Ludington City Council Meeting May 18, 2015: Fire on the Edge of Town

[XLFD]

This will be less of a review of what happened at the Ludington City Council's May 18, 2015 than what happened before and after the meeting. 

At the meeting, they had the usual communication involving an event where signs were to be posted in the street right-of-way, and fortunately for the Ludington AAUW's antique show, they had specified everything to the council about the signs.  Among the councilors this usually seems to be the only area of contention between them. 

As has been the annual custom since the new city attorneys arrived in town, they trotted out three ordinances setting the millage rates for the DDA, the police pension fund, and the operating fund., and three ordinances setting the tax levies for those funds.  If you wonder why they do this each year it is because of the potential for Headlee rollbacks to automatically cut the millage rates when property values go down, as they did back in 2009 and 2010. 

Since there was growth in that sector, those rates will remain the same (and currently at their maximal rate), and these six ordinances will have no effect this year.  But when our property values head south, these six ordinances will be part of a 'truth in taxation' hearing, where citizens can voice their feelings, but ultimately the council will vote on whether the old rates will remain in effect.

Suffice it to say, that they have not voted against it yet when that opportunity has arisen.  It may seem very immoral to you to effectively raise taxes on everyone's property when their property values are decreasing, but this hasn't deterred the Ludington councilors from doing so.

To nobody's surprise they also upheld the FOIA Coordinator's recommendation to deny another FOIA appeal, this begins at 22:50 into the video.  What is compelling about this denied appeal is that the city council has broadened the definition of a confidential "informant" to include someone who reads something non-criminal on Facebook, and reports it to the local school leadership with (one would hope) good intentions.  Someone who never formally requested the confidential informant label, nor admittedly witnessed any crime. 

The documentation of the FOIA request and appeal begins on p. 72 of this packet, where you can decide whether Carlos' three page legal opinion (starting on p. 79) adequately addresses the issue.  Apparently "citizen informant" identities are now exempt from FOIA in Ludington, so if you call 911 to report an accident or suspicious situation, your identity is withheld from the public.  If you enjoy his three page justification for not giving out information that is routinely given out by police agencies (even LPD in the past!), you should because you paid a few hundred dollars for making it. 

Shay and Councilor Holman got more perverse pleasures of the numbers of FOIA requests I've made in the last seven years; I will remind them that I have never been ashamed of any of my FOIA requests because they have all looked to find information that could have been given to the public and wasn't.  And I've uncovered my share of improprieties.  The shame is heaped only on their plates, not mine.

Beyond an appointment for a committee and a notice that they would be having a workshop on sidewalks and special events at 5:00 PM on June 11th, there was only one other item of business that was considered, the purchase of property to build a new fire station. 

                 Ex-Mayor Henderson's property adjacent to the soon-to-be-acquired woodlot

As a former firefighter for Ludington, I can vouch for the fact that the current fire station is serviceable, but should be replaced in the coming years as the structure, which is little more than a pole barn, is about 40 years old.   When a new station is built, it's location would be important (see the article Fire Station Location 101), and the current location is almost optimal.  It is just out of the downtown near the heart of the city. 

Unlike the Ludington DPW Building, which is located on the very outskirts of town, no replacement station should be built in a remote location of the city.  The council was considering moving the station to the northeast fringe of town, more than a mile away from the downtown, industrial, and maritime districts and would require responders to travel adjacent to school property.  Here's where the station would move from and where it would go to. 

The orange rectangles denote school property, which usually have pandemonium incarnate on both Washington and Tinkham in the early morning and mid afternoon hours on school days.  The current location and the first proposed location on Dowland Street, have no such issues.  Likewise, having spent many years on the LFD, I can report that the majority of calls we received were well over a mile from the new location in the denser population areas surrounding the downtown. 

Ludington Fire Chief Jerry Funk corralled me after the meeting to dispute some of my claims about the remoteness and dangers of placing the station in the old lumber yard (which follows in my comment after the video).  He pointed to a few firefighters who wouldn't have to respond by going past the school, such as his nephew-in-law John Henderson, who lives in the ritzy Forest Hills section just to the north of the station.  He himself could go up Staffon Street, as could another lieutenant.  But that still leaves more than fifteen who would find their most direct route going through school districts and traveling long distances to get to the station. 

As we were talking outside the chambers after the meeting LPD Chief Mark Barnett walked up as if he was going to become part of the conversation but just spectated.  It made me feel incredibly uncomfortable and vulnerable to hearsay information (since I had no recording equipment) and so I begged leave to go home, only to be peppered with some insults about my lack of courage from the chief I served under for eight years. 

Unfortunately, I am not too cowardly to confront the facts of the matter, unlike the chief.  I was told that the Dowland site was smaller than the Tinkham lot, but there is not a lot of difference if there is.  The bonus to the Dowland site is that it would allow 'pull-through' parking of the apparatus since the property has access on three streets, the Tinkham lot (2nd from left picture) could not allow that, any additional length of the lot will not help.   The Tinkham lot has access only to the one street.  As you can see, both lots allow a bit more space than the current downtown station (rightmost picture)

Likewise, the citizens of Ludington will likely never figure out what kind of deal was involved to get this deal.  Morris Street LLC was previously noted to be stewards of the bowling alley area, and bad ones at that, who received two sizable bits of downtown property for under $100 each.  They have now entered into a new contract with the City of Ludington  whose full details are a mystery to the people, and is introduced to the citizens on the weekend before the city council votes to confirm the sale.  If this is such a great deal, why do they totally go around having meaningful community input into it?

