Young City Leaders – Discussion with Nick Sizeland, Mitch Foster, and Brian Chapman

David Haynes sits down with Northern Michigan University alumni Nick Sizeland, Mitch Foster, and Brian Chapman to discuss their current roles as young leaders in three Michigan cities.

Nick Sizeland is currently the City Manager of Grosse Pointe Park, MI and graduated from NMU in 2016 with a Masters in Public Administration and undergraduate in Public Administration. Mitch Foster is currently the City Manager for Ludington, MI and graduated from NMU in 2011 with a degree in Political Science and Government, and University of Nevada-Reno with a Masters in Public Administration. Brian Chapman is currently the City Manager for Sault Ste. Marie, MI and graduated from NMU in 2011 with a Masters in Public Administration.

In this episode, David discusses what Nick, Mitch, and Brian are experiencing as leaders in their respective cities, their current challenges, and some of the risks they are facing.

Transcript

David Haynes:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Rural Insights podcast, another edition. And today, I’m excited to have three Northern Michigan University alumnuses. Is there such a word? Alumnuses? Alumni, I guess. And also, all three former students of mine, and all three smarter than I am right now. And they’re all running important cities, one in the Southeast Michigan, outside of the Detroit area. Talk about that in a minute. One in a large city in Northern Michigan, Ludington, and one city manager in the UP here, of our big city Sault Ste. Marie, and one of the big three cities in the peninsula.

David Haynes:
And what we want to do today is talk to the three of them about their experiences and what’s going on in their experiences in their city, what their challenges are, maybe what their risks are. And then I’m going to ask them to talk about rural cities or smaller cities of the future, not cities of 600,000 or millions, but the… And they’ll tell you about the size of their city. So, gentlemen, welcome, and thank you very much for being here. And so, Nick, first of all, what year did you graduate from Northern, if you don’t mind telling that? And tell us about your city at what challenges and threats are.

Nick Sizeland:
All right. Well, thank you for having me here, and it’s good to have some fellow MMU city managers. There’s not many of us, but it’s great to have some colleagues among us today. I enjoyed my time at Northern Michigan University very much. I graduated with a poli-sci degree in 2011 and then a master’s of public administration in 2015 from NMU as well. So, I have been the city manager of Girl’s Point Park, Michigan for the last two years. I previously worked there for another three years as an assistant city manager and assistant to. My population’s about 11,500, with 1.7 square miles. And if you don’t know, there’s five Girl’s Points in the area.

Nick Sizeland:
So, I am the second largest Girl’s Point. I border two major arteries of roads with the border of Detroit, and I also border Girl’s Point City. And we have Lake St Clair along our way. Very proud to have two private municipal parks, which is very odd for… The Girl’s Points are one of the few communities that have private parks where residents pay more in their taxes in order to have that privacy that’s only relevant for just the owner of the Girl’s Point Park.

Nick Sizeland:
So, the biggest challenges that are happening today within Girl’s Point Park, would say, in regards to… And I’m sure Mitch and Brian would both agree to me, is infrastructure. We just had two major storm events in June and July of this year, down in Southeast Michigan, that inundated us with extreme rain. In Girl’s Point Park, we had eight inches of rain in 24 hours. That is what equates to 1,000-year storm event. Typically, the state mandate is that you can handle a 25-year event, which may be about three inches of rain. However, none of our infrastructure was built for these types of events.

Nick Sizeland:
And so, what Girl’s Point Park has been grappling with is we had about 75% of our homes flood with a mix of storm and sewage. We have a separated sewer and water system in Girl’s Point Park. Much of our system goes to Great Lakes Water Authority, which is the regional provider for sewer and water in Southeastern Michigan. And we actually were declared a disaster by President Biden in seeking relief for residents not only in Girl’s Point Park, the other point, City of Detroit.

Nick Sizeland
And so, from this right now, I’ve been working closely with my partners of the other Girl’s Points, City of Detroit, Wayne County, in that we’re seeking how do we get this funding that is sorely needed for updating our infrastructure? Because, as the suburbs were being built throughout the years, the regional utilities were not being done with it. And so, Detroit was able to serve so many residents. They’re moving up to the suburbs. That infrastructure was never built to last then in Detroit. And so, you have a whole Oakland, McComb, Wayne, Livingston, and parts of Washtenaw County all bringing their sewage and water down to Detroit.

