Mayoral candidates pledge different paths to paved roads

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Mayoral candidates pledge different paths to paved roads
Potholes on Vine St. Brendan Clarey | Courtesy

 

A drive down Hillsdale’s most crumbling roads may no longer feel like a sudden, unsolicited stint on an old, wooden rollercoaster.

Mayoral candidates current Mayor Scott Sessions and City Councilman Adam Stockford have pledged to fix Hillsdale’s disintegrating roads, but their solutions take different paths to even asphalt and patched potholes. Sessions said he will continue to search out grants and use tax dollars to fix Hillsdale’s infrastructure crisis with immediacy, but Stockford said economic development, supplemented by grants, will beget city funding for the project that costs $1 million per mile.

Four-time City Councilman Bruce Sharp said his years in office have taught him the severity of the road problem, which developed when the upkeep budget was cut about 20 years ago and street maintenance stopped, according to Sessions.

“The roads are the No. 1 issue in this town,” Sharp said. “We’ve ignored the streets for many years, and it’s going to take time and money to fix them.”

Sessions and Stockford agreed with Sharp’s analysis.

Under the mayor’s direction, the city has put aside more than $900,000 intended for the roads, which will be spent in the next fiscal year. This money comprises $300,000 saved from the previous year, $300,000 from the three-millage property tax passed in June, and $300,000 from a pilot program in which the city receives money in lieu of taxes, Sessions said.

“Since I’ve been on council and mayor, we’ve done three streets, three projects,” Sessions said. “We have put money toward that. But this is sustainable funding for streets.”

Sessions credits City Manager David Mackie for the work he has done to secure Hillsdale grant money from the state. In addition to the grants he obtained for the Dawn Theater, Rough Draft, and Stock’s Mill, Mackie has submitted Hillsdale for a $1.8 million grant through Infrastructure Capacity Enhancement.

Tying grants and taxes together is Sessions’ overall philosophy about roads — they require immediate action.

“We can’t wait any longer,” he said. “We can’t wait. We have to do something.”

Stockford, however, is a little more comfortable being patient.

“For years I’ve been saying, and I believe this to be true, that the roads are a secondary issue,” Stockford said. “They’re a symptom of a bigger problem: economic stagnation, which is the erosion of our industrial base.”

Stockford said he likes to explain his approach to the infrastructure problem using an analogy of household finances.

“If your driveway is in terrible shape and you’re working a minimum wage job, you can borrow money to fix it, you can steal, you can beg for money, but the only responsible way you’re going to get that fixed is to build your skill set to make your earning potential higher,” Stockford said. “If you’re working for $20 an hour, that driveway isn’t an amount that’s unsurpassable.”

Stockford said he sees economic opportunity in food processing such as Coldwater’s new processing plant, Clemens Food Group, which provided the city 600 jobs. He suggested that Hillsdale should try to attract similar businesses to come to town. He amended that, right now, the city’s economy does not appeal to such enterprises.

“They went there, because they wanted to be in Michigan where all the hog farming is, and that’s right here in Hillsdale County,” Stockford said. “I’m not sure if we could have gotten them to come to Hillsdale. I’m not sure if that was a possibility or not.”

Stockford’s goal to invigorate the economy did contribute to his vote against the three-millage income tax, but he said his main concern was that there was an option to put the increase on the ballot and let the public vote on it. The council, however, passed the measure unilaterally.

“I do think that the current administration has been very focused on trying to do something about these streets,” he said. “They are thinking out of the box, they are. But I don’t think a unilateral tax increase on the majority of the residents was a smart way to build trust.”

Grants, Stockford said, would still play a part in his move to fix and maintain Hillsdale streets. He, like Sessions, also congratulated City Manager Mackie in the work he has done to secure state money for Hillsdale.

But that doesn’t change Stockford’s conviction: “The only responsible way to not only fix the streets but also, in the long run, to maintain them is through aggressive economic development. The rest will fall into place.”