“Downtown” Davison gets a lot of attention. So much so, that some people are starting to think that we have forgotten about other areas of the City.

“The City is more than the two blocks on Main Street.” Is a common thread of some of these comments.

Where “Downtown” does get a lot of publicity, we have a good record of accomplishment of City services and programs throughout the city. However, sometimes we take what we do on a daily basis for granted and perception starts to become out of whack with reality.

We must do a better job of telling our story.

I looked back over the past five year’s worth of budgets just to give a glimpse of how City Council has spent funds in neighborhoods etc…

Some people may be surprised that we have spent about $200,000 on our side walk replacement program. This does not count the near $60,000 that we are spending on a sidewalk program this year with a Community Development Block Grant Funded program.

We just recently came off a five year local street program where there was a millage passed to pay for some street improvements. Two streets were recently resurfaced that that were not in that program.

With the assistance of the DART Committee and a grant from the State of Michigan DNR we added a $500,000 non-motorized route through Abernathy Regional Park.

We beat the Federal timeframe for changing in the acceptable level of arsenic in our potable drinking water with about a $6 million upgrade to the city wide system.

The City is addressing an issue that has been around since 1970 with our current Inflow and Infiltration Program that addresses improvements in 300 homes around the city and will improve the efficiency of the entire sanitary sewer system.

In developing the community as a hole, we have seen new development and redevelopment out side the downtown of over 15 million dollars in the past few years.

We have also worked with the Schools and neighboring townships to cut duplicated services.

Some of these things don’t have the “sex appeal” of what is going on downtown, but all of it helps define our community and makes Davison a great place to live, work and raise a family.

Sometimes it falls back on us to keep telling our story, so people don’t loose sight of all it takes to keep a community moving forward together.