Why don't we put-down the owner with the dog?

On June 4, 2010, an Oak Park girl was attacked by a pit bull and her leg was ripped to shreds.

On June 1, 2010, a 59-year old bicyclist was attacked by four (4) pit-bulls while riding along Metro-Parkway west of Mound.

Still fresh in my memory, because one of the victims was the sister-in-law of family friend, was Dianne Cockrell's dogs killing two of her Iosco Township neighbors in Livingston County.

"Cheryl Harper, 56, and Edward Gierlach, 91, were mauled to death after Cockrell's dogs crawled under a fence at her property across the road from where the attacks occurred."

I'm not necessarily in favor of banning the breed (as much as I would be in favor of banning anyone careless enough to own one), because I don't think you can punish someone, or something, for what they may do.

That's the province of insurance companies.

Rather, I would prefer more severe penalties (and insurance premiums) for people that own and breed vicious dogs.

From www.dogbitelaw.com:

The deadliest dogs

Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People, has conducted an unusually detailed study of dog bites from 1982 to the present. (Clifton, Dog attack deaths and maimings, U.S. & Canada, September 1982 to November 13, 2006; click here to read it.) The Clifton study show the number of serious canine-inflicted injuries by breed. The author's observations about the breeds and generally how to deal with the dangerous dog problem are enlightening.

According to the Clifton study, pit bulls, Rottweilers, Presa Canarios and their mixes are responsible for 74% of attacks that were included in the study, 68% of the attacks upon children, 82% of the attacks upon adults, 65% of the deaths, and 68% of the maimings. In more than two-thirds of the cases included in the study, the life-threatening or fatal attack was apparently the first known dangerous behavior by the animal in question. Clifton states:

If almost any other dog has a bad moment, someone may get bitten, but will not be maimed for life or killed, and the actuarial risk is accordingly reasonable. If a pit bull terrier or a Rottweiler has a bad moment, often someone is maimed or killed--and that has now created off-the-chart actuarial risk, for which the dogs as well as their victims are paying the price.

Clifton's opinions are as interesting as his statistics. For example, he says, "Pit bulls and Rottweilers are accordingly dogs who not only must be handled with special precautions, but also must be regulated with special requirements appropriate to the risk they may pose to the public and other animals, if they are to be kept at all."

For those of you struggling with reading comprehension on editorial pages, let me extract a few key sentences. You can right them on your palm for the test later.

According to the Clifton study, pit bulls, Rottweilers, Presa Canarios and their mixes are responsible for 74% of attacks that were included in the study.

If almost any other dog has a bad moment, someone may get bitten, but will not be maimed for life or killed.

"Pit bulls and Rottweilers are accordingly dogs [that] must be regulated with special requirements appropriate to the risk they may pose to the public and other animals, if they are to be kept at all."

For the sake of easier reading, when I subsequently refer to "pit-bulls" I include Rottweilers and other vicious breeds identified in the report.

If we assume, for the moment, that some breeds are genetically more dangerous and/or unpredictable than others, then we should pass immediate legislation discouraging the ownership or breeding of pit-bulls.

If as some owners insist, it's the owner and not the dog, then we should pass immediate legislation discouraging the ownership or breeding of pit-bulls.

If careless and irresponsible (read: stupid) dog owners are so easily identified by their choice in household pets then the best thing to do might be to disarm them. Take their pet away. Probably their kitchen knives and small toys, too.

If we discover a hitherto unknown constitutional amendment protecting the right to bare vicious animals for a well-regulated pack, then we should require special permits with semi-annual proofs of continuous $10 million insurance coverage so that anyone attacked by their "normally gentle and loving" family weapon is guaranteed to live prosperously off the insurance payout--and that includes the next-of-kin of the victim killed by the "docile and great with children" creature.

Being in possession of an unregistered pit-bull should carry a stiff penalty. In the end, I think euthanizing the owner with the dog may be the best deterrent to these attacks. It will certainly cut-down on repeat offenders.

