On October 11, MLUI will present Harvest@theCommons, a community farm-to-table event that will feature the best ingredients northern Michigan has to offer. You are invited! Not only to the event, but to help generate a buzz about all the good work this community is doing. The task is simple:
Members of citizen groups from around the state will be in Mackinaw City on Labor Day, but they won’t be on vacation. Instead, they will be at the south end of the annual Mackinac Bridge Walk, collecting signatures for a letter aimed at the most prominent of the event’s predicted 50,000 striders, Gov. Rick Snyder.
Ari Kresch, CEO of 1-800-LAW-FIRM, likes to brag that his Southfield company is the first in the country to use its phone number as its actual name. Perhaps more significantly, though, he may be the first attorney in the country to use an innovative, new financing mechanism called PACE, which stands for property assessed clean energy, to make major, money-saving, clean-energy upgrades to his building.
The Michigan Land Use Institute is pleased to submit the following comments to the TC-TALUS Board regarding the TC-TALUS Long-Range Plan.
“Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable, and Secure Food Systems,” by farmer and university professor Philip Ackerman-Leist, is the third book in the Bob Russell Resilience Reading Project. He discusses how we came to the largely industrial food system that we have today, where it’s often easier for a school in our region to purchase lettuce from California, for example, rather than from farmers right down the road.
The Traverse City Area Transportation and Land Use Study (TC-TALUS), the regional transportation planning agency, wants feedback on their draft long-range plan, which recommends how local agencies should spend scarce transportation dollars. While there are many bright spots in the plan, it assumes we can build our way out of traffic problems with new and wider roads. It fails to recognize the role that demand-side strategies-like parking management, reliable transit and safe bike networks-play in reducing traffic at the busiest times of the day.