“Community Columnist” Michael Schrader

(About a dead downtown)

Written 10 September 2016

When I rejoined the public sector one year ago, the first order of business at my new job was to attending a mandatory “leadership retreat” for all department heads. In order to allow the brainwashing to be most effective, this retreat was held at a remote resort two hours away from the city so our minds would not be cluttered with the worries of our daily lives in order to maximize our brainwashing, I mean our absorption of ideas to improve our skills and enhance the efficient delivery of services to the citizenry. Of course, the city spared no expense, and dropped a cool thirty thousand dollars on the retreat at which the city leadership lamented the ongoing financial struggles the city was having. Yes, it is ironic to blow that much money to discuss how little money you have, but irony is the norm in government.

Lack of common sense is a disease that has afflicted all levels of government. Take Congress, for instance. The current standard operating procedure is to pack a bill that would do good things that the President is in favor of (like fighting Zika) with completely unrelated things that Congress knows that the President opposes (like defunding Planned Parenthood) and then lamenting that the bill did not become law. The common sense thing to do is to get the bill that does the good thing passed and signed into law by not including all that other stuff, but common sense seems to be nonexistent in the Capitol.

Not to be outdone, the state of Michigan has embarrassed itself over the Flint water crisis. You have two guys appointed by the governor to manage two separate local governments with the same mandate – maximize available revenues and minimize costs. In the case of Detroit, the mandate was met by raising water rates to reflect the actual cost of production. The problem is that Detroit meeting the mandate caused Flint not to, as Flint paying more for Detroit water was not minimizing cost. The solution? Dump Detroit water for cheaper water. That sounded good on paper, but in retrospect, really wasn’t . After poisoning 100,000 people, the Flint “River” has once again been deemed not suitable water, Flint has reconnected to Detroit at the cost of millions of dollars, and the world has been left wondering, “Why did Michigan ever think tapping into Love Canal was a good idea”?

One would think that local governments would learn from big brothers and exercise just a smidgen of common sense, but then this is the government, and common sense is left at the door. You have a city whose downtown reached its zenith five decades ago, and has been on the decline ever since. Ever since freeways have been built, development has moved to where the freeway is, because travelers do not want to stray too far from the freeway for goods and services. This is a phenomenon that has been observed time and again. Port Huron is no exception; there is a reason M-25 through Fort Gratiot is the new “Main Street”.

Not to be deterred by reality, Port Huron has tried one scheme after another to revitalize downtown, and none of them have worked. That does not seem to have sunk in. The latest scheme? Fire the management firm for McMorran and let the city do it in house. The same city that could not keep enough toilet paper stocked at Lakeside Park on Memorial Day weekend, the same city that built a splash pad that, after three months, was already suffering serious maintenance issues, the same city that had to close the overlook due to lack of maintenance, somehow thinks that by taking over management it can somehow do better than the management team it fired. Seriously.

There is a reason that the private managers failed in bringing attractions to McMorran while at the same time succeeding at the convention center- location, location, location. Downtown is dead, and it is not coming back. It is time to stop living in the past and accept that reality.

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