Nick Sizeland:
And so, I’ve had some good conversations with Great Lakes Water Authority and other regional governments of sharing data and information together, something that… My experience as city manager so far is we had not been doing a very good job of working together, sharing data regarding our engineers or holding stuff too tight to each other. And it’s something that we’ve been working together to really work together because we have in Southeast Michigan… Well, we believe probably a 10 to $20 billion fix just for the regional system itself, to fix our water and sewer.

Nick Sizeland:
In the meantime, in Girl’s Point Park, myself, I’m looking at cleaning our sewer system right now, giving the residents confidence that they won’t have, hopefully, other sewer events down the road. And I’m also pursuing what’s called a sewer outfall. In the very case of an extreme event… And when I say “extreme,” I’m talking 100 years or more, which is happening, seems like, every two to three years now, that we would discharge out into Lake St Claire, which we don’t want to do. I love the environment, but at the same time, I have to protect my residents that are getting inundated with these extreme storm events.

Nick Sizeland:
So, in a nutshell, I’d say that’s probably our biggest concern we have nowadays. And so, we have a very built-out housing stock. There’s almost no developmental land. Right now, we’re going through a city master plan process. And just, in short, I’d say, what are we looking at in the future? I’d say it’s diversifying that housing stock, and then also just working with what we have available to transform in the 21st century, especially with autonomous vehicles. That is coming here. More electric vehicles. I have a lot of residents that work closely over in Chrysler and General Motors and Ford. And so, those are really the areas that we’re looking at in the future in Girl’s Point Park. And I can talk about more, but I know I got two other guys here with some good stories. So, thanks a lot.

David Haynes:
All right. We’re going to get back to you, Nick. Mitch, why don’t you tell us about the great city of Ludington?

Mitch Foster:
Yeah. So, I also graduated in 2011 with a poli-sci degree. So, you got Nick and I here with the call there. After I left Northern, I went to the University of Nevada, Reno. Got my master’s degree in public administration out there. Then made my way back to Kingsley, Michigan for a couple of years as the village manager. Then I went to Wisconsin for four years as the village administrator in the community of Winneconne, just outside Oshkosh. And then, somehow, I made my way back home, which is Ludington for me. We have a population pre-census of right around 8,400 people, year-round. Summertime, Ludington is a very popular tourist destination, and so that bumps up to about 20,000 people. Countywide, we double from 25,000 to about 50,000 simply in the summertime.

Mitch Foster:
And so, for us, we’re looking at, really, two primary issues of concern. One, as Nick already touched on, is the infrastructure. I don’t think you’re going to find a city manager across the state or the nation who is not going to say that infrastructure is an issue, whether that is existing transmission mains, collection mains on both water and sewer lines, electric infrastructure, we just had this conversation with consumers recently. Or now, we’ll call it unfunded mandates, hopeful health improvements from a lead line perspective. But how do we upgrade our infrastructure locally when over 70% of it was paid for originally by the federal and state government? These are questions that I don’t think a lot of us are able to answer right now because there’s no real good answer. So, we are trying our best locally to try to figure that out.

Mitch Foster:
On the other end, the person issue or people problems. For us, unlike being a university town or being in the Detroit Metro area, we don’t have a primary driver other than tourism. We have made that transition, I think, in the most part, to a service-based economy. And so, we’re trying to attract and retain younger families to the area, as well as try to get those boomerangs that want to move back to the area is important. And we’re not able to figure out how to do that quite yet.

Mitch Foster:
What we’re seeing is a ton of investment in housing, remodels, teardowns and new builds, a lot of infill infrastructure. We’ve made a lot of improvements on our planning and zoning side to allow for conversions and adaptive reuse of properties. But what we’re probably see is a loss of population in this most recent census of possibly 400 people, even though we’ve seen massive housing investment. It’s an interesting dynamic that we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with. But for us, those two issues, the infrastructure and the people are our big things that we’ve got to look at as to how to deal with those challenges moving forward.

