Bloggin’ on the Edge

Posted by Scott Spielman at 10:26 AM | Comments (4)

This week, members of the Livonia City Council approved a resolution in support of the upcoming annexation vote on Aug. 5.

It came during the same week that a group of Livonia police officers took a search warrant to a Madison Heights print shop to investigate a piece of anti-annexation literature that had been distributed in the city.

That’s just one of the ironic aspects of this whole issue, which has pitted the Northville Township Community against Livonia. Another is the concept that allegedly stalled legislation that would have protected townships across the state from annexation: that annexation is an important tool for economic development.

Not in this case. The reason why you can use the economic development argument for annexation purposes is that cities tend to have more established infrastructures and can more easily accommodate the increased water and sewer needs for large scale developments. That’s exactly the opposite here. The property is on the extreme western edge of Livonia, so there will have to be some kind of connection built from there. I sincerely doubt that Livonia officials will get any help from any of the Western Township Utilities Authority communities (Canton, Northville and Plymouth Townships have exclusive rights to the sewer system out here).

I was driving through a portion of Livonia today and I saw a sign urging a ‘yes’ vote on the issue. ‘Yes on Annexation,’ it read, ’8,000 jobs.’ On that, I’m assuming they mean direct and indirect jobs. I have a hard time visualizing 8,000 people working on a 414-acre parcel of land; 3,800 people live in the City of Belleville, for comparison.

So in a couple of weeks voters in Livonia will decide if they want to help out a developer that has (a) spread plenty of money to influence legislation at the state level and (b) has spent plenty of money in order to avoid local ordinances.

I think that’s the ultimate irony in this entire thing.

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