City Council addresses “A Perfect Storm” of budgetary concerns

Interim Fire Chief, Cory Velzen, makes a case for the importance of paid on-call firefighters.

By Justin Tiemeyer || contributing writer

Lowell’s City Council met on Monday, February 5, at 7 pm, with a full roster of Council members, a city manager, and a deputy city manager present, to boot. During the third council meeting of the new year, council members addressed an agenda with seven line items of new business and no old.

Lowell resident, Perry Beachum, spoke during public comment encouraging citizens to attend Coffee with Council the first Saturday of each month, from 8 am - 10 am, at the Lowell Area Chamber of Commerce office. Public comment, he noted, is not meant for an exchange of ideas, but Coffee with Council, on the other hand, is, and Beachum characterized it as a great opportunity to bounce ideas off of city leaders. At the past Coffee with Council, three council members, a former mayor, a former council member, and the current person-of-the-year were present.

Beachum also noted some concern about the previous meeting’s budget update. In general, he believed there was too much information brought up all at once. In particular, he felt concerned about perceived flippancy toward $700,000 in-the-red, due to depreciation. “At some place down the road,” Beachum said, “you’re going to have to reinvest in infrastructure.”

During his later report, City Manager, Mike Burns, responded to the infrastructure concern, identifying the reasons for the budget figures and speaking to the fact that the city has been investing in its aging water and sewer infrastructure.

“It kind of was like a perfect storm this year,” City Manager Burns noted. “Am I concerned that the sky is falling over us? No.”

Executive Director, Lisa Plank, presented the annual report for the Lowell Area Historical Museum, which included a lot of encouraging numbers from 2023: 37,897 in-person visits to the museum, 32,159 reads from direct emails, 249,000 Facebook interactions, 8,000 people visiting the museum’s web site, with 3500 people interacting specifically with the online oral histories, and close to 300 artifacts taken in. “All in all, we reached over 330,000 people last year,” Plank said, “which is really fantastic to see.”

On the qualitative side, the museum has continued immersive programs with first through fourth graders in the Lowell Area School District, posted a number of entries in both the “ABCs of Lowell” and “Along Main Street” series, and hosted five history experts during the public speaker series. This was all facilitated by a mostly volunteer staff reporting 2643 volunteer hours. “I’m pretty sure they are underreporting,” Plank clarified.

The fire authority budget was presented by Interim Fire Chief, Cory Velzen, and the compensation and benefits needed for a new permanent full-time chief, was just one of the line items likely to inflate the budget in the future. Also on the horizon are the needs to fund fire engine repair, to hire a salaried fire inspector, and staff the fire department with full-time, day-to-day personnel. Based on call volume, Velzen noted, these staffing increases are justified, but they will be costly.

Velzen took special care to explain the budget line item for paid on-call staff. “They are the most important tool in my book,” Velzen said. Last year, the fire authority had $220,000 budgeted for paid on-call wages, but they are currently at a shortfall, with only $198,000 budgeted. Velzen clarified that only a portion of that budget goes to wages paid for actual fire response. While there is a separate line item for training and education costs, the wages paid to firefighters to attend those classes come from the paid on-call budget. Also covered under this line item are duty weekends, where firefighters check equipment and trucks and weekend team training, which significantly increases buy-in.

“The most frightening thing is going to a call and not being prepared,” Velzen explained, underscoring the necessity of these training and team-building exercises. “For $150,000, you get 34 highly-trained individuals who are bought into the department. It’s cheap, considering a fully-staffed firefighter may cost $100,000 or more.”

City Manager, Burns, explained that the costs for the city’s share of the fire authority have gone up significantly from year-to-year, and he expects at least $300,000 per year required for fire services moving forward.

“I don’t dispute. Everything he’s saying, it’s needed,” City Manager Burns said. “We’ll probably have to do some robbing Peter to pay Paul to address this.”

Seeing that February has brought with it better weather than January, Brooke Oosterman, the Executive Director of Housing Next, had no problem making it to City Hall to discuss the city’s affordable housing plan. Seeing as this is the beginning of the city’s affordable housing conversation in response to new opportunities presented by the state of Michigan, Oosterman’s presentation mostly covered high-level topics like research-based needs assessment, connecting the city with helpful resources, and empowering local leaders to make the necessary changes to address the problem. “We know that interest rates are not helping,” Oosterman said. “We know construction costs are going up. We have population growth, and we have household growth.”

Oosterman identified the largest-need segment as households making up to $100,000 per year, which typically includes important community infrastructure jobs such as teachers, public safety, and hospitality workers. Additionally, the need is defined by two large demographics, boomers and millennials, with the overlapping need for walkable, amenity-rich neighborhoods with smaller lots and smaller units. For many individuals within these groups, housing decisions come down to price and a desire to not spend entire Saturdays mowing the lawn. Boomers, in particular, are looking to downsize, but it does not currently make financial sense to do so, not without local zoning changes encouraging smaller houses built on smaller lots.

City Manager, Burns, gave an update at the end of the meeting on the city’s PFAS mitigation efforts at the contaminated Ware Road site. Following the testing of 39 wells, no PFAS has been detected. There will be a public hearing at the Monday, February 19 City Council meeting, for the extension of King Milling’s Industrial Facility Tax Credit. Those interested in watching the February 5 meeting can find it on the City of Lowell YouTube channel, @cityoflowell. The agenda can be found at the City of Lowell home page, lowellmi.gov.