David Haynes:
So, the housing and affordable housing for young families is an issue in Ludington?

Mitch Foster:
Oh, absolutely. I’m sure it’s the same with the other gentleman as well. In a tourism town, you have people that come in, they want to retire from Chicago, Seattle, New York, Philadelphia. They buy a house for cash, for significantly over asking. And once that happens over and over again, the entire market inflates drastically. It took me two and a half years to find a house to buy that I could afford in my own community. And I’m at the higher end of income levels here in the community as well. And so, trying to figure that out on a community-wide or a region-wide aspect is a difficult task, but it’s one that I think we’re starting to make some ground on. So…

David Haynes:
You used to have some manufacturing in Ludington. It used to be referred to as the lead manufacturing city in Northern Michigan. Is that still true?

Mitch Foster:
We still have some manufacturing, but I think we’ve started to see that transition over to more of a service-based. We still have white hall industries that does a lot of work with the auto manufacturers. We still have House of Flavors that employs over 150 people doing ice cream and dairy products across the country. But the unfortunate fact is that, when the auto industry took the hit in ’08, along the US-10 Corridor, I’ll say, took the biggest hit across the state. Mason County is surrounded by two of the four poorest counties in the state of Michigan. And if you go along the US-10 Corridor, you hit, I think, it’s four of the top 10. And so, this entire area of mid-Michigan has really seen a drastic decrease in the number of jobs in the manufacturing industry. So, I think we’re trying to do our best to keep some of those jobs but also recognize we’ve got a shift to more of a service and knowledge-based economy.

David Haynes:
Okay. So, Brian, tell us about what’s going on at Chippewa County, Sault Ste. Marie.

Brian Chapman:
Yeah. So, Brian Chapman, city manager of Sault Ste. Marie. I’ve been here a couple years now. Sault Ste. Marie is about 13,000 people. I graduated from Northern in ’07, so I guess I’m the older of the two other gentlemen on the phone here with us. But I graduated ’07 with my undergraduate and 2011 with my MPA from Northern. Prior to this, did some stints in Oshkosh, Vassar, Michigan, and Negaunee, Michigan.

Brian Chapman:
But just to reiterate some of the points that were already discussed too, infrastructure is going to be a big issue for us. We have overbuilt ourselves quite a bit. And what Sault Ste. Marie is interesting about is our infrastructure extends to not just the road sidewalks and underground, but we have a major deepwater port that the city owns that we’re in the process of trying to redevelop that. All of our parks facilities are all old and outdated. So, our infrastructure extends out quite a bit than just the normal cement and brick and mortar.

Brian Chapman:
One of the bigger issues that wasn’t mentioned for us is staffing. We have staffing challenges, and that’s trying to retain or more recruit applicants to fill our positions. Right now, we have four open positions at the police department. We just closed out that recruitment. We got one application in. They won’t even be licensed or certified until May of 2022. We have three or four openings in the fire department for firefighter paramedics. We’ve been recruiting those since last January. We’ve had one applicant in my time since I’ve been here. I’ve had to hire out five or six different department heads, two of them needing state certifications to operate the water system and the wastewater system. Those took about a year to fill. And it’s becoming more challenging to find those individuals with the proper certification.

Brian Chapman:
So, it’s one thing to have the infrastructure and all the assets there, but to be able to recruit and retain those individuals, actually do the work to make those assets more work for you, is one of our bigger challenges. And given our rural location and how far away we are from any other population center, people really have to be dedicated or in the mindset that they want to live in Sault Ste. Marie. And as much as I came up here without any kind of poking or prodding, there’s just not a lot of individuals like that, that want to live in the rural UP. So, that is one of our bigger challenges moving forward, is staffing.

David Haynes:
So, you are certainly the only international city in the Upper Peninsula, one of three in the state, and that have a bridge to connect to our northern neighbor, Canada. Any issues around that being an international city and complications that are a little different than other cities in Michigan?

Brian Chapman:
I wouldn’t say there’s any different. Maybe there is a greater amount. For example, being a border community, you do get involved in a lot of human trafficking cases or even potential drug crossing across that border. So, I’m sure all communities have that, but we may have a little bit more than your average, just given the location and the wanting to cross from one country into the other country.

