Yesterday morning I was talking to “Mac” down at the Home Bakery in downtown. We covered a host of topics on some of the projects the city has been working on. It has always been interesting for me to get different perspectives when taking on projects. In fact that is one of the reasons I started this Blog. We at city hall have been working hard to respond to the community’s request in several different areas over the last few years. But we are also planning for the future, based on the same community input.
We have planned investment in the “downtown” area of about $4,000,000. This includes utility upgrades to water and storm sewer, road widening to improve parking and driving safety, and some streetscape upgrades. But like most dreams and plans it takes funding to get these projects moving forward.
One issue we are facing in the City of Davison is prioritize funding. We have this is common with most cities across the State. Year to year budgets have been increasingly tough, but planning for major capital improvments has been made a lot tougher with limited funds. One of the challenges to local governments have been all the non-funded mandates that keep getting passed down from the Federal and State Governments.
The City of Davison just responded to one of these non-funded mandates and invested over six million dollars into our water department (new water treatment plant and water delivery lines). We have been working with another non-funded mandate to deal with rain water.
I recently went to a workshop on NPDES phase II.
The Federal Clean Water Act of 1972 created National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). The major focus of this was to control discharges from industrial and large municipal wastewater treatment plants. Once these problems areas were addressed and mostly brought under control the focus changed to various smaller widespread (non-point) pollution sources such as failing septic systems, illegal dumping, storm water run-off from parking lots, roads, agricultural fields, construction sites, etc…
Within Michigan, the Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) manages this Federal mandate. The MDEQ is allowing local governments to establish goals and improve surface water by implementation of a watershed management plan. In Genessee County, the local governments have decided to group together to work through this process. Streams, rivers and drains don’t stay with in the dotted lines we have drawn to identify communities.
We have all signed a contract with the Genessee County Drain Commissioner to work through the County office to meat the Federal and State requirements. A lot of communities are paying around $10.00 per parcel to comply with this mandate. By combining resource with other communities our cost is around $4.00 per parcel.
One of the additional cost is the time it takes to fill out all the paper work that is required. We actually have to attend workshops to understand what is being asked and what our plans could include. 
We will comply, in the City of Davison, but we are hearing more and more small communities cry out that they can hardly afford to keep up with the old regulations, let alone take on new projects without any funding to accomplish the new task.
If anyone is interested in more information, the Drain Commissioner’s office has compiled a good NPDES phase II web page that might be worth a peek.