Blind to the obvious

[Note: This article originally appeared in the June 2010 edition of Ferndale Friends]

It’s a good thing the DDA spent $40,000 on the Crow’s Nest sculpture.  With Ferndale’s public safety departments slashed 20%, the constable inside the tree-house on Woodward at Nine Mile may be the only officer with job security.

Ferndale city council has finalized its budget.  The Kulick Center survived the cuts, but eight police officers and four firemen did not.  We have churches with spaces our community may utilize.  Affirmations does as well, as will our new library.  We have health clubs both in and very-near the city’s center for working out on state-of-the-art equipment and aerobics.  What Ferndale doesn’t have, charitable or not, is an organization that responds to 911 calls, keeps little fires from becoming big fires, will enter  big ones to save lives, and respond to the 1700+ medical calls-per-year (nearly five a day!).

Ferndale doesn’t have a fashionable special interest or advocacy group that’s prepared to police our southern border, our parks, or assist neighboring communities respond to their emergencies or manage traffic for parades and festivals.

Our city government, and by extension its public safety department, are uniquely qualified and authorized to do things no other organization, public or private, is able to do; apprehend, arrest, and detain suspected criminals.

The staff and volunteers of Affirmations, as great as they are, wouldn’t have been much good at the VFW hall after the December 19 birthday party shooting.  The members of the First Baptist Church or their new tenants, SOS, haven’t the equipment to respond to fires, strokes, heart attacks, domestic violence, reckless driving, drunk driving, or chemical spills.  Kulick-center patrons aren’t going to raid a drug-house, keep our streets safe for children on Halloween, or bring their emergency vehicles to our block parties, picnics and fairs to thrill children and introduce them to the brave men and women that protect and serve.

A lot of people want to lay all the blame on city council for the cuts.  I’m not one of them.  Ferndale’s voters hired our current city council in 2005, 2007, and 2009.  I include 2005 because there were already warnings the housing bubble artificially inflated city budgets in the mid-decade as much as it did property values.

Having learned nothing from the Savings and Loan scandal in the early 90s or the internet bubble burst in 2000, there was little sense of caution or restraint as council continued hiring and spending as though hiring, spending, and arts & crafts was the purpose of government.

OK.  Maybe for some it is.

Regardless, all our city council persons were elected by voters.  It’s up to voters to tell city council whether they agree the city should be managed by $6,000-surveys, USA Today’s at-a-glance charts, or by pop-urbanists.

In the same week Ferndale’s downtown was patting itself on the back for Mainstreet’s National  “Best In Show” award, residents on Camden (third block north of Eight Mile, west of Woodward ) alerted police to two people sawing catalytic converters off parked cars and a drug house that was subsequently raided by Ferndale Police and the Oakland County Narcotics Squad.

I applaud Camden residents’ devotion to their neighborhood and hope city council is as vigilant of all our streets as they are opportunities to promote downtown or their political careers.

But until property values return to rational levels there are no easy budget remedies.   And perhaps that’s exactly as it should be.

According to our city manager, Bob Bruner, our four-square-mile corporation would have already declared bankruptcy had it not been a government.   But like a company, tough economic times present as many opportunities as challenges.

Falling revenues provide us an opportunity to prioritize our spending--an opportunity for our city to discriminate between core and discretionary services.  A core service is one that only our government is given the authority to do, or one that if our city didn’t provide it there’s little reason to have a city at all.  Like public safety, zoning, and community development.

 A discretionary item is a service or facility that can be easily provided by another entity—either public or private.  Think meeting rooms and halls, kitchens, exercise equipment, garbage collection, leaf pick-up, and ballroom dance lessons.

Between the extremes public safety and ballroom dancing (and I rank Plante Moran Cresa’s nurturing council’s desire for a new city hall about as important as publicly-funded ballroom dancing), it is council’s job to prioritize how tax dollars are spent.