Brian Chapman:
One of the things that’s more recently happened with the impact of COVID and having the border closed, our local economy is heavily dependent on a lot of the Canadians coming from Sault, Ontario, to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, to do just their basic grocery shopping, getting gas, stuff like that. With that border closed for so long, a lot of our businesses didn’t have that additional revenue coming in from the Canadians shopping over here. So, they that really put a hamstring on a lot of our local businesses.

David Haynes:
So, for all three of you, we’ve been in rural insights asking across the Upper Peninsula on our weekly newsletter, Whispers, about what are some of the priority issues for you as a citizen? And a couple that we hear repeatedly, repeatedly, and interesting enough, infrastructure comes up from private citizens also, is childcare cost and mental health availability, especially juvenile mental health. Any of you have some experience with that you’d like to share as issues? Go ahead, Nick.

Nick Sizeland:
Yeah, I’ll share. So, excitingly, I’m one of those that has those issues right now, our first three-month-old child, little girl. And so, just my wife’s going to be leaving maternity leave soon, and we’re having to balance a way right now of my job as city manager and her working from home. We can’t find childcare here in the Girl’s Point area. It’s very challenging to find right now within Metro Detroit. And you’re finding that it was a problem before. And then once the pandemic hit, we’re finding that several of these daycares were actually considering folding up or having staffing challenges, people not wanting to work in it anymore, they’re afraid of COVID, and obviously those health concerns.

Nick Sizeland:
And so, what I’ve been looking to do as city manager right now is we need to diversify and… How can we bring daycare into Girl’s Point? We just have a elementary school that closed two years ago with our school district. And so, I’ve been trying to work with our school district and see if there’s a early childhood care opportunity there that we can work with, and just trying to help out our residents and of the fellow Girl’s Points. It’s something that’s a major challenge, especially with working families that are going to Detroit, commuting. And so, we’re working on that right now.

Nick Sizeland:
On the mental health side, I haven’t seen too much in Girl’s Point Park. However, our Public Safety Department has been working well with our Detroit Police Department whenever we’ll have individuals that could have those cases that they need to seek the help that they do. And so, that’s really what our extent has been in Girl’s Point Park, is working with our partners at Detroit Police Department.

David Haynes:
What about the cost in childcare at Girl’s Point Park [inaudible 00:19:17]? Is it high? It is-

Nick Sizeland:
Yeah.

David Haynes:
… at UP very high.

Nick Sizeland:
It’s very high, yeah. We’re looking at, right now in some cases, close to 400, $500 a week right now in some cases. And I’m hearing, too, of families now that mothers or fathers are quitting their jobs or saying, “Hey, why should I work when it’s cheaper for me to stay at home and do so?” So, that’s really the challenge we’re having in Girl’s Point.

David Haynes:
Okay. Well, Brian, what about you at childcare and mental health issues at Sault Ste. Marie, Chippewa County?

Brian Chapman:
Yeah, childcare is an issue up here. And I can speak to it from the provider side too. My wife does in-home daycare, and she’s limited by the state of the number of kids that she can bring in. So, she’s capped at six. And we’ve frequently get phone calls or emails from residents trying to find daycare services. And we have to turn them down, which, if it’s a phone call, the conversation usually leads to, “I guess my spouse or I are going to have to drop our job so that we can just stay home with the kid.” And in an area where there’s employment shortages, if there was a better solution for daycare, you’d have those parents be able to enter in the workforce and be able to fill some of these other spots, so it’s an economic development issue to a certain extent, too.

Brian Chapman:
Our behavioral health issues in the community, they’re present up here. Our challenge, again, being so remote and not always having those services, is how do we get the services to the people that need them? Oftentimes, we’re doing the long transfers. Just like Nick said, a lot of our contacts are with the police department. So, what we’re having to do is long transfers to facilities to get the people the services they need, because they’re just not present in the area right now.

David Haynes:
Well, one thing, Brian, you’ve got going on that would be interesting is your major hospital War Memorial in the Sault just developed a relationship with the University of Michigan, therefore the Mott Children’s Hospital. That relationship might help with some of the issues around mental health and juvenile health, right?

