A proposal to safeguard the land and life of northwest Michigan

I. Executive Summary
Population growth and government policies encouraging the development of natural resources are altering the land and quickening the pace of life in the small towns of northwest Michigan. Although community groups have formed to contend with the development, their challenges amount to a mismatch. Business executives and government officials, accustomed to confrontation and armed with data and money, easily defend their plans and generally wear down critics.

What is needed is both a new logic for how to integrate economic opportunities into a working rural landscape, and a technically-qualified, well-financed group of land use experts to help grassroots groups organize and manage their campaigns.

The proposed Michigan Land Use Institute, based in Benzie County, would be an information, education, and service organization, helping rural communities to shape public campaigns. The Institute’s goal: to give communities a much stronger voice in deciding the best uses for their land.

II. The Problem
Northwest Michigan, a land of clear lakes and rivers, serene forests, wildflower meadows, and vaulted sky is now faced with a disturbing irony. The region’s wondrous natural heritage is attracting boom time development that, left unmanaged, threatens one of the genuinely great places in the United States.

Population Growth
The population of Grand Traverse, Benzie, Leelanau, Manistee, Antrim and Kalkaska counties now stands at more than 150,000, according to the Michigan Department of Management and Budget. In the next five years, at least 25,000 more people will settle in the region. Benzie and Leelanau counties lead the way, with population increases during the 1990’s expected to exceed 20 percent.

Evidence of the intensifying interest in the region is easy to find:

Just south of Northport in Leelanau County, an Ann Arbor developer is planning a 370-acre resort on the west shore of Grand Traverse Bay that will include 450 housing units, a marina, condominiums, a 100-room inn, and several golf courses.

The state Department of Natural Resources, despite widespread community opposition, has approved a new asphalt plant in Leelanau County that will be built on 40 acres of rolling meadow less than a mile from Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

The McDonald’s Corporation, acting on a plan aimed at capturing small town markets, is planning to build a new restaurant in Benzonia on U.S. 31. The increasingly busy road is likely then to attract other fast food restaurants and franchise centers in a typical strip development.

In Traverse City, downstate developers have received approval to turn a 200-acre orchard into the region’s second mega mall, called Grand Traverse Crossing. The center will be directly across South Airport Road from Grand Traverse Mall, which opened in the early 1990’s.

Road-widening proposals are in the works for U.S. 131 near Kalkaska and U.S. 31 from Ludington through Manistee and Benzonia to Traverse City. There are other proposals for freeways and bypasses to handle the increased traffic that is projected in coming years.

The National Park Service is proposing the construction of a “scenic drive” from U.S. 31 north of Beulah to the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Other National Park Gateways have attracted unbridled commercial development, such as chain hotels, fast food restaurants, and amusements.

Natural Resource Policies
State and national policies to encourage the development of natural resources, energy, and ever-larger farms also are altering northwest Michigan’s landscape.

Striking reductions in the number of trees being cut in the Pacific Northwest, combined with increasing demand for saw timber and paper, has pushed the market price for raw logs to near-record levels. The result is that thousands of acres of forest land is being clear-cut and selectively cut in northwest Michigan. Not since the early 20th century has so much timber fallen in our forests, according to the state DNR.

Prompted by a lucrative federal tax credit, and the government’s promotion of natural gas as a “cleaner burning” fuel, energy companies have turned northern Michigan into the nation’s most active region for natural gas exploration and development. Since 1989, more than 4,000 wells have been installed in Otsego and Montmorency counties. In the last year, the development has intensified in Antrim and Manistee counties, where hundreds of wells have been drilled or proposed. Wexford, Benzie and Grand Traverse counties also are being explored. Each well comes with a road and a pipeline that fragment fields and forests. Preparing the gas for market requires dozens of compressing stations, each of them powered by 500- to 1,000-horsepower engines that rumble as loud as a diesel bus 24 hours a day.

Agriculture Policy
The nation’s frustrating inability to develop a rational policy for agriculture is causing farms to become ever larger and more specialized while at the same time pushing small family farmers out of business. The trend is especially worrisome in northwest Michigan, where thousands of acres of prime orchard land and open fields are being sold for housing subdivisions, roads, industrial plants, shopping centers and other commercial uses.

State of the Environment
The threats to northwest Michigan’s landscape arise at the very moment that the environment here is in the best condition it has been in more than 100 years. At the turn of the century, the region’s forests had been turned into graveyards of waist-high stumps. Its streams were choked with eroding topsoil. Later would come wildfires that destroyed whole towns, clouds of air pollution crossing Lake Michigan from Chicago and Milwaukee, and water pollution from overloaded sewage plants and chemical manufacturing.

That our streams and forests now support abundant fish and wildlife owes a lot to nature’s vast healing powers. That the air is clear and the lakes clean is the result of an array of environmental laws enacted since the late 1960s to reduce pollution and better manage industrial wastes.

III. The Response
The array of development issues facing northwest Michigan demands a different kind of response, one that goes beyond regulations, restrictions, or outright bans.

Across the region, concerned residents have formed citizens’ groups to contend with development pressures, and to protect the natural assets and quality of life in their communities.

A Noteworthy Example
Last summer, in a decision that attracted national attention, residents of Peninsula Township north of Traverse City voted to increase property taxes in order to establish a $2.6 million fund. The money will be used to buy the development rights to thousands of acres of orchards on Old Mission Peninsula that will be permanently put off-limits to any use other than farming.

The Old Mission project, which is occurring in one of the wealthiest and fastest-growing communities in the region, points the way to a new framework for development.

