilling permits is subject to a separate and independent review.

Member Organizations	Contact		City	Telephone
Ann Arbor Transportation Authority (AATA)	Mr.	Greg Cook	Ann Arbor	(734) 677-3902
Arc of Livingston County	Ms.	Sherri Boyd	Howell	(517) 546-1228
Capital Area Transportation Authority (CATA)	Ms.	Nichole Lam	Lansing	(517) 394-1100
Center for Independent Living — Mid Michigan	Ms.	Terry Cady	Midland	(989) 835-4041
Coalition for Sensible Growth	Mr.	Ken Smith	Traverse City	(231) 947-3280
Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice (DWEJ)	Ms.	Donelle Wilkens	Detroit	(313) 821-1064
Disability Advocates of Kent County	Mr.	David Bulkowski	Grand Rapids	(616) 949-1100
Disability Awareness Center for Independent Living	Mr.	Jennifer Faunt	Muskegon	(231) 830-0099
East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC)	Ms.	Heather Northway	Bloomfield Hills	(248) 258-5189
Environmental Law & Policy Center of the Midwest (ELPC)	Mr.	Shannon Fisk	Chicago	(312) 673-6500
Faith in Motion	Rev.	Andrew DeBraber	Grand Rapids	(616) 774-9037
Goodwill Industries of Greater Grand Rapids, Inc.	Ms.	Susan Dobbs	Grandville	(616) 532-4200 ext. 105
Huron Land Use Alliance	Ms.	Brenda Bentley-Goenka	Ann Arbor	(734) 662-4735
Huron River Watershed Council	Ms.	Laura Rubin	Ann Arbor	(734) 769-5123
Interurban Transit Partnership (ITP)	Mr.	Jim Fetzer	Grand Rapids	(616) 774-1187
Kalamazoo Handicappers United	Ms.	Diane Kempen	Kalamzoo	(616) 349-0058
Lakeshore Center for Independent Living	Ms.	Aimee Sterk	Holland	(616) 396-5326 x104
League of Michigan Bicyclists (LMB)	Ms.	Lucinda Means	Lansing	(517) 334-9100
Metropolitan Organizing Strategy for Enabling Strength (M.O.S.E.S.)	Ms.	Vicki Kovari	Detroit	(313) 341-7844
Michigan Assoc. of Railroad Passengers (MARP)	Mr.	John DeLora	St. Clair Shores	(313) 882-8132
Michigan Association of Centers for Independent Living (MACIL)	Ms	Elizabeth O'Hara	Haslett	(517) 339-0539
Michigan Environmental Council (MEC)	Ms.	Conan Smith	Lansing	(517) 487-9539
Michigan Land Use Institute (MLUI)	Mr.	Kelly Thayer	Beulah	(231) 882-4723
Michigan Resource Stewards	Mr.	Bill Murphy	East Lansing	(517) 333-8486
National Wildlife Federation/ Great Lakes Natural Resource Center	Mr.	Guy Williams	Ann Arbor	(734) 769-3351
Oakland and Macomb Center for Independent Living	Ms.	Susan Marsh	Lathrup Village	(248) 443-1306
Public Interest Research Group in Michigan (PIRGIM)	Mr.	Brian Imus	Ann Arbor	(734) 662-6597
Rails-to-Trails Conservancy Michigan Field Office	Ms.	Nancy Krupiarz	Lansing	(517) 485-6022
Scenic Michigan	Ms.	Debbie Rohe	Petoskey	(231) 347-7327
Transportation Action Strategy for Kalamazoo County (TASK)	Mr.	Dave DeRight	Kalamazoo	(269) 345-1018
Transportation Riders United (TRU)	Ms.	Karen D. Kendrick-Hands	Grosse Pointe Park	(313) 885-7588
United Cerebral Palsy of Michigan (UCP)	Mr.	Kevin Wisselink	Lansing	(517) 203-1200
West Michigan Environmental Action Council (WMEAC)	Mr.	Thom Peterson	Grand Haven	(616) 846-8875,
West Michigan Region Environmental Network	Ms.	Cynthia Price	Muskegon	(616) 784-9942
West Michigan Child and Family Leadership Council	Ms.	Mary Reilly	Ludington	(231) 843-5478
Member Families/Individuals	Contact		City	Telephone
Hands/Kendrick-Hands Family	Mr.	Stephen Hands	Grosse Pointe Park	(313) 885-7588
Lesley, John	Mr.	John Lesley	Kalamazoo	(616) 343-7363 • (616) 343-8772
Rohe Family	Ms. & Mr.	Debbie & John Rohe	Petoskey	(231) 347-8853
Sebring, Lois	Ms.	Lois Sebring	Comstock Park	(231) 347-8853

Justices Support Wetlands Protection

Introduction and Contributers