I would appreciate any reasoned opinion on why the new location for the fire station is better than the old one (or even Dowland Street) and why the city leadership's decision to go into a secret deal with a LLC from Muskegon, granted by the council without any discussion at an open meeting, is not an omen for bad things a-coming. 

The added insult of the agreement is that former Mayor John Henderson brought the property adjacent to the woodlot on Tinkham (soon to be adjacent to the Morris Street LLC property)at almost the same time Morris Street LLC was buying up the bowling alley block, and shortly after the city was putting the Dowland Street property on the market, without any alternative publicly mentioned.   There's an awful lot of coincidences going on.

The local news media does not want to report these inconvenient factors.  We must remember , LFD Chief Funk worked in the printing room for decades, and that they have grown used to reporting what the City leadership tells them to.  George Orwell made an observation at one time:

The Mason County Press mentioned the acquisition in a matter of fact way, as if it had been a public issue all along.   The City of Ludington Daily News (COLDNews) wrote a friendly article for it in the Monday paper, also letting us know that the developer was going to have a food pantry on their side of the lot.  After the meeting they printed the following:

Chief Funk says it's a great place for a station, John Shay says the Tinkham lot would allow for pull-throughs, whereas the Dowland site wouldn't, contrary to fact.  The only way they could do pull through action on Tinkham is if they oriented the station to have bays on the east and west, but the lot is thinner than the Dowland lot and only one street access, so this would be more difficult. 

But it seems to be a moot point, they unanimously voted for it, even de facto Fourth Ward Councilor Mike Krauch, who stood up for the interests of his ward by voting to buy a plot of land that should never have been considered for a fire station, so that a fire station would not be built in his ward on property that can support little else. 

And the only point that was attributed to me, as a Dowland Street resident, was that I said the Dowland Street location was good.  Well, I did say a bit more, and let me go on record as saying that the Dowland Street property should be used for what it was purchased for because it won't get sold except at a major loss.  Even better, however, would be that they decide to remain where they are, which is almost an optimal location for a fire station in Ludington.

May 18, 2015 Ludington City Council from Mason County District Library on Vimeo.

 Except for a brief summarization which follows, I will defer from my recent exercise of explaining the ten main reasons City Manager Shay should be fired by this challenged council, in order to briefly explain my FOIA Appeal and go into detail about the main order of business introduced at this meeting.

John Shay has not taken an oath of office, city and state law requires it, the council ignores the requirement. John Shay funnels money through the city attorney, a city attorney that overbilled the city for three years with Shay's signatures of approval on the three dozen invoices, to pay a consultant a large sum of money for a cost of service analysis without any approval of this council. Approval by the council at a meeting open to the public is required-- yet continued silence from the city council. They only sign off on raising the public's water and sewer rates twice this year and twice next year due to the consultant’s recommendations that they never authorized for that purpose. Doesn’t that sound corrupt to you?

My FOIA appeal is significant in that the city is trying to preempt the usual definition of "informant" to refer to someone who noticed a posting on a publicly available school webpage and brought it to the attention of the Ludington School's superintendent who relayed that to the LPD. Contrary to the school and LPD's reports on the incident, the so-called informant did not bring the info to the school's attention under any terms of confidentiality, that person voluntarily reported their noticing what was posted on a PTA Facebook page.

Using the broadest legal definition of "informant", minus any stated desire of confidentiality stated by the person and any criminal activity going on, the person in this case cannot be declared an informant, but just a typical respondent or witness whose name should be included in a redacted police report. Calling them an 'informant' is implying that the completely innocent posting of a question on a PTA website by a Ludington citizen was a criminal act in itself. The only law, however, that is being broken is the Freedom of Information Act by this response from the FOIA Coordinator.

Let me lastly address the fire station issue by revisiting history. In 2007, the city purchased property on Dowland Street for $95,000 with the understanding that it would be the site for a new fire station. The ground contamination at the site actually made it a good choice, since the land would be effectively capped with a building and pavement to protect the firemen and the surroundings from any ground contamination. It was also centralized.

In 2008, forces were at work that had the city looking into buying property for a fire station where the Varsity Cleaners Building on North Washington is. This was part of a complex deal that would have had Western Land Services developing the bowling alley block where the current fire station is, and helping with the costs. The public was generally against the move, as witnessed by the public comments at the city council and planning commissions at the time, and due more to the economy, the deal failed.

Four years later in 2012, Morris Street LLC, a Muskegon based company brought much of the bowling alley block for under a hundred dollars and another lot in the adjacent block. At about this same time, then-mayor, John Henderson, purchased a commercial lot on Tinkham Avenue adjacent to the vacant lumber yard.