The easiest way for government to avoid prioritizing or risk upsetting the beneficiaries of discretionary spending (and their votes) is to raise taxes.

Council has already asked the city manager to prepare a buffet of tax increases they might consider for the fall ballot.  Two of them will certainly be a dedicated public safety millage (an extra tax for something the city should fully fund in the first-place) and a Headlee Override, which would allow the city to increase its millage rate to 20.0000 from 2010’s 14.5448.

According to early estimates, Mr. Bruner has indicated a Headlee Override could bring-in $3.4 million for the 2012-2013 budget.

Given the dilemma of further cuts or tax increases, and the surviving discretionary items in the 2010-2011 budget, I’m disposed to more cuts before raising taxes.

We’ll know when city budgets become critical when discretionary expenses are almost non-existent and the other local cities’ resistance and excuses for not integrating more services finally disappears.

Newsflash:  Just before going to press, I heard a rumor that city council has a plan to augment our diminished police force.  They’ve asked Bob Bruner to investigate erecting eight constable-occupied tree-house sculptures, like the one downtown, along our Eight Mile border to discourage crime.  They want to call them Scare-Crows Nests.

If you have a short story you think would make a great tag-ending to this column, write me at tggagne@gmail.com.

Thoughts on Headlee, taxes, and Geoffrey Dollars

[Note: This article originally appeared in the April 2010 edition of Ferndale Friends]

For the third year in a row, Ace Hardware has been recognized by J. D. Power and Associates as having the highest customer satisfaction of home improvement stores. Scheer’s Ace Hardware in Oak Park on Nine Mile at Republic is certainly deserving of that award. The folks there have been doing their damnedest to help me through my home improvement ineptitude for 12-years in a row.

I also want to congratulate Wyll Lewis on a successful fundraiser to return Thunder, the mechanical horse, back to the front of American Pop! Thunder has become a better-known and loved Ferndale landmark in five years than the solar-powered 100-foot tall Viagra® advertisement erected at Woodward and Cambourne will ever become. Unlike city council, Wyll doesn’t need to compensate for anything.

If you’re like Covey, Lennon, and Galloway, you missed the first Wednesday night budget meeting in March (canceled due to lack of quorum). If you missed the second meeting (both of us showed up) you also missed what I thought was an amusing moment.

City Manager Robert Bruner had just finished telling council that the service-counter at city hall will require some remodeling so the remaining public-facing staff can move upstairs. Bruner didn’t have a cost estimate, but indicated the remodeling wouldn’t be cheap.

Galloway started (and I’m paraphrasing) “If the cost difference between remodeling the counter and renovating city hall isn’t that big, maybe we can save money by renovating city hall once instead of the counter now and the building later.”

Boy, that guy doesn’t give up, does he? In the face of a $3.5 million budget deficit this year Galloway still holds a candle in hopes we can buy a $4 million service counter (a really nice counter) and get city hall renovations thrown-in.
Not even the helpful hardware folks at Ace could pull that off.

It’s a good thing Councilwoman Kate Baker was there to suggest a new counter would likely only have three or four zeroes after the first digit, and not six.

While we are on the topic of the budget, I recommend the 14% of registered voters interested in Ferndale’s budget emergency visit the city’s website and check-out Bob Bruner’s slide show. While reading it, contemplate Bob’s graph showing how Proposal A and the Headlee Amendment will likely prohibit property tax revenues returning to last year’s record $9.2 million until 2023 or 2043.

Heck, even I could be elected to council before 2043. Or not…

Anyway, rather than holding on to the pipe-dream of a renovated city hall, or blaming senate Republicans for Ferndale’s financial woes and not repairing the garage on his vacant property, I’d rather Galloway talk more about the remedy he suggested to The Daily Tribune—a Headlee Override.

The two most interesting numbers on your assessment are your home’s State Equalized Value (SEV—roughly half your home’s estimated street value in Goeffrey Dollars) and its Taxable Value (TV—calculated by laid-off NASA scientists).

