Leelanau Grand Vision

Anna, a few years ago, in the garden, eating peas and offering them to her dog

I participated in the Leelanau Grand Vision workshop at Suttons Bay School last night. A lot of other people participated as well; the venue was packed and the presenters seemed a little overwhelmed by the crowd. The idea was to gather input from the community our how we would prefer to see our area grow, and then use that to formulate a coordinated plan for the Grand Traverse area. Our elected officials can then refer to this plan when they are making decisions about zoning, transportation, energy, and other infrastructure.

I found out that I'm not that much into scenery. Or maybe that my idea of scenery is a lot broader than other people's idea of scenery. They started out by giving us a score sheet and asking us to give our first reactions to a series of outdoor scenes. Much of the audience was murmuring in approval or tsking in disapproval at various pictures. I was in the back, and couldn't see that well, but all I saw was buildings, grass, and trees. Or sometimes grass, trees, and buildings. My responses were all in the middle range. There was one picture of a vineyard, but no gardens, no playgrounds, no livestock, no orchards, none of the scenes that I find pretty or restful. It was like they looked at Leelanau through the eyes of a suburbanite and couldn't see anything else. (The photo above is closer to my idea of nice looking scenery.)

But that was that. The next part was the part where we got together with the people at our table and plotted the next 50 year's growth on a giant map of the county. Or a giant map of most of the county, as our map did not have Peshawbestown, the National Lakeshore, or the gravel pits in Kasson denoted. The group at my table included three younger people, one full time farmer, one part time farmer, three people from Northport, two from Suttons Bay, two people who worked with the Leelanau Conservancy, and a master gardener. Our group spent a good deal of time plotting out the best farmland in the county, then plotting out the Lakeshore and Pere Marquette Forest, then the critical bird habitat on the tip of the penninsula. After that, we were supposed to figure out where 20,000 more people were going to live, and how to get them the goods, jobs and services they would need.

We started out brainstorming a list of what we wanted for the future. We wanted everything --a protected environment, vibrant villages, open shorelines, broadband access, local food chains. The younger people wanted to walk everywhere -- to work, to shop -- or they wanted to ride bikes. The lady next to me kept saying "Ban Cars! No Motorized Traffic!" and I couldn't tell if she was serious or sarcastic. I threw out my own far-fetched idea, calling for small scale alternative energy -- wind and solar -- with a smart grid so that households could sell excess power back and local electricity storage so that our county could be self sufficient in electricity.

The people of our future were at least going to eat. We were given stickers that represented one household for every five acres, and we could trade stickers in to get fewer stickers representing higher densities. It was clear that if we let everyone have the 5 acre mini-estate, we would end up cutting up farmland and crowding out critical habitats. We would also end up with a scattered population that would be far from the village centers and harder to serve. But it was hard to envision any of our current villages absorbing even one whole sticker's worth of people, so we took the higher density stickers, cut them up, and shoehorned them in around the existing villages. That all took a lot of time, especially the part where we debated the exact size of an economically viable farm. So we quickly sketched in some light rail transit lines to connect the villages and drew in a few (not enough) bikes trails and Table 19's contribution was complete.

I had to be the presenter. (I always have to be the presenter.) The various tables had a host of different problems that they were trying to solve. Some groups were trying to move cars -- several groups proposed a bridge across South Lake Leelanau from Hohnke Road to Bingham; one group wanted to make M-22 one way north and Center Highway one way south. Several groups were trying to move people, and were plotting ferry routes. One guy said that he had already located some vintage ferry boats in good condition and made an appeal for investors in a new ferry business. One group made a vastly expanded Suttons Bay village the focus of their planning. One group presented their map with a bunch of population stickers out in the Bay. When asked for an explanation, they said "We didn't know where to put them." A guy in the crowd said, "I guess they just have to sink or swim."

Since we were last (I wasn't going to wait in line) I talked about the things that the other groups hadn't mentioned. I said that we were interested in food first so we had plotted out farmland first and shoehorned the populations around that. I got applause by saying, "We need broadband access everywhere." and more applause talking about small scale alternative energy. So I went out on a limb and spoke about dark skies, my own favorite sort of scenery. Finally I said, "Our table, like everyone here, likes the county the way it is, but we're willing to be flexible, so that others can enjoy what we have."

I'm not sure if that last statement was exactly true, exactly yet, but it can't hurt to portray ourselves as less selfish and more interested in the common good. Sometimes people learn to live up to their reputations.

Leelanau Farm Preservation Board to be Axed?

Well, how do you like that?

Not even a week after the County Operations Millage was passed, promising to "preserve all county services", the Board of Commissioners voted to ax the Farmland Preservation Board, citing the defeat of the Farmland Preservation millage as evidence that the public does not value farmland preservation.

