City Of Muskegon Commissioners - Regular Meeting

Heat. Hey, Heat. Good evening, good folks, and welcome to the city of Mskegegan city commission work session for this Monday, March 9th, 2020. 26. Uh before we get started, I want to remind folks that we do have uh public comment at the end of the meeting on general public comment. Anything you wish to share with the city commission. Everyone has up to three minutes to provide your remarks, whether you're giving comments in person or by phone. If you are here in person, wish to comment. I encourage you to complete a comment form at the back of the room. Please provide your name and home address. Note, I'll not be sharing your home address publicly, nor asking you to announce it. That's for our records. I will be acknowledging if you're a city Mskin resident, which neighborhood you're joining us from. If you're not a city of Mske resident, which other township, village, or city you may be joining us from? Um, when we get to public comment, there will be time for phone and comments as well. We'll do in person first and then we'll go to phones. And I'm going to give that phone number right now just so folks have it at the ready, but it will be scrolling at the bottom of the screen when we get to that and I'll announce it again at that time. Uh, that phone number is 231-7246721. Again, that's just to have it at the ready. Do not call at this moment. All right. Roll call, please. Commissioner Jackson

here. Commissioner Cochan here. Commissioner St. Clair here. Mayor Johnson here. Commissioner Kilgo here. Vice Mayor Keenir absent. Commissioner German here. Thank you. All right. We're going to proceed with new business. First item is the Mskegegan Lighthouse Restoration Progress Save Our Light Capital Campaign. Madam Clerk, you going to lead out on this? Well, absolutely. I was just going to introduce we have two people here um that are uh I'm sorry all I can think of is Kim Kim that's okay here with Dan Kalis of Don Don yes that's right of kind

who are going to give us a presentation about uh where we are with the lighthouse.

Good evening if you'd both uh kindly introduce yourselves and you know the organizations that you represent. Um we'll get right into the presentation then. Kim Lang, Mskegeegan Ligh Houses. On behalf of Jeff Shook, the president of Michigan Lighthouse Conservancy, we appreciate City of Moskegan to allow us to give the presentation uh restoration advancements and update. We're going to start plain and simple with a quick video. built in 1930. It's almost 100 years old. This wasn't here no longer. It's like another historical thing taken away. You say Mosskegan to me that's what I picture in my head is either one of these lights. In the 1920s the city of Moskegan realized how important our port city was to help ships come in safely. So the breakwater light was built and put into service in 1931 and uh has been a beacon and icon of the city ever since. The lighthouse has not had a major renovation since it was established. So it has been sitting out here in the weather 12 months out of the year and um as a steel structure it has deteriorated. South Breakwater Lighthouse suffers the most in the winter with the ice and the waves. The whole lighthouse gets just covered in thick ice. All that water

gets in there and then freezes and then just starts to break the lighthouse apart. We've got to do this restoration and we've got to do it now. A few years ago, I when I was serving as a state representative, I had an opportunity to to get funds into the state budget to help restore the lighthouse. The initial estimates were somewhere around $800,000. But it was pretty clear after we started to take a much closer look at what we were working with at the lighthouse that it was going to be much more than that. That's why we've decided to uh to be a part of this effort to to try to find more funding to bring this lighthouse uh restoration project to fruition. So, this community in the next year, year and a half needs to raise about another $800,000 to uh complete the deal. And then for the next generation or two, that lighthouse will be secure and able to continue to be a symbol of this community and enjoy uh that special relationship that we have with Lake Michigan.

We're well on the way with half the money secured for repairing the lighthouse. We don't want to let it fall into so much disrepair that it's not able to be rescued. We need to do it now. We have to preserve it and keep it there so that we can keep that going for another hundred years or more. The Save Our Light project, it directly impacts our community. When you contribute, it's something that you'll be able to enjoy as well. Rebuilding it, restoring it, bringing it back to life brings hope again.

That lighthouse has been a symbol and a part of Moskegan for approaching a 100red years. It's important for the general community uh to support this effort uh so that we can maintain uh that symbol of who we are. The community of Moskegan loves our lights. They especially love the breakwater light. We ask please help. Please help us save our life. That gets me every time and I've watched it a thousand times. So that is our plea. I'm going to step back just a little bit and give a very very short history lesson. Oh, Moskegan, God bless it all. Thousands of years ago, the receding glaciers left Moskegan Lake as a natural port with entry from the lake, Great Lake of Lake Michigan to Moskegan Lake. Uh it's the deepest, largest port on the eastern side of Lake Michigan. It was inhabited by the Adawa and Padawatami Indian tribes. uh up until the late 1600s when the French trappers came up the channel and started a trading post. By the mid 1800s, lumber was queen in Mskegegan and it became a major port city. Ships subsequently needed a lighthouse to guide them in and out. So Mskegeegan's first lighthouse was built in 1851. Ships advanced from sail to motoriization and their sizes increased in capacity,

but Moskegan Channel and the lighouses kept pace with a new lighthouse being built in 1870. Century ends. Mskegegan's major industry change changes from lumber to industrial. The world is growing. By the late 1920s, the entrance to the harbor needed more protection than just the simple protection the peer headlight built in 1903 was giving it. So the arrow head was built, the breakwater arrow head. The light itself was built in 1929 uh but uh the pier wasn't finished. So it was temporarily lit and then lit permanently in 1931 when there was electric power electronically feeding the light and the source of power to the light. Breakwater light is one of a kind. There is no other lighthouse of its pattern in the United States. It's the pyramid style and it very quickly during that time became an icon of the city. It guided countless numbers of ships and cargo in and out of the port of Mskegegan for nearly a century now. Its simplistic basic design evoked pride in the community and a symbol of strength and forward movement that still welcomes maritime vessels into what has become our shoreline city. Today it s stands brutally battered

after nearly a century of nature's abuse. It's waiting to be rekindled to rekindle the pride, the strength, and the forward movement that was once so celebrated by the community as a welcoming sign to the coming thousands of commercial ships, cruise ships, pleasure ships, and the general public who simply comes and enjoys it from the beach itself. Total restoration cost 1.6 6 million is needed to complete the project. The state granted $800,000 to get it started. The remain needs to be collected from the comm from the community, excuse me. The contractor MIM Enterprises was able to begin work based on that initial 800,000 on September 16th last year. And through October, they leabated the lower exterior surface. They applied a zinc primer and applied an inter intermediate and a top coat layer of bright red. They secured gaps in it in the structure so that it would survive through the winter. During the winter, MIM Enterprise is working at the facility offsite for railing and other fabrication of structures in hopes of beginning again in the springtime. Eagle Group Manufacturing has completed a replication of the diaphorn that will be placed at the top as it originally was. won't be the horn, but it will be a di a replica of the horn

itself. We are asking the community to help for donations for the remaining funding that we need of $800,000 to complete the project so that this lighthouse can grace the shores of Lake Michigan for our community for generations to come. They hope to finish the project this fall.

Thank you, Kim. I'll be brief. Um, proud city resident, uh, Bluffton. I'm proud to say that. Uh, my business, Kindred Marketing, also is downtown here. So, so thanks for having us. Um, you can check out the website. You saw the great video uh that we have um that we played for you, but the website has a lot of information. Save ourlight.org. I've also provided some printouts for you, some booklets you can look through and it tells you um everything from the history of the lighthouse through project plans and even some updates and ways to give are also on the website which of course can be through our community foundation. Uh otherwise the general the other obvious means of check and other ways. But um one thing I want to point out that this is not just a paint job. This is not just uh you know this is crumbling like literally crumbling. They did uh structural engineers assessed this the damage before this thing even began, the restoration project began, and they determined that it was too brittle to move to shore. So, they had to actually it's so bad they have to repair it in place. So, you'll see some ships out there this summer. Um and we're looking to uh if if we're successful in raising the money, we're looking to finish this thing up by the end of the fall and have a nice little celebration out there with all of you, of course, uh in attendance, right? Um, I do want to thank the city for being the fiduciary of of the funds, which does not mean you're paying for it. It means that you are just um making sure the money goes where it should, which is awesome, right? So, the $800,000 grant, you've been doing that for years. That's already been or been part of that, and now it's continuing through the end of the of the project. And and a quick update on the the money we 1.6 million is our goal. Total today raised via contributions and pledges are nearly 1.2 million. So, we're we're in pretty good shape. Um, we're going to do a big donor plaza to celebrate all the gifts and appreciate and I just will leave you with this. Think of how weird or how odd it would look out there without having that lighthouse and you'll have terrible pictures, right? I mean, every photo of Mskegeegan has that beautiful lighthouse. So, so thanks for your time. Appreciate your support.

Thank you so much. Appreciate you, Mr. Kalis and Miss Lang for uh taking on this this initiative and um all the work that you're doing in this regard. And I know this has been very much of a passion project for you, Miss Lang. um you've been very active um in this for several years and we appreciate your uh dedication um and really appreciate Kindred Marketing stepping up and uh coming alongside these efforts um so that we can get this job done um making great progress. Really appreciate it. Commissioners, do you have questions for our presenters this evening? No. All right, we did a great job. We answered everything. Uh thanks so much. Uh just to reiterate folks um to learn more about this go to save ourlight.org um where you can s give securely online or you can also go to mskegan foundation.org and look for the Mskegan Lighthouse fund so you can make contributions.

Thank you again. Much appreciated. We're going to move on to item B, beach settle service recommendation. Uh so deputy city manager Mike is going to report out on this one just to give us an update uh on what our plans are for the shuttle service for the summer of 2026.

I try to balance my computer up here. Um so you're all familiar with the beach shuttle service that we provided last year. We had one route that circulated amongst the essentially beach parks that was called the tan line and then we had a blue line that connected people from further into the city out to the beaches. The tan line um the park circulator was operated by Mats and the blue lane blue line was operated by Pioneer Resources. We did have a follow-up meeting with them once the season was done and um recapped what we learned from the survey and realized that Pioneer Resources while they were happy to help us it was really doesn't fall within their U model and so they asked to be relieved. Um Matt was happy to step in and so we do have a proposal that's in front of you tonight from Matt's to handle both of those routes. Um one bus for each of those routes. Um the proposal is outlined. Um there is a proposed change to the hours um just so that we can fit this in better with the staffing that Mattz expects to be able to provide us. So the end times essentially on Friday and Saturday are an hour earlier than they had been last year. Um the Sunday time I believe is quite similar to what we had last year. Um these are going to be considered um seasonal fixed routes by Matts and you know some of this is um their terminology for how transit rules work. Um, but they will be published routes. So, they will be on their service map and on their website and those kinds of things. Um, and people will be able to

track those buses so they can see how far away the bus is from the stop where they are, how long they might have to wait. Um, so I think that will be really useful because that was not true for both routes last year. Um, the buses will be very similar to what we had last year. those kind of 16 passenger ADA ADA accessible buses. Um they do have bike racks on them and there is um some space for people to bring their beach gear if that's the method that they're um or what they have planned for their day. Um it's just a day at the beach. Um so there's some details in there about the different stops. I'm happy to answer some questions about those. Um we do plan to have a regular schedule. Um and then along with those fixed routes comes the ADA complimentary paratransit. Um that's essentially a service that allows um qualifying people to be picked up um closer than what their the published stops are. Um and that has to be planned in advance. Um so um same rules as last year, no unaccompanied minors. um and no pets. Um coolers, beach gear and that kind of stuff is permitted. We do want people to be able to use these buses to be able to have their beach day. Um and then the proposal is that the city would fund the service and anybody using it would not be charged a fair. I know one of the things that I had been asked to look into is sponsorships and I have not done that as of yet. Um but I can definitely look into that. So happy to answer questions um and provide any more details whether that's on how it went last year or what the proposal is.

Excellent. Uh thank you so much uh for presenting and all your work on this uh service. I was very excited that we were able to launch this last year and uh take feedback and look at how we can uh improve it and we're going to take that forward and uh continue to solicit feedback and in terms of how it operates and um continue to tweak it and and improve it year after year. So I appreciate all that work. I do have some questions and other comments, but I'll hold those off and go to the commission. I see uh Commissioner German, and I'll go to uh Commissioner Ggo. Commissioner German. Yeah, thank you, Mayor Johnson. And good evening. Good evening.

Um Deputy Manager Mike. Um just kind of curious to the routes. Um I'm looking at U Town Route 30 42. I know last year there was a pickup station at Smith Ryerson. I don't see that route here. And from the looks of it, and correct me if I'm wrong, um a lot of these um routes do not um service from what I see here the uh east side of that uh Moskegan down there. And why is that?

Uh well, that was one of the thing one of the changes we made from last year. Um Smith Ryerson and Campbell Field were um very very very rarely used um by people last year. So, uh, the proposal this year, um, does not include those stops.

Okay. Um, was there an area kind of closed that would be somewhat um, acceptable, I guess, for um, residents in that area? I mean because it looks like the closest route I mean the closest pickup location for anyone in that area would be probably let me see shoot this downtown on Morris

and the Herman Ivory terminal that's the bus station down there right so so they will have to pretty much cross the expressway to come down there which is an inconvenience not safe um some people don't have transportation Um and you know looking at this because we try to serve in you know as many uh residents as possible when we talked about this. Um but you know I would like to see that area more um included. Um, also I looked at the um l look looked at the proposal whatever there's a savings of what about close to $20ome,000, right?

Okay. Um, if money's the uh issue here, is that cost or um why are they these areas are not being served? Just giving them the opportunity to be able to come if they choose to use that service. That's what I'm looking at. Um, everyone doesn't have the means or transportation to get out to the beach. Like I said, lack of transportation. That's why we talked about um bike routes and things like that also um in the city. So um I think it would be in the interest of the city to at least try to accommodate some of the means for people that's less fortunate and don't have the means to um get out there to the beach by looking at other bus stops or something close to the downtown within the inner part of the city.

Sure. and we we can do that. Um we can um have some further conversations with Matts. The decisions the decision not to include those was based partly on the fact that we didn't have people using it from those stops. Um and um partly to um make the the schedule efficient. Um we can certainly talk about adding those back in if um if a majority of you want us to do that. um and can certainly talk about what effect that has on the schedule and and where we where else we might need to change. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner Kilo,

thank you. Um Madame Deputy Manager, you know that I've been relentlessly working on transportation for our community as a whole. I I loved seeing that we could save some money because this possibly might be money that we could use to have continued conversations with Matts so that they could just run other services on this on the weekend, bring people down to the terminal and then they can get on any bus they want to. Right now we have zero service on Saturday or Sunday which doesn't help residents of Moskegan at all. Um, so I would really be inclined for us to make a formal request to Matts to bring in the county and our neighboring municipalities and have those conversations. We have to fix transportation. I see all of my housing friends, which we'll get to in a minute, but if people are in a house over here and over here and over here and they need to get to Trinity or MCC or Meyer or Walmart, not everybody can do that. So, we have a bigger transportation problem than just getting to the beach. As far as the shuttle service, do we have or can the commission be sent numbers? Were there any general numbers? Hey, the summer season of 25 was approximately such and such riders for specifically our shuttle service with Pioneer.

Yes. Um, we um we have a trying to get to the link here. Just a second. We do have, excuse me, a spreadsheet. That's not the link that I was looking for. Um, we do have a spreadsheet of um each weekend, each day that the service was running, what the wrership was. Um to the right file here we have a passenger data spreadsheet. So um I I mean I have all the data in front of me. Um the we have totals per um per day um totals per weekend. Um total ridership um I would have to do some math. No problem. I

um but I do remember there was a number that we had come up with what we spent on the service for the number of rides that were given. Um we were spending somewhere in the area of $40 a ride per person. Um so we we are looking for ways that we can make that more efficient of course.

Um certainly this was our first year. I'm not sure that enough people knew about it. We're, you know, certainly working on efforts to do some more marketing and things like that. Um, I look at this as our second year of a trial. Um, I I don't think that the information we received last year gives us everything we need to, you know, plan it out exactly how it ought to be. I think this is another year that we need to gather some data. Um, we need to promote it more, see if, um, people's habits change from last year to this year. By chance when we were looking at the numbers, did we take into account minus the two stops that were further on the east side of the city because you said that the wrership was very light. I don't know what vary means, but it's okay.

Uh if we if we exclude them what our wrership was from 25 with the new numbers that we have from Matts versus what we paid from Pioneers. So it would be if it was $40 a rider per ride Mhm. it should be significantly less than that. Correct.

Um so I I would like us to look at those numbers. Um but also if if we use the second year as a trial to see um if we can get more participation or if the service is used by people more. Do we have anything indicating bus stops at any of these stops? Is there any signs? Because with Pioneer, they don't really do bus stops, but with Matts, they do. Was there any talk about doing a special bus stop kind of sign to say that here is where you can get picked up if you're looking to go to Pure Marquette?

Yeah. Last year, um, we did have a bus stop sign at every single stop. Um, the ones that were out into the city, um, also had flags on them. Um, I can't remember if we put flags on every single stop on the circulator route because there were quite a number of stops there. Um, but certainly ones where was maybe not so obvious um, where you were supposed to be, we put some flags up. So, we did try really hard to make it clear where these were. Um, we can certainly continue those efforts.

Yeah. And just to to chime in real quick with regard to the the flags, the two sites that you've proposed um not um be included going forward, Campell Field um uh over on the west side and then Smith Ryerson on the east side. Both those did have a flags uh last year indicating where they're where the pickups were happening. Thank you. Yeah, good ideas. And if you've got more specifics, we're happy to take them. Yeah, I I mean, but we do want to make it clear again. I'm sure some other commissioners probably have some questions, but my bigger idea is us formally trying to put together another meeting with the county and Matts and have the overall transportation conversation. Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Go. I do have that number. It was about 22 2300 total. Thank you for both. Commissioner Jackson, I was just curious as to why the service hours ended at 8. Is that something that Matt's proposed or is that our time? Um, that's something that Matt's proposed. Um, I think it allows them to get all of the work done in one shift and not have to have overtime.