The trick is to insist on development that fits the scale of the landscape, and to change or halt those that are out of scale. Unless this occurs, the get-rich-quick, anything-for-a-buck economic culture that dominates America’s urban and suburban centers will overwhelm northwest Michigan, too.

A National Problem
This is not only the principal challenge confronting northwest Michigan, it is becoming the central environmental and economic issue facing rural America. A few years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sponsored studies in several states, among them Vermont, California, Oregon, Texas, and Michigan, in which panels of scientists, citizens, and state officials were asked to rank the most pressing environmental issues they faced. Every one of those studies, including Michigan’s, said the deteriorating rural landscape was the most serious environmental problem.

Unfortunately, there are not a lot of places communities can turn to for help in addressing the problem. With the notable exception of the American Farmland Trust, the national environmental community does not have a single program for helping rural communities wrestle with growth and other land use issues.

The state and federal governments are principally concerned with encouraging growth in rural areas by offering business loans, grants, tax abatements and the like. The government has given little thought to the environmental and social costs of its business development efforts.

Universities have conducted countless studies on the question of development in rural regions, and doubtless there are professors and technical experts ready to help a community in need. But small groups generally are managed by time-strapped volunteers unable to conduct a thorough survey of the literature and make the phone contacts.

In short, even as residents in northwest Michigan display an encouraging pluck for contending with development, it isn’t long before it becomes clear that their campaigns are starting at ground zero. They don’t have enough money, data, and time to do the necessary work of gathering facts and establishing a response that will resonate in the community and lead to changes.

In most cases, as a result, grassroots campaigns are a mismatch. Facing community leaders are business executives or government officials accustomed to such confrontations, armed with stacks of data supporting their views, and able to tap corporate coffers or government treasuries to defend their proposals.

IV. The Michigan Land Use Institute
For a community group to mount a successful challenge to unwelcome or poorly conceived development, it must have better data, stronger ideas, and a more capable public information and communications strategy than its opponent.

It must also be persistent and be able to sustain its challenge.

The Michigan Land Use Institute, based in Benzie County, would help community groups to do all these things. It would be an information, education, and service organization, and a permanent center for assisting grassroots campaigns in this region.

The Institute also will help existing businesses, including farmers and timber companies, become more competitive by lowering waste and energy costs and increasing production. By becoming more profitable, local businesses will be able to compete with national chains and companies, and less of the land they own will be turned over for other uses.

The Institute will accomplish its goals through an array of basic programs. It will:

• Have a small full-time staff of technical experts in such fields as land use planning, sustainable agriculture, waste management, energy efficiency, information resources, education, and the law.
  
  
• Operate as a nonprofit corporation and generate its revenues from foundations, membership dues, consulting fees, and sales of its own reports and other products.
  
  
• Collect and manage a repository of information that community groups can use to more quickly understand the problems they face and to design an effective response. The information will be available on paper, video, computer and CD-ROM, and through the Internet. The aim here is to enable community groups to launch their response several steps beyond ground zero.
  
  
• Make its staff members available to help communities formulate an effective strategy and coordinate a public campaign.
  
  
• Initiate its own community projects. The first will be the campaign to respond to McDonald’s that began late in 1994 with the formation of Citizens for Positive Planning in Benzonia. Another is the campaign by the Michigan Communities Land Use Coalition, a group based in Manistee County, that is calling for a more sensitive plan for developing natural gas reserves in northwest Michigan.
  
  
• Make its technical experts available to farmers, timber companies, small businesses, and local governments interested in becoming more profitable and productive, and less polluting. For instance, the Institute’s agriculture expert will help farmers make more money by reducing the use of toxic chemicals, increasing the health of soils, and improving the marketing of crops. Landowners seeking to profit from their timber lots without damaging the land would find assistance from the Institute’s timber management specialist. Small businesses interested in reducing their waste disposal costs and in improving the productivity of their workers would be able to consult with the Institute’s energy efficiency and waste management professionals.
  
  
• Retain a lawyer and establish a legal defense fund to help communities advance or defend their ideas in court.
  
  
• Be a center of publishing on the newest trends and ideas on land use. The Institute will have a monthly newspaper, and publish pamphlets, how-to guides, and books on conservation, agriculture, forestry, small business, rural communities, and the environment. It also will produce multimedia presentations using video and CD-ROM, and operate its own Internet billboard.
  
  
• Work with other like-minded groups in the region, among them the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, the Northwest Michigan Resource Conservation and Development Council, the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy, the Traverse Bay Watershed Initiative, the Crystal Lake Watershed Fund, the Friends of the Jordan Valley, the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council, and Friends of the Betsie Valley Trail.
  
  
• Develop programs with regional and state colleges and universities and establish paid internships for students interested in working on land use issues.
  
  
• Hold periodic seminars and retreats, inviting local experts and national authorities on land use to discuss new ideas with leaders and advocates from the region and the state.

V. Conclusion
The Michigan Land Use Institute is designed to be a cutting edge organization to contend with the principal threat to northwest Michigan: haphazard development. The Institute will be a first-rate, nonpartisan, independent center of ideas on rural land use planning and management. Political leaders will consult the Institute and solicit its information for new legislation and policies.

It is an idea that perfectly fits its time. In Washington and in Lansing, lawmakers are calling for more authority to be transferred to local governments. But without adequate support in understanding the complexities of the rural economy and landscape, local leaders are certain to be overwhelmed by development proposals. What is needed is an anchor for community advocates eager to try a new approach.

The Michigan Land Use Institute will be that anchor. Whenever it has been discussed, community leaders have reacted enthusiastically. Several land use professionals in the region have indicated strong interest in becoming staff members. The Institute also would conduct a state and national search for staff. With careful planning and adequate initial financing, the Institute would be capable of beginning its work later this year.