After it became clear that we would have to go for the operations millage I withdrew from the Farmland campaign. I ended up talking about Farmland Preservation, anyway, because people had so many questions about it. This is how I described these conversations in a letter to my County Commissioner:

I spoke to many people who were conflicted about the Farmland Preservation millage. They supported Farmland Preservation efforts but they thought that the millage was too much and for too long. They had practical questions about how the program would work. They wondered if it could be done cheaper. They wondered about a plan that had been designed before all of the talk about the burst of the "housing bubble". People had good questions, but the Farmland campaign was long on scenery and short on details.

I told people that a yes vote on the Operations Millage was supporting the Farmland Preservation Board. If they couldn't support the Farmland Preservation millage, they could still support the preservation effort by voting for the Operations Millage. I told them that the Farmland movement had a lot of momentum, and that if this farmland millage plan was voted down, they would no doubt come up with a more refined (and probably leaner) plan. The Farmland Preservation Board would still be at work, because that was one of the county services that we were saving.

Indeed, that is what we promised, that a yes vote on the Operations Millage would preserve all current county services. With a 90 vote margin, I don't think we can discount any constituency, even farmland preservation proponents.

I feel used. I don't like putting my time and reputation on the line for people who can't do what they said they were going to do a week ago. And it's amazing to me that the Commissioners didn't hear the same sense of conflict about the Farmland millage that I heard.

No, It's Not About the Courthouse

I'll admit, it was the first thing out of my mouth, too.

"You mean they're building that brand new building but we can't afford to pay people to work there?"

I never liked the idea of moving the courthouse. The new jail bugs me, but the old jail (our current 4-H office) was obviously too small, cut up like a mouse maze, and falling apart.

It is true that we helped balance the county budget for the last four years by drawing on the interest on the building fund, and that we could have put off this vote for a year or two more if we had put off building. But we would have built anyway, eventually, and the building fund would have been depleted no matter where we built. (Check out this Enterprise article from 2001 , predicting a one mill tax increase if the courthouse stayed in Leland)

It is true that we are paying off the bond that financed the new jail, in the amonut of $4.5 million per year. This is a new expense, and part of the budget shortfall. It made sense to finance the jail with a bond because interest rates were so low at that point. But (according to Bob Hawley) the cost of running the new jail, even with its empty beds, is about the same as running the old one when you factor in the money we used to spent to house overflow prisoners in Benzie County.

People who tell me that they hope the millage fails so that we have to stop construction on the new courthouse need to get a grip on reality. We had a referendum on whether to move the county seat and the majority of voters agreed to move. The County Commissioners cannot undo that vote.

"If we stopped construction tomorrow......", as various people have suggested, we would still need to do something about our aging and cramped courthouse. We would still lack revenues to cover our expenses. We would still need the operations millage.

I was interviewed by the Record-Eagle yesterday, in the middle of baking a pumpkin pie. We talked for about 15 minutes with the end result being a two sentence quote. I'm relieved that I wasn't quoted out of context, but somewhat disappointed that there was not more interest in the underlying tax policies. Sometimes I feel like a geek.

Chickens vs Condos

I wish the Leelanau Enterprise had posted the story, but I'll just have to tell it myself.

On March 30th, the Enterprise ran a front page story about a complaint that had been lodged by the local sales manager of the new condominium project in Suttons Bay. It seems that the neighboring farm includes chickens, some of which are crowing roosters. The sales manager complained to the village council that:

It is constantly crowing, which in turn is making it difficult to show that particular property (to prospective buyers). I understand that our neighbors are not zoned to have a farm on that property, yet they have several chickens, ducks, and a rooster in a pen, located near the water.

It is hard to figure out what she was thinking. She must not be too familiar with small town life. Village officials responded quite confidently that the chickens were OK. To quote village manager Chuck Stewart:

That farm has been there for about 150 years. I'd say it predates our zoning ordinance by well over a century. Besides, there's nothing in the village zoning that prohibits anyone from keeping chickens within the village limits. Several families keep chickens, one family has goats, and another even keeps horses inside the village. This is Northern Michigan, after all, and we're proud of our agricultural heritage.

The sales manager should use the poultry as a selling point. Fresh Eggs Next Door! Around the same time that this story broke, I was hosting web ads for Omlet USA, a backyard chicken supplier that custom ships a utra-fashionable coop with hens right to your home. I was especially taken with their page of fashion magazines with articles on backyard chickens. Chic chicks!

I guess the poor woman really didn't figure that her complaint would not only be spurned, but would run on the front page of the Enterprise. Even I was surprised about the letters to the editor, three weeks running, on this issue. They seemed to have tapped a deep vein of discontent towards people who want to move to Leelanau because it is so "unique" and then set out to change it to be more like everyplace else.

Known Books has posted a page of Suttons Bay Roosterisms.