Okay. Um, and maybe just thinking about collaborating with the deck and maybe seeing if they would want to sponsor because there's a lot of drinking that goes on at that business. So maybe if we could collaborate with them as like it could be a safe ride back into town. Um, it and it's hard to find parking down there. So if that's something that they want to utilize the shuttle service for and then just overall better marketing this year. um utilizing like 103.7 the B if we want to get more of the I hate using the term inner city but the inner city stops if we want to continue to have um at Smith Ryerson and at Campo field um I feel like that would be the best way to get the word out um of the shuttle service because like I didn't hear I knew about it because obviously I paid attention to commission meetings But none of my friends knew about it or anything like that. But in Spring Lake and Grand Haven, they have the Harbor Transit and a lot of younger people use that to get down to um the beach there. And so if we can market it that way, I feel like it would work out better this year for us.

Good ideas. Thank you. Thank Commissioner Jackson, Commissioner Cochant.

Thank you. Um I could echo all of those sentiments. I think it's uh a lot of really great ideas that my fellow commissioners have brought up. I support the idea of maybe looking for sponsorships from the deck or other businesses in the Lakeside area or downtown even cuz I heard from a lot of friends who would use the circulator um or the what it's now called the tan line to go downtown and um they would be able to go out and have a good time and not worry about being able to get home safely. And so I think that that there's a part of this that we didn't even think about when we were talking about the beach shuttle idea, but when I was thinking about the beach shuttle, my thought process was in line with Commissioner Germans um where this would be a connection from the, you know, the other side of our city to the beach because we've we don't have really good connectivity there. And as Commissioner Kilgo pointed out, and you've you've heard me talk about before, too, we don't have service on the weekends, and that's really a unfortunate thing that really needs to get fixed. So, I want to see that conversation happen as well. And however we can get there to do that, I'm willing to to, you know, have those kinds of conversations. Um, I did touch base with you earlier about some questions that some folks may have had when they read the packet. So, when we were talking about the the different types of stops, the current um Matt's bus that would be running the shuttle would be able to pick up a passenger in a wheelchair and they would not need to schedule in advance. The paratransit would only be for if they want to be picked up right from their door.

Right. And then just to clarify on that because the the packet just says next day. Um the reason why they would need to call ahead is because the Matt's bus station does not have people who are available on the weekends to take those phone calls and so those calls would actually need to be made by Friday in order to schedule. Correct. Um well that's what I recall from the conversation last year. I can double check with Matt's because this is their proposal. I didn't modify the wording and it says in here next day basis. So I do feel like I should follow up with them and double check if it really is next day or if those have to be arranged by Friday.

Yeah, we definitely would like that that clarification. And I think that

the um last year was our pilot program, right? Like so we needed to get more information out. I know we printed some really great brochures and we had the flags, the Camp Billfield stuff and the Smith Ryerson stuff. Um, but I was still over the winter talking to people and they're like, "I don't know what you're talking about. What beach shuttle?" And I just wanted to pull my hair out. But I think we have to, as Commissioner um Jackson noted, like we need to find other re like ways to get to people to let them know that we have the speed shuttle, that the speed shuttle is free um and it is available um as a service. And so I I would really like us to not discontinue the stop on the east side of the city if we could find a way to do that. Um, you know, and I don't know exactly what that would look like, but I really think that's an important thing to include.

Thank you, Commissioner Goen. Commissioner Sinclair, thank you.

Thank you for all your hard work on this both last year and this year. I um I know you've put a ton of effort into this and it shows. Um, I am excited about the idea of it being a single operator. I think that um there was kind of a miracle performed last year to make this happen in a very small time scale with um a lot of unknowns. and um what happened last year made sense because that was what was available. I I do think it was a little chaotic for people. Um and I uh I do like the idea of it being a single mats system. It's very easily identifiable as a bus. They have bus stops. This is what they do. Um, I appreciate Pioneer being willing to give this a go last year and they did a really good job. Um, but I also appreciate them being willing to say, you know what, there's somebody else who is better at this and we're just going to pull out. That sometimes simplifies things. Um, I there is definitely a larger transportation conversation and I think we need to be careful about mixing these too much. those are separate animals and there are things that we can do as a city that we don't need the county to to get in line with and this is one of those things that we have control over tonight tomorrow whenever this comes to us again. Um I agree with all of my fellow commissioners that I think it is too early to pull the stops on the east side out. That was one of the things that I

was most excited about last year and I know it didn't get utilized and I think we need to continue to help people be aware that it's there and I have every faith that we will do things differently this year to make sure that they do know. Um I see on this there's one two three four five I think no four downtown stops. um which feels like a lot if we're not going to do any on the other side of the Moses Jones Parkway. That that feels very much like a discrepancy or a disparity that I can't be comfortable with. I would rather lose one or two of those downtown stops for efficiency sake um than to not try again this year to see if we can generate more ridership um on the east side. Um or maybe we sacrifice one of the lakeside stops. You know, I think um I think it's it's pretty clear that um we're all on the same page on that and I understand efficiencies and um I'm willing to be a little inefficient to be a little more equitable. So, um I think that that's that's something that we need to take another stab at to see if we can spread that out a little bit. And you know, maybe it's in a slightly different spot. Maybe Smith Ryerson wasn't the sweet spot. Um, but uh I I do think that we need to we need to include that. Um I uh I would encourage everybody when this is running this year, take an afternoon and ride it. It's really cool. I got to ride it the first

weekend that it was running and it was a lot of fun. Like I don't I don't know that people think that riding the bus is a good time, but whenever I travel, we always take public transit and you you meet cool people and you see things in a really different perspective when you're on public transit than you do in a car. Um I found the bus driver to be fantastically helpful and just really personable. Um, and the buses are clean and you know, it's it's just a really it's a neat experience. Please take advantage of it even if you don't need to do it anyway because we need you to use it so that we can sustain it because we can't keep this going at $40 a rider. Like we can do that this year, maybe next year, but then we're going to have to look at does this make sense even if we really want to do it. So, um, again, thank you. I know that this has been a ton of work and I appreciate it. So,

thank you, Commissioner Sinclair.

Yeah, I do think uh thank you for uh speaking on distinguishing between what we're trying to do here with this service versus the um greater mosquary transit system services they provide. um because that's a that's a whole another beast um that is operated by the county and some municipalities contribute to it of which we are one of them. Um just for clarification sake um because we heard that Mass doesn't provide services on the weekend. Um go to is an option that is available that has more expansive transit hours and days that runs Monday through Friday 5:00 a.m. to midnight. So um greater hours than the fixed routes um throughout um that Matts operates. And then Saturday as well, 8 am to 5:00 pm. So there is no service whatsoever on Sunday though for either go to or the fixed route. Um and I know there's been ongoing conversations about how we'd be able to improve the Matt services to multiple municipalities. Um including creating a new transit authority that um we put in the work. Um it did not uh prevail um but put in that work and still exploring other alternatives. Um I very much support sponsorship opportunities as you know um uh deputy manager and see that as a way uh to change that that that number of what we're we're charging uh deferring the costs um you know what we're paying um so anyone that was interested in um understanding those numbers in terms of wrership and all that um deputy manager presented on that at our work session in February so you can go on back and watch that Um, and also a parking presentation. Uh, so you can hear about the parking program as well as the beach subtle service and how that worked out. I thought that per rider number was in the $30, upper $30, but yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So, it's 304. Um, still want to get that down. You know,

two ways in my mind to get that down is um, one, increase wrership. So, you're getting the per per rider cost down, but also um finding sponsorships uh to defay that cost of us or otherwise get the the total cost down, which I understand looking at how do we make adjustments to the routes, you know, be able to uh squeeze out some some cost savings. Um I do really appreciate the unified service, you know, one one provider, um and everyone be able to go online too and see where the the shuttle is um in that. Uh this is a service that I have, you know, been advocating for for many years. I was so excited that we were able to bring it online last year. Um and and I'd always envisioned as being a a shoring circulator, you know, connecting our our neighborhoods and business districts um along the shoreline of Moss Lake and Lake Michigan. Um I didn't necessarily think of the B Beach Circulator. Um but I love that. I think that's a great connecting all of our beach parks out there. Um I do think it merits us reconsidering um a stop on the east side or on the other side of um Mos Parkway. I thought last year Smith Ryerson Park was an excellent stop because it was a major park um that it's very well utilized. Um and so I was hoping that that would um spur more interest in it, but like my fellow commissioners, I've heard from numerous uh residents who just weren't aware of it. Um you know, I had some events at Smith Ryerson was talking to people about, hey, do you know about the beach side service? And so many people just weren't aware of it. So, you know, we have um opportunity to better communicate that and we as commissioners can help communicate that. That's something that I did um everywhere I went last year. was like, "Hey, check out the beach level service. Um, it's a new service they're providing and we're piloting. We want we want feedback." Now, if Smith Ryerson is not the ideal place for whatever reason, um, you know, an alternative maybe is Amont Park, you know, right on Marquette. Um, that's a higher visibility. Um, that park's maybe not as well trafficked as Smith Ryerson, but it is higher visibility. um where

maybe more of our Marquette Jackson Hill neighbors weren't aware of it because they're not always regularly going to Smith Ryerson Park, but they more frequently going down Marquette and they see that flag um and like oh what's this about? That might be a good alternative spot um to consider. I can talk to Matts too and see just on their regular routes that are out in that neighborhood where where are the popular places? Yes, that would be welcome. Thank you. Um, I'm curious, one of the stops on Tan Line, Beach Street, and Woodlon, how important or beneficial is it to keep that stop, do you think?

Um, I can go back and try to find some data um to see if that one was used very often. Um, it's um kind of a nice um midpoint. Um, but they're also stopping at the kite shack, so which isn't very far away. So, you know, I I definitely think there's room to make changes.

Okay. Yeah. I wonder about because we do have the end caps with the the two bath houses essentially essentially that we have stops at and that is a good a nice midpoint. I had heard some um misgivings from from folks about that stop though wood lawn and impact on traffic and you know so on and so forth. Um so if it's not very well utilized and doesn't you know have significant benefit perhaps that is um one that we have an opportunity to to remove. Um, but otherwise I do have a couple of questions, but they're not anything that I need to ask right now and I can, you know, follow with you afterwards. You don't want to reach me.

Just out of curiosity on some some elements, but no, I really appreciate your work on this. I'm excited that we're going to be able to continue this into a second year and continue to look at improvement and tweaking it. But I did see followup from Commissioner Kilo. Thank you. So, I do understand that our overall transportation conversation is different than our seasonal transportation. I I'm going to still continue talk about our overall transportation conversation and would like to get partners to the table again, but for tonight, we are talking about our seasonal transportation. So, specifically talking about our seasonal transportation, the price was cut down over $21,000 from last year to this year with a new serer and not including a few stops that it sounds like the entire commission would still like us to service on the east part of the city. Is there a way for us to get numbers? Because if they start service May 22nd, we have a little bit of time. We have a couple of months right before that starts. So, can we get information from Matts? How much would it be for us to add a second line or extend the route out to um uh the parks where they were before or alternate parks like the mayor suggested because there's also um other streets like if there was a single bus and it went down Lake from one end to the other Lake kind of you make that right at the end of Lake and I'm sorry um um Lake turns into Lakeside and goes

right down to the beach. But you know, Lakeon hits the far end east end of our city and it's a you know easier location for people on the east side of the city to get to parts of Blake. Sherman doesn't go through our entire city. So Sherman wouldn't necessarily be the best option unless it went from Lake over a little bit to Sherman and continued on. But I guess what I'm trying to say is I would like to see if they can price out, okay, how much would it be for us to do what we would like the service to do and that service more parts of our city cuz I am looking at some of these stops for the town line that people who have transportation could easily get from Western and third to the terminal. They don't necessarily have to be picked up at Western and Third or I mean I don't know which ones are best, but there's a lot of them that are close enough or walking distance where someone could walk to the terminal. Um, and then my second question, so that was kind of a statement. My question is, has Matt's talked about how they would differentiate Route 41 from Route 42? Do those buses have a um marquee on them? They do.

They do. Okay. just cuz if they're both down there at the same time, people might think that they're getting on to go back downtown and they're getting on the the cross one.

Yeah, good point. Good point. Yeah, I will definitely follow up with Matts to see um if there's a change in cost by adding the stops um back to the um Jackson Hole neighborhood. Um so I I will definitely get that information um and share that. Um, I I heard your um idea to add in a route that goes down Lake. I'm curious if the rest of you want me to ask Matt about um a cost for that. Um, it will depend on their staffing, I'm sure. Um, but I'm happy to talk with them to explore that if everybody wants me to do that.

I think that would be a third line then, not trying to incorporate into one of the existing lines. Um, I mean, I'd be interested in just knowing the cost just for information sake and um whether that's not something that we can uh consider adding this year or in the future years. It'd be a good reference point if it's not too much trouble for them to provide that information. I can ask um uh it's not my um news to share, but I know that there are some staffing changes happening there. Commissioners, anything else to ask, Brad? Commissioner Coachen?

Yes. Uh, one one more follow-up question. Um, the policy about not having unaccompanied minors on thinking about that in regards to thinking about the the two stops that are underutilized, right? Our parks um that are utilized by by children, right? So, uh I'm kind of wondering if maybe that might have been some of the hindrance. Did we talk to any of those neighborhoods and and get any information from um like individuals in the neighborhood or the neighborhood associations about what what the hindrance there was? Um I don't believe that we reached out to the neighborhoods separately. We just pushed the survey that we had available for everybody. Um there are a number of people that responded to the survey that never wrote it. um but you know had input nevertheless um which we wanted um because if you're driving and you're experiencing and you know we want to know what you think too. Um so um we got um a smattering of um responses from a lot of the neighborhoods. Most of them were Beachwood Bluff in um outside the city and outside the county.

Okay. mo most of the survey responses were from those people. Um so uh I don't know that we had direct conversation with neighborhoods about um the you know whether um young people wanted to use it and couldn't. Um and the unaccompanied minors is if you're younger than 12. So it's not 18, it's younger than 12. Um that's a Matt's rule. Um, I don't know that we'll have a lot of success in asking them to modify that. Yeah, that's fair. I don't think I want any eight-year-olds getting on the bus by themselves either. Yeah, I'm sorry. I should have clarified that when I said um the comment about the Myers, it's under 12.

And it are we making that clear in our literature as well? As far as I remember, it was in everything. Okay. Yeah, there's a nice pamphlet that was provided. I remember that the routes and information on that and that was also presented at the neighborhood associations of Moskegan um and there have been um different conversations um at NAM um which meets every month all the neighborhood associations of Michigan come together monthly um so we've had conversations at that level about the service. Mr. Man, you had something to add?

Yeah. Um, so this is just anecdotal to uh talking to the neighborhoods, but um I was at the Angel Neighborhood meeting uh in February and we talked about the stops uh and their comment was that the downtown stop was more convenient than the Smith Ryerson. Um so one neighborhood anecdotal no, but we did have that conversation about it because that was one of my updates was the bus service. Um and so they volunteered that. Um, and I also wanted uh to one of Commissioner Kilgo's questions about the bigger transportation conversation that's we're talking about. I believe you've got a meeting coming up on that shortly. We sure do. Um, so it the the conversation is starting again.

Yeah, I can't remember when it is. It might be tomorrow. Tomorrow or the next day? Um, Wednesday. Thank you. I will keep you posted. Thank you for uh being persistent on that staying sing. I'm happy to. Um you know how important it is to our community and and the commission. So I appreciate that. Um commissioners, anything else to ask or add at this time? Commissioner German.

Yeah, thanks Mayor. Um just the deputy manager Mike, thank you for your work that you do. Um I've seen under your leadership and you know the staff through here in the commission how you know we're transforming Moskegan and providing these services to our citizens. Um I know sometimes we may have to do things to somewhat be uncomfortable you know for citizens you know to adjust to but to see something given back to them. Um, I think that really all sets the things that they appreciate that the city is actually thinking about them as a whole and we're working with them. So, thank you for your leadership on that. Thank you, Commissioner German. All right.

All right. Thanks. Thank you so much. Next item, discussion of utility bill autopay program. Good evening and welcome. Kindly introduce yourself and please report out on this item.

Good evening. Sarah Wilson, city treasurer. And bear with me for a moment. There you go. All right. Sorry about that. So, I wanted to give you an update on our utility billing autopay program that we currently offer to our utility bill customers. Um, this first slide just outlines the different payment options we provide. We have some where there is no fee for the customer. um paying cash or check in a variety of ways or using our autopay program which is signed up for through our office. Um there is no fee to the customer to pay their bill using those options. We do have a few options where they do have to pay a small fee. If they want to use a credit card whether at the counter or online as well as they can do an e checkek online those do have a small fee. Um, currently the autopay program, which is what we're focusing on, the customer can fill out a form in our office with either a bank account or a debit or credit card. And if they do that, they receive a 75 cent credit monthly on their utility bill. and then we absorb the costs for processing that payment with a either a credit card or a bank account. Um, the thing to point out with this is with the credit cards, the fees that we are currently paying are

extremely extremely low. As you can see, it's about $2,200 a year to process those payments. And that's why we've been able to absorb that cost over the years. Um, which brings us to our current problem. We received notice at the beginning of the year that our current autopay provider for credit and debit cards is discontinuing their service. They were bought out by another company and they're discontinuing that product line based on the pricing that they were giving us. It's not a surprise that that service is being discontinued. They were literally losing money on the pricing they were giving us. Um and so we started searching for other options to replace this program. We came up with two viable options. Um the biggest drawback we found is that the processing costs are significantly higher. It wasn't surprising that that was the case, but they are significantly higher. Um, so it was a little bit difficult to compare not only these two options to each other, but also to what we currently have because they're all priced very differently. Um, but the first option we found would be to use the BSNA online payments platform. As you know, um, in just two weeks from now, we're going to be switching to the new online payments platform through BSNA, um, which is more modernized, more up-to-date. And so, I had conversations with them about the ability to be able to do this autopay program through their platform. It is a possibility. Um, they would offer us a flat percentage rate um, based on the transaction dollar amount. And so looking at the number of transactions we currently process as well as the dollar amount we currently process, it would be around $26,000.

