Regional Cooperation
Creating Collaborative Communities
Michigan cities are in a serious financial crisis. The struggling state economy, cuts in state and federal funding and the drastic rise in insurance and pension costs are severely limiting city budgets. As well, the state's municipal finance policies prevent local governments from leveraging the revenue they need to keep their communities healthy and attractive.
The crisis hits all cities hard, but none so hard as southeast Michigan's mature suburbs. More frequently, these cities are forced to cut basic public services such as snow removal, tree trimming, libraries, parks and even fire and police protection in order to avoid insolvency.
Our Creating Collaborative Communities project is designed to help city leaders facilitate partnerships with other local governments and school districts to deliver key services. These partnerships can save money while preserving and even increasing public services by sharing costs, equipment, knowledge and people-power. Through our workshops and conferences, city administrators, elected officials, departmental directors and union leaders are learning how to best approach joint service delivery that best meet the needs of residents.
Focusing on school and city collaboration, this summer we are launching a Creating Collaborative Communities Workshop Series with the University of Michigan-Dearborn's Institute for Local Government. This series compliments a previous event cycle that highlighted three areas of intergovernmental cooperation—fire, public safety and public works—to share with public service providers the tools for joint delivery. Visit our Resources page for the latest research on intergovernmental cooperation, and stay tuned for more information about this summer's exciting opportunities!
Regional Energy Office
The Regional Energy Office is an innovative new tool that local governments will be able to use to cooperatively develop and implement energy programming for local governments and the citizens they serve, resulting in direct, measureable impacts on energy efficiency, municipal budgets (and hence the local and regional economy) and environmental protection through the use of more efficient products or sustainable sources.
The mature cities of southeast Michigan house some of the oldest building stock in the state. Much of it suffers from outdated systems for heating, cooling and lighting; the waste is extraordinary. Through the Regional Energy Office, cities will learn about new products – from light bulbs to HVAC systems – that can save them dollars by reducing their consumption. With each city that joins the Office, we will benchmark their energy usage, monitor trends and report on the impact of efficiency programs. Through the Rebuild Michigan program and in partnership with DTE Energy, we will be auditing the buildings of several cities every year and producing technical analyses that recommend affordable energy efficiency reforms. Several communities have found performance contracting to be an effective tool enabling infrastructure upgrades, but the capitalization of those contracts is sometimes beyond the reach of smaller cities. We will be working with our partner communities to craft multi-city contracts to leverage their purchasing power and put energy projects big and small into play throughout the region.
