The Dexter Leader
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
It takes a village to raise a city
By Sean Dalton, Staff Writer
PUBLISHED: February 28, 2008
Dexter village officials are gearing up to embark on a journey for cityhood that has been in the works for years.
Advertisement
They started exploring the prospects of becoming a city in 2006 and voted to start the process last year, after a 17-member committee drew up a report last March that was largely in favor of the move.
It had become a raucous discussion in 2004.
Monday night, the municipality voted to contract the planning and consulting firm OHM to begin drawing up the boundaries of a prospective "City of Dexter."
The village also heard from David Rutledge, who was hired to assist Village Manager Donna Dettling through the process for a consultation fee of $3,000.
Rutledge made it clear to those at the 6:30 p.m. work session that "it's not a sprint, it's (a test of) endurance."
He projected that it would take at least two years following submittal of community petitions to the State Boundary Commission before crossing any finish line.
According to Rutledge's understanding of the process, at least 500 residents per square mile and 5 percent of registered voters within the village must sign in favor of pursuing cityhood.
Preparation for that petition must include a map of legal boundary descriptions that match the proposed city limits, so each petition signer can see a visual representation of the proposed city.
OHM's fee for preparing that map will be $10,000, for now. That money will come out of a professional services contingency fund in the village budget.
The engineering firm must assemble existing village property descriptions and turn them into a base drawing of the village.
OHM must also collect and analyze existing property tax roll descriptions to weed out any overlaps and omissions.
There are additional actions that the council has not yet authorized.
OHM has outlined seven steps to create the petition map. Steps 3 and 4 involve "locating critical property controlling corners" and identifying inconsistencies in the village boundary.
Those steps are estimated to cost an additional $25,500, according to OHM's proposal to the village.
An additional three steps cannot have a cost estimate attached at this time, according to the letter.
The first two steps will take about four weeks to complete.
Several council trustees are not fully convinced and there are still many unanswered questions air, such as how existing Public Act 425 agreements that the village is party to will affect the ultimate boundary of the city of Dexter.
"I'm for cityhood today, but when I see the boundary, I may not want to vote for it," said Village Trustee Jim Carson at a town hall meeting earlier this month.
Trustee Paul Cousins framed his reasoning from a tax perspective.
"It saves me a mill and a half that I don't have to pay in Scio Township tax ... some people won't have to pay Webster," he said.
Carson added, "We do everything that a city does. We provide police, fire, sidewalks, events, etc."
The only two things the village does not do are tax assessing and running its own elections.
"As a resident I have a right to have my own assessor and say these are my guidelines," Carson said. "We're being assessed on what happens in Scio Township to some degree."
Trustee Ray Tell was skeptical that cityhood would happen, at least, "not in my lifetime."
Trustee Donna Fisher expressed concern about the objectivity of the cityhood report that the council acted on last March.
"It was not the most balanced report that I have ever seen," she said.
Trustee Jim Smith said he "would hate to spend a year or two years and funds to accomplish all of these steps, and then it gets voted down."
Not all stories are guaranteed to appear
online. The Web edition contains a reasonable
sampling of the print edition stories.
For the most complete news coverage, we invite you to
subscribe
to the print edition of the paper.
Expanded
Web
Coverage
TOP JOBS