That's a very rough estimate. Um they did not give me a formal quote. This was more of a conversation like this is what we could do. Um the other option is to process it through Fifth Third Bank, which is our current banking center. Um, this is a much more complex pricing structure because we would be paying fifth for the use of their platform and then we would be paying the third-party processor behind the scenes. Um, whenever you process a credit card transaction, there's a third party processor behind the scenes. We don't get charged that fee from the third party processor from BSNA because they absorb that and just charge us a flat percentage. Fifth Third would not be doing that. So we would have to pay the third party processor when we added those two fees together. Again, this is an estimate because we had to estimate how many Visa cards there were, the types of different Visa cards because all of these have different types of fees, how many Mastercards, different types of Mastercards, debit cards, where are the debit cards issued from, dollar transactions. It was very complex. Um, we came up with $29,500 annually. So, as you can see, compared to $2,200 annually, we're looking at a big increase, more than 10 times the cost. And so, the question became, do we want to continue offering this credit card autopay option considering the increase in fees? Do we want to absorb that fee knowing that that fee has to be factored into the cost of the services we provide for water and sewer? It could theoretically impact our program fees, right? Because we have to absorb that somewhere and it has to be accounted for no differently than the chemicals we buy to treat the water or, you know, what we pay to the county to treat the sewer. So, that is kind of why I'm here tonight because I'd like your

feedback. Um, the recommendation of the staff and I had this conversation with other finance staff as well as the senior leadership team. Our recommendation is to discontinue the program because of the cost. Not discontinue the entire program, just the credit card or debit card autopay portion. We would keep the bank account autopay option and keep offering that 75cent credit and absorb the processing fees. Um, and so, you know, we could go through, let our residents know, hey, this program is ending, but you can still sign up for this autopay option. You still have this available. It's just you can't do it with a credit or debit card. Um, and so obviously we would lose one option for payment, but we still have a multitude of other free options for making payment. And if somebody really wants to do autopay with a credit card, they can sign up themselves to do that with the new BSNA online's payment platform. Um, they would just have to pay the processing fee when they do it. So, it is an option they could sign up for themselves. Um, and so just a few things to think about when we're deciding whether we want to do this. You know, other utility companies have moved to this same type of structure where they no longer absorb a fee for using a credit or a debit card. The fees have gone up for anyone that wants to process a credit card. They're charging the accepter of that credit card more money to accept it. Um, I'll be honest, I didn't realize how complex the fees were until we started doing this research and saw how Visa and Mastercard and Discover actually charge for each of these transactions. And it's kind of mind-boggling how complex it all is. Um, and the reason they do that is because each of these cards has rewards or points or whatever it gives you to

entice you to use their card. Well, they have to somehow make that cost back. and they're doing it by increasing the fees they're charging to use their card. Um, and so as I mentioned, these fees would have to be absorbed by our water, sewer, and general funds, and it could ultimately impact our service costs. And that was our concern with absorbing such a large increase in the fee to process this. Um, and again, the customers can still choose to stay enrolled in the autopay program by using a bank account. It would allow fee fee fee excuse me fee free processing and a monthly billing credit. So that program itself is not going away just the option for the credit or debit card. And so what I'm looking for tonight is a consensus from all of you on whether you feel like you want to end this program or if you say nope we still want to continue with this. We want to absorb you know what could be $30,000 annually. It can be done. I did have that conversation with our city attorney. It certainly can be done. Um, but I'm looking for direction from all of you because unfortunately this processor is ending their service at the end of April. So, whichever decision we make, we need to start making plans in our office to notify residents or get those contracts set up for another processor.

Thank you, Treasurer Wilson. appreciate you uh presenting this evening and exploring alternative options considering that this uh our current uh payment processor is discontinuing this service. Um so I appreciate you presenting uh these options and the consideration you've given to it. Um and I believe that your recommendation um from my perspective is reasonable. Um commissioners, Commissioner St. Clair, thank you. I agree. I think that um if I'm understanding this correctly, none of the options will stop being available. It will just be the individual will have to set it up themselves and they won't get the payment credit that we currently

and they will have to pay a processing fee. Yes. But yes, it is still available just not in the format they're used to. Yes, we would not be subsidizing it. It would cost them more and they would miss the credit. But if that is the only way that they could proceed, they could still do that if for some reason they couldn't set it up through their bank account. Yes. So, okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. It doesn't make sense to potentially risk increasing water or sewer fees to accommodate one one way to pay the bill when there's a lot of other ways to do it.

And the majority of people that are doing it are doing it because they earn rewards from their credit card. And so, you know, I while I understand that, we probably shouldn't subsidize that for our residents. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Sinclair. Commissioner Coach.

Yes. Thank you. Um, I really appreciate that explanation, um, and the deep dive into what is going on behind the scenes with all of this because, um, I think a lot of people don't realize that. And, um, you know, I think it's really important for people to understand, you know, where some of those fees are going. I I sadly agree, um, with Commissioner Sinclair. I don't think it's something that we want to continue to subsidize. Um I think that as long as people are still able to pay by credit card or by debit card, um because I know some utilities are not allowing you to do that any longer, um I think that that's still a viable um option and I I think I would agree to discontinue that autopay service, especially if they can do it on their own um and and pay the fees if they would like to. Um, I think that that's I think that that's okay. So, I really appreciate the the work you put into this because I'm sure untangling all of that was difficult.

It was and it was a bit um condensed in the time frame knowing that we didn't get noticed until the end of December and we had to have a decision made by the end of April. But I wanted to make sure that I presented you all with this information because there will be questions, you know, and people are going to be asking you guys why. And so, I wanted you all to be armed.

Yes. Um the the one question I did have was um if we have to notify residents um what would be the avenue we would take for that? Would it go with in with a monthly water bill? I I my thought at this time is probably to do a separate mailing specifically to those customers um with a letter explaining the situation and including a copy of the form to sign up for the bank account autopay.

Okay. Um, I don't want to wait until the water bills go out because in some instances, well, two of our districts have yet to go out this month, but one has already gone out this month, which means they wouldn't get that until next month and have less than a month to make that change.

So, I would prefer to have my staff get a mailing together. We'll get that out and get the notice out right away so that residents have time to adjust. and um the conversations that I've already had with my deputy, our intent would be to do a mailing with a copy of the autopay and then monitor that and see how many we're getting back and possibly do a second mailing even saying, "Hey, we noticed we didn't get anything back. We just want to remind you that you can either sign up for this or you will have to find another method to pay your bill just so that people aren't assuming they're on autopay when it ends." Um, but you know, we'll we'll certainly be cognizant of this program ending and people not maybe getting that notice and we'll we'll monitor that and make sure that we're working with residents on that for sure.

I appreciate that consideration and I don't know, you know, if emails would be going out as well, but electronic communication because sometimes you go, "Oh, that's the water bill. I'll just put it there and then open it later when it gets closer to time to to pay it." And if they are enrolled in auto billill with a ebill um we can do that but we don't have everyone's email address. Not everyone wants to provide an email address. Um and so I think we might have to go both routes. But u again you know we can we can certainly monitor that and and take steps as we as we go along and see what we need to do. Thank you. Thank coaching. Commissioners, anything else to ask or add to that? Commissioner Kilog.

Yeah. I just want to say, Madam Treasurer, thank you for your work on this. I know it's tough. With that being said, screw these corporate overlords because it it really is a greed thing and they don't have to charge with AI. They can do a lot of things and they don't have to charge people for these fees. But that's not a U problem. That's a that's a bigger problem. Um and I am glad to see that um people who do use autopay can still use their bank account and not necessarily have all those fees. So that that at least is an option. Um so I am also would be in favor of not subsidizing the fees anymore for the credit card part because there are still other options.

Thank you. Thank anything to ask or add? I'm just in grieving with the recommendations that you provided and thank you for um sharing that information and bring that to light. Really appreciate it. Yeah, I also support your recommendation. Excellent. You have consensus. All right. Well, thank you all for your time. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Next up, we have a presentation on Moskegan Infel Housing Program, our progress and next steps. Good evening and welcome.

Good evening. Thank you. I'm just making sure all of my stuff is queued up. I believe it is perfect. So, good evening. My name is Jake Ekhol and I am the director of development services here in the city of Moskegan. Um so for several months the staff uh and I have been working on a few different aspects of our infill housing program trying to sort of assess where we are um what progress we've made and you know what are people's level of satisfaction with the program and where we'd like to take it and what we'd like to recommend for the commission's consideration. So um tonight we're going to kind of go over our infill housing program's progress performance and potential. So, I will say that I'm going to do my very best to uh be respectful of everyone's time. There is a lot of information. This is an important uh set of information and I'm going to do my best to make it as digestible as I can. Uh we've split this presentation into four parts. Uh a brief history of where we've kind of come from when it comes to housing as economic development, our performance so far. Um so, a lot of policy changes and actual uh projects that have gotten over the finish line or started. um proposed next steps, things we'd like to go uh get started on this year uh this calendar and fiscal year. And then some potential long-term directions that as you guys come into 2027, which which ends your 5-year goal period 20, excuse me, 2022 to 2027, um you know, where we want to kind of take that conversation from a policy recommendation standpoint. after each full session uh or section of the uh presentation, I will stop briefly to ask questions so everybody can keep their questions top of mind. So with that, we'll jump right into it. So um I realized when making this presentation that only two of the commissioners uh well the mayor and commissioner German were actually on the city commission when the first infill housing brownfield was passed and also when we uh allocated art funds. So, I figured I would give a

brief overview. Um, in the Brownfield TIFF, the local brownfield tiff, the city of Moskegan has established itself as really a national leader in housing innovation, uh, utilizing this program. So, we act as the developer, uh, according to the state statute. We facilitate the development of housing units on our own lots. In some cases, we act as the builder and we hire contractors to build them for us. In other cases, we sell those lots uh so that private developers can um build, you know, whatever they feel the market will bear on the on the lots that they choose. Uh at the beginning of the program, it had about 435 lots uh that were vacant and city-owned buildable lots in the program. After we did our first two rounds of infill, so particularly a round called Midtown Square Phase 2, we did 16 forale units, uh six single family homes and 10 town homes. Uh we got a lot of mixed feedback. Some people were absolutely in love with them and were excited to see that type of development in the city. Um other residents uh were kind of giving us some feedback like hey you know these weren't really price attainable for me. Um we'd like to see stuff built that more folks in the city can afford. And then even within the staff internal conversations some of the design criteria that we had utilized. There was some feedback from our frontline planning staff like we could be more efficient with our land use. We could build things that could then be less expensive. Um, so we did a lot of community feedback at that point, including an internal multif family market study and we realized like uh we actually at one point I took I think it was like eight different uh Moskegan area landlords to lunch and was just asking them like hey what are the impacts of co been on your rents? Uh what are you seeing in the rental market and across the board they were all like oh we're all we're all going up you know by several hundred dollars because we haven't been able to evict anybody in several years. uh we have all these deferred maintenance issues and so we realized we probably hadn't a problem and so we did an RFP and conducted a 5-year housing needs assessment for 2023 to 2027. It came out in late 2022 and what it really did was it scared us. So

uh we knew that we had an issue. Um but the study indicated we had the most drastic per capita housing gap in West Michigan that had been studied up to that point. So with that, uh, if you have not seen this table, then, uh, you haven't come to one of my other presentations because I put it in every single one of them. So, um, these are shocking numbers. For context, as it says, we had just under 15,000 housing units at the beginning of the study period citywide, and it showed a gap of 2,924 units at varying price points. This table indicates um the difference between total needed rental units which is at 1611 and then total owner occupied units at 1313. The red ones are highlighted in red by the researcher to indicate the areas of most need by price point. Um so these were shocking numbers. We we realized at that point you know we were already housing focused but we needed to make housing the primary drive of our economic development strategy. So getting to that um in 2022 uh every department head, division head and city management leadership met with the city commission at that time and we developed these um multifaceted five-year goals that each had sub goals and action items. So bringing some of this data as we were going through that study process, uh we really worked to make sure that the the city commission at that time understood the need and as a result um a key focus area was diversifying our housing types, making more housing available at different price points for our residents and uh new citizens. And that led our staff to really focus on um facilitating housing infill as our primary economic development strategy in the city of Moskegan. So, that's kind of a really quick run through of several years of policy, but does anybody have any questions? Any new commissioners up to this point or anything you want more clarity on?

Any questions up to this point, commissioners?

Perfect. That's the easiest section. So, if we can get through that, we can get through the rest of them. So, performance so far, some things I want to touch on that the commission has helped us facilitate. Um, in 2024, uh, we implemented, uh, our third attempt at some zoning reforms to allow different types and scopes of development in the city limits. Um, we did several community engagements related to just some ideas. We didn't even call them recommendations because they were very fluid and negotiable and we took a lot of citizen feedback and we made several changes to them. um our housing needs assessment. What it did, it was our third attempt at passing any kind of zoning reform in neighborhoods and it really helped us get the hard data from a neutral third party that told the problem we were trying to solve. And it was, hey, there is a serious gap. People will continue to get priced out because rent rent prices, sale prices are going to continue to inflate with a lack of inventory. And so we made various amendments to the zoning ordinance. Uh the primary ones that really uh drove us to some of our successes we'll touch on tonight. Uh we lowered the minimum square footage of a lot to 3,000 square feet in residential zones. Uh the minimum lot width to 30 feet in every residential zone. Uh we allow duplexes as a use by right, triplexes in some cases as a use by right, accessory dwelling units, which are some people know as mother-in-law suites or smaller homes behind the primary home as a use by right. And then we also reduced our uh off- streetet parking minimums from two off- streetet spaces per housing unit to one off- streetet space per per parking housing unit. Um, and so these pictures uh all illustrate new construction units that would not have been possible. And I do want to take this section to note that um around 20 of our building partners are in the room tonight. We invited a lot of them and I I want to thank them for being here and being patient because we had some other city business to get through. Some of them may recognize some of their product uh throughout this presentation. So um you have in the top left there you have purpose-built duplexes and their builder is here. These will also feature an accessory dwelling unit behind them. You have forale product uh on the righth

hand picture built on 30 foot lots. Those are all sold and occupied. And then on the bottom left, I really like this one. This one's sort of an unsung hero for me. It doesn't get a lot of attention, but I drive people by it all the time. Um where we could have only gotten one house right here and only on one of the fronted streets. The other one, it didn't have the depth and you couldn't get a house at all. Um and meet setbacks. You'd have to be really really careful. Uh you actually have two single family homes on that. So where we could have only gotten one, we got two. In the case of those duplexes where we only could have gotten one, we got three. Um, and that's helped us address that housing shortage to the tune of uh there's over 150 units uh that are additional based on that zoning reform that we would not have been able to program were it not for that late 2024 change. Additionally, uh we really wanted to understand, you know, we know that we're following best practice for zoning. We have some of the most progressive zoning in Michigan. It's it's bearing fruit. We're building units. uh we wanted to understand like what do people think of these units and so we focused on the owner occupied product all throughout the city and uh on your screen is the actual survey that we created with the help of our community engagement team to make it look way prettier than I ever could. Um, and we actually went out in teams of two throughout the second half of summer and we found of about 171 homes uh targeted for the survey. We got 56 uh respondents that in person, they're all anonymized, all in person. Um, we double anonymize them where we actually as we coded the surveys, we shuffled them every time. So, there's no way to tie any data set back to any individual survey. Um, and what we found, and we'll go through the answers, uh, we found a high level of satisfaction was our key takeaway. And then we saw pretty broad diversity um when it came to household incomes, uh ethnic background, and educational attainment. But we're going to briefly run through these. And again, I'll invite you to save any questions you have for the end of the section, and I'll be happy to go back to that slide. So, this is broken up by age group. This one, as you might expect, you know, um well over half of all buyers were between 25 and 44, but we did see pretty

broad diversity. Uh, I was really happy to see that almost 6% of our buyers uh in the survey were under the age of 25, which is extremely unusual in Michigan for first-time home buyers or home buyers generally. Uh, we also had some folks that self-reported as retirees, downsizing, things like that. And uh, so you saw a pretty pretty good diversity of age group. Uh, this one I'm excited by. So, one of the biggest questions we've gotten from the commission is like, hey, are residents achieving these houses? Are residents buying them? And of the surveyed respondents, 45% were previous city residents and about 55% were new residents to the city. So they were not residents before being in that house. This one expands on that a little bit. So about 40% were non-county residents before that. So they were new to Moskegan County and then uh about 60% of them were at least county residents. So they lived in another area of Mskegegan County prior to buying the house. This one I'm also very excited by. So actually one in five buyers uh high school or GED is their highest level of educational attainment. Um this is an interesting uh tidbit that's sort of hidden in the data. If you look nationally about one in five home owners have high school level education. Uh but their average age is over 60. And so it's become increasingly hard for people to access this market with that level of education and be a homeowner. And so this illustrated that many of our uh buyers were kind of beating those statistics. And then if you add in the some college but did not graduate, it's actually just over 40% of respondents. And again, this is about a about a one-third response rate of the targeted owner occupied homes that we got, which is statistically valid for us because that's a substantial size of respondent pool. And then it breaks down relatively evenly between associates, bachelors, masters, and then obviously a small minority of postgraduates. So this speaks to employment status. As we might expect, 70% of respondents are full-time employed. and buying a house. That makes a lot of sense. Uh just about 10% were self-employed. Uh and then the

