Bloggin’ on the Edge

Posted by Scott Spielman at 3:00 AM | Comments

It wouldn’t be right to suggest some work at Community Park without leaving a way for officials to change their mind later on.

Throughout the first phase of the park expansion, township trustees changed their mind on what was going to go in there more often than a teenager looking over his or her wardrobe.

It appears that will be the case with the latest round of work at the park at Beck and Five Mile roads, too.

Through a recent parks and recreation master plan process, trustees identified and prioritized the need to improve the drainage on the two oldest fields in the park. They’re also lighted fields, a huge commodity at a time when the sport of soccer is so popular there are enough teams to cram the fields with players at almost all times of day.

Township engineer Don Weaver and Traci Sincock, parks and recreation director, estimated that it would cost about $100,000 to make the improvements. They plugged that loose number into a formula and decided they could probably do a field a year.

Enter Marv Gans.

At a parks and recreation commission meeting a few weeks back, Gans brought up a concept that has worked well in Millennium Park, which is off Six Mile Road. It involves fewer drainage pipes and a different base, but it could be completed for about half the price. Gans said he came up with the idea with a contractor that was helping with the Millennium Park development.

What’s more, he said the Friends of Northville Parks and Recreation would be interested in contributing the $68,000 it would take to do one of the fields—but only if they had some oversight into how the work was done. In other words, only if the township went ahead with Gans’ plan.

I’m all for saving taxpayer money, but this raises a number of red flags to me.

It seems a step outside normal governmental procedure, which is put in place to eliminate the you-scratch-my-back and I’ll-scratch-yours philosophy.

These are the premiere fields in what will be the premiere park in Northville Township, too. I don’t think any corners should be cut to save a few bucks. I don’t think you should experiment on them, either. I’d want proof from outside professionals that it would work as well as a guarantee that it would not need to be fixed in a year or two.

The offer from the Friends group strikes a bad chord, too. It doesn’t sound like a group that has the best interests of the community at heart; it sounds like a group that doesn’t trust the credentials of those that will oversee the project. It reeks of a request to micromanage the project.

Township officials will go out to bid for both proposals. I hope the response they get back indicates not only what each method would cost, but how effective it would be. After all the changes this park has been through, only the best should be put in there.

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