City of Davison, Michigan

The sky is falling, the sky is falling…

We hear all sorts of warnings for our protections. Global Warming, The next Ice Age, latest internet cons, Conspiracy theories, etc…

A lot of these are very entertaining, based on just enough fact to get you thinking, but no definitive consequence that is base in reality.

One of these scenarios a few months ago dealt with a web site that was being abused my teenagers and sexual predators a like. This site was myspace.com. Having a couple teen age girls in my house I had my concerns, but they knew my rules on internet usage.

Well this past week I found one of my daughters had a my space account. Business Week calls this next generation Generation @. An NBC Dateline story in January takes a more relaxed look at the site and its possibilities but still points out ease for anyone to put anything.

I started surfing myspace. If you have teens or pre-teens I think you should look at what our youth has access to.

This is just like building a community room for teens and not putting any rules or adult supervision. The language and rantings of these on going conversations would make the proverbial Sailor blush.

As you may guess, This dad is the bad guy at my house this week.

At Tuesday’s Davison/Richfield Fire Authority meeting we awarded a contract to Rehmann Robson to conduct an evaluation of our current operations and to help us plan for the next 20 years of fire service.

I was asked by Flint Journal reporter Jerry Earnst if this had to do with the requested Richfield Township sub-station.

It does, but yet again it doesn’t.

Clear as mud…

The Fire Authority could not come up with a consensus on a sub-station in Richfield Township. Richfield Township had approached the Fire Authority and was willing to build the building. This could be very good, but the Fire Authority could not answer some questions that they needed to make future expenditures on.

One item was we have no way currently to purchase new vehicles for the Fire department. We have a way to purchase replacement vehicles, but not new. At the same time we were working on our cost recovery ordinances and we got into conversations about how we pay our firefighters. Most of the Authority I think believe they are under paid and their is always confusion on the fee for run structure.

Hopefully those reading this blog can get the picture that before we map out how we are going to operate for the next 20 years we have a lot more questions to ask and get answers for and this is the next step.

These type of questions are what drove the RFP for the study an Fire Service Master Plan. Right now we provide fire service for a 72 square mile area with an estimated population base of 30,000 people from one fire station, with a paid on call staff.

Is this the best thing for our community?
And if not what is the best way to improve?

This is what we hope to find and it will be an interesting journey.

I got a late start this morning. It was about 6:35 AM when I drove out of our subdivision this morning and I got to see sunrise.

But the next thing I saw could block out the sun and is not what you see every day.

It is the biggest trailer I have every seen. It was parked in the Davison Center Parking lot this morning after it took out some traffic signals on M-15 in our City, after it attempted to “sneak” through town.

The story I am getting is this is a part that is to be installed in a GM plant in Flint and is coming from Canada. The State of Michigan is reported to have said the vehicle weight and size was too big to go on I-69, so they recommended snaking through back roads from Port Huron to Flint.

Problem is this thing is too big to fit on our roads and now won’t fit under the underpass that goes under I-69. My understanding is the two scales the Weighmaster used to weigh the trailer both broke.

Notice how the rear trailer moves separate than the rest of the trailer. These pictures really don’t do justice to the size of this thing.

I really don’t know how they are going to get this out of here. Maybe helicopter?

Boy I would hate to be the GM Future Planner who planned this move…

I was reading an article from Team Management Briefings and they pointed out how even geese learn from the advantages of Team Work.

1. By flying in a “V” formation the whole flock adds 71% more to its flying range than if each bird flew alone. Lesson: Teammates who share common direction can get where they are going quicker and easier when they travel on shared power.
2. When the lead goose tires, it rotates to the back and another goose takes the point position. Lesson: It pays to take turns doing the hard task and sharing the leadership role.
3. While in formation, the geese from behind honk to encourage those up front keep up their speed. Lesson: Sometime team members need to hear a little honking.
4. When a goose gets sick and drops out of formation, two other geese go with it to protect it. Lesson: Stand by one another during times of distress or times of trouble.

Amazing, that we can learn from geese. While we are talking about learning from geese, do you know why one side of the “V” formation is longer than the other?

There are more geese on that side, geez, do I have to point out the obvious?

I was reading Crains Detroit Business a ran across an article that made some good sense. This goes along with what Governor Granholm is calling her “Cool Cities” initiative.

I think what really is the focus is being that destination that people want to live, work, and raise a family. Good businesses will locate where they can attract talented hard working employees. The challenge is getting everything to mesh together where businesses want to locate and people want to live.