other 10% worked at least part-time. And then you had some small cohorts that were unemployed for various reasons. Gender identification. So we had uh almost a 50-50 split between male and female gender ID and then a small uh subsection of buyers that identified as non-binary. This one's interesting and this is one that uh if we're, you know, uh fortunate enough for the commission to allow us to continue infill housing, we think we can do a little better on. So, um this is grant recipients. This is anybody who got any form of down payment assistance uh or any other type of home buyer grant. Uh and about 15% of respondents said yes, we did receive some kind of assistance. Some of them self-reported uh MISTA. Um others didn't specify. Uh 83% didn't receive anything. For context, MISTA on average distributes about 5,000 first-time home buyer grants when they run that program in a given fiscal year. Um, and that's spread throughout obviously hundreds of thousands of home buyers in an average year in Michigan. So, um, it is, you know, not well concentrated in any one part of the state. They try to keep that money moving around, but it is nice to see that we had that many, but we do think we could get more. This is a breakdown of household income. This is probably the messiest chart, so I apologize just because there's so many cognates. Um, and it go actually 7 and a half% so about one in 12 were under 25,000 uh annually. And then we had a large cohort of people that were at or below uh the city's uh median income, which is about $46,000. So it's about uh one in five buyers. And then you go to 120% of the city's median income and it goes up to just under 50%. Uh and then just about 60% were at or below the county's median income, 100% of the county's median income. And then you can see it really tails off after that uh that 65 to $75,000. You start to see it pretty evenly distributed amongst higher income levels. Interestingly, the higher income levels did correlate to larger

family sizes, but not all the time. We had some folks report as um individuals or sets of two that were high income owners as well. So, it it ran the gamut pretty pretty extensively. Household size, again, uh this is pretty indicative and we have at least a couple realtors in the room and they would probably concur with me that there's a lot of one and two person households uh out there that are in the marketplace. And we are trying to accommodate that with our infill housing program. Uh building smaller product, not building only larger suburban style homes. And then as it gets into three, four, and five, you can see it sort of declines with the larger families. This one uh we really tried to benchmark. This was sort of an internal goal. Um because of the Fair Housing Act, you can't necessarily obviously restrict any buyer pool based on any of these protected classes. And we really wanted to try to be as representative as we could. So it was about uh 5842 white versus non-white in our buyer pool. And then um black and African-American folks, they almost identified uh point for point with the city's population. It's just under 33% based on the most recent data. Um the only group that underrepresented, notably underrepresented was Hispanic Latino. Um they make up, depending on the data set, anywhere between 6 and 8% of the the city's population. Obviously Hispanic and Latino are two different things. We asked people to combine that statistic so that we could capture selfidentified Hispanic folks. Um and we asked people to identify with what they best describe them. And so um and then white folks in this over represent uh slightly relative to the city population, but they also uh white folks in the United States and Michigan is not an exception tend to over represent by population in every buyer pool. And so that's not unexpected. So we got close on what our target goals were to be as representative of the city's population from a diversity standpoint as we could. This one I'm very excited by. So, this is previous home ownership status. And

these are all owner occupied people surveyed. And uh 58.5% of respondents were renting before they bought their house. And I think this is a stated goal of the commission at the time is that they really wanted to create pathways to home ownership. Um and that's why we we really as the city want to focus our efforts on owner occupied housing and then facilitate some our partners that are in the room to build the rental product that the study also says we need. Um the other was almost exclusively self-reported folks that they were living with family like saving money to buy their house. So and then finally we have satisfaction of process and product. So we were we asked folks their level of satisfaction with the program, the house, you know, whatever they felt like they want to give feedback on and check a box. And overwhelmingly we saw people were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied. Uh we did have a few individual surveys that identified as very dissatisfied in every case. those were either um issues with realtor process or some mechanical issues with their their housing unit. In at least one of those cases, we did a connect that person with the contractor to try to see if that thing was warrantied. So, um but yeah, overall very high level of satisfaction which we were happy to see. So performance so far. Um this kind of led us to wanting to go a step beyond just like resident reporting in these surveys and we wanted to be able to show the entire community and the wider public how we could visually demonstrate our progress on on housing. And so we over time you can see we've sort of matured in our ability to like market the lots and show people what we're doing. Uh, so the graph the chart on the left is actually we used to actually make PDFs that were colorcoded, print them off of GIS or email people PDFs and be like, "Here's the lots and take a drive around and let us know what you like and we'll we'll see what we can do." Um, eventually we realized that wasn't we were getting enough interest that that was not going to get us where we needed to be and it had we had too many people fighting over not fighting but like asking about the same lots and so the staff in planning did a really nice job of putting together a live uh vacant lot map. I'm betting every uh

person in behind me in this room should nod their head because they've all probably used that lot map to select their they're nodding, right?

Good. Okay. Just want to make sure. But uh so yeah, they this was great. It updated every evening. So as people put deposits on lots waiting to get in front of you for a purchase agreement, the lots would automatically depopulate from the map. And it gave the existing zoning, the dimensions, the true cash value. It was a navigable live document. And we wanted to go a step further and not just make it easy for folks to acquire lots, but we also wanted to make it easy for us to kind of show the public, you know, what is the yield from investing all this public property with all of these partners. So, with that, I'm going to briefly exit the presentation because the link doesn't work from the presentation. And for the first time ever, I want to show everybody uh a project that my staff have been working on for a really long time, um the better part of a year. And so, this is the city of Moskegan's housing dashboard. This will be live updated once it goes live to the public at the end of March every evening. And so as we complete new projects, as we program new projects, they will auto geopulate on the map and then they'll be sorted into whether or not they're market rate, whether or not they're subsidized for folks at a certain AMI. Um, and then they also benchmark against our housing study. So these lighter colored bars, they're what's actually stated as needed in the study. And I want to spend a little bit of time on these. Um, but what's also nice is that you can zoom in on these program on these products and you can actually click all of them and it will show you like who built it, what was the build price, uh, was it subsidized with anything. Uh, and it'll actually show you like what type of project it was and whether it was for sale, market rate, if there were any incentives attached to it. So the citizens can actually educate themselves and we'll have a legend once this is finished on the different tax incentives and like who was incentivized and how and our hope for that is specifically so that we can encourage more incremental developers from the region in the city to like show people like hey everyday people are doing a lot of this for us and you could be doing it too. So I want to kind of touch briefly

on this. These will auto update and these are not final. I don't want to uh say that these are the final numbers, but these kind of show where we're performing relative to the study which says at the end of 2027 to meet the need, we need to fill in all of these with with solid coloration. And um we'll talk a little bit about where we're overperforming. We're really overperforming in these like middle inome rents. So anything from like 900 to 1450, we've programmed a lot of stuff. um if it weren't for our low-income housing tax credit project partners, we wouldn't have any units done in these ranges uh without with the exception of maybe a few ADUs, but I mean a nominal number. So, we have well over a hundred programmed in these very lowest ones. And if you'll recall, those of you that were here, the first time I presented on the housing study, I was very candid in saying, I don't exactly know how we're going to meet this accommodation. This is this is very difficult to build and be able to program. Uh and you can see the same is true over here at the the very low income needed owner occupied stock. So we need you know between these two um about 400 units between uh less than 71,500 all the way up to about 120,000. And if I ask any builder to private build that for me new, they're going to probably tell me they can't. And we'll get into the wise of that. Um this is something that I'm very interested in keeping track of as well. So from 2018 till now. So the the whole dashboard runs from 2018 to now. Um we've seen in our housing as economic development programming an investment of $424.2 million so far. Um which is substantial. And so after you burn off all the abatements in the brownfield, that equates to just city millillage that equates to about $5.3 million in new tax base. Uh just property taxes, not inclusive of any income tax. Um and we're we hope to to get into that a little bit too. There's some other cool little features here. You can filter by neighborhood, which is cool. So, if you go over here, you can select your neighborhood and it'll just zoom into your neighborhood and let you show exactly what's been built there. But I want to really kind of before I navigate

away back to the PowerPoint, I want to kind of show people. So, right here is Midtown 2. That's when we first start. You see the orange dot? Anything orange is city involved. Anything u blue is purely private. And we cut the line off. If there's a brown field, a pilot, or a housing tiff, we call it city involved. or if it was on a city-owned piece of property, uh any like other statutory tax statement like NEZ or um PA 255 and a mixed use, we we call that private just because we had to draw the line somewhere. You can make the argument argument we've been involved in all of them, but so I want to kind of watch this progression. So there's Midtown 2 and then you see um some rental pilot agreements that took place in 2020 to infill some rental stock. You see that kind of continue primarily in the Nelson neighborhood. And then here comes the first of our ARP houses. So the city commission was gracious enough to appoint millions of dollars in infill owner occupied housing for ARP Mclofflin uh Jackson Hill and you start to see those populate. This is the year that we did the study and then you see us continue to try to like find innovative ways to infill housing a lot of owner occupied product. Here comes zoning reform and I want to kind of illustrate what this does start to see the impacts of those zoning reforms. And so were it not for the policy changes that you've allowed us to make, we would not be where we are today, which is between 2018 and now 1,770 new housing units programmed or complete. And that's substantial.

I'm going pause you right there. I'm going to clap.

Thanks to you all, everybody. Everyone in the room had a real hand in it. And so I want to illustrate that uh that will be live at the end of March. We will finalize those numbers and that will be updated on a regular basis. So before we move on, this is the housing dashboard project team from development services. So Joselyn Hines was the project lead, Jamie Pesh was our liazison with the county GIS, but everybody up here, Sam Pulos, Isabella Gonzalez, Sarah Roine, and then Tom Van Bugan with county GIS. Um that dashboard would not exist exist in any capacity without them. So I actually was going to ask for a round of applause for these people. So if you can run that back.

Yeah. Wouldn't have been possible without any of them. And so I wanted to make sure that we acknowledge that. So again, performance so far. I want to kind of summarize those program units. Again, the zoning reform was a gamecher. But a big important point that I want to make tonight, we have folks in the room right now that represent large housing developers that have a lot of capacity. And we have folks in the room that build us two a year, three a year. And were it not for those smaller incremental developers, uh the output on that slide between 2023 and now would be about half of what it is. And so they've utilized zoning reform. They've come in and found viable projects. And so they've effectively doubled our output since we did that housing study from 2023 to now. So that incre incremental development does work when you find the appropriate partners. I want to reiterate, we would have made zero progress on lowpriced rental units uh without the LITC program. And I I've mentioned it at the podium before. I think were the second most awarded community in the state of Michigan in the last three rounds behind only the city of Detroit. I believe that's true. Um and then the new housing tiff and scattered site pilot tools that the state passed and that we gave some feedback on as they were in the in the pipeline. Those were essential for us to be able to do this stuff. They create market viability for these. And then moving the NEZ maps, the economic development staff coming up with uh the right maps to maximize the city lots for owner occupied. Those have made a huge difference too. And I want to call your attention to these two products uh on the screen. One of them is one of our art homes and uh it's it's a single family home and then the other one is a purpose-built duplex uh up down a two-story duplex and I would argue they would both fit beautifully in any of our neighborhoods and that they are both very welcome additions. So I I really think that's striking because we had a lot of people wondering how duplex product would fit purpose-built into the community and I think if it weren't for that door on the right hand side of that other one, you wouldn't be able to tell these two things apart. So I did want to draw that comparison for your consideration. So again, uh we're since 2023, which is the beginning of the study period, and

that's what we've kind of benchmarked ourselves at. We are at 1,290 of the 2,924 units programmed under construction or completed. that does not include the sappy site or the docs development. Uh the reason for that just being they have approved site plans, but we know they're quite a ways away from units to the point where it may be the next study period where we actually see them come online. Um we've performed really well, as I said, in some key areas, uh but we're underperforming in the most vulnerable areas. Uh and just for specifics, uh since 2023, that's the breakdown. So we have 933 of 1611 programmed rentals and 357 of 1,313 for sale products. and we need to focus on further for sale product. That's the biggest takeaway that we've noticed is that people are building it for us. We have private builders building it. We haven't built anything since the end of the art program. Uh but we think that we need to get back in the game a little bit. So that's the end of performance so far. Be happy to entertain any questions before we get into next steps.

Commissioners, Commissioner German. Yeah. Thank you, Mayor Jonathan. Director Echo gotta say good job. Thank you. Um you know this this project has came came a long ways um from the very beginning as you stressed that in the u presentation. Um I think taking a risk first with the uh Midtown project that uh Mayor Johnson and I was uh fortunate enough to approve that. Um people thought we were crazy.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. U there was some skepticism and um also um when I talked about the possibility of displacement um gentrification those things were inevitable. I I thought um I think taking a pragmatic approach and also doing it in increment kind of allowed us to fill things out as well. Um as me and you had disagreements on on a lot of things. I think um the thing that really uh added um some structure to it was the um study that now we have data to see and um look at something tangible to measure how we're moving along and growing the city of Moskegan. Also with you know improving the downtown and developing that area I thought it was essential that we also focus in the inner part of the city which now we have somewhat of a balance and we have a strong robust downtown. So I can see the momentum um to the developers um who's coming in and helping us with these projects. Uh kudos to you all. Um, I just think that now um that we have this momentum and my focus was always to as I campaigned on um economic development to make sure that it's equitable and you talked about that in your different price points and things like that which was a hard sale for me till I started seeing the data and stuff like that. So it allowed me to support some things. So, I'm I'm just really excited about this to see the outcome in a positive way that's going to um give opportunity and fair equitable opportunity to people that want to buy homes here. Um people that live here are able to afford them but also have a place to stay for renters also. Now, I do have that concern as and I don't know if this was

in that study. I can't remember not. How will we um help out homelessness? Um I I think that was in that study also. Was it in that study? Uh not that specific study, but I we do have some uh some brief content in here and we actually are already preparing another presentation for a different work session that really takes a deep dive into options. Um but it is very much on our radar as as the housing as economic development conversation continues. Okay. All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Commissioner German. Commissioner Kilo.

Thank you. Good evening, Mr. Alome. Thank you so much. A ton of work to your whole team. I've been also like Commissioner German following from the start. So much so I have a statement I'd like to read and then I do have a couple of questions for you. So as a city commissioner and as a real estate professional, I am incredibly proud of the work our city has done expanding housing opportunities. Programs like our infill housing initiatives, our zoning reforms, and tax incentive programs are making a real difference here in our community. These efforts have created a true win-winwin, providing residents with new construction housing and opportunities through programs like the NEZ, creating jobs and opportunities for builders and construction workers, strengthening our city by adding muchneeded housing stock. Moskegan is showing what thoughtful house housing policy can look like, and I'm excited about the progress we've made and that we're showing here in the state of Michigan, leading in the state of Michigan. I also want to encourage every contractor and developer here in the room to talk with your lender partners, talk with local nonprofits to invest in much needed home buyer education. While the city works closely with our county partners and our regional partners on economic development and things for job creation, we also have to do our part in the real estate industry to help people be prepared to purchase these homes here in our community. So this pin here on my lapel, that is the fair housing pin. So I'm a member of DAR, National Association of Realtors, and that's our fair housing pin. And looking at these numbers, which I got a chance to peek at last week with you, I'm super excited about the diversity of the numbers from age groups to u racial makeup to just the way that our city already is, right? It wasn't the the

needle wasn't falling too far one way or the other. I do. Um, the two questions I had is one though, we need more being boots on the ground, we need a few more options for lower priced new construction homes than what we currently have. And like our earlier infill program, the ones that the city did, those price point ones are more stock that we need. And I know that you know that, but I'm just kind of saying it out loud for the public. Um, but then the second thing that I hear from some of the folks in this room and other folks in the industry that I talk to are, why are we holding lots if people aren't going to build on them? So, I love our bigger partners, but I love our smaller partners even more. And sometimes a bigger partner has 50 lots reserved, but they can only really do five of or 10 of them this year because they're working on something over here and over here. Do we have a strategy or a plan to make it more equitable for people that can do it right now so that we are city, we can actually get the housing stock right now? That's my question for for now.

Uh to address your first comments, uh commissioner, I think you're really going to like the next slides that I've got. So, that's exciting. Um, and then to address your question, um, so we do have reverters in our purchase agreements, as I'm sure you know because you guys review them and approve them. Um, as long as someone is working productively towards homes, we really try not to exercise that. Um, we do have a few folks that have just not been able to get over that finish line. And you know, we despite our, you know, efforts with extensions and utility fee connection waiverss, which we do for all residential, um, and we are at a point where we're going to have to start taking some lots back. Um, and actually the staff are working on preparing those right now. Basically giving folks the opportunity to say, "Hey, we're not obligated to um to return, you know, purchase prices. We can take them back, but there's a court filing and it's further cost for both of us. It'd be easier if we could just work through deeding them back to us." um or you need to, you know, build houses now. And and there's not very many of those folks. Um and then if there are larger format folks that um have a larger number of lots, the policy currently states that if they're under an existing development agreement, then they are not subject to a reverter the same way that individual sales are. And because um most of those development agreements predate the policy. And so we didn't want to claw back stuff on folks uh that have them sitting in a development agreement. In most cases, those actually haven't closed, so they haven't bought them. So that reverter doesn't apply anyway, but they have an active contract with us. One of those contracts uh we're actively working to retool right now um to make it a more favorable contract for both the city and the builder because the builder's held off because it's not really working the way it was designed with good intentions in in earlier 2020s. And so yeah, you'll see some agenda items coming your way in the next several months to to write some of those issues. Yep.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Ko. Commissioners, anything else to ask Brad at this point with regard to performance and what's been presented thus far?

