The Lively Lowdown

 
Megan Olds leaves COG, joins GTRLC

With more than 1,700 local units of government, Michigan is not a state that readily embraces regional planning. Local control is fervently defended. No big government bureaucrat will tell us how to plan our communities.

It’s tough to be a regional planning director in Michigan. I know that only too well after working more than 9 years at the Northwest Michigan Council of Governments in that position. I’m sure my departure in 1999 was applauded by many local officials who thought I was pushing too many ‘wild’ ideas about coordinated planning and zoning.

So I appreciate a regional planner who can get the job done while not raising the ire of the local officials who enjoy the control of being the boss of their backyard – and the limited pay and benefits that come with it.

Megan Olds was regional planning director at the Northwest Michigan Council of Governments for the past seven years and she did a masterful job advancing better planning in the region without antagonizing county officials. Unfortunately, just last week she left to take a job with the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy as director of communications.

It is a loss for the region – although a coup for the Conservancy. Under Megan’s guidance, the Council of Governments had many notable accomplishments: they partnered with the Chamber to reinvigorate New Designs for Growth, helped guide the upcoming Grand Traverse Area Land Use and Transportation Study (LUTS), took over the regional Benchmarks Northwest community quality of life assessment, produced a regular regional economic development strategy and convened countless planning and zoning workshops with an emphasis on voluntary intergovernmental coordination.

It is especially difficult to lose Megan’s proficiency at intergovernmental coordination just as the region is moving into a world-class regional visioning and planning process. The Northwest Michigan Council of Governments must play an important – albeit quiet - leadership role in advancing regional coordination on land use planning. Megan was adept at finding the right balance between protecting her agency – and job- by staying below the radar and yet tackling some of the key issues that this rapidly growing region needs to work on.

Good luck, Megan in your new career at the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy. Certainly you will excel at that fine organization. Here’s hoping that the Northwest Michigan Council of Governments continues to play a strong role in convening local governments around a regional vision.

One of Meijer’s stores that markets itself as a “higher standard.”

I want to like Meijer. They are a Michigan-based company. They treat their employees better than Wal-Mart treats theirs. They even sell fruits and vegetables grown by local farmers.

But they flat-out refuse to respect Acme Township’s right to manage growth and maintain small-town character. And in the Traverse City area, where growth threatens to overwhelm us, that’s just too important to ignore.

So my family has agreed: We’ll no longer shop at Meijer.

Acme Township is trying hard to do the right thing in the face of the coming onslaught of commercial and residential development. Ten years ago, residents spent thousands of hours planning, approving, and formally adopting a Smart Growth design for their township that would concentrate growth into a small "town center" and help protect their lovely countryside from unwise development.

Meijer Inc. has owned land in Acme Township for more than 15 years, and its officials are very familiar with Acme’s master plan. They knew that Acme was looking for something special. But despite flowery language in a letter to Acme residents claiming to be a good neighbor, Meijer, a $13 billion-a-year company, maintains that it will somehow lose money by cooperating with residents’ plainly stated wishes and needs.

When Acme officials approved a new Meijer store, but placed modest conditions on its design, how did the company respond? It got personal in a very bullying way, suing not only the township, but also the township’s trustees as individual, private citizens. It then helped promote a recall election for all the trustees, who were—and still are—following both the letter and spirit of the law.

All of this after trustees voted to invest 50,000 township tax dollars in a world-class design team that could help make Meijer’s design a better fit with the community master plan. Meijer flatly refused to participate.

The good news is that Meijer’s bullying tactics are failing. The company has lost every one of its lawsuits against the township and saw 60 percent of township voters reject the recall proposal.

But that hasn’t stopped these so-called "good neighbors." Rather than following the advice of Circuit Court Judge Phillip Rogers to stop fighting the township and work with them, Meijer officials continue to run up big legal bills for township taxpayers and introduce more havoc into the personal and civic lives of the trustees: The company is stubbornly appealing its most recent failed lawsuit against the township and its personal suits against the township officials.

So that’s it for us. We’re not shopping at Meijer any more. For all their rhetoric about "higher standards," they are only interested in making a buck at the expense of our region’s beauty. If you think that we should fight for our right to make sure that new development preserves community character, you might consider not shopping there, too.