Brian Chapman:
Correct. Yeah. So, that partnership with War Memorial Hospital in mid-Michigan should open the door to a lot more services. I think there was some anxiety about what that would actually work out to be for the community. But as the agreement stands right now, there’s not going to be any loss of current services here. And the way mid-Michigan describes it to us is it should only open the door for more services. And being with that partnership with mid-Michigan, War Memorial will now be on a priority list to be able to access those services, whereas before, if they called up to have those services, they had to get on a waiting list. So, there would be more access to those type of services for our residents now.

David Haynes:
That’s great. That’s great. Mr Foster, what about down in Ludington? How do these wishes play out?

Mitch Foster:
Yeah. And similar to Nick, I had my first child in September of 2019, so COVID had really just started picking up. And so, six months later when my wife and I were required to go back to work full time, we were lucky enough to find a location in one of the daycares for a spot for him. However, out of the five-or-so daycare facilities, not in-home as Brian was talking about with his wife… Out of the five daycare facilities, every single one of them has been closed for a period of time over this last year-and-a-half period.

Mitch Foster:
One in particular in the last six months has had to close one day a week, rotating for every week. And then they had to close for two weeks a at a time because they had a COVID contraction on staff. But because they don’t have enough people to work, they had to close one day a week so that one room was closed or one age group was closed at a time. And I think you’re seeing that across all of our facilities.

Mitch Foster:
I know that Senator VanderWall, who is our state senator, sits as the chair of the Health Policy Committee at the State, has done his best to try to help with this. The State put forward a TRICARE Cost-Share plan, which is a project idea where the State would put in a third, the employer would put in a third, and the employee would put in a third. And if you had facilities in your municipality could sign up, you could be a part of this pilot program. Ludington has tried to put forward for that but we were thrown out based on Grand Traverse County taking the winning bid on that one. But we’ve got to get a little bit more creative in how we allow LARA or MDHHS to license some of the in-home facilities, as well as how do we incentivize and get more folks to have facilities? We see down in Coopersville they’ve got a union shop for training. Why couldn’t you have a true facility where you provide care and you also train new in-home and facility-type workers for childcare? I think there are ways that we can do this.

Mitch Foster:
On the mental health side, we actually had a representative from the governor’s office in the office last week Friday. And my police chief brought up this exact issue because we are having to transfer folks from Ludington down to either South Bend, Indiana or Northern Ohio if we don’t have a location or anywhere near us to house, in particular, juveniles. So, the cost to house them at these places is significantly higher, but also it’s the time taken away. As Brian said, these long transfers, you’re talking one to two officers going four hours, five hours one way, that takes them out of the community to do their real job, not necessarily playing chauffeur.

Mitch Foster:
And so, it’s really unfortunate that we’re dealing with this. But again, these are big issues that, as a community, we’re trying to figure out how do we deal with. And so, we’re working with our partners at Community Mental Health, some of our local nonprofits. And it goes right back into the issue that I’m sure we’re all dealing with which is a homelessness issue. Between mental health and substance abuse, homelessness in our area in particular is up in the last few years, and COVID has not helped with that. And so, I think these are all cyclical issues that continue to touch one another over and over again. And COVID has exacerbated that in many of these cases.

David Haynes:
Interesting. So, I want to ask you one last question before I wrap up and that is: so, five years from now, the three of you decide to come up to my funeral, and you’re ready to do it and you get through listening to all these boring speeches about me, and you walk out together and you’re going to go have a beer. What would you tell each other, five years from now, is your greatest success and something that still remains a problem? I know that’s jumping way out, but just do a creative thinking. What do you think is something that’ll be so hard to solve that’ll still be there in five years? And what are you so excited about that, in five years, you’ll see blossoming? Brian, what do you think?

Brian Chapman:
I think you should start with somebody else. I guess the easy one would be a lot of the infrastructure projects that we have going on. And it’s going to be a problem after they’re done, because we still have to continue to find a way of funding the maintenance and the preventative maintenance for those infrastructure projects. So, for example, we are redoing the Carbide Dock, the deepwater port I mentioned earlier, as well as a road that would lead heavy traffic to that facility. All in all, it’s about a $22 million project, which came in significantly over budget due to a lot of the COVID price increases. But once we get that project done, we still have to figure out a way of funding the maintenance of that.