Phenomenal insights. No, like seriously, thank you so much for pulling together all that data, presenting it, and giving us those insights into how the different policies and programs and initiatives that we have undertaken um are benefiting our community and a broad spectrum of our community and um some newcomers as well to our to our community. Uh so I really appreciate that and that dashboard is phenomenal. Like I'm excited for that to go live um and be able to dig into that and and use that and share that um and have that be readily available. So, I really appreciate all the work that's gone into that dashboard and collecting all of this data and insights. Um, and while home info program and strategies um got underway, you know, before before your arrival a decade ago, but since your arrival in, uh, was it March of 2019 or there about

2019? Yeah. Um,

you've helped take it to the next level in so many different ways, you and your team and just phenomenal work. Um, I'm using that word a lot, phenomenal this evening, because it really is, it's quite impressive. um the progress that we're making. We understand there's still some gaps. We understand there's still work needs to be done. We understand particularly from the um our unhoused populations. Um but we do know as well that the work that's being done on all these various different housing initiative programs are moving the needle and is helping to prevent more people from being put into in a housing insecure situation. Um, and so every little bit helps. And, um, I really appreciate you and your team with regard to attracting and working with, um, LITC developers, low housing tax credit developers, um, and being so successful in getting those awards. Like you said, you know, in recent years, we are second only in Detroit. um not because we're second in need um in the state, but because we have willing developers and a great development services team that's going to baff them and and getting and securing those grants and making sure those projects move forward and actually bring new housing online. And so just hats off to you, your team, and to all of the developers uh in this room who are working um whether it's, you know, one house or 100 houses, you know, whatever the scale is, we appreciate every little bit helps. Um and so I really appreciate thank you all for choosing to grow with Mskegegan and uh thank you for inviting so many people to grow with Moskegan. So thank you. Um now we can go on to next steps and where you want to maybe take us from here.

Yeah, thank you. It's a a huge team effort. So yeah, the team has done a fantastic job. So yeah, proposed next steps. So here's the ask. We gave you all that shiny data so we can make some asks. But so here are our proposed next steps. So, what we found is that private builds really cannot meet the price points that the study says residents and probably potential uh people that are at risk of of housing instability need. Um, and we saw that in the dashboard. So, what we also have noticed is that some folks are building for us on 30 foot lots. Um, the forale product that has been attempted there, they've really said like, hey, this is hard to make profitable. it's hard to build on a 30- foot lot um and fetch like the price point against the build price that people in the marketplace want to buy. Um so that's kind these are all kind of pieces of data that we maintain these relationships for and we hear them with open ears to kind of like understand what people are seeing because they're the ones on the ground building these homes. Um, we want to continue to invest in our brownfield and get all of those lots redeveloped to complete that brownfield plan. Uh, because that will lead to larger gains in the newly created housing fund, which is another policy change that the city commission allowed us to make where we do now we're we're the only city government budget that I've found that has an actual housing capital fund. There are housing revolving funds at county levels in lots of our neighbors, but this one is is at least unique from what I can find. Um the data that we've been able to pull from pre-qualification, if you dig through all the people trying to sell you a mortgage and find this data, um it shows large numbers of buyers in the region that need product at or below $200,000. Um the average mortgage is in Michigan is over $300,000 with the median in the 240 to 260 range. So a lot of our folks in in our area of the our corner of the state need something that's less expensive than that. And so what we're proposing, all these red dots uh represent locations where we have currently held over city lots. Uh some of them can be split. So there's 22 dots, but we would split many of them.

Um and we want to propose to do another round of infill similar to the ART program we did and construct 40 to 50 new forale units in our neighborhoods uh throughout the city. And you can see there's a pretty good stratification. Obviously, we kind of have to go where the lots are. Uh but we tried to spread it around more than we've done in the past. The predominant amount of homes in the art program were in Mclofflin with a few in Jackson Hill. Um the rental product, we've done a great job finding folks to build in just about every neighborhood, but these we really want to focus on trying to build some owner occupied stock where we've built some rental product to make sure we're being diverse in what we infill in in neighborhoods. Um we estimate that it would be a capital improvement bond or direct placement of about $8 million. uh of which we estimate about 75% would be paid back through direct proceeds from sale of those homes and the remainder would be paid off by the brownfield. For a bit of context, this is not written in a slide, but I would encourage everyone to to tuck it away. Um the this year's brownfield for this for the city's infill brownfield fund will be just over $300,000 collected. I anticipate next year when a lot of these houses hit the tax roll um and we t both pilots and advalorum, I think we're going to be closer to 450 to five. And so we're going to be taking in some significant brownfield revenues which can help us serve a note on further owner occupied construction. So that's the the main thrust of what we would like to do next. We're calling it phase three because Midtown Square phase 2 was the first brownfield funded infill housing and ARP was the the next one. And so I see some people taking pictures of slides just so you know I am going to email you this presentation this like this evening. Um, in addition to that, we've come up with another idea that we think is a little innovative and but is reminiscent of some things we've done before and it also helps us solve an existing kind of big hairy problem which is what to do with the 881st street lot which we as you know we tore down um the skeleton building everybody called it last year. Um and we utilized some some remaining uh wrap money from the state

to help us with that. So, we also as either a next phase or a component phase, we would also propose doing um a higher to medium density connected owner occupied housing development at 881st Street. We've spoken with three separate developers, one litec, two market rate, and the challenge we're running into is that the site is just too tight to get enough density of multif family on there to to turn a profit as a traditional multif family development. And as you'll remember, it was an office building prior to uh prior to its demolition. So, um we're restricted by an existing parking agreement on that parking lot. We're party to a condo and so we don't have any exclusive rights to the parking that's adjacent to it. So, not only is it small to try to get the units you need for the construction type you would have to use, uh but it also has no dedicated parking, which makes it difficult. Um so, you know, honestly, we kind of got this idea. I was taking a walk uh throughout downtown with my dog and uh was walking by the lot and realized like the whole context area for Clay, which the lot is just as much a part of if not more than Western Avenue, is three stories as the maximum. The highest building is the Birkshshire and it's three stories. And so there's a lot of institutional buildings. Um there's two other town home developments across the street are in the same block. And this is really what got my wheels turning on it. So, we're all told after the reimbursement of that wrap grant, from what I can tell, we're about $700,000 to the bad in removing that structure. So, um between taking the facade off in 2018 and the actual demolition project and any carried costs on the lot, the fence, we ended up buying the fence because we had rented it for so long and that the guy was like, "You just want to buy it." And uh so we've got some costs into it. Um, I believe that these could actually positive cash flow into the housing fund and help us recoup some of the that investment. Um, some or all would be my hope. And there is a strong desire for

owner occupied market rate housing in the downtown, but it's very difficult to deliver. Uh, because the per acre price is probably somewhere in the 400 to $450,000 per acre range. We already own this site and we've already sunk the costs into clearing it. Um the logical next step is to redevelop it with something that we think will cash flow positive. So the thought would be 10 to 12 units on site uh condominiumized similar to Heritage Square right next door um and build for sale product targeting a per unit price in the 300,000 range and then selling them over that. So these would be market rate. These would not be held lower below our construction costs the way the neighborhood houses would. My target is to try to get some some houses in the neighborhoods um to sell in the under 120 range. The reason for that is because the brownfield is overperforming in a revenue standpoint and so we can take deeper losses on the next round than we have in the past because we're overperforming due to all the private sales that we've done. So we would act as a developer and we would place 81 street back into the city's brownfield. It was in there and we took it out because we were trying to get another developer to do it and they would want to do a brownfield there. So we took it out of our brownfield plan thinking someone else would do their own brownfield plan. Um, but this is this is the first time I've talked to any of you about it uh in any public way, but this is an idea that we think could really help us recoup some of the the public's investment into that lot. And then next steps, moving on, is honestly research and analysis from 2027 and beyond. So, we already know that we're going to propose to you an RFP for another 5-year housing needs assessment that would be conducted towards the end of 2027. Uh, and that would be our next five years. Um the the right now the plan is for the staff to quarterly update the housing dashboard. So it will automatically update any uh database updates on its own, but every quarter we'll go through and sort of wash it and make sure that it jives with permit data with CFO data and like any lot sales that we know have taken place to just make sure it's correct. Um we want to do

further analysis, likely paid third party consultant analysis of unhoused conditions and potential solutions. So, the deputy city manager has been doing a really good job um sort of pulling in different subject matter experts, people that are working in wraparound services, people that are working in mental health, um talking to our public safety team, and she's been kind of leading that conversation to to determine what role should the city play. And again, we have a whole another presentation on that, so I don't want to get too deep into that tonight. Uh and then for that 5-year goal setting session, we want the city commission's recommendations on the best implementations for our housing fund, which is fund 447. Um, this is newly created. Once the brownfield is all said and done, um, there will be funds in it. Um, to the t I'm guessing to the tune of a couple to several million dollars. Um, and so, you know, is that a housing revolving fund that we that we invest in other developments in? Is that something that we utilize for housing intervention? Is it something we utilize for home buyer education programming? Do we invest that in a CD ladder? There's all kinds of options and we'll bring those options to you at the end of this study period at the end of 2027 when you do your next round of 5-year goals. And then uh we really want to get deeper into I referenced some numbers on the total investment and what that means in property tax dollars. We want to really study uh the economic impact the housing program is having on not only the city but the region. Um and we want to understand the budgetary ramifications of what it means for the city's finances after all is said and done. So once everybody's getting full freight taxes and the brownfield is over, what did it actually generate for the city to deliver public services? Because as many of you know, most of the places where we're building these and a lot of these builders will tell you they find foundations by accident all the time. Um, and we do not pay to take those out. I will repeat that. I've said it several times. Um, but they used to have houses on them. And the city used to be 50,000 people. And if we ever really want to deliver the level of public services, parks and wreck, things we discuss here all the time, we have to we have to put them back. It's as simple

as that. So, um, those are kind of our next steps in the immediate year or two. Any questions on those? Feedback on the scope of the infill housing project that we're proposing. Commission Commissioner Coch. Yes. Um, thank you very much, um, Dr. Ekholm for that breakdown. The the one question I had um was in regards to the proposal of the $8 million project. Um I saw that you said you were talking about 40 to 50 new for sale units that the city would be taking on as the contractor. Did I read that correctly?

Developer. Yeah. So we would what we would do is we would design these homes with an architect and instead of the way we've done it in the past where we have contractors propose what to build on a given lot, we will program the lots. the planning team has already selected the ones they'd like to see developed and we will program the lots with a set of plans and we will ask people for bids on against that set of plans. So we'll say okay commissioner coachin wants to build on this same address as commissioner Kilgo and there'll be an RFP to to issue a bid on that particular housing unit that we have designed is the plan. Yeah,

I see. Okay. So do I didn't see dollar amounts on there. Um, do we have an idea of what those dollar amounts could be in a range for residents? Because I saw, you know, on the slides previously in the last section talking about the numbers needed between uh under 71,000 to 119,000 and it doesn't look like we've moved the needle on that. And you discussed how that would be difficult. I was hoping that was kind of the leadup into and here's what we're doing with that. Is that in that range or are we thinking that would not be in that range? Yeah, our goal is to make a number of these units marketable in the 100 to1 120 range. I think it depends on the math. Uh I have we have some ideas, the planning team included, on how to achieve something in that $70,000 range. And uh it's going to be multif family condo that's purpose-built for Lotomod folks. Uh so basically like think of a litech new construction but owner occupied. And then um the other thing and again that's going to take deep losses and it's going to require us to get involved as a brownfield. These are all options. This phase we're going to focus specifically on owner occupied single family homes. Um and my goal is to really fill the market wherever it's missing. And so we've noticed that really our builders are having a really hard time despite their efforts to get under $200,000. And that's what the data says. So, I'm guessing of those 50 units, it might be 12 that are at 180 and they're larger homes, three-bedroom, two-b for families. And then, uh, we'll go all the way down to trying to get into that $100,000 cottage style house. And we're going to take a deep loss on that house. And we're going to count on those private builds that have been built on our sold lots to generate that tiff to help us make up that gap. And so, yeah, we h we don't have like a pro for a breakdown. Uh we're using a rough number of $200,000 per unit because that'll include soft costs, tree clearing, architecture, uh new utility connections, things like that. And so um

some of them will be far less than that and some of them will be right up to that and maybe a little over. And so that's where that number comes from.

Okay. Yeah, I appreciate that that explanation because I think that that's something that I'm really interested in seeing is that price range and us getting some movement in that direction. um because I know there's a lot of people out there that need those homes. I think that's a super fair point because I think a huge pitfall that we as staff and me in particular fell into and uh I think several commissioners held me to account on over the course of ARP was I didn't always know exactly like where the bids were going to come back on a house because we had selected contractors and assigned them lots and then they were proposing builds based on what we were seeing we needed in real time and we didn't have to commissioner German's uh point we didn't have this housing study we didn't have a good understanding of what people really needed from a banking perspective talked to bankers and they're like, "This is what I'm seeing. We're talking to realtors. This is what I'm seeing." And we were making what I would call educated guesses. Um, but we were not being particularly data driven until the very end. And that's when you saw like those small format two-bedroom homes come out. And I can only speak from my own experience, but the people that I surveyed that were in those homes, those like several people really really said like, "I would not be able to have a home that I own were it not for this house." And that's nice to hear. And so, yeah, absolutely. We're going to be targeting um multiple price points. I would guess the maximum that we're going to get into is just under 200 and then the minimum is going to be as low as we can effectively build it and find qualified buyers.

Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Coach. And yeah, I've heard from numerous now residents um whether they're existing residents or newcomers to our community, but heard from several um you know, in recent years that they're were only able to buy because of the programs um that we've um provide that we have here. So, that's always nice to hear. Um, Commissioner Kilko,

thank you, Mr. Mayor. Um, director, so I don't want to contradict myself, but I'm about to, right? I said we need low price houses, right? but with a caveat of currently the lowest price new construction home on the market is around $190,000 and it's been sitting there for several months. We had a rough winter, whatever. Some people can't afford it. That's why I said they would love to buy but they can't afford it, right? So, we need some lower price ones. Do we have any plans to um AMI cap these homes if you find a way? cuz I saw some of the faces in the crowd when you said $70,000. They were like, "You're on drugs or something." But I get it, right? It that would be with us taking a loss and using some of the funds and making the numbers work. And I love that because there are people out there.

I talked to a lady, a single mom, three kids. They approved her for $100,000. She doesn't want to live in the Heights. She wants to live in the city. She don't have many options. So, she would love some options like something around hundred something thousand dollars. Do we have any plans to cap the price for AMI qualifications? Because I guess what I don't want to see happen, somebody can't afford 200, they buy that 100 home and now that 200 home's still sitting there. You know what I'm saying?

Mhm. Yeah. No, that's a real concern. And yeah, I'm sure there were some uh interesting fac facial expressions on a house for sale between $70 and $80,000. Uh so, um the idea is the cheaper we make the home, the it costs what it costs to build and so the more of a hit we take against construction and soft closing costs. And that's what the brownfield helps with without getting too far down that rabbit hole cuz we are taking a lot of time. Um, but I want to highlight and thank, you know, in particular West Urban Properties. Brent Cox is here tonight who's very outgoing and I'm sure he loves me pointing him out. Uh, like, uh, you know, we were finding that during ARP, we were like, man, we're we're still pricing people out at 180. And like this, and again, we didn't have the caveat of this data. We didn't have the help. And so I talked to to Brent and his colleague uh Dave Doozand and was like what I said was we've all and you might remember this. I was like we've all lived in a two-bedroom oneb apartment or we've visited someone who does like everybody in the country has seen this apartment. Build it for me on a slab and and Dave uh is a very talented designer and they did it and uh we built those at the time I want to say like 158 with no

Yeah. Yep. and we sold them for129. And so that we can take deeper hits because the brownfield has done so well in with all these other folks that are here tonight purchasing our lots and infilling for sale product or for rent product on them that the tiff will still capture. And so that's going to take a lot of analysis. So I'm not going to overcommit to you and be like, "Yep, we're going to sell all of them for $75,000." Um because we have to do a lot of math to see how that bears out. The target is to make an impact in those lower two pieces of the bar chart that we really haven't made an impact in. Thank you, sir. Thank Commissioner Sinclair.

Thank you. I do not have any questions right now. I'm sure I will as we get farther down the road. Um I just want to shine a light on how creative and innovative what we're doing is. And I don't think I don't think many people understand the risks that this community has supported and the hard work that Director Eckholm's team and other teams as well have really put into this. But I um I have the opportunity to talk to other elected officials around the state fairly often and every time they hear I'm from Moskegan, they're like, "Oh my gosh, you guys are killing it there with housing. How are you doing that? How did you get zoning through? How are you doing this with the brownfield? Like what what is your magic? And there's lots of magic happening, right? Like it's not it's not one simple thing. But I think it all comes back to big risks, big ideas, and the willingness to have a lot of conversations. You know, we talked about the the zoning reform that we passed and it was not unanimous. It was a really contested thing that came around several times and even the final vote was not unanimous. We had to do a second reading because not it did not get full support. But I think it was important enough that your staff took the time to help the community understand why it was something that had to happen to get us where we needed to go. And by the time it finally came up for a final vote, there was no public outcry. We did not have people in the chambers

with pitchforks, And that happens like we people come to see us

um and they tell us all about ourselves all the time and and that is that is part of the job but because so much work had been done to help the public understand the need. it just went through, you know, and and I I don't want to I don't want to minimize the amount of work that was put into that happening. But that um you know, when when you ran through the the slides and you showed the impact of zoning reform, um I I am so grateful for the continued persistence because I remember when I was campaigning, I went to every meeting in the city. Um, and I went to like seven different zoning reform groups and all of the housing study feedback sessions that you did. And um, sometimes there were three people in there and sometimes there were 30. And you got to get your people on board. Um, and you do that by having conversations and and helping them understand. And sometimes it's hard and people get in your face and and they don't want to hear it. And I just appreciate the resiliency of our staff to to keep having those hard conversations. I you know I I can't express my gratitude enough for all of the work that has been done to get us to where we are. And I will certainly have questions in the future and I won't always be a yes and you know that. But I will always support what we're doing to keep us moving. So, thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Sinclair, you want to chime in before I ask? Oh, no. Okay. I thought you had like you had something to say. One more brief session and then we're done. Yeah. Commissioners, anything else to ask or share at this time? I just wanted to ask what does ARP mean? Oh, American Rescue Plan. Sorry, I broke my own rule. Explain all acronyms. EA. Yeah, we committed what 5.75 million. Yeah. To um out of our ARPARE dollars that the city of Michigan received. We committed $5.75 million to a um home infill partnership where we invited private sector to build houses um and half of which were intended our half essentially that we were paying for to build were intended for um folks at 120% AMI and less

um but you said you have next uh more more to present.

