Issue of the Month: Experience Grand Rapids

Our county’s efforts to attract visitors and tourists is handled by an organization called Experience Grand Rapids. This organization is partially funded by county dollars and is tasked with the responsibility of marketing Grand Rapids and Kent County as a premier convention and visitor destination. In this way it provides positive impact to the economic growth and well being for citizens of the area. During 2012, Experience GR brought in $127 M in hotel room revenue, 223,000 convention attendees, and an estimated economic impact of over $1 B through use of restaurants, retail shopping, service stations, and art galleries, etc. There are over 70 hotels and 24,000 hospitality employees who are impacted with pay checks. The hotel occupancy has increased each year of the past 5 years, and each year return convention business appears to be the norm. And, in addition to its tourism goal, Experience GR has also brought new business development, better enrollments to local colleges and universities, and improved ability to attract quality human resources. Because of the marketing efforts of Experience GR our influence throughout the region continues to grow. Experience GR has integrated marketing of West Michigan with the Pure Michigan marketing efforts. This also has resulted in increased growth in tourism in West Michigan. Kent County and Grand Rapids have become recognized destination areas throughout Michigan!!

