With Stressed Staff, Rising Costs and Unpopular Design, Council Walks Away from $1 Million Grant for Valley Court Park Pavilion

The City of East Lansing’s staffing is stretched too thin. Costs of construction labor and materials are rising steadily. Construction timelines required by the grant agreement would be very hard to meet given that so many cities are vying for contractors to do public works projects. And a majority of citizens weighing in – including the Planning Commission – don’t love the design.

At Tuesday night’s East Lansing City Council meeting, these were the four major rationales by council members and city staff for walking away from a $1 million grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC). The project would have involved construction of a farmers market pavilion in Valley Court Park, new landscaping for the park, a new playground, public restrooms and more.

With the MEDC looking for East Lansing to sign a detailed grant agreement by today (March 15) – or, at the very latest, a week from now – city staff brought the vote to Council last night. Staff wanted to know if Council wanted to have the city manager sign the grant agreement and have staff keep trying to get this project done.

As ELi reported late last week, the MEDC grant funds were coming via the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), federal funding with tight deadlines. And, to get the $1 million from MEDC, the city would have to put in at least $1.4 million of its own money and possibly much more.

Councilmember Noel Garcia was absent from the meeting to attend a ceremony honoring a mentee. When the vote finally came after a long discussion, Mayor Ron Bacon and Mayor Pro Tem Jessy Gregg voted to sign the agreement and try to persist. But Councilmembers George Brookover and Dana Watson voted against. With Garcia absent, the 2-2 vote meant the motion to proceed failed.

The concept has been presented in many meetings and a public forum, but public enthusiasm for the design was lacking.

Public comment on Tuesday night didn’t help the project’s survival. Five residents came to speak on the matter. All raised concerns, and none said Council should vote to continue. The written communications packet contained a mixed bag of citizen responses to the design, with many raising criticisms and alternative design ideas, including for dedicated performance space.

Tuesday night, Barb Anderson of the Glencairn neighborhood told Council about her background in architecture and planning and said the addition of substantial amounts of impervious surfaces in the design was ill advised, especially given the park’s flooding problems.

Diane Wing, a Chesterfield Hills resident and chair of East Lansing’s Historic District Commission, told Council her commission was nowhere near ready to give the permission required to let the project go forward, because key information was still lacking. The commission has been waiting months for information about the existing construction of the old brick BWL building in the park, particularly the materials that make up the roof (which appears to be slate) and the cupola.

“I urge the council to say no and to reject the application,” Wing said, speaking for herself, not for the commission. She referred to the “huge loss of leadership” in the city, suggesting there is not presently the staffing to make the project work.

Kristin Good of the Whitehills neighborhood told Council, “I really urge you to decide against [signing the grant agreement] even if it leaves funding on the table. I would love to see a focus on restoration of what is there,” such as the BWL building. She called for a focus on improving landscaping rather than construction of a new pavilion.

Nichole Biber, who serves on the East Lansing Parks & Recreation Advisory Commission, said she agreed with those who did not want to see impermeable surfaces increased. She wants to see “higher quality of greenspace,” with the planting of native species and trees and the addition of bioswales for managing stormwater. Some of that was in the design, but the chief design element was the big new pavilion with paving under and around it.

City staff, including the city attorney, raised concerns about the city’s capacity to meet the terms of the grant agreement.

Introducing the agenda item, Interim City Manager Randy Talifarro told Council, “We’re very much aware that we’re operating with a lean staff, a staff that has been taxed and is working very hard and, candidly, are getting exhausted on certain things. And so I asked that we pause at this moment to see if there is a desire to continue to move forward given some of the new price estimates and some of the other challenges with the project itself.”

Talifarro added he wanted to make sure this issue was discussed openly and transparently.

He then turned the matter over to Interim Planning Director Peter Menser for the formal presentation. Menser has resigned and his last day with the city is today (March 15). Because his department has lost so many staff, Menser suggested the city might have to hire consultants to finish review processes normally led by city staff, if the council wanted to keep trying to pursue this project and grant.

Menser made clear that even if the Council authorized the grant agreement, there would still be “offramps” to back out if necessary. But he warned (as Talifarro had) that costs of construction are rising. Because MEDC is only committed to a $1 million grant, any cost overages would have to be borne by the city.

The grant agreement also required that construction start by July 31, 2024, and be completely finished by Dec. 31, 2026. Menser questioned whether this was doable given that the processes for the Historic District approval and the site plan approval are nowhere near complete, although he said the plan had the support of the Parks & Recreation Advisory Commission.

Menser said he “absolutely recognizes” that not enough public input has yet occurred on the design. After gathering that input and the local design approvals, months would have to be spent finalizing engineering and architecture. Then there would be the bidding out of the project and finding the money to pay for what the MEDC would not cover. That was a tall order for the timeline.

Both Menser and Parks & Rec Director Cathy DeShambo told Council that, if Council voted not to proceed, that didn’t mean all the designing and learning would be thrown out and renovations to the park would never happen.

But Menser did say a grant opportunity like this was unprecedented in his career experience, calling ARPA “a relative unicorn.”

While acknowledging a lot of staff effort had already been put into the project, DeShambo said the work staff had put in was aimed at informing Council’s decision, not locking them into proceeding.

City Attorney Tony Chubb expressed serious concerns about the deadlines in the grant agreement and the city’s ability to meet them. He said the city was struggling to find construction vendors “in the very competitive [ARPA] market” and that bids were coming in well over expected.

Chubb said he had been talking with city staff “about the incredible escalation we are seeing in bids…so we are getting money [from the grant] but we may be spending a lot more than the typical market cost would be. And so that kind of weighs into my concerns.”

Talifarro concurred with Chubb, again raising the question of whether “this is the right time to continue.”

Council was split on what to do.

Gregg described herself as “in favor of this” grant and project, but she noted that “staff has no interest in building something the community would not enjoy.” She noted the current farmers market space gets muddy and the trucks are tough on the park’s lawn. The pavilion design, she said, minimized the amount of paving necessary to keep the vendors’ trucks off the grass.

Watson expressed concerns about the unknown costs, including the potential for having to hire outside consultants to move the process through the normal review stages. She was also concerned about how the process had played out so far, recognizing that staffing shortages had caused that problem.

Explicitly contrasting his feelings to Gregg’s stated enthusiasm for the project, Brookover said, “I have no enthusiasm to get this project done at this time.”

He named five reasons for voting against: escalating and unpredictable costs; staffing shortages and the desire to see staff work on “something else more significant to the city”; the lack of support for the design in the community; the desire to maximize preservation of open recreation space “for kids to go do kid things”; and the grant agreement’s legal wording.

On the last point, Brookover noted the city could not in good faith sign an agreement that stated it is not facing major litigation that could present a significant financial risk. The city is a defendant in two major lawsuits, the BWL franchise fee case and the Country Mill case. (The latter lawsuit was brought over the city’s move to ban a vendor from the farmers market in Valley Court Park.)

Brookover said the grant agreement language “makes me nervous. I really appreciate the work everybody has done on this. I think people have really gone above and beyond, and it was a nice thing to think about. But there’s a whole lot of other things we need to think about in this city right now.”

Bacon said he was also worried about the loss of green space and “putting additional dollars at risk.” He tried to push the decision to next week, but did not find support for that idea.

Ultimately, Bacon voted with Gregg in favor of signing the grant agreement. But with Watson’s and Brookover’s votes against, the motion to sign the agreement failed.

Watson said she hoped the city would revisit the idea of these renovations when the city “is in a more stable place.”