Yep. Just brief uh wanted kind of set the table for future after the next project that we're going to bring to you as long as we don't hear any real push back. Um, so so far we're by the end of the current iteration we will have developed 435 lots and that sounds like a ton. This map is just a small section of the city and its neighborhoods. Everything in black is buildable privately held vacant lots. And so there's over 500 remaining. Um, now some of these have been long since established as somebody's yard and they're, you know, they have a fence and their dog runs out there. We're not trying to take those lots. I I don't want to give that impression at all. Some of them are vacant and they're held by LLC's, many of whom are not based in Michigan and they're purely spec property. Um, our goal is to use the housing fund to start as early as this coming fiscal year in 20 fiscal 27 26 27 to start to acquire some of these lots um to continue to provide opportunities to our partners to build owner occupied and rental product because as you said, as you saw, we're really only on pace or overperforming in one section of the housing study. And so, uh, we want to continue to have the opportunity to kind of write our own story on housing and these lots are essential to that. These are all just one area of vacant buildable property. Uh, and then again, future study to dictate the recommended city involvement. So, our 2028 study will give us a lot of guidance on, hey, do we need a phase four? Do we need to build, you know, 40 or 50 more? How did the previous one perform? It's too early to answer that, but it may be that this next round of of owner occupied stuff we build is our last time acting, playing developer, so to speak. So, another thing, and this speaks to housing intervention, and we'll go into more detail in the housing intervention presentation for the works uh session, is single room occupancy. And so, this is another housing option that uh can really help us get to that rental stock under $536, which the study says I think we need 385 units of, and we've programmed about 84, which is great because I was didn't think we were going to get that many at the beginning. Um, we think that this is viable both as a

private for-profit development model and as permanent supportive housing, which will absolutely help in the housing spectrum for for unhoused folks. Uh, we think it gives an opportunity to partner with other agencies. We just recently got um Habitat for Humanity of Kent County to make investments here. We continue to speak to ICCF and uh Dwelling Place and others that are doing great work in other communities um to provide some wraparound agencies for uh services for folks that need it. Uh, and we think that this can sort of be a launching pad for folks into permanent housing. This was a common piece of the housing spectrum right up until it wasn't. So, post World War II when zoning became prevalent, um, these were seen as things that you people didn't want close to them uh, for different reasons and they kind of zoned them out over time, but they were an essential part of the housing spectrum in the United States for most of our history. And so, we want to take a look at allowing these as a use by right over time. Um, and again, we think they complement other forms of housing presentation, which we'll get to in a in a different presentation. So, just a really brief like just so you're not surprised at the goal setting session in 2027. We're going to be like, "Hey, we have all these ideas." Um, we didn't want to end it solely with asking you for money. So, we wanted to let you know we're going to try to continue to innovate. But that's all I had for today. Thank you for your time. Uh on that last point with the single room occupancy, you said uh end of 2027, do you not anticipate us exploring moving that forward sooner? That's something that would be coming only after uh this housing needs assessment cycle done and we embark on the second um cycle of housing needs assessment. You want to have that assessment done before to to help inform whether whether or not we move forward SRO's in what capacity and extent. So, what we're finding, and I was of the mind I, as some of you know, I have a super secret special lot that I've been saving for a single room occupancy development. Um, and it's not on the lot map, and that was by my choice. I was like, let's keep this one. But, uh, that my thinking on it has evolved in the sense that through

deputy manager Mike Cell's research and collaboration with the continuum of care and other folks, I think there's a lot more just like we we grew to become like housing experts through data. I think we need to grow to become close to experts on this issue because while they're connected, they are not they are not aligned completely. And so I think it's a huge lift to even pay to build an SRO facility in a brownfield mechanism like we would um but then finding the right partner to help, you know, to run it effectively for wraparound services to to shelter people with permanent supportive housing. There's a lot of stuff going on. And I think there's also some steps in between folks that are unhoused and getting to that. And so what we would advocate for 2026 and 2027 is probably doing some really in-depth study of those specific issues. Um, and then probably asking for some of those things to be further expanded on in our housing needs assessment. So, I wouldn't anticipate breaking ground uh on a single room occupancy in 2027 the way maybe I had hoped in 2024 25 just because we've learned we we know so much more of what we don't know and I think that's probably the best way I can put it.

Okay. Thank you. Commissioner Kog, thank you. Quick question. Single room occupancy. There are private builders who would love to build single room occupancy on nonpublic or private property. Is it something that you think that we're gonna not have a conversation on at all until 2027?

No, I'm hopeful that this calendar year we will bring some further zoning reforms that would include making this an easier thing to do. You can do it now. Uh you can kind of shoehorn your way into it. Um but we want to be able if somebody wanted to come to me and say, "Hey, I want to purpose build 16 units of SRO." That would be a heavy lift. And so we want to find pathways to do that that the community again aligns with after some community engagement.

Awesome. My last point, um, don't get a big head. Okay, to people who may be watching this online across the world, you can't have Jake. He likes it here. He likes us. He's staying. But, um, um, the state is following suit, sir. So, hats off to you. The state of Michigan just introduced legislation in the state capital doing the exact things that we're doing here in the city of Moskegan. And that's how well it's working. Like the entire state is looking here at Moskegan, seeing how housing is working for us and our residents and new residents that come. I encourage everyone who has continued questions. You can find Jake's information or city's information online on our website and email him questions. He is a personable person and he is great. All my developer friends, I'm sure you all have talked with him, but let's continue to work together. If there's issues, if there's hurdles, if there's ideas that you guys have, I know a lot of you guys will call me and talk to me. Let's talk. Let's get new projects on the books. Let's look at other things to continue to grow together because we are stronger together. Thank you for my county friend, our housing coordinator in the house. Like, that's the kind of step that we need because it's not just the city of Moskegan. She is doing a kick-ass job all over Mskegegan County to bring these ideas that we're doing here in Moskegan to other municipalities across our county so we can grow as a county because like I said, we're bringing jobs here. We're trying to do things to not just uh insulate ourselves from everyone else, but to actually grow together. So again, thank you all for being here this evening. I think that we're going to continue to do great things around housing here in Moskegan County. Thank you, sir.

Thank go. I think Mr. Manager, you had something to add. Yeah, I just was um I mean kind of to echo what a lot of other folks have been saying on the DAS about the work that's been done and it's I've been to Capcon in Lancing where um MEEDC was specifically talking about what we were doing here and how the state had to go in and change rules with brownfield and scattered site to make it so other communities could do it. We are setting the trends. I get calls from colleagues in states on the West Coast because they've heard about what we're doing here, trying to understand how it is and how do you get through these processes on on, you know, eating this elephant. And it really is one bite at a time, taking a look at the whole problem and then figuring out how you get through it because uh if if you don't have that path forward and you're kind of attacking it from all angles, you're not going to be successful. And because of what um Director Ekholm has done with his team, we've been able to get through that. And because of what you all on the commission have done, this commission and previous commissions um and previous administrations quite frankly on setting the the path forward to get this rolling. It's all because of the efforts that the community is doing as a whole. And I think sometimes we get really wrapped up in like how are we going to solve this next problem? We've got this huge thing going on here. Maybe this isn't going right. It really is worth taking the time to look backwards and see how far we've come and the steps that we've taken. That might have looked crazy at the time um for those of you who are sitting on the dis but it really did work out and it and we really started to get the the you know the acceleration moving when we started looking at those plans on how to move it forward. And I'm really excited about this next option. Um, and the you know the tying I I wanted Jake to talk about a little bit more about how the 880 first street stuff gets tied in because one of the things that we talked about that does seem a little weird. Um, maybe but when you think about the fact that

if we own the property and if we develop it we get the net of the profits which helps in the brownfield as a whole where if we had a developer come in we would probably sell it for couple hundred thousand. Yeah. we would end up net negative against what we've got into it for sure.

Yeah. So, this it helps us achieve those other goals um and does and it helps us achieve some objectives of more market rate ownership downtown which is something that we know we hear all the time that people want to live downtown in a market rate house. So, it really does fit into this puzzle. Um for you know you folks watching at home like this looks weird but that is a component of the housing study too and all the housing that we bring online helps to alleviate the problem overall. So, other communities, you can do this. I know a lot of our neighbors, as Commissioner Sinclair noted, they're they're struggling with this now. They're having people come out about it, whether it's in um other communities here in Moskegan County, Kent County, Ottawa County. I I know they're dealing with this. You can get through this, too, and you can achieve what you need to achieve to serve your community.

Thank you, Mr. Manager. I see over here, Commissioner Co.

Um, thank you very much, Director Okome, for your work and all everyone else on the team's work. you know, we've done the applause and um I still really appreciate all of you guys and all the dedication you put into this. You know, I I don't know if it's a secret or not, but I'm a gamer. I like my board games and when you're playing a like economic type board game, you have to build your engine, right? That's the first step when you start playing because you need to be able to use that engine to then b pay for other things that you're going to buy in the game to make, you know, your city better, right? I think this is very similar. Um the idea with 881st Street, like when you were explaining it to me, that's exactly what went into my mind. I was like, "Oh, okay. That's what he's doing. He's using that to to fund that." Um the the conversation about the single room occupancy I think is a really good conversation to have because while it might not be helping our unhoused who are you know maybe a lot of them who are currently unhoused I think it would help people from falling into that crack and then becoming unhoused. Um, I been been looking for different family members around Moskegan to try to help them find housing in the last year and looking at how much more expensive it is is is just it's wild to me. You know, when you are talking about homes for under $71,000, you know, my my mortgage is about $80,000, right? So, like it's really weird for me to go, whoa, I bought that not that long ago

and now you can't even consider finding that. Um, and so that like that's I think it speaks to a change in the market overall. Um, but I would really like us to, you know, keep considering that as an option. If there's any private builders out there who are interested in smaller versions of this, um I think that that could be a really viable thing to help people right now in our community while we assess things further um on a bigger scale and I I'm really looking forward to that conversation about how we're going to help the unhoused. Do you have an idea when that might be coming to us? Um, so actually, uh, I know this was super brief and concise and but it ran a little long before and I had slides in this presentation and I pulled them out because it was we felt like it was a little too heavy for one presentation. Um, I we have the framework for that presentation now and I would defer to deputy manager Mike Salon an actual time so I won't answer that directly today. Uh, but she and I and the rest of the team will continue to work towards something with some ideas and recommendations for you guys to consider before we go shop them on the street. So,

okay. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Thank coaching. Anything else commissioners to ask or add at this time?

All right. Uh, thank you again for all the work you and your team are doing and thank you to all the developers um for your partnership um and investing in Mskegegan and choosing to grow with Mskegee. Um, as we are making further progress on the infill, um, something that I'd like us to, um, give thought to and consideration is, um, how do we further leverage our zoning reform to assist with existing property owners to add accessory dwelling units, uh, where reasonable or converting single family housing to duplexes um, where possible so that our existing um, homeowners um, have an opportunity to be part of the solution for this housing crisis while also being able to create new income streams. for their their household um and raise their own equity um and be have greater opportunity for that multigeneration of wealth that we've talked about on many occasions here um so I think that could be part of the um solution as well and so I'm speaking to the developers here in this room you know in addition to building you know on uh vacant lots you know where you might be able to come alongside um our existing residents and homeowners uh to develop even more housing you know on those sites adus for potential conversions to duplexes. Um so again, thank you so much and thank you to my fellow commissioners both um present and past who have supported all these different initiatives um whether it was the original Midtown, you know, decade ago, Midtown Square development or any of the various different tax payments and incentives and payment in L of taxes and bite and brownfield all the above um ARPA home and fill. So, there's been so many different um initiatives and programs and so it's really exciting and heartening to see the progress we make and know that we've got so much more to do uh potential to uh achieve and challenges to overcome. But I I really appreciate the progress we're making and thank you for elucidating that um with your presentation tonight and the housing dashboard. Um and you expect that to be going live by the end of this month.

Yes, sir. Awesome. Excited to share that. But uh thank you again. Much appreciated. Thank you. um our community engagement manager would like to take a photo. YES. If um Deborah, could you come up? If you kindly come up our community engagement manager, Deborah uh Sweet San Diego was interested in um or San Diego suite, sorry. Um is taking a photo of your photo of the various different housing partners and our development services team. Um, where where are you thinking to do this at? Thank you. Just due to the size of the group, we are thinking just outside in the hallway kind of in our lobby over here. So, if you go out the doors to the right, I'll be over there if anybody's interested in.

Do you want to do this right now or do you want us to ask them just to stay for our last item, which should be fairly brief, or do you want to just get this done right now? I would defer to you, whatever you prefer. Oh, I don't want to go. Do you all want to do this right now or do you all want to wait for this last item? They're ready to go. right now. They've already been joining our development service team in the hallway. Yeah. Thank you all.

Can you bring me? Yeah. Thank you. She said we're good to go, but I'm just waiting for He said you're live.

It's a pretty good delay today. Good evening good folks and welcome back to the city of Moskegan city commission work session uh for this Monday March 9th 2026. We had a brief intermission uh but now we're going to get underway with a final item on the agenda and then we'll have public comment. Um so good evening good sir. If you kind of introduce yourself and please report out on this item.

Thank you mayor. Uh good evening. Good evening commissioners. Dan Vanderhigh director of public works for the city. Um I'm here to discuss uh a couple things that we've been looking into at the commission's direction, some acquisitions uh for the park system. We've come to a point where we have uh defined a little bit better the costs associated with those opportunities. Uh and so just want to discuss that within the context of uh a few things. So um just a brief look at what uh we'll cover. It'll be uh nowhere near the last presentation both in uh impressiveness nor length. um looking at the uh the two specific opportunities that we have in front of us. Uh one at the city's heartshorn property and one on the sappy site. Uh take a look at uh those things in the context of a few uh items including our master plan and some uh parks metrics comparing ourselves to our neighbors. Uh and discuss just briefly some future acquisition opportunities that are hanging out there. And then uh present you with the summary of the costs associated with those two opportunities. and we can discuss. So, this is one of the two opportunities that we have before us. It's the parcel outlined in pink. Uh it would expand the uh city's heartshore property. It would bring the trail back under city ownership. It would protect uh viewshed in the area. Uh and it would add just shy of 2 and a half acres of land to the park system. Uh we don't currently have any uh things planned for the property itself. This is just talking about acquisition. Uh you see the cost there, just about $1.1 million total. The good news is uh we were successful uh in getting a grant for this project of just shy of $750,000 or so. These are still preliminary numbers, but um the city does still have to make a relatively serious uh

investment though to make that work. Um there had been some talk uh about donation and so forth, but staff is not confident that continuing. Uh and we uh furthermore have had an uh request by the property owner in this case. Uh in order to uh proceed down the timelines associated with these acquisition grants, which can run to 18 months or two years, they uh have requested that the city uh front the money. Uh so the city would purchase upfront and when the grant closed when the the grant process had run its course the city would be reimbursed that 746,250. Again preliminary numbers and uh some things subject to change but that's the current uh situation here at the heart opportunity.

Quick question on that. um not indicating that uh my support for that going that direction, but I just wanted to see if we if there's been conversations with the state that that is an option where the state says nope, you can pay for it and we once this goes through and the money's secured um we'll reimburse you for expenditures already made. It is is not common, but it does happen and the city does assume the risk. So if something goes wrong with the environmental clearances or appraisal process or something like that, the city is at risk for any monies that would not be reimbursed

or the legislature doesn't make the appropriation um for because as I understand it, we've got a recommendation from the DNR trust fund board for this grant, but ultimately the legislature needs to appropriate the dollars. um which typically they concur with the recommendation but um we also know it's not a foregone conclusion what comes out of legislature either but thank you sorry to interrupt but I just wanted to get a clarification on that. That's all right.

Um we have uh another opportunity out there as well. This one um has not been submitted for a grant application just yet but the timing uh is coming together to where it would need to be if we were going to pursue it. First just wanted to highlight what this is and where it is. So this is on the sappy site. Um this uh picture which I'll have a a clearer sort of more holistic picture of here at the end of my discussion here in this slide uh is the current planned unit development by the owners of this parcel. and they have proposed uh everything highlighted in yellow on this map which includes 6 and a quarter acres of parks about 1,000 ft of frontage on Moskegan Lake 2,000 ft of additional boardwalks and about 5.8 miles total of trails and sidewalks throughout the development. Here is that uh more complete view uh that shows the the west portion of the property. Again, the yellow highlighted parts are going to be accessible to the public, open to the public, not necessarily as recreation assets. You'll see the streets are highlighted and things like that, but they do come with uh in the case of streets, sidewalks that would be accessible to the public. And then there are 10 to 15 specific items uh noted on the plan with the P designation followed by a number. Uh those are specific things that they've called out as being publicly accessible spaces or parks. Uh where we are headed is P9 up there at the north end of the future extension of Lincoln Street. So zooming in to kind of the northeast portion of the property. As a part of the PUD process, the city has the first right of refusal to purchase 10 lots. They're outlined by the green box. uh with the note park

pointing to them. Uh the city would purchase those pro properties. They would expand the boundaries of the park noted as P9. So you see a a property in the middle with a 16 on it. That portion is intended to be a park regardless. What the city has the option to do is purchase the 10 lots surrounding it, two to the west and eight to the east in order to expand the size of the park. would add about 240 ft of frontage uh to that total number of thousand that I mentioned earlier and 83 acres of parkland. It would be the only deed city property on the site. The remain remaining uh items that are being offered by the developer will be open to the public, but they will not necessarily be under city ownership. Again, uh these costs are just for the acquisition of the property. There's no current amenities or anything identified or planned or funded. The costs uh that you see there are 1 point uh just just shy of 1.6 million and that's a combination of the purchase price that the city had um estimated together with the developer and the city's obligations under the grant program. It's a little higher than what that option identified, but that's because of the appraisals, the environmental work, the various things associated with the grant. Uh the grant application, if we were to choose to make it, would be about 1.1 million and the city would be signing up for about $475,000 worth. This one it's important to note that um because of the nature of the property, it just being one big single parcel and having u prior different use um and various other components, it was um fairly difficult to estimate the costs. And the consultant we had that prepared some of this preliminary information used information from the developer about what they intend.

