Better communication goal in meeting of local officals

by Angie Asam, Staff Writer

Last Thursday many city, township and county officials gathered at Bismarck Township Hall in Hawks for a meeting to discuss better communication and collaboration between all the governmental entities in the county in the future. Dave Glenn served as the moderator for the evening and opened the meeting explaining the purpose of it. ?The intent is to discuss an intergovernmental agency meeting, with the intent of including the entire county in order to gain an understanding of what everyone is facing,? said Glenn.

The group then moved into a fairly informal discussion on the idea of collaboration and how everyone may be able to work together without adding more meetings to the already busy schedules of the local officials. ?If everyone could put the information about their meetings, what the agenda is and when they are on the county Web site, it would make it easier for us to attend one another?s meetings,? said Rogers City councilmember Deb Greene.

The Michigan Township Association (MTA) already gathers all the township officials together on a quarterly basis, and the idea following the discussions at Thursday?s meeting was to ask them to invite city officials and county officials to those meetings to allow for the county to develop an intergovernmental agency. Those present at the meeting who also attend MTA meetings will be bringing the idea forward at their meeting in April.

One of the issues everyone in the county faces are those related to recycling costs and availability to residents. Rogers City council member Dana LaBar also brought up the idea of sharing costs. The example LaBar used was for elevato

r inspections, everyone in the county that has an elevator pays to have it inspected once a year, his idea was to have everyone try to schedule those things together to share the cost of having the inspector travel to the area.

The group discussed one collaborative effort already working well in the county, the Presque Isle District Library Board, which now has five library branches in the county. Other topics that were discussed was the future need for a countywide parks and trails committee, the need to increase communication and the possibility of combining efforts to apply for grants in the future.

A lot of ideas came out of the meeting; but the first hurdle that must be cleared is to figure out when to fit in the intergovernmental meetings, with the hopes that they could be combined with the MTA meetings already going on quarterly.