The west Michigan vacation towns of Douglas and Saugatuck (combined population 2,154) could save $500,000 if their governments merged. Naturally, there’s fierce opposition to this common-sense consolidation plan because something something “character” and that classic refrain about how people like things the way they are now.
Detroit Free Press: Bill Hess, the mayor of Saugatuck, said he fears the loss of the historic city hall in Saugatuck because a consolidated government would most likely use the more modern city hall in Douglas; the need to change street names because each town has a Water, Main, Park, East and West streets, and the loss of historic district designation in Saugatuck that would come with a merger.
“I just think the risk is too great,” he said. “The cities are running well.”
Balmer, the former Douglas mayor, said he fears the loss of a quieter and calmer Douglas if the two towns merge. He also worries that Douglas will be taking on Saugatuck’s $3.4-million debt.
These are the issues that could prevent an overhead-reducing, tax-saving merger? Historic city halls can be sold to chamber of commerce/visitors’ bureau types and repurposed as a community/heritage center, street name issues can be resolved with a little common sense, and mergers can be structured to insulate the former Douglas for Saugatuck’ legacy debt—a debt that, by the way, could be paid off in seven years with just the savings from the merger.
Reading about this supposed battle for the hearts and souls of Saugatuck and Douglas, calls to mind Kevyn Orr’s Wall Street Journal interview: “For a long time the city was dumb, lazy, happy and rich.”
Orr’s controversial assessment was wrong on one count only: He limited his scope to Detroit. His narrow focus ignores that Detroit’s problems herald bad news for the region. If we can put aside our collective butthurt for half a second, we would recognize that Kevyn Orr’s “dumb, lazy, happy and rich” is absolutely correct about, not Detroit, but the entire state of Michigan.
We have been too dumb, lazy, happy, and rich for our own good.
Flush with auto industry money, previous generations put us in a state of arrested development. Michigan has been unable to imagine a local economy that wasn’t built around the carmakers and supplemented by fumigated pyramid schemes multi-level marketing.
Comfortable in our middle-class existence, our parents and grandparents began moving further and further away from whatever problem (race, crime, poverty, the lack of an attached garage) happened to pop up. In the process, hundreds of miles of roads and sewage mains were laid for a stagnant population that has spread out across an increasingly larger geographic footprint.
And, thanks to archaic home rule laws, arbitrarily autonomous communities happily cannibalized each other for residents and businesses, everyone believing their town was a special snowflake of a municipality.
That last point is clear in Saugatuck-Douglas, where opposition exists to a plan to save money (dumb) because the details might be too hard to sort out (lazy), they like things the way they are (happy), and no one is pressed for cash at the moment (rich).
If tiny tourist hamlets like Saugatuck and Douglas, where many services are already shared, and can save $500,000 merging, how great a benefit would come from consolidating Highland Park into Detroit? Or merging the five separate Grosse Pointes? How about Warren with Centerline? Or any of the countless other spots in metro Detroit (never mind the rest of the state) where separate governments seem to exist solely as a job-creation program for elected city clerks?
How much money could be saved across the three counties with an aggressive consolidation of local government? And what would that money mean in terms of lowering property taxes, funding the regional transit system metro Detroit lacks, or dealing with the regional poverty concentrated in places like Detroit and Pontiac because we currently labor under the delusion that a problem, so long as it exists across an arbitrary political boundary, isn’t our concern?
We aren’t asking these questions because we remain, as a region and a state, too dumb, too lazy, too happy, and too rich to care. But we need desperately to start caring because metro Detroit will remain a third-rate, inefficient, and backward metropolis so long as we treat and fund (for example) Berkley, Clawson, and Royal Oak as separate things.
Almost five years ago, it took a bankruptcy-creating global economic collapse to shake the industry out of its complacency. Today, the city of Detroit is bankrupt because of a long-standing refusal to deal with the consequences of the city's “dumb, lazy, happy, and rich” period. It would be nice if the region and state didn’t wait for the cliff’s edge before doing the necessary hard work to modernize and streamline our governmental systems.
Surely we can’t be so dumb, lazy, happy, and rich as to take things to the brink. Again.