Once we get through the the grant application process, we would go through appraisals and really you know those appraisals define the terms of the grant. And so this is the best we have for now. Once that application is made, if it is selected, uh then we would move into a process where we better define it. Just one note that there is currently 150,000 set aside uh in the parks capital improvement budget for this property. Um that timeline uh this those dollars would not work with this uh timeline. Um those dollars are obligated to be spent by the end of this calendar year. And again, the 18 to 24month time frame associated with these um trust fund land acquisition grants uh would not support the city being able to use those dollars for these lots in that case. If if that goes the way that we expect it will and the grant application might be made, then that 150,000 would be freed up within the parks capital improvement plan and uh we'd be looking at um the next thing on the list that fits within that budget, whether it's another playground, um whatever it might, the director uh of parks and I would would figure that out. So, we have these opportunities. wanted to provide just some um context with with which to make these decisions. As you'll see in the summary page, you know, we're talking a relatively large amount of city uh investment to make these happen. So, in looking back at our our master plan, which is due to be updated next year, uh even in 2022, it did identify a surplus of the two categories of parks that it looked at compared to national uh metrics, right? uh parks less than 10 acres and larger than 10 acres. It identified 11 million in capital needs that's been converted up to today's dollars and thank you to the commission.

Um we have been able to invest by the end of this calendar year 6.7 million. Uh since then uh that uh capital plan did not identify any acquisition dollars. It it had a line for acquisition and very uh noted right on that line you know no funds identified. uh the 2027 plan, like I said, we will be updating next year. Um we anticipate uh you know, the remainder of that capital improvement plan and perhaps others that we went through a communitywide survey process uh a couple years ago. And these are some of the uh things that that survey process identified uh things that have come up since then. Richard's Park pedestrian bridge being one we've heard a lot about lately as well as some staff priorities uh things that are coming due lake shore trail boardwalk repairs uh and other things. So you you all are smart you know that each time we uh you know choose to invest in one thing we are delaying or deferring investment in another. So to extent that we would invest in acquisitions you know these are the kinds of things that would be delayed by a year how things go. Um I'd be remiss if I didn't uh point out that um the top three um lines in this comparison chart uh show that Moskegan really has an abundance of park uh and recreation resources. Um the statistics are a little goofy in terms of the way that they define them. So the comparison uh column uh kind of identifies uh what exactly those uh that statistic is showing. So in parks we have about twice the parks of most systems our size. Uh we have about twice the acres as most systems our size. Our size being a pop a town population of 40,000.

We have almost twice the number of playgrounds as most systems our size. And uh just in a um a kudos to the department uh we do more with less. So we have about 3/4s of the staff as most communities our size and we charge about half as much as most systems our size. So again um making sure that as we talk about these decisions, we're understanding that you know additional parks um come with additional maintenance. And so we're talking about adding uh to that maintenance list and therefore perhaps making decisions again about where those uh maintenance dollars can go in the future. And then last, just wanted to um call your attention to a couple um imminent and and a little bit more future opportunities that we have that are not the two that are in front of you tonight. Just so we're making that decision in complete context. Uh you're aware, I'm sure, of the Third Street Warf um opportunity, which comes from the Fisherman's Landing and Mart uh development agreement that the commission recently approved. Uh it's close to downtown. It has external funding secured. Uh it's close to the Moskegan High School campus and kind of the center of town and creates that city-owned corridor from downtown out to the lake. Similarly, a little bit further out, but as part of that same process, uh we've got expansion of Richard's park or or where the um the Ver plank or CMS property uh which would be balance of the property uh that is not taken for port once move. So really this is this is the meat of the issue, right? So this is a summary of the costs that are associated with these grants. The grants come with uh high dollars, but the match uh is pretty

significant as well. And so we wanted to call attention to that. And before we move forward with applications and and continue to spend staff time, we wanted to hear the the thoughts of the commission and find out if if this is the direction you'd like us to keep going. explaining this chart just really quickly. Um the city column is the match that the city would be obligated to pay. So yeah, that's actually the calculation they just was running. That's what was causing the pause. Um I thought it was a 25% match required because that comes to calculus at 30%. Yeah. Actually 31% rounding up.

Yes. Yes. the um in order the heartturn property is set at 25% but again we have uh additional costs associated with environmental work and and so forth sappy the with the with the what work I'm sorry there the environmental work the appraisal work and the various components that are required as a part of the grant application process we've we've been to your point we've been recommended by the board to move into the full 18 to months to 24 years process with the heart application with the sappy property. The consultant uh felt that in order to be a competitive application, we would need to go to 30% match, which gets you additional points in the matrix. So, that was their recommendation

for if we were to apply for the SAP property that we would need to commit to 30% to get higher pointage. Um

or if we are able to satisfy the conversion because that's an automatic 50 point deduction with having that conversion. Um, but if we satisfy that, that will restore 50 points to our scoring. We're well, we'll revisit that another time because that's a yeah, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole, but I just want to acknowledge that we already have the 50 point deduction due to an existing conversion. Um, we were satisfying that by committing the railroad rightway to a public access um as part of the trail as well as um the the Lakeshore Trail um where it was being moved. it was slightly being expanded but um moreover we were committing the railway right away um and so that was our intention to satisfy that conversion but it's a matter of still some some documentation that needs to be finalized and submitted to the state and the state to go through its process but we've taken the steps to at least satisfy that conversion um that is um dilemma that's resulting in an automatic 50 point deduction underscoring um so all right thank you uh for presenting this information this is very um helpful um and illustrating.

So, do you have right now ideas for how to fund this beyond we're just going to pull from our general fund or we're just going to you know um whether ongoing yearly fund or pulling it from our reserves like do you have any additional funding mechanisms in mind? Uh if you were to support both of these acquisitions, I would anticipate they would be uh showing up on the the city's capital improvement plan budget this year than next year.

Okay. Um for consideration of how we might be able to fund this if the commission wishes to move forward. Um and the commission did give um vote and gave support for pursuing the Heartshine acquisition. Um and thank you for um you and our parks and recck team uh for advancing the application being successful in getting uh the DNR trust friend board's uh recommendation to approve that grant. Um so it's question whether the commission wants to continue that process that we've already committed ourselves to, but we've also committed not committed we secured the purchase option for the additional 10 lots um at Sappy um on a discounted basis relative to what they actually anticipate selling those lots. Now, um the price has gone up since that that agreement was secured, but we still have the locked in um purchase price. But for consideration in terms of how we may be able to fund all this um and I mentioned one of these to to Mr. manager the other day, but using brownfield reimbursement um as a way to pay ourselves back um for these these purchases, particularly with regard to the the sappy acquisition. Um looking at potential sponsorships, um looking at potential private capital campaign, maybe even setting up a public waterfront property uh acquisition fund at the community foundation. There's a lot of interest in our community about uh waterfront public access. Um and so that could be a way to invite um our community to contribute directly to that for the matching component. And the other piece is um which we heard earlier in terms of 881st Street and the opportunity for us to develop that potentially as town houses to recoup um most if not all of our $700,000 approximately that we have all in on that. Um that money came from our out of our public improvement fund originally. And so if we were able to recoup those dollars, it goes back into our public improvement fund from which we could then tap to cover the matching components of these two acquisitions um which is approximately 700,000. Um I

really loved hearing from I think Mr. Manager, Director Holm, uh who had some optimism that we'd be able to uh break even if not net, you know, on that that development there. Um, I think that'd be wonderful if we could net on that or even just break even getting that $700,000 back um to go in our public improvement fund because we're looking at um 822,000 right here for the city component. So, that covers the line share of that. Um, but I just wanted to put out some additional possibilities from a funding uh perspective. Um, but commissioners questions um thoughts? Commissioner Kilgo.

Thank you. So, when I go to when I go to Meyer and sometimes I'm walking around, I'll see like several different things and I'm like, "Oo, I want that. I want that." But if my budget doesn't say that I have enough money, then I can't always buy X, Y, and Z. There's very rarely a time when we have lakefront property that the city can purchase. So for instance, Sappy that's on the water touching the water. I would absolutely love for us to have city-owned park there. I think it would be beautiful. So if we can afford it, I'd like to do it. I just don't know that we can afford it because we have Third Street Warf, which I would love to see beautifully done. We're already in motion on that project. Then we have um the um the ver plank property which we've applied for the money to get money to to buy that. Correct.

We have not put No, that'll be the the money for the Verplank property will come from the sale of Fisherman's Landing. There will be a city contribution um on the on that and because that's a conversion uh it's not grant eligible in that one.

Okay. So, that one will be city funds that we'll have to put in to acquire that property. I've seen some of the renderings, the thought of what we can turn that property into. And I think that will be beautiful right as the river meets the lake. Um, who current I guess my questions now, who currently owns and I know we're we've talked about the harshorn and we've like discussed it. Is that owned by the owner of the rest of that uh Adelaide Point property?

It's owned by a separate LLC called Harbor West and it has multiple members.

Thank you. Um, I want us to be aware of um I I would like for us to be aware of different things that have happened in that neck of the woods. And I'll just leave that there. Now, going over to Sappy, they're still really early in in everything. And I don't think if we don't tell them yes right now that they'll be like, "Too bad, so sad. we're going to build on it. They have they have work to do. I mean, do you I mean, if we say no right now, they're going to be like, "Oh, okay. No, we're going to build on it."

The the conversation that we've had with them is they're they're not willing to wait any longer than the two years that were put into the purchase option uh with the PUB because of the grant timelines associated with these DNR trust fund acquisition grants. This is the last cycle uh that we would likely be take advantage of the trust fund acquisition process for sure. We could still purchase them going forward, but it would be with either a different grant or at the city's sole cost or something like that. Okay. What kind of timeline are we talking about? End of summer, end of the year, beginning of summer.

So, the the full process with these acquisition grants takes 18 months to two years. And that is essentially the time frame that we have on that option. So we would we would have to apply in fact not to put too fine a point on it but we would be having a public hearing at the second meeting in March uh associated with the sappy grant application if you were interested in moving forward with that property and this application.

Yeah. So if we if we meaning the city of Moskegan if in my this is just my opinion this work session we're supposed to give our thoughts. In my opinion I think if we had a clear picture of where some of this money could come from because these these two aren't tied together. We could say yes to one and no to the other, right? Um I'm more interested in one than the other. Um just I think prime real estate versus not. I mean, I think the other one's not gonna it's fine being a driveway in a parking lot. Um, but if we had a better idea of where we could get almost a half a million dollars from um equitably, like here here's a really good smart option way or we have money or the commission decides to approve $475,000. Then I'd be like, "Okay, we approve 475,000 and go for it." I just think that we should think about the other two parks that haven't started yet or projects containing two parks that you brought up that we haven't really um we haven't started down that road yet. So, that's just where I'm at right now. I'm not too comfortable with the almost half a million dollars on more when we haven't kind of got full plans for these other ones over here. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Giggle. Just to um get some piggy back and get some clarification. um the two years on the purchase option agreement um that is initiated from the date that the PD is effective or they was there it's it's a it's effective from the date that they closed on the property which I believe was December 15th 2025 um or somewhere thereabouts um so that gives us to be effective so that so that gives us to um basically the end of 2027 to do that Good. Yeah. Okay. But we need to get this process underway now so that we can um

and us you're saying the public hearing on the 24th, what what would be asked of the commission at that public hearing to say that the commission is willing to cover the the matching grant for it as part of our application process? Um but if for whatever reason down the road a future commission can say no, we can't we can't do this after all. Yeah. So what what the DNR asks for is willing seller documentation and documentation of match. Um we were pleasantly surprised that the Heartshorn application was approved because we did not provide either. Yeah, that was an unusual yes event there that happened. Um

uh thank you for that clarification, Commissioner Cochen. Okay. Um, thank you for bringing this to us. I appreciate that. Uh, I think to Commissioner Kilgo's point in regards to the Heartshore property, I also have some questions. Um, because from from my understanding of part of that property, part of the um trying to remember what the C stands for now, the continuing use.

That's right. cooperative cooperative cooperative use agreement. I always just say CUA and I forget what it stands for. So the um the cooperative use agreement was for the developer to take on the responsibility for raising up that part of the bike trail. Um and we are several years in and that has not occurred and that's been a sticking point for a lot of constituents that have reached out to me. So I do have concern about that. And then if we take that on, then do we take on the liability with Eagle of the things that have already occurred on that property?

The not that I'm aware of. The only thing that we might potentially take on liability for is is the trail not having been raised and still being in a wetland area effectively. Right. Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking was just to clarify though that the PD calls out as a condition the developer does that. It doesn't say property owner. I'm pretty sure it says developer and it says to apply. It doesn't say it says to apply for the permit is is actually what it says. Um and it's not part of the CUA. It's part of the PUD development for Hartorn. Yeah.

Either way, it was not supposed to be on us to do that work. And so taking on $400,000 to take on a parking lot and then to do that work and then the environmental costs. I'm not a huge fan of of doing that. Um, you know, I was very vocal during the process with Fisherman's Landing. I love our parks. I want us to have more waterfront access, but I also want us to be able to take care of the parks that we have, and I don't want to keep kicking cans down the road. I got a broken toe right now. I really don't want to kick any cans. So, like, um, I I am very interested in this sappity sappy property opportunity. Um, I think it's interesting to Commissioner Kilgo's point, like again, we go shopping a lot. Do we have the money for it? Um, and I hear that the developer might not want to hold on to it for us any longer, but they the developer also wants us to um redo the brownfield, right? Or is it the TIFF? Which which one are you talking about?

Um was it the brownfield or the tiff that they were asking to which property you talking about? Oh, they want to reset the brown um the brownfield tiff, right? Yeah. So, if they want to reset the brownfield tiff, I mean, I feel like

that resets a clock and we could maybe negotiate giving us a little bit more time to think about this and where we could get funding. And I think that would look really good on that developer to give the city an opportunity to purchase those lots to be able to, you know, help make a park out there for more residents. I think that would be helpful. If I may piggyback on that, I would ask that we do have a conversation with the parking properties of the current owner um of of the sappy uh site um since they closed in December, end of December, but the PD is not effective yet. that if we could have a conversation on extending that timeline for the first ops agreement um whether it's adding another year or saying it doesn't become the timeline doesn't actually start you know amending it so the timeline doesn't actually start till the PD is effective um because there's still some outstanding elements there before the PD becomes effective as I understand it

point of information Mr. Mayor um Mr. manager or if at the next commission meeting in late March we said yes to the grant application does that commit us to the money that's what I need to know

in order to have a complete application we would pass a resolution at that meeting that says the city is prepared to contribute 474 the um and then correct me if I'm wrong, director, the the challenge that we run into is if we are awarded the grant and then we back out of it, um that doesn't look great for future grant applications. Um is is what the big is what the big issue there is. It's um you know, we awarded something to Moskegan, but then they weren't able to actually get it across the finish line. Um I don't know that there's a formal um point deduction for that but it is something that is known and discussed.

Do also want to clarify with regard to the heart shorn u property that we uh considered acquiring and had already voted to move forward with the grant application process. Um, it's not just a parking lot or a driveway. There is green space on there. Um, and also our bike trail, getting our bike trail back in city ownership. Should never left city. That's another story. Um, so the the entirety of the lake trail is within uh city ownership. Um, but one other thing to as a caveat or or context. This isn't a foreground inclusion, but it's an opportunity is for the skate park to go down below uh next to that green space between the driveway down below there. Um, this escape park project is something that the city has been working and our community. It's it's very much community uh supported and I've I've not seen a project um which is make saddens me that we've not made more progress on this but I've not seen a project that has elicited such widespread community engagement and support um in response um you've you have hundreds of skaters and uh bikers and the like show up at engagements and have given feedback through surveys. Um, and we had previously made a commitment to uh doing a new skatepark when we had to essentially remove the one at at Cipher Park due to um inadequate maintenance over the years. There is a DIY um skatepark that um community driven happening over there, smaller scale, but we still were looking at doing a and we have a some preliminary engineering or or or uh uh designs for that skatepark as well that was done through Grind Line um that's already been paid for and so and that was envisioned to not

necessarily be city funded that skatepark entirely um but a community fundraised um private capital campaigns and the like uh to make that happen. And so there was a desire to have a skate park downtown somewhere. The we looked at the Carpenter Brothers property next to um the dog park. There was an opportunity to do it um next between the Boys and Girls Club and on Heritage Landing between the the um little playground area there. Um that opportunity is no longer available. Um, but that's where most recently it looked like it was going the direction that was a few years ago now. So, right now there's a no home for this uh potential skate park that has been now a decade um in that we've been trying to advance that. So, I'm just sharing that as additional context of this potential um new home which is in close proximity to where the skatepark had been considered previously and it was desired to be um closer to downtown as well as accessible from the Lakeshore Trail if possible. Um, just one point of clarification on the SAPPY land acquisition grant. The reason that we're looking at the March 24th for the public hearing is the application deadline is April 1st.