Whenever a home is sold and its taxable value adjusted up to the higher SEV (uncapping) the city gains NO EXTRA TAX REVENUE. Instead, all the nearby homes have their taxes lowered. The longer you’ve owned your home the lower your taxes will be thanks to your new neighbors paying your freight. The net result is the burden of property taxes falls on new home-buyers. The older a city’s neighborhoods, the more disproportionately its property taxes are likely to be distributed.

In older cities like Ferndale, one homeowner may be paying $9000/year in property taxes while their neighbor with a nearly identical house (as far as SEV is concerned) only pays $1200/year. The difference being the first home was purchased in 2007 and the second in 1997.

If we raised property taxes the reality may be the biggest burden is born by our newest residents, and our homes become even less attractive no matter how often the Woodward Avenue tent pole is polished.

Let’s not rush into millage increases until we examine the alternatives.

A quick story

While campaigning last year in “The Dales” I met a woman that moved to Ferndale from Detroit and for many years enjoyed her beautiful neighborhood. In the last couple years, however, more junky cars, trucks, and vans have been accumulating on the street creating an eyesore.

“All my neighbors hate it. We complain all the time. If I wanted my street to look like this I could have stayed in Detroit.”

“Have you called the city?” I asked. “I know someone that called the police for a long-parked truck near our street and it was towed a few hours later.”

“No, we haven’t called anyone,” she told me. “We just complain to each other.”

If you don’t have your own tow-truck, badge or other credentials, call the police non-emergency hotline at 248-541-3650.

Troy Daze should return to its roots

Troy Daze's cost to the city isn't the only thing that's inflated. Troy Daze itself has inflated. If the City of Troy turned-back the clock 35 years it might rediscover both what Troy Daze used to be, and how affordable it might be.

If I can claim to have grown up anywhere it is "The City of Tomorrow... Today!" Our family moved to Troy from Livonia in 1973 when I was only eight years old. I went to Martell and Schroeder Elementary Schools, Boulan Park Middle School, and graduated from Troy High in 1983.

Our house near Wattles (17 Mile for you outsiders) and Coolidge was within easy walking distance to Boulan Park where Troy Daze was held. On the way to the park my friends and I could hunt for Garter snakes along the dirt path that has long since been replaced with another subdivision.

Boulan Park already had baseball diamonds, merry-go-rounds, teeter-totters, monkey bars, and grills for picnicking. But during the three-day festival it also had a fire engine, a police car, an ambulance, tug-of-war, pick-up softball games, and an extra few thousand people.

My favorite thing about the fair was the free (as far as I knew) Kentucky-Fried Chicken. It turned out that one of our neighbors owned a KFC franchise and he provided the chicken to promote his business and addict me to its 11 herbs and spices.

Each year the festival seemed to add something. I remember once there were helicopter rides. I couldn't afford them with my paper-route money, but I had a lot of fun watching it take off and land, and wondered how great it would be to afford the $15 ticket for a 10-minute ride.

Later years added carnival rides. I remember my brother's first ride on the salt-and-pepper shaker. I was too young to ride it myself, but watched with amazement as the ride took my brother Charlie into the air, held him upside down with his school buddies, then swung back to the ground like an upside-down metronome.

Looking back, as a kid, I was just as amazed watching the adults play softball and eating my neighbor's chicken. As I got older I looked forward more to having more freedom to go to the festival on my own, and with my friends, stay a little later, and walk home in the dark, than I was to new attractions.

The festival improved each year not because it changed, but because I changed.

Maybe the City of Tomorrow should remember the City of Yesterday, and be reminded that childhood brings its own magic to the park. It's not necessary for the city to spend Disney-sized dollars for a three-day picnic and softball game.

