Saginaw City Council, School Board and County Board leaders should cooperate more closely, delegates from the three major governing groups have agreed.
Amid the future plan, at the same time, a current unresolved major teamwork topic lingers on the total future use of the Saginaw High School building after September 2024, when the merged Saginaw United is slated to open at the current SASA riverfront site.
The unity discussion was sparked by Joyce Seals, school trustee and former mayor. In response, members of the little-known City/School/County Liaison Committee agreed in January that they will aim for more cooperation.
Startup plans include:
- Meet every two months instead of every three months. This was a compromise instead of changing the schedule to the former once-a-month.
- Explore renewal of a long-abandoned $5,000 apiece, or $15,000 combined, mostly to revive a “Hot Times: Summer In the City” youth activity promo booklet, remembered for its cover with a smiling sun cartoon. This had been the main liaison project until it died during a 2008 dispute among past members over sharing the small cost, among the three entities with current combined annual budgets of more than $450 million.
At the same time, the delegates did not discuss why the City Council and County Board did not act upon tentative commitments to provide $750,000 each from federal ARPA anti-poverty funds for the community center portion of a Saginaw High renovation into a middle school, or why the County Board sliced half of $500,000 each for First Ward Community Center and the Saginaw County CAC.
In addition to Seals, others who took part on Jan. 19 were School Superintendent Ramont Roberts, re-appointed Board President Charles Coleman, school trustees Ruth Ann Knapp and Janet Nash and newcomer Kevin Rooker, along with County Board reps Sheldon “Snap” Matthews and newly-elected Lisa Coney. Mayor Pro-Tem Annie Boensch was the lone City Council rep.
Seals launched the “let’s unite” focus when she described taking part in a countywide forum more than two decades ago on “Cities Without Suburbs,” with author David Rusk, that emphasized investments in low-income neighborhoods for the good of Greater Saginaw. This event was linked to the adoption of “Great Lakes Bay Region” for the tri-counties.
She said: “Rusk spoke about the importance of the economic health of the core city. As the core city does well the suburbs around that core city even experienced better economic growth. There is a correlation. Therefore, it is important that there be intergovernmental cooperation. Our economic health conditions are intertwined. Inner-cities affect the entire region’s bottom line. It’s a no-brainer that we should work together.”
Others chimed in.
- Roberts summarized: “This group can have a lot of power,” and expressed a need for “tangible” results and action.
- Boensch added: “We really are in this together.”
- Matthews described Seals’ report as a “real eye-opener” and “something to look into” for the County Board, with seven of the 11 members from suburban, rural and small-town districts.
- Rooker, a retired Carrollton educator, noted a need to address hardship countywide, because outlying areas also are coping with major poverty, made even more severe by COVID-19 in pockets of rural and small town poverty.
Previous teamwork talks have included large concepts such as consolidated metropolitan government, merged school districts, unified police and fire services, countywide transit, even shared custodial services. However, virtually all local leaders will assert that these big-picture options are overly idealistic and likely unattainable, at least short-term.
One of the few David Rusk-type examples of unity, from a book Joyce Seals has read three times over, has been a countywide millage bailout of the Civic Center, under regulated privatization, which had become a turn-of-the-millennium albatross on City Hall finances.
Therefore, the former mayor says restoration of the “Hot Times” info booklet, either as an old-time paper handout and/or as an online site, would plant seeds for restoring parks and recreation programs, or at least provide support funding for volunteer groups that have aimed to maintain at least some of the former activities, mainly at Hoyt Park.
Roberts suggested to the liaison group that summer and after-school programs are more important than ever. He noted that pupil group “learning loss” from pandemic shutdowns has equated to more than one full year of falling behind at city elementary grade levels, and that communitywide outreach (SPSD, City Hall, County, agencies, churches, PTA and neighborhood groups) is needed to begin to close the gap and to forestall the crisis.
School day-to-day operating funds from the state, along with federal anti-poverty Title I monies, basically are aimed for K-12 “until 3 p.m.” However, said Roberts, many programs beyond the timeclock, sometimes beyond the realm of school buildings, will require shared local funding (government and foundations), along with donated time from volunteers.
He added that without mutually-organized activities, a revived “Hot Times” spread-the-word promo sadly would contain fewer pages to fill.
The superintendent on Jan. 19 did not specifically speak to the “Future of Saginaw High” issue, which has been somewhat hidden by the holidays and by a lack of local media taking notice. This aspect took root publicly late last year, when the County Board and the City Council did not act upon a prior tentative plan to share comparative small portions of their combined $89 million in federal ARPA monies.
In rounded numbers:
- The school district still will invest about $2.75 million from the local $100 million property millage, voter approved in November 2020, six months prior to the federal funds windfall, to transform about half of Saginaw High into an East Side middle school for youngsters whose families would prefer a nearby alternative to Thompson Middle.
- Half of the future outlook is canceled, however, at least for now unless there is some reconciling. Board of Ed members, along with the city and county, would have given $750,000 apiece in federal ARPA/ESSER grants to transform the building’s remaining portion to a “one-stop” community center, also billed as “multi-purpose,” to better serve people in hardship who currently may feel frustrations and lost dignity in trying to cope with occasions of bureaucracy and short-staffed agencies.
As the holidays approached late last fall, the team effort was intended as a prime example of the local collaboration that is a guideline from federal bureaucrats, specifically the Department of Treasury. Part of the message was that both the middle school and the multi-purpose center would have cost more taxpayer dollars if carried out in separate projects. This was envisioned to be revenue saved, through their newly emerging teamwork.
However, the January participants, while looking to the future, did not follow up on the sudden pre-holidays breakdown of the $5 million combined plan, even though it would not have taken any of their general fund budgets. Rather, they focused on trying to find $5,000 apiece for “Hot Summer” from their regular operations.
For the other current unresolved example that does not reflect the new goal of teamwork, county commissioners last November asked the City Council to pledge $500,000 apiece for First Ward Community Center (FWCC) and Saginaw CAC, in advance before they would support a matching sum. But after the Council agreed to make official the half-million to each, the County Board in December reduced the sums to $250,000 apiece.
The FWCC and CAC concerns started at the same time as suburban and rural County Board members took note that the city population now is less than 25 percent of the county count. This overlooks the detail that the ARPA grants are based on numbers of people in poverty, not on general census figures that span all incomes.
The next mutual liaison meeting, always open to the public but rarely attended by citizens, is set for 5:30 p.m. on March 16, which is a Thursday, at the Board of Education headquarters on 550 Millard, next to Maplewood Manor.