Um, so and that's to director Vanderhid's point, the um 18 to 24month timeline then lines up nicely with the end of 27 when our option would expire. So that that's that's why we're saying that this is the last one. there are multiple grant cycles for this grant. But for all of the, you know, the stars aligning if if if you will. Um, and since both of these are on the table right now, that's why we're having this conversation with you. We weren't anticipating necessarily this scenario. Um, and so when it's when when we're looking at this scenario and the number total, that that's why we're having that conversation. So, yeah.

Yeah. And fortunately with third street warf we do have um some state enhancement monies uh to invest in development of that property and for acquisition. Um so there's money set aside there and the plank property not a foreground inclusion. I would love I would love to be able to create the Mosc Nature Preserve there. Um but right now that's we're going through seems very um still intangible like still um yeah it's definitely down the road years from now it's hard to yes consider what

yeah to forego an opportunity now for the potential many years down the road which we can't use these grand for anyhow. Yeah. But anyhow, um commissioners who have not Commissioner Sinclair, uh did we already commit to the Hart Shorn Grant match? Is this one of those situations where we said we would do this and now we're saying it's like never mind. They didn't actually we didn't

that's the exception that he was talking about. They made the recommendation without having that. Yeah. Um, we as a commission had voted to move forward with the grant application, but we had never formally voted to commit to the matching and at one point the developer or the property owner um, you know, had indicated potential discounting of land value there. Um, yeah. So, so it was submitted with the intent for the property owner or developer to donate. That was how it was presented to the board. So, we did not pass a resolution offering up match dollars, but as I said, we no longer believe that that donation is likely.

Okay. So, the circumstances are different. Will the state remember that the circumstances are different in a year or five or are they going to remember, oh yeah, they bailed on that that grant application that they said they would? I can't speak for the state, but I think given the unique um circumstances under which they approved it, I think they they understood there was perhaps some risk there.

Okay. I um I of course believe that we can always have it all and that we have the potential to do whatever it is that we set our minds to as a community. Um where we are now is wildly different than where we were 5 years ago from a financial perspective and a community perspective. Um so I you know I understand fiscal responsibility and how I budget my household is you know from that place but I also know that we are moving forward deliberately as a city and making choices and investments that will continue to grow our potential to make these sort of investments. Um, so you know, I don't want to I don't want to operate from a place of scarcity or fear when um these bills aren't all going to come due on the same day. You know, there's there's different pots of money and there's different opportunities. This isn't all going to come from the same um you know, if we move forward with it. Um, it's not all going to come due on the same day and it's not going to come due from the same pots of money. Um, I have some concerns around the Heart Shorn acquisition around the request that the city front the money in the hopes that we get the reimbursement. that feels a little more risky than I'm strictly comfortable with just because everything is so in flux with that with that property. And um I don't I don't feel as comfy with that one.

Um had this been, you know, six months ago and we could have, you know, signed the paperwork and and gotten things squared away, I think it would look different. And maybe six months from now it will look different. But right now it just feels um very tenuous. Nobody knows what it's going to look like there. Go ahead.

Oh, I was going to say and to to kind of add on to that, one of as the director was pointing out, one of the initial um assumptions was there was going to be land donation. Um the other part of this that we don't yet have is the commitment from the LLC to participate in the grant program. Um and so and that that's kind of where the question came up. Honest question and and as the director noted, it's happened in other instances where the money gets fronted. Um I I don't think there's anything wrong with the request. It's a perfectly legitimate request. Um but so there there there's two steps in the process that are missing right now.

Um so I just want to be clear on that too. Um that just popped in my head. So but

thank you. That's helpful. And we also have, you know, the I know it's a separate LLC, but I also know that many of those properties are tied together in financial ways that are very hard to tease out. And any impacting one piece of that is likely going to have a ripple effect to impact that whole corner of um our community. So, I um I'm more I'm more comfortable with not moving forward with that one than I am with um unless there was, you know, some some definitive support that um you know, I am swayable, but I you know, I'd like to have it, but I also know that it's not um it feels a little too quick Sandy for me um to feel really confident in that. I am more comfortable with the sappy property. Um you know I I think that's a completely different situation and that there's a lot more um grounding underneath what we're trying to do. Um, but I also don't feel like that's a hill that I need to die on. So,

thank you, Commissioner. Thank. Um, I would, uh, concur or agree with regard to us paying for the whole thing up front and expecting to get reimbured. I'm not keen on going that route.

Um, in terms of still pursuing the grant and that opportunity, I'd still I wouldn't I'm not of the mind to kill that right now. I'd still like to to move that forward. Um, but ultimately, we're going to need that commitment, you know, that written commitment um from the program and I things are in flux. Um and there this u new element or dynamic with the receiver as well. Um have there been I know we've had some conversations but like where what conversations have we got had the receiver with regard to this particular uh transaction and where are they at? Um, so we the conversations that we've had with the receiver, which there's been two, um, have been about the city's involvement as a whole, um, not necessarily one particular aspect of it, trying to help, uh, that attorney get a a better picture of the PUD requirements, the cooperative use agreement, uh, the requirements that we were asking for to be completed this spring. All of those things right now are on hold um because of that receiver order from the judge. Um we've submitted a lot of documentation to the receiver. Uh Director Ekholm has had two conversations with him I believe.

Yes. Um and uh after we've given him some time to digest what we've sent over, we anticipate having another. We've also talked about do we just drive over to his office and sit down with him if needed? um to try to to have that part of the conversation. So, we're we're communicating. We're obviously not the only party that has an interest in this. We have a lot of different aspects of um the development that we are very interested in. We have deadlines that we are there um on because of the receiver being in place and the court order. We're not in a position to enforce on those deadlines. So,

thank you, Mr. Manager. Anything else to ask or add or share or before I uh return to you, uh, Commissioner Jackson or Commissioner German, anything to to raise right now?

I've just heard a lot of mention about like obviously the money and other things, but I heard you mention director capacity of staff of taking care of the parks. It sounds like that's a concern of yours if we add these additions because we're operating at a three force capacity compared to other counties in similar size. So if we add more parks, what do you think that would look like? And is that a concern of yours if we cuz obviously we would have these but then we have the third street wararf and then what would come at the verplank property too?

Yeah. Um, it's hard to suppose exactly what might happen, but I think my my intent there is simply to I guess bring back to top of mind that each time we add something to the park system, you know, it either should come with a commitment to additional operational funds, you know, to help take care of that thing or an expectation that, you know, sort of systemwide we're a little bit more stressed than we than we are now. Um,

question. Thank you, Commissioner Jackson. Mr. Manager. Yeah. And then uh to build on that, one of the conversations that we have had with the developer and nothing on the sappy site and nothing has been inked yet is uh there's been discussions about because there'll be an HOA taking care of the grounds in that area that possibly in this instance for for the um just under one acre that would be in this spot. Uh we would contract with them to have the same folks that are cutting the grass in that area handle that um just because they're already going to be out there. they're going to be at a, you know, probably cutting it at a a more frequent rate than what we would cut it at. Um, and they're already there. Um, so then we would, uh, get a bill from them for that is essentially what that would boil down. So, in that instance, we we have had that conversation. There is a cost there. Um, but it would seem to be if that's something we can come to an agreement on, a logical approach to maintain that. Um and then some of the other stuff, the Verplank property would um hopefully it'll end up being a more passive park. So we're not going to be over there with, you know, cutting the grass a lot. Uh and same thing to a certain extent with the third street area, but we'll be doing engagement on the third street. So that'll be dependent on that, too. So

yeah, I think that is sensible though contracting with HOA that's happy to do maintenance of that park. So it's consistent and uniform particularly because there's the other parks right across the street. um what I'd refer to when we adopted the PUD and arc of parks um between the dog uh the dog park and playground area and then the waterfront park and then the the wood trails and uh tent course and the like. Um so having that consistent would be nice. Um any followup, Commissioner Jackson? No.

Uh Commissioner German, anything to ask or add right now before I go to Commissioner Coachin? uh you know just listening and uh thank you director um I um to me there's you know some uncertainties um what I am um ecstatic about is that the SAP site is getting developed um that's something that um you know I want to see for as long as I've been on this commission um as for the additional spaces. Um the part that's actually that's available to the city. Is that something that they gave us or is that something that we're buying the space?

There's a a small portion of that piece that they intend to have open to the public regardless. Okay. We're talking about buying some of the property around it to make to make it larger. Yeah. How how how large is that piece that they're talking about for public access to that park? Um I would put it just estimating at probably a quarter of an acre and then we're purchasing or we would purchase enough uh to bring it up to about an 8.8 acres total.

And right now I'm just you know I'm not if I moved in favor anything it'll probably be looking at that sappy property. um as for the partials being purchased um you know looking at the budget and all the the uh things that comes with that. I'm not really um sure. It's something I have to just really think about and if for some reason we did move forward on that and things didn't work out or would be committed to go ahead and move forward if we did a resolution or whatever. uh would be obligated to move forward with the uh project even if we had some skepticism or anything like that. Correct.

Yes. I wouldn't pass the resolution if if we weren't confident we could come up with the resources at the right time. Yeah. So that that would be my only concern. I'm not saying that um Hersan would not be something that um I can have a conversation about or more conversation, but I just want to make sure we have the means and the funding and the um ability to go ahead and um move forward without any hiccups or anything like that. Thank you, Commissioner German. Commissioner Cochen.

Yes, thank you. Um, I just want clarification from maybe staff or um, from Mr. Manager in regards to this specific situation with the receiverhip because that's still new to us. Um, and I'm still learning about all of that. Um, so if we went into an agreement, we would not be going into the agreement with the receiver. Correct. We'd be going into the agreement with the current owner. You're talking about the Hershorn group. The Horn. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. And that Yeah. That LLC.

Yeah. And that that's where because we were discussing about how the receiverhip kind of trumps everything and they kind of get to make decisions about what happens. Have we talked to legal about what that could look like? Um I mean legal is definitely involved with the the receiver conversation and things of that nature. um the receiverhip is not this piece of property, right?

Um so I don't think that there's any necessary tie there other than the fact that there's some common entities. Um but as everything gets, you know, unwound, um I I don't know what that necessarily looks like, but the these are different legal entities um that that are involved here. the ones um that are specifically called out and I'm just flipping through the receiver order right now. Um this property is not called out to the best of my recollection. I'm just thinking about like the PUD and I know it's not enforceable at this moment, but I'm hoping at some point

keep keep in mind there's two PUDs here. So there's the Hartorn PUD, which that's what this property is part of, and there's the Adelaide Point PUD. Um the Adelaide point PUD is what is is impacted by the receiver. Okay. Gotcha. So that so this that the heartshore PUD is not impacted by the receiver then.

Not really because there I mean there is some overlap between them as far as geography goes but the entities that are involved and the you know the the marina operations both dry and wet and things of that nature are what's impacted. they're they're over on the Heartshore property or adjacent the heartshore property and use the Hartshorn drop lifts. That's the cooperative use agreement. Um and that that is impacted in this um because of the order about kind of just freezing things where they're at,

right? Okay. So then if the Hartorn PUD is not part of this, then the raising of the bike path would still not be impacted. Is that correct? um the I guess technically um but the and again it's for the application. It's not to do the work. It's to apply for the permit to have it done. Right. But I know we've had a lot a lot of time to to allow for that to happen. Sure. Um and that has has not occurred. Okay. I just want to make sure we're understanding things. Thank you very much, sir. Thank go.

Yes. Right quick. My last two things on this because we do still have CRC. Um, one is if we were to move forward with SAP on the next the second commission meeting this month, I as a commissioner would like to to have clarification about where we would get the money from. like, hey, we would say in 2 years or whenever we got X, Y, and Z, we would most likely pull it from here. I need to know those things. Um, the second thing that I will say is I think as a whole, the commission and the community to echo Commissioner Coachin's statements, we do want to know what's going to happen with I mean and everybody we we want to kind of know what's going to happen with that neck of the woods, but we haven't we're kind of in new territory with the whole receiverhip thing, but specifically talking about the bike path, there were things that should have been done a long time ago that weren't being done. And so hope for a lot of people is like it's just going to be on us and not them. But we don't know those things. But I I don't want us to be like um I I don't want us to necessarily try to hide from the fact that an agreement that the city got into with someone is now in this receiverhip thing. That doesn't mean anything. the receiver could get it sold and boom, you know, they sell all of the things that they need to sell and good owners come in and they own it and everybody's happy. We just don't know those things. But I don't want to avoid them like these are big huge landmines that are going to be terrible. I'm an optimist though, so I think that at the end everything is going to work out. But I just want us as a city to be on the up and up. Here's where we're at. This is what happening. Certain things are in

our hands, certain things aren't in our hands. So, we just want to be transparent about those things. So, thank you. Thank you, Commission. Go. And I do think that um further exploration and uh information additional information about funding opportunities for this um would be helpful for the public hearing um on March 24th.

24th. So, I would I would suggest we move forward with a public hearing on March 24th. that gives an opportunity for our us to hear from the public um on that particular land acquisition. Um and whether or not we want to, you know, commit, you know, however we come up with that money. Um I do think there is opportunity for brownfield reimbursement. Um we're tapping our public fund with reimbursement of that other um 881st Street. Um but I'd like to yeah be further considered and and and information presented to the city commission with that with that regard. So, I would advocate that we do move forward with the public hearing on March 24th with regard to the SAPI acquisition. Um, potentially have some conversation with Parkman about extending that if need be, you know, um because last thing we want is like we're almost on the the cusp of getting this money and, you know, pursuing this and now that purchase options gone and will they still honor it? So, I'm some some level of understanding about where they're at with that. Um, and at the same time, I would not I would I would ask us not to give up on the harsh right now. Um, we're not we've not committed anything, but we've got a grant recommendation without us committing anything. So, it does us no harm to continue that process at the very least. And if ultimately the developer or the property owner is not willing to, they're not willing to, you know, they're the one torpedoing that opportunity, not necessarily us. I would just um say not to give up on that just yet um and proceed with the public hearing for um sappy on March 24th.

Mr. Manager, uh just to answer Commissioner Coachin's question, now I have the list in front of me. Um the Heartshorn properties are not a party of the um receiver order. So, thank you. Yep. All right. Anything else to ask or add or is there anything uh Director Vander here? um Hyde that you want to ask of us um before we conclude?

Nope. I think uh we've got some good direction. We will proceed with the uh public hearing uh later this month with uh some details about where we think the likely funding sources for that that money is. uh have a conversation uh see what we can do in terms of the the deadline on the option and um we'll let Harts run sit there and and if things change substantially there maybe there's a path forward.

Thank you Director Vanderhide. Appreciate uh the work you and our uh great team at parks and are doing. So, we're going to move on to public comment and I have one form. John Allen Jr. joining us from the Nelson neighborhood.

Good evening, sir. You have three minutes to provide your remarks. Well, there's a lot more than three minutes to unpack after all that with Heartshorn, but I'll do my best and first and foremost, I'll take even 30 seconds of my limited time to say how much I appreciate Jake and the work his team does to keep uh Moskegan growing in the way that they are through uh responsible uh and and thorough development and and vetting developers the the right way. I got to say it takes a very special level of vision for a governing body to sell off the public lands and our bike trail property for pennies on the dollar. I think it was sub300,000, which is less than what we're going to be matching now, only to come back less than a decade later and ask that we buy it back with our collective tax monies. Doesn't matter if it's an MDNR grant, it's still everyone's money. And that's at a premium price. Again, don't think I'd call that vision. That's pretty shortsighted and frankly I'd call it stupid. If anyone here still believes in the vision of the cooperative use agreement at Artshorn, I would suggest you see an optometrist because what's happening at our park isn't just outrageous. It's bordering on dereliction of duty with regards to how ordinances and contract laws are enforced in this city. Let's be explicitly clear about one thing. The land being proposed for acquisition tonight at Hartorn has only one purpose. It is used exclusively for the parking of Adelaide Point In-N-Out customers who previously monopolized what little public parking remained after their forklift started hazardously operating over our shoreline recreational trail. So, are we seriously seeking a grant to provide even more taxpayer funded property to benefit private interests? Again, there is zero public benefit here. The land isn't on the lake and has no park-like infrastructure. It's a staging area for private business. Meanwhile, the historical access point east of the launch ramp, land used by those with mobility challenges to fish and recreate, has been destroyed thanks to this agreement. Yours and your predecessors decisions have thrown the

most vulnerable members of our community out of out of their own park in favor of a private forklift operation. And outside of granting this extension, which apparently is now on indefinite hold, and the idle threat of termination, which is just that, idle, there hasn't been a proverbial finger lifted to restore that access for those with mobility challenges. In conclusion, I am seriously asking you all, why are we adding more acreage to maintain when the namesake Marino right next door to this proposal has gone without a T dock that requires a grant for 6 years? Not a single grant application has been submitted to restore that revenue generating infrastructure despite countless requests from the public. Instead, we want to add property that's going to cost us money to maintain at a park that has already been historically neglected. The cooperative use agreement hasn't just muddied the lake water with unpermitted dredging. It has muddied the waters of accountability. The proposal for Hartorn is the opposite of equitable. It is a logistical bailout for a private entity. Stop being the developer's concierge. do the right thing for the residents, deny this acquisition, and terminate the cooperative use agreement before the damage to Hartshorn is permanent. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Allen. Appreciate you joining us this evening. Is there anyone else in the audience that wishes to give public a comment? Seeing no takers, we're going to go to the phones. The phone number is 231-724-6721. When you're calling in, please turn down any audio in the background. State your name. Um, and if you're a city of MSG resident, which neighborhood you're calling from. And if you're not a city resident, which other township, village, or city you may be calling us from. And you'll have up to three minutes to provide your marks. There's quite a long delay. So, um before it got to me announcing, so I'm watching the the video, but I think we're at that point. We don't have any comments at this time. Um all right, commissioners. I would entertain a motion to adjurnn.

So, move. We got a motion by Commissioner German. So, by Commissioner Kilo to adjurnn. All in favor, please saying I. I. I. All oppose. same sign. We are journ. Thank you. Take care and be well.