We have been working on this in Davison for sometime. We have a lot of the pieces in place and a lot of people are already enjoying the the benifits of our community.

The ground work is in place.

• We have a great location. Located on a State Highway (M-15) and next to an Interstate Highway(I-69). North of the third wealthiest County in the United States (Oakland).
• We have great Schools. Davison Schools graduate high levels of students every year that compare very favorable compared to our counterparts throughout the state academically. We have great extracurricular programs that are envied nationally.
• We have access to great Higher Education. U of M, Flint is minutes away as well as Kettering University, Mott Community College, and Baker College.
• We provide a safe environment. Our Police force is a talented and prides themselves on our Community Police program, low crime rates, quality service, and quick response times.
• We have affordable housing. A wide range of housing from starter homes to family sized homes, rental units and empty nesters.
• We have a traditional Downtown. A four block traditional downtown that offers a variety of retail business, service business and of course food offerings. We host a multiple schedule of events downtown for the entire Davison area to enjoy.
• We have plans in place to improve on what we have to offer. Through a public planning and visioning process we have five different plans that help guide us into the future on almost every area of the city.

Now we are poised to take the next step and implement the things we know we need to do so we can be the place where our kids will want to locate in Michigan and raise the next generation of Michiganders.

Spring is finally here!

…and in Davison that means the snow has melted away and we now have kind of a, well a, a blah- brownish look. This is the time that grass has not greened up yet and the trees and bushes have not sprung to life to give us the color and variety of color and textures.

What it also means is that some other things stand out, like code violations. Yesterday, I took a half an hour and drove several parts of our city and a few violations jumped right out at me.

Some people do not realize what they are doing is against the law or local ordinances. I was able to find a couple examples of things we get a lot of calls on. It is important that we stay on top of violations to maintain the community standards that have been set.

There are a lot of regulations regarding parking in residential areas that people may not be aware of.

Eyes and Ears Program

City Council is looking forward to this program getting off in full swing. In this program Dennis Miller (In charge of City Code Enforcement) is working with Scott Yaklin (Director of our DPW) and Bill Brandon (Police Chief) to utilize the staff we have on the street 24/7 to increase our level of code enforcement.

The basics of this program is to get our staff to report to Dennis what they are seeing as they are out in the community and remove such things as signs on telephone poles or that are illegally placed in the city Right of Way.

This is a way to keep things in our city looking good and up to code.

I was floored when someone asked me the above question. Why would someone ask me that?

Well I found out why, it was an article in the Ann Arbor News that a Council member from the City of Chelsea made that statement. I would have to say I disagree with that statement.

We have been meeting with the other three cities motioned to work toward the betterment of all our systems. We have learned some very valuable things observing what has been done in other communities, and hopefully they have also learned from our experience with Reverse Osmosis (R/O).

Our system seems to be working fine. How much of that is due to Scott, Matt and Brian in our Water department? I don’t know. But I do know that those three know this system a lot better than me.

Are there issues that we would like GE/Osmonics to clarify or change? Yes. But there is a process for this, and we are working through this.

One thing we know, that a lot of people do not realize, is that all water is not created equal. Our water quality and make up is much different that even Grand Blanc (who is relatively close to us), let alone the cities of Saline or Chelsea.

This Water Business is a very complicated operation, but rest assured the City of Davison has a highly competent staff that is very dedicated to ensure that the City of Davison Water is the best quality water in Genesee County.

No, I am not talking about the NCAA basketball tournaments. One fact is true of an active city the needs to grow is there is never a short “To Do” list.

March is normally busy just coming of City Council Goals and Objectives and formatting a budget for the next fiscal year and somehow getting Department Head evaluations done is normally enough for anyone to handle.

But not here in the City of Flags. We have a exciting downtown improvement project going on that is taking shape. We are interviewing architectural firms to help us design a new municipal center and we are getting our arms around our Inflow and Infiltration (I/I) challenges.

We had another meeting yesterday with our Bond Council (Miller/Canfield), our Engineers (Rowe, Inc) and staff to try to get some recommendations for Council.

This is truly the Readers Digest version of some of the deeper and more complex discussion that we had yesterday.

If we were to attack the entire project at once we are looking at just under 24 million dollars. We will not attempt to do the entire process at once for two reasons.