Currently before the council is to have the city buy the east side of the woodlot for the purpose of constructing a fire station, and allowing Morris Street to purchase the west side. The developers are thus adjacent to the sizable lot brought by ex-Mayor Henderson in an area where most commercial development would not work well. Henderson continues to be empowered with the development of Ludington as chairman of the DDA, and stands to potentially benefit if the developer develops that lot and expands westward.

For some reason, the City has decided to keep the public in the dark about this redundant real estate purchase until the weekend before they make it. For some reason, the City leadership wants to put a fire station in a corner of the LFD's coverage area, where the responding volunteer firemen will have to travel hastily on Washington and Tinkham Streets, adjacent to our schools to get to the station and speedily take their fire trucks often back the same way in emergency mode. Not only will this put our children in unnecessary danger, but hamper response times dramatically especially when school is starting or ending for the day.

The Dowland property is paid for, it won't sell easily [Here was where the five minutes were up, it continues...], it will make Ludington cleaner environmentally, and it’s a better location for a fire station. And we won't have to hold a lot of secrets from the people about deals made with public resources and unaccountable limited liability companies that will probably fall through once again. Thank you."

[stump]

I think there is a law about someone in the know such as Henderson buying property with the knowledge that the city would buy it . Something like insider trading with stocks. Myself, I think the location is totally wrong because of the school location. I have seen how these volunteer firemen drive to get to the fire station, I believe it's totally uncalled for, the speeding and veering in and out of traffic, and of coarse running red lights. Just what we need in a school location.

[shinblind]

Sounds like common sense would dictate that having a fire station located where there is access to 3 streets is preferable to having a station located with access to a single street. When in the future when there will be a need to tear up Tinkham it will greatly hinder the response time of the department to respond to a fire.

 

In the overhead view of the lumber yard, in which direction is the lot owned by Henderson? And how large a lot are we talking about? It makes you wonder who owned the lot before ex-mayor Henderson bought it? How much he paid for it?

 

Does former city council  member Brent Scott, part owner of the defunct lumber yard, stand to benefit these shenanigans? It makes you wonder if his quote after he won his first election ( he was first appointed to fill the term of another council member)  "  primary focus is to allow the area to grow in a controlled environment " had a double meaning.

 

But the thing I am most concerned with is the back door dealings without public disclosure until after the fact. Is this really the city government you want when council members  and former members benefit at taxpayer expense?  It might be some time for some serious house cleaning of council members.

[XLFD]

Very good, catching the Brent Scott angle, Shinblind, I forgot about that myself until midweek.  It adds an additional wrinkle to the ramifications of this deal.  That's one of the reasons why they introduced this just before a meeting, passed it without comment and will sit on the property.  Nothing like the city taking away more of the tax base just so the can own more property they need to maintain.

[Willy]

Good points stump and shinblind. The reasoning about future road repair on Tinkham is a very valid concern. My guess is, if the rocks were overturned regarding this situation, we would find a bevy of rotten cronyism and corruption stewing in political slime.

[stump]

Just one more property for the tax payers pay to have the unused lot mowed!

[XLFD]

And don't forget we have the privilege of paying for the demolition of any existing structures and any relevant environmental testing and cleaning, surveying, and any other costs, even if it never gets used for a public purpose and gets sold off at a great loss.  Recall Lee Peter's Bicycle Circus Building:  the city took over the land, spent $50,000 demolishing the structure, additional for engineering, surveying, cleanup; they were informed the lot was worth $50,000, held it for a dozen years despite interest in it from business owners before John Shay and his rubber stamp council sold it for a tenth of that to his daughter's soccer coach. 

Nothing to see here folks!

[Willy]

The lack of common sense and a full disclosure and the lack of a public hearing regarding this matter only continues to show just what a rogue Council Ludington is plagued with. I guess making not only foolish decisions but potentially corrupt decisions is going to be this Councils legacy. This deal spotlights the cronyism and back slapping politics that keeps the good ol boy politics alive in Ludington.

[XLFD]

Great point, Willy.  Even back in 2008, it took Councilor Engblade a lot of finesse to get the proposed redundant purchase of a fire station discussed at the city council meeting, Mayor Henderson and Shay preferring to have a quick vote on it without any public discourse.  He had thought the city mayor and manager had effectively hidden the redundant land purchase inside a non-public memo.  Councilor Holman at the time said on record "there is no such thing as (the city) having too much land", and believed the city will be able to sell the Dowland property...

Seven years later, no takers, and an attempt at grabbing new fire station land without public knowledge until it's already a done deal.  Corruption and cronyism is in full gear and has left the station with light and sirens.

[Jasper]

Unfortunately this situation is not isolated within the COL.  It is very common throughout the entire USA.  A truly sad state of affairs, just not locally but also across the entire Country.  Most United State's Citizens are blinded or don't give a rats about government, whether local, State, or National.  Just have a gander at the local news sites, along with the several news agencies that cover Michigan.  Read the comments-----the comments are frightening.  This Memorial Day week-end is to celebrate the men/women who served our Country and lost their life for Freedom!  Somehow, somewhere in time this has been lost. Very sad and disturbing!