Nearly two years ago, 34 people, including yours truly, formed a new community group with a big mission: launch a Land Use and Transportation Study that would allow people in the Grand Traverse region to work together to figure out how they want the area to grow in the coming decades. We were appointed to the LUTS steering committee because each of us is a “community stakeholder” representing a certain group of people with a stake in our community: realtors, environmentalists, business people, government officials, and so on.

Two years later, still no study under way, and people are asking: What’s the big holdup?

Even for many of us on the LUTS committee, the progress has seemed achingly slow—as if we’d never get started.

But let’s step back and consider a little local history.

Just three years ago, the folks who are now working as a team to launch LUTS were bitter opponents in a battle over a proposal to put a bypass, complete with a big bridge, through the Boardman River valley. When the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality found that the studies supporting the bridge were flawed, pro-bypassers agreed to work with anti-bypassers to figure out the best way to deal with the traffic congestion that the bypass was supposed to relieve.

So, while everyone saw the wisdom of working together, for the first few months the level of trust in the room was so low that even agreeing on an agenda could take an hour.

Another thing that really slowed us down was the decision to use formal consensus, not voting, to make group decisions. That is because, when your position loses by even one vote, you’re closed out and your voice is silenced because the other side “won.” It doesn’t make for good, cooperative decision-making.

So, I’m proud to say, our group received formal training in consensus, and uses a facilitator who’s expert in the technique.

Consensus takes longer because it requires every member to be in agreement—or at least agree to ‘stand aside’—before the group can adopt a proposal. But we have found that the extra time the consensus process requires actually saves time later by avoiding conflicts later on.

We also had the mixed blessing of $3.3 million in Federal Highway Administration money to fund the study. It’s good money, but it comes attached to both federal and state procedures—including those of the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT). We managed to navigate those mysterious waters and select a world-class consulting team last November. But we’ve been stuck in a holding pattern ever since, while MDOT bureaucrats who are used to reviewing paving contracts try to understand what it is they need to approve.
 
Yes, it’s taking a long time. But we’re doing it right.

You know that sinking feeling we get driving by our favorite orchard and seeing rows of new houses replacing cherry trees? Or when we shop at ugly, new, big-box stores for low prices even though we know we are helping to drive small, local stores out of business? Or when we find ourselves stuck in long lines of traffic just trying to get home for dinner—or take the kids to the beach?

LUTS—the Land Use and Transportation Study—can help us get rid of that feeling for good. LUTS may be an unfortunate acronym, but it stands for what will be the most important, sophisticated regional visioning and planning process Grand Traverse—or any other part of Michigan—has ever seen.

Hopefully, it will get a better, more memorable name when it finally gets rolling, because every citizen that cares about the Grand Traverse region needs to know about this historic opportunity to guide growth in our region for decades to come.

Lots of growth is coming to this area--lots. By 2020, the 5-county region will add 50,000 more residents to the more than 150,000 that live here today. If we don’t take our civic responsibility for community planning to heart, this place that we love so much (no one who lives here secretly wishes they could get out—except a few 17 year olds!) will lose its luster.

LUTS will allow us to figure out where to put the newcomers to the region without screwing up our beautiful home. It will invite us to collaborate as a region, instead of competing as isolated townships and villages. LUTS will map out future growth that is fiscally, socially and environmentally sound. Using cutting-edge technology, some of the nation’s leading community planning experts will help us look beyond fights about re-zonings, strip malls, and highway widenings and see the big picture.

LUTS will show us which community investments will lead to the growth we want; which will lead us to more new housing in cherry orchards, more big-box malls, and more lousy traffic; which areas we should preserve forever; and which areas we should develop.

Most importantly, though, LUTS will be profoundly democratic. It will remove the politics and decision-making power from local officials who may or may not get what the community really wants, and place it squarely in the hands of citizens who care enough about our region’s future to become actively involved “LUTS stakeholders.”

It’s pretty simple: The more people get involved, the better LUTS will work. Unless everyone contributes and sets the highest, best community standards, we will be left with merely the sum total of everyone’s self-interest—which looks a lot like South Airport Road or Chums Corners.

We can do better. With LUTS, we will, because it will be up to us.