1. We can’t afford it
2. Logistically, we would have almost the entire city under construction at one time.

The next step in my mind is what I’ll refer to as the 3 P’s.

We must Prioritize the project areas to find out how big of Project to take on with the most benefit to the challenge we face:

• cost of treating rainwater
• prevent sewer back ups in basements during rain events
• stop illicit sanitary sewer discharge to black Creek during rain events
• comply with Sate, Federal, County rules to avoid fines and penalties

and how to we Pay for it.

Prioritize
The engineers have broken the city into 11 districts that all could stand alone as project areas. They are going back to rework the numbers to come up with aprioritized ranking of projects in order to be able to do our best cost/benefit analysis. I think we can do this by making and comparing three lists of the fore mention project areas.

1. How much does each section contribute during a rain event?
2. How much cost is involved in correcting each section?
3. How much money can be saved by fixing each section?

By compiling three stand alone lists with the above attributes I think we can then be confident in scaling back the project where the cost of the project give us the most financial gain.

Example of inflow: A downspout

connected directly to the sanitary

sewer system.

Size of the Project
This section will rely a lot on the other two P’s. Financially it would be good to aim for a ten million dollar project. In general terms this would mean approximately $6 million worth of work on private property and $4 million in the Public Right of Way. This general size of project would cost the city about $600,000 to pay off the debt every year.

How do we Pay for it.
A project of the above size can be paid through a host of different financial vehicles which we discussed in our meeting. Grants are almost for sure out of the equation (although we did explore this). There are several loan options out there (SRF, SWQIF, USDA to mention the primary possibilities for this project). How do we pay off the loans is the biggest question for our residents (rate increases, General Obligation of the City, Special Assessments to name a few).

No decisions have been made yet, but just to give you and idea of how the cost affects people. To have this project paid for by rate increase alone we would have to raise our sewer rates by around 40% or $14 per month. This, so far does not have the savings cost associated with not paying the Genesee County for treating our rain water.

We will look to have this issue at the April 24th City Council Workshop.

This is an interesting question I often get from people inside and outside the government environment.

There are numerous ways to explain what a City Manager does, although the closest thing that I have heard that covers the entire picture is what I heard from Mike Senyko, City Manager of the City of Fenton, Michigan.

He explains:

“Anything you ever think about I have dealt with, am dealing with, or will deal with before the end of my career.”

At first gloss over that might sound like we think pretty highly of ourselves, but in reality he is not too far off the mark. We have to deal with high profile issues (like Police and Fire incidents), and anytime you are in charge of employees you are going to have a host of personnel issues, then there is planning, project management, presentations, water, sewer, public health, and so on. The list goes on and on and is open ended.

One of the open ended issues is to attempt to stay ahead of the curve on legislative issues while remaining independent of any political party. This can be very tough to do since in Michigan we send people to Lansing as a full time job to make more rules (laws & regulations). There are always a half dozen pieces of legislation ready to go that affect the operation of the City of Davison. What I am going to attempt to do this year is point some of those issues in this blog space. This could be a real challenge due to lack of space and time, but I will attempt to do my best “Readers Digest” version.

The one thing our legislature hasn’t done is to come up with a formula such as: For every new law we add we must take one law off the books. Now you see why I am not a Politician.

My wife received an email the other day from a financier who was some how related to a diamond mining juggernaut in some out of the way country on the continent of Africa. The problem is that there is some sort of crises (civil war or something) and they needed our help to launder millions of U.S. Dollars out of their country and if we assist them they will share this wealth with us.

Sound to good to be true? Most people who received these scams can spot them. Identity theft and cons are an important issue that people should be aware of.

I was talking with Lieutenant Gilbert last week and he told me of one of the latest scams to watch out for. Apparently incidents have been reported in several states.

Most of us take those summons for jury duty seriously, but enough people skip out on their civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of scam has surfaced. Fall for it and your identity could be stolen. In this con, someone calls pretending to be a court official who threateningly says a warrant has been issued for your arrest because you didn’t show up for jury duty. The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you never received a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your Social Security Number and date of birth so he or she can verify the information and cancel the arrest warrant. Sometimes they even ask for credit card numbers. Give out any of this information and bingo! Your identity just got stolen. The scam has been reported so far in about 11 states. This scam is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try and bully people into giving information by pretending they’re with the court system.

A web site that can help the curious is an Urban Legend References, people can find all kinds of mis-information here. Scambuster is another site that you can look out for the latest scams.