Lanes and Docks and Lawsuits

Oct. 23, 2015

Traverse City has issues. Some will selfresolve. Others not so much.

The Eighth Street debate continues. Three lanes or four. Bigger bike lanes or no bike lanes. Longer right turn lanes or not.

The city even conducted an online survey and a traffic study. More than 60 percent of respondents said they preferred the old four-lane approach. The traffic study found a whopping 44 percent increase in accidents on the new, three-lane alignment.

Some commissioners’ responses to those results were fine examples of how not to react to unwelcome news.

They managed to discount both the survey and the traffic study. The survey wasn’t scientific, they said, and many of the respondents were not Traverse City residents.

Then, they said, oddly, that people will stop slamming into each other once they get used to the three-lane configuration.

Perhaps they’re right, but they might have at least pretended to appreciate public input and the study. Dismissing both out of hand was unusually bad form. And we could have used a bit more information. Why did you do the survey? What percentage of respondents were not Traverse City residents? Do all the folks who use Eighth Street but aren’t Traverse City residents count? Who told commissioners all those accidents would eventually stop?

We’re going to “reconstruct” that chunk of Eighth Street in a couple years anyway. So we’re now paying a bunch of money for temporary fixes, like grinding the pavement so we can recess the road striping, on a street approaching rubble status only to pay a lot of money to rebuild it in a couple years.

Ultimately, no decision on retaining three lanes or reverting to four was actually made when two commissioners were absent from the commission meeting. The decision fell a vote short of the five needed for approval, something both the absentee commissioners and those in attendance surely knew before the vote was taken.

We can’t make up our minds about the old coal dock, either. It is outside the city limits but owned by Traverse City and Light and Power (Traverse City seems to have a lot of interests outside the city, doesn’t it?).

Rotary Charities has offered to buy the property for $1 million — with strings attached — though it has been appraised at $2.8 million. Rotary intends for the property to be used by the Discovery Center, a group of non-profits involved with Great Lakes history and education. There would be deed restrictions in the deal for that purpose.

Like the Eighth Street question, the sale fell short of approval. At least one commissioner wants the city to receive near the appraised value and to eliminate the deed restrictions. One envisions waterfront condos after hugely expensive, taxpayerfunded environmental remediation.

Meanwhile, the battle for Downtown Traverse City has authored two new chapters.

Petitions that would put the high-rise issue, or at least a zoning special use permit issue, to a public vote have been approved. If enough signatures are gathered and verified, Traverse City voters will determine the question in a future ballot issue.

It might be too late.

Developers, who withdrew their proposal for a downtown high-rise in the face of opposition, resubmitted their proposal, timing it precisely so it would be heard by a newly elected — and presumably more favorable — city commission.

This is opportunism at its most naked but within the rules of how the current development/political game is played. Not the best way to garner local support, however.

Nor is suing people who are vocal in their opposition to the project. Local attorney Grant Parsons is now such a target (full disclosure: Parsons is a friend and I have worked for him in the past).

It seems Parsons wrote a none too gentle critique of the developers and their methods. The Ohio-based tax dollar sponges (of their $13 million share of the project, they expect a whopping $10 million plus will be paid for by various tax breaks and grants) responded with a defamation lawsuit.

This has the stench of a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) lawsuit. If so, we’ve seen this in northern Michigan before.

The idea of these suits is not to win money, but to win silence. Make the loudest opponents defend themselves amidst a costly and time-consuming undertaking, and perhaps they will just shut up and go away.

Or perhaps not.

There are important First Amendment issues at play here, and not everyone surrenders to the lawsuit pressure.

Meijer tried the same thing when Acme Township trustees stood in the way of their development plans. They sued the trustees individually. The trustees countersued. Instead of winning millions, Meijer paid millions in settlements. One of the trustee’s attorneys? Grant Parsons. This should be good.