In an effort to out-do itself each year, Troy has finally found that it has out-done itself into suspending the event for lack of money. Perhaps the citizens of Troy could simply pack a mitt and a cooler, and take the family to the park. Would it really cost the city too much money to park a police car and fire truck and give the kids a chance to sound the siren or horn?

Sure, it may only amuse children, but surely they're the most easily and inexpensively amused.

I know I was.

What is government for?

[Note: This article originally appeared in the February 2010 edition of Ferndale Friends]

What’s government for if not public safety?

On January 25th, hundreds of villagers armed with torches and pitchforks stormed council chambers to demand council stop their evil plans to layoff police officers and pull the plug on an $8 million city-hall- monster.

I tried doing that last November but fell 79 villagers short.

Sorry. I couldn’t resist.

The truth is, there was nothing on the agenda regarding layoffs, police or otherwise. But eventually $3 million will need to come from somewhere and according to city manager Bob Bruner, public safety is half of the city’s budget.

In the heat of the moment someone suggested, and was applauded no less, a special public safety millage they would gladly pay to protect our police and fire departments from budget cuts. Not being the excitable chap I was in my youth, I was dumbfounded. If public safety isn’t one of the essential responsibilities of government what is? Why shouldn’t government attend to its primary responsibilities first then the discretionary? Maybe an essential government responsibility should consume half the budget. Maybe the public safety budget should be thought of as less a percentage of the budget and more as an expense proportional to the size and demographics of the city.

If cutting public safety 20% is reasonable, then so should shortening our streets 20%, or turning away one of five cars coming into the city, or responding to only four-of-five 911 calls for medical or fire emergencies.

Rather than propose a special millage for public safety I would rather (though reluctantly) consider a temporary millage for non-essential services. When I write temporary, I mean the millage for discretionary (though popular) services like leaf pick-up must be renewed every year or two. This would give citizens a direct vote to fund (or not) projects and services similar to how they were given an opportunity to vote for a new library.

If city council wants to protect discretionary items then they need to find a way to pay for them until the general fund can afford them.

How about an out-of-the-box idea? And I mean REALLY out-of-the-box idea.

Little cities need to stop thinking big and start acting big. The 38 square miles made up by Berkley, Clawson, Ferndale, Hazel Park, Huntington Woods, Madison Heights, Oak Park , Pleasant Ridge, Royal Oak, and Royal Oak Township pack ten governments and nine police and fire departments into an area the size of Livonia.

According to a July 2007 article in The Detroit Free Press, Zachary Gorchow and John Wisely wrote:

These 10 municipalities spend more than $9 million combined on salaries and benefits so that most can have their own city manager or township supervisor, clerk, treasurer, fire chief, police chief and other department directors, according to records obtained by the Free Press.

It is theoretical only -- no one has proposed the idea -- but if the 10 municipalities were to become one, it would create Michigan's third-largest city at about 192,000 people, behind only Detroit and Grand Rapids.

Mixed inside those hard facts are some real possibilities. How much of those cities’ budgets could be saved by sharing not just services, but department personnel and motor pools as well? How green could that community be? How much political capital might it have in Pontiac and Lansing?

Imagine the resources our schools might have if they weren’t half-full—but that’s another article.

Of all those cities, Ferndale may be financially better off than some, but is our nose so big we’re willing to cut-off 20% of our police and fire to spite our safety?

I think not. I’d prefer our city council and manager start camping at other city’s council meetings, calling them out, in public, on cable, and even in print, to pressure them to agree to more regionalized services.

Lots of regionalized services.

We don’t need to erase our borders, but it may be time to blur them. How bad are the 10 governments willing to let it get? Maybe it’s just not as bad as they tell us.

A quick story.

Crystal Proxmire, writer and editor of Ferndale115.com, moved in across the street from me so I gave her a ride home from the council meeting. She told me she’d heard a rumor that I was responsible for the anonymous flyers about the police layoffs that caused the raucous.

“I wouldn’t have left my name off,” I told her. “Writing lacks credibility without a signature.”

