This correspondence is intended to provide a final report/ update to the Oxford DDA Board AND community at large regarding the ER committees status. Since the Village Council voted to eliminate the Executive Director position and in a sense do a "hostile takeover" of the DDA Board earlier this year there has been little to report on during this time. I will take this opportunity to summarize the ER committees plans and path over the past year and how it will be impacted by the VC's actions along with the narrow vision of the current Village manager.
They say when there is smoke there is likely to be a fire and the smoke has been pouring out of the Village Offices for some time now. There has been one continuous drama after another ranging from accusations of theft of funds by employees to simple mismanagement of bills and invoices by the manager. Without going back over old news and the patterns that have been established now by the local governing offices I will stay focused on the ER committees time line and path.
By now the community at large knows that there has been continuing focus on developing our local economy through an effort to bring forward a street scape and walk ability plan to move us into the next 20 years. Our infrastructure here in the Village of Oxford is worked especially hard by the high traffic and heavy truck loads that pound the pavement each and every day. In fact it has effected the road surfaces, side walks, land scaping, and the integrity of the structures themselves.
We set out two years ago to begin a study on street scape's designed for more walkable communities. There is no doubt that Oxford has great potential and its Achilles heal is the main artery itself in M 24 which brings a daily rush of car and truck traffic through our single stop light community. Now that may be inaccurate since we do have the the light at Broadway and a light at the fire station for emergency controls. But the fact is that since the beginning traffic has been controlled mainly by one traffic control. For years it has been discussed that we need more controls and studies have been done to look at this only to be told by the controlling party (MDOT) that there is not enough traffic that crosses at any given cross street to warrant a light.
We attended meeting with SEMCOG and MDOT over the past several months. We made contacts and connections within both of these organizations and discovered that what really gets attention is fatalities. It is kind of sad that it takes a death or several deaths to occur to get the attention of the authority who controls are roads. If you take that into consideration then we are surely closing in on a need for some additional controls as the counts of pedestrian injury and fatalities continues to mount. It may not be a large number at any one given time... but the count continues to mount.
The other reality is that we gained the support from the DDA Board and the Village Council in the pursuit of the study of this street scape and walkability design. The Village Manager serves on this very committee and sat in numerous meetings and in fact was part of the core group who began this journey over two years ago. He was in the room with us at Lawrence Tech when we first started to talk about partnering with LTU on bringing students to Oxford to vision about what some of our assets could/should look like to attract a new generation of young citizens. What do they want/demand in the towns they will choose as their homes? Walkable, safe, vibrant down towns are the center of every successful community in the United States today.
The Village Council unanimously adopted our proposed "Complete Streets" resolution giving our committee a clear indication that there is support for the vision and continued effort to move toward a more walkable community. Then the vote came for funding to complete and hire a firm to create a plan and design. Although this was not a unanimous vote across the board there were no public officials present or opinions voiced in any of our meetings at the ER committee level or the DDA Board meeting level. One thing became clear at this point though. There was going to be a struggle between those who were thinking, planning, looking ahead and a faction of those who were looking back into the past and firmly planted there.
The plan and design was underway and several public input meetings along the way. Many can remember the conceptual drawings displayed at the then Margo's Gallery which was largely attended by community leaders, officials from MDOT, business owners and citizens. These meetings were intended to allow for feedback to the design team and the input was taken very seriously. The drawing were conceptual and never set in stone. The plan itself was conceptual and never set in stone. The price tag was a high water mark and never set in stone. The concept that MDOT will be coming through Oxford in the next few years however was not conceptual at all. They are going to do something here and the year 2016 is being bantered about whether the community is ready or not.
So fast forward to early 2013 and the Village Council and the DDA do their annual budget review. Many do not realize that the DDA Board members do the planning for the four pronged "Main Street" community model. It involves 4 committees who make work plans, set budgets, and execute work plans. The misunderstanding comes when these budgets have to be approved annually by the Village Council. It should come as no surprize that never has there been a DDA submitted plan that has not been picked over and scrutinized by the Village Council. Nor has there been a year gone by that the Village Council has not voted to assign a good amount of the DDA funds to be redeployed as a subsidy for Village services such as police, fire, and DPW services. They use the DDA funds as a revolving line of credit that never gets paid back.
History will show that in (don't quote me here) 2006 the Village Council determined that the DDA had "too much" money in its accounts and voted to "take/sweep" over $600,000 from the DDA and into the Village accounts for their own needs. Think of it as taking money from a neighbor to help pay your bills. Moving ahead to 2013... the raid on the DDA funds continued as the Village Council did a highly unusual and questionable deed. They allowed a former board member who was asked to step off the board to present them with an alternative plan, largely built with self interests in mind, to start a movement to stop the DDA from further actions. We see this as largely a weak Village Council not knowing any better being manipulated by a largely one person committee who has been very dividing and unwelcome in many communities he has operated in the recent past. The last stop on the station is Oxford... and they took his self interested plans right into the center. Remember Council it gets hot and uncomfortable when you dance with the Devil.
All this is to say that the work the ER committee has performed over the past two years has come to a stand still. The committee has worked the plan and brought forward a development plan that is sound and aligns with every major communities desire to be more walkable, safe, and economically sound. The partnerships and parties working together to bring a properly sized/priced plan into allignment with the MDOT plans to resurface in the near future. We hired a professional grant writer who layed out a plan to fund the project. We think of this work as our "gift" to the community of the Village of Oxford.
Going forward we believe that the critics of our work will attempt to tell a story about "plans on the shelf" that were paid for with tax payor funds and never implmented. I am here to tell you that we are fully aware of this and in fact resurected a "on the shelf" plan in the "Vision Plan" that we used as the foundation for the Street Scape plan and design. The fact is that there are elected officials that are unable to look past the day in front of them and into the future. Some are still fixed on the past and will never be of value to future planning for the community. This is simply a preemptive response to attacks we know will be made on our work. We are hopeful as a committee that some where in the future others will see the value in our work and pick it up and carry it forward and into being.
In closing this final report I want to make on observation on the Village's attempt to put a new face on Celebrate Oxford 2013. The icon is simply a mask that is intended to represent a historical figure from years gone by in the Lone Ranger. It was ironic to me that the "masked man" theme as the focus for the 2013 high point celebration here in Oxford. This is symbolic in many ways. First in that there is a clear representation of focusing on the past. This may be another Achilles heal for Oxford as it will continue to struggle to develop a future if it continues to gaze back at icons of the past. Who connects with this symbol? According to the box office it is not the kids of today's generation. I find it laughable that a group of middle to senior age men standing around in a black masks trying to relive the glory days of yester year. In the mean time... MDOT is coming..ready or not. You can make things happen, let things happen.... or won't know what happened when they come in and do a patch job in 2016. They can pave with you or pave over you.
I want to thank my fellow ER committee members for their countless hours of service and visioning and members of the board who have worked side by side with us on the plan for a safer, more walkable, and economically viable downtown Oxford. One only needs to go visit Rochester Michigan to see what a walkable, safe, pedestrian, bike friendly down town can do for your economy. In the mean time we have pink duct tape on our side walks. That begs the question to be asked... where is the return on the investment of the subsidy that the DDA pays to the Village for DPW services at? Instead of making a plan to repair the tripping hazards the best they can provide is pink duct tape to warn you of the hazard? We must be in real trouble folks!
I am resigning as Chairman of the Economic Development and Restructuring Committee effective today this 17th day of July 2013. It was real, it was fun... but it wasn't real fun.
Thank you,
Don Sherman
Former Chairman and From Economic Development Chairman for the Village of Oxford DDA
