In a recent Letter to the editor (January 24, 2007) the letter writer asked the question “Must Studies agree with the officials?”

The answer in Davison is no. We actually pride ourselves by not surrounding ourselves with people who agree with us, but can give us different perspectives. I can think of several times when our attorney has told us things we didn’t want to hear, or our planning consultant slow a process down to ensure we did it correctly instead of just implementing something that we wanted to do.

Here is my response to the letter writer:

When the City of Davison started this process we were actually looking to renovate and add space to the existing structures. We have not found a firm (even the ones we did not hire) to tell us renovating and adding onto the existing buildings would be in the best interest of any of the entities involved.

City Council took extra steps in their decision making process by touring several different facilities. One of these city hall facilities had a portion of the community vocal about keeping the existing building and adding onto it. The City of Saline, Michigan ended up paying an additional quarter of a million dollars to keep the existing structure rather than starting from scratch. There are times when it is more fiscally responsible not to add on or renovated. All the firms we researched said they would help us design an addition and renovate our existing situation, but all of them thought it was not the best option when it came to cost and/or gaining efficiency.

The letter writer continued to explain how we shouldn’t need any more space due to technology. In some area he’s correct. In all actuality, city administration square footage stays the same. Some of that is due to technology and maintaining a lean staff. The other aspect is combining like spaces to save square footage in the overall project. We have worked hard with all users so that they see no one unit is receiving all the square footage they would normally need if they were a stand alone building. We have combined common areas to be shared by all. An example would be conference rooms. Every use (library, courts, police, and museum) could utilize conference rooms. But, they don’t need them all of the time. By utilizing technology we can schedule the same space and have multiple users. Not to mention the need for community space for uses like Boys and Girl Scout meetings, neighborhood group meetings, or other community type meetings.

Record keeping at City Hall is mandated by two things, State/Federal regulations and the City’s retention policy.
Some items we have to keep forever in paper format (that’s along time). Other information we are moving forward to storing electronically.

City Council has been studying different aspects of going more and more “paperless”. We have made some progress, but we are limited due to our current building on how far we can take this.

In the past five years the Davison City Council has led our staff and accomplished about 6.5 million dollars in savings. That is not too shabby considering our General Fund Budget is about the same it was five years ago at just under 3.5 million dollars per year.

So it may be hard to accept, but our consultants didn’t give us the answer we wanted. We received an education through the process which will save and benefit our community for years to come.

You see, in Davison we believe in openness and getting professional advice . Sometimes it takes us longer to come to a conclusion, but we feel the community wins with a better product.