City Should Consider More Cooperation with County, Entrepreneurship
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All over the country states, counties and municipalities are finding ways to cut costs.
Indiana is looking at consolidating its 1,000 townships; Nebraska may cut in half its 93 counties; Missouri may go to a four-day work week.
The longest recession since the Great Depression is in its death throes, we hope, but its effects are continuing to be felt in Michigan, and in the tri-county Great Lakes Bay Region, especially severely.
In Bay City, Manager Robert V. Belleman says under present conditions core services cannot be preserved. There just isn't enough money.
Population is declining, property values are tanking, state revenue sharing is tepid, etc., etc.
We all know the story; the world is changing and jobs either aren't coming back or they pay only subsistence wages.
It's a vastly different world than in the 1950s and 1960s when Bay City was on top of the industrial world with shipbuilding, auto parts, textiles, chemicals, and good wages prevailed.
Now, the world has changed and the city hasn't kept pace. Key institutions in the city are on the ropes, police and fire departments have been cut to the bone and only essential services will survive.
Bay County has been lean for years, has reduced its employee rolls and has been able to avoid tax increases.
The factor we find most disturbing is the city's propensity to hire consultants for nearly every function of government where it doesn't have a staff expert.
We have a millionaire's appetite on a pauper's budget.
The first thought is somebody from out of town, a nationally known firm, or at least one that has state level credentials.
Remember we needed a consultant to tell us which one of four fire stations to close. We paid somebody good money for that!
Starting with the attitude that staff can't handle most important jobs is a bad premise, in our opinion.
It's hard to justify the $500,000 or so the city spent on consultants for the Uptown at RiversEdge project when we are cutting fire and police services.
We have pushed for years to have the city become more entrepreneurial, to expand its power system and make it more profitable.
There have been ideas bandied about like a city run cable television system; many residents we have spoken with have expressed the desire to sign up and pay the city, if that would help local finances, rather than pay a huge corporation.
Mr. Belleman appears to be a highly competent technocrat, an efficient controller of the financial and technical aspects of his job. If he leaves, as apparently is his intent, we will be hard-pressed to find a competent replacement.
But if and when that day arrives -- and we have little doubt it is on the horizon -- we should rethink our municipal culture, starting with the mayor and city commission.
The first thought when a problem, an issue or a project arises should be: is there anybody on staff that can do this job? We are already paying them, very well in most cases. Why can't most of these consultant projects be handled in-house?
Next, if city staff can't handle the project, is there anybody at the county who can do it? The city and county should have a working agreement for sharing staff or cooperative work on projects.
We the taxpayers are paying people to figure out how to spend our money to hire other people from out of town to do the jobs we hired the staff group to do, aren't we?
Let's use our human resources wisely and maximize their efficiency. And, why can't the state government do some of these jobs? They're being paid by the taxpayers, too.
Lastly, let's think about what our local residents need that the city can furnish: cable television comes to mind first. We already have the poles and the wires, and we have our own television channel, too, thanks to a cooperative venture between the city, county and schools started more than 15 years ago.
Scour the world for ideas about what other governments are doing, services they are providing. Power generation could be enhanced by burning trash, and there have been some ideas along those lines in Bay City.
Wood is a commodity now, and the city should be selling the forest products it cleans off the landscape rather than giving it away. Also, wood could be burned in a power generating mode, saving more money.
The city might profit by improving one of its most important assets: its housing stock. Local developer Dr. Steven Ingersoll is showing the way by restoring old houses and buildings long since given up for dead. He is helping to revitalize parts of the city that have been written off most real estate interests.
Jim Reid, Tom LaPorte, Paul Rowley, Bill Gregory, Art Dore -- all have invested hard dollars in redeveloping Bay City from a 1950s industrial boomtown to a place where downtown living and tourism can create a new culture.
These hardy investors need support from the city and the city needs to do its job better, more efficiently and more entrepreneurially if we all are to prosper.
So, why can't the city expand its program of housing rehabilitation by exponential factors? There is money to be made and the city can improve itself immensely by focusing on housing stock, classic buildings, parks, cemeteries, neighborhoods, etc.
There are thousands the unemployed and ex-prisoners, some with viable skills, that could be put to work on repairing foreclosed homes that could be sold and bring money into city coffers. Grant money has already been received, or is available, for this process. It just needs to be jump-started and expanded to meet the needs of the time.
The idea of firefighters expanding their role as emergency responders has some additional merit, we think. Can the city find a revenue source there and provide more personnel to do the jobs the populace needs?
Can the police and fire functions be combined and will the employees be more amenable to that idea? Perhaps that can be explored further since jobs are being lost in the environment we have today.
In short, we need a new spirit of cooperation, of doing for ourselves what we have been hiring others to do. We need to expand the profitability of every asset we have to survive the economic tsunami we are experiencing.
Tourism can be expanded and more intensely promoted. A good start has been made on signage projects seeded in part with grant dollars. We have excursion boats running and attractions we haven't even thought of -- churches, 19th century buildings like the Masonic Temple, the Consistory Cathedral, City Hall itself! People will pay to tour those buildings, buses will come and folks from other parts will go away amazed.
Others will come and bring their dollars. There's no reason why we can't emulate Frankenmuth that did it all with family style chicken dinners. If three million folks a year can eat chicken, maybe a like number can come here and eat Polish sausage.
So we can reverse the flow of dollars out and get the funds flowing in. That's the basic culture change we need to make to survive and thrive, in our opinion. ###
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