“I knew it wasn’t you,” she said. “It wasn’t wordy enough.”

Ah, thanks?

More equal than others?

Just this AM on Facebook I read a friend's posting:

"Three Michigan Christian pastors sue to halt federal anti-hate crimes law. They demand the right to speak hate toward GLBT people. Sheesh...have they even checked their own religion? Last I checked, Jesus didnt speak hate against anybody."

From what I read online, the pastors weren't demanding, ".. the right to speak hate toward GLBT people." Instead they were suing to protect their First Amendment right to practice their religion and their Fifth Amendment right to due process.

They don't want to be prosecuted for thought crimes any more than I do.

One of the articles I found online summed up their complaint:

"Robert Muise, Senior Trial Counsel for TMLC (Thomas More Law Center) who is handling the case, observed, “This new federal law promotes two Orwellian concepts. It creates a special class of persons who are ‘more equal than others’ based on nothing more than deviant, sexual behavior. And it creates ‘thought crimes’ by criminalizing certain ideas, beliefs, and opinions, and the involvement of such ideas, beliefs, and opinions in a crime will make it deserving of federal prosecution. Consequently, government officials are claiming the power to decide which thoughts are criminal under federal law and which are not."

I resisted the temptation to edit-out, ".. based on nothing more than deviant, sexual behavior," for its obvious bias against gays, deciding instead to leave it as-is because it is not my responsibility to mask others' biases.

The actual complaint is available online at The Thomas More Law Center.

The challenge with constitutional rights is we must protect others' rights as jealously as we guard our own--even when we disagree them. As it's been said too often before, but is worth repeating, it is easier to protect someone elses speech when you agree with it than when we do not.

Or as Mark Twain wrote, "Tis a fine thing to fight for one's own freedom; tis a far sight finer to fight for another man's."

And so it is with freedom of speech and equal protection. I don't understand the Commerce Clause argument but will keep reading.

PS Christ's teachings and Christianity's position on homosexuality is orthogonal to this issue, and has already been exhaustively argued elsewhere. To debate the merits of the complaint based on either misses the point of the law and more often exposes our ignorance of New Testament scripture than anything else.

City of Ferndale Delays Municipal Building Project

I'm posting this here only because it's new and I can't find a link to it in a more respectable location.

SUBJECT: City of Ferndale Delays Municipal Building Project

Ferndale, Michigan (February 2, 2010) - In November the City received design-build proposals for the Municipal Building Project from Redstone Architects and Walbridge Aldinger; CDPA and JS Vig Construction; Wilkie & Zanley and Micco Construction; and French Associates & Neumann/Smith and The Daily Company. The Project Team reviewed the proposals in December and interviewed the design-build teams in January. The Project Team recommended the Council interview Wilkie & Zanley and Micco Construction; and French Associates & Neumann/Smith and The Daily Company in February.

The Council has spent three years carefully considering the City's facility needs and solutions to fulfill those needs. Now that the Council has arrived at the decision point regarding these design-build proposals, the City has arrived at a crossroads. Without significant cooperation from the unions, the Council will have to reduce the number of City employees by approximately 30 positions (20%) to balance the FYE 2011 Budget.

The design-build proposals are based on staffing levels the City may not be able to maintain. As a result, City Manager Robert Bruner has invited the top two design-build teams to present their proposals at the Mon 2/8/2010 Council meeting but has also asked them to extend their Guaranteed Maximum Prices (GMP) until Fri 5/7/2010, the deadline for the Council to adopt the FYE 2011 Budget. This will allow the Council to consider the FYE 2011 Budget and the Project simultaneously.

CONTACT:

Robert Bruner
City Manager, City of Ferndale
(248) 546-2360
rbruner@ferndale-mi.com

Alicia F. Washeleski
Senior Project Manager, Plante Moran CRESA
(248) 223-3811
Alicia.Washeleski@plantemoran.com