Plenty to Talk About

Oct. 1, 2015

Three debates are scheduled for the upcoming Traverse City city elections. That’s a good thing.

Municipal elections are typically more civil affairs, at least in part because the candidates actually live among and interact with the citizens they serve. There is reason to believe that will be the case again this year with reasonable candidates for each available office.

Mayoral candidates Jeanine Easterday and Jim Carruthers, both current City Commissioners, are experienced public servants with track records and ideas to be judged, and neither has strayed into the radical fringes.

Hopefully the debates can be a conversation among candidates rather than a regurgitation of canned answers to a series of canned questions.

It’s not as if there’s nothing for them to talk about.

Where do they stand on buildings downtown taller than 60 feet? If greater density is the goal, then how dense? What about the pier into West Bay? Three lanes or four lanes on Eighth Street, and are you really going to wait until 2018 to resurface it? The poor thing looks like a patchwork crazy quilt now and even miracle-working street crews will be unable to save it much longer. What about the Safe Harbor homeless shelter? Has the City Commission ceded too much power to the Downtown Development Authority? What would you do with the coal dock property in Elmwood Township?

Is your new city manager right that the city is trying to do too much? What are your priorities? What’s at the top of your list and what gets dropped off the bottom ?

And maybe a personal favorite: Why is Hickory Hills, completely outside the city limits, the responsibility of the city, and the Civic Center, completely within the city limits, the responsibility of the county?

There is little doubt the debate about highrise buildings downtown will continue at the forefront of discussions.

We’re now being told increased density and vertical housing downtown will actually save outlying areas from the dual scourges of sprawl and strip malls. Apparently just about everybody wants to live in a condo on or near Front Street.

Except, of course, that isn’t remotely true.

Much as some folks want a place downtown, many others do not. Some people want to live in the city but not downtown and there are plenty of real estate opportunities for them; hundreds of listings online.

Many others want to get completely out of the city and not just because of housing costs. There are lower taxes too, and less traffic, less noise, less stress, more room for children to run, and the perception of greater safety and security. It isn’t “sprawl” to them; it’s their piece of the American Dream.

And what some derisively refer to as strip malls are also jobs, tax revenues, shopping, dining, groceries... not to mention reducing unnecessary trips into town. None of that is especially destructive.

In a city as small as Traverse City, less than 9 square miles, “downtown” is a relative term. There is no place within the city limits a “long way” from those few blocks we call downtown. What we’re really talking about is housing in about a six-block area.

The “we need workforce housing” drumbeat now seems almost a ruse. Nobody seems to be able to pinpoint just exactly how many full-time, permanent employees work downtown much less how many of them also want to live there. And does that equation include Old Town, too?

If it’s workplace housing we’re after, it’s peculiar there is no movement afoot to build more near Munson Medical Center, far and away the largest concentration of full-time permanent employees in the city.

It would seem what we have are some people who want to live within walking distance of their favorite downtown happyhour haunt, can’t find or afford such a place and now want everybody else to subsidize towers for them. It’s a really good plan if the rest of the city agrees but there is scant current evidence they do.

The next mayor and city commission will get to seek that consensus. Long-term plans and citizen-driven visions are certainly helpful but issues that change the very character of the city and its future should be decided at the ballot box. Downtown height rules are the perfect candidates.

Meanwhile, the city has just short of 100 other projects on the table, more than enough work for a new mayor and commission (and, by the way, they work hard enough on issues of sufficient complexity and difficulty to deserve whatever kind of raise they can get).

Maybe the biggest question they should answer is this: What will Traverse City look and feel like in 10 or 20 years as a result of what you do now? That would be useful information to voters.