Brian Chapman:
And the impetus on this whole project was the dock was condemned from use or freighters, cruise ships, whatever the case may be. And if we don’t figure out a way of funding routine maintenance on assets like that, they will just become into a state of disrepair like it currently is. So, in five years we’ll be celebrating that the dock is done and that road has been reconstructed. But at the same time, we still need to figure out how we’re going to fund those maintenance activities.

David Haynes:
Also, you might be celebrating a Lake State National Hockey Championship. You never know. You never know. So…

Brian Chapman:
Hopefully.

David Haynes:
And hopefully, Northern too. So, Mitch, what do you think? What do you think?

Mitch Foster:
So, I think, from a, “Hey, pat myself on the back or the community on the back,” as I talk about it over a beer with somebody, in five years, I think we will have made a massive dent in the housing affordability and capacity issue. We have got great partners in the development and nonprofit world that are doing a lot of good work. I have a planning commission and a city council that are very progressive in some of the things that they are doing to try to ease restrictions on the zoning side and to make it easier for folks to do those things. So, I think, in five years, I’d be very excited about it.

Mitch Foster:
I hate to just continue to pile on, but I think the one thing that I’ll say we’ve made progress but hasn’t changed, is still a massive struggle is the infrastructure piece. I think that is going to be the elephant in the room for communities down the line. And you can pair that up with pensions as the areas that will need to be seriously reviewed in the years to come, that will never go and will always be a problem. But I think the housing piece could be the one thing that I can pat our community on the back for in five years.

David Haynes:
Great. And Nick, what about you down there in Girl’s Point Park?

Nick Sizeland:
Yeah. So, two things immediately come to mind. If they come to fruition in the next five years, I’m going to be very happy. One, I just did a groundbreaking for our new public works building through our tax increment finance authority. They’ve never had a building built for them properly. They’ve had a automobile bump shop. They were in a bakery that was added on over the years. I mean, in the Girl’s Points, you don’t have much space. And so, if you’re able to find a little bit of land and get this through fruition, it’s a great thing.

Nick Sizeland:
And then the other thing that wasn’t discussed today and I’m particularly proud of is community policing. This is something that, as we have with the events with the last couple years, we operate in a public safety department in Girl’s Point Park. We’re bordering the City of Detroit. And each Girl’s Point has their own public safety. And we operated in this vacuum over the years of not really branching out or listening to more ideas and such. And so, I hired a public safety director that… Typically, Girl’s Point would just hire in-house, and I did something that was different by going outside.

Nick Sizeland:
And I think it’s very important for the community, especially our local communities, to hear from our public safety police or fire that they’re human too. And let’s listen to the community and see what we can do to improve. Right now, my chief has just had a police advisory committee working with different groups of people within Girl’s Point Park, learning from what are they hearing in their communities regarding public safety and what we can do to improve.

Nick Sizeland:
Little plugs in five years from now, if we can work on that OPEB and pension, I’ll be very excited about that. We’ve made some inroads there, which has really helped us out. And then, last but not least, infrastructure, working with my partners at Great Lakes Water Authority, Wayne County, Detroit. There’s a lot of entities here in Southeastern Michigan that need to work together. And so, if there’s a couple things we can do, and I’m very hopeful, at the federal and state level, they can provide those to us, then I’d say we did our jobs. So, that’s what I hope for in the next five years.

David Haynes:
Well, thank you, gentlemen. I know our viewers will be able, when they listen to this, to know why I’m so proud of the three of you and how proud Northern is to have three of its alum doing major work in municipal management at this state coping with unbelievable issues. I think local government is the place that touches more people’s lives. That’s where more innovation happens and creativity that directly affects people, so you all are really important. So, thank you very much. I’m proud to know each of you. And I hope we can do this again soon.

Mitch Foster:
Absolutely.

Nick Sizeland:
Absolutely.

David Haynes:
Thanks, guys.

Nick Sizeland:
Thank you.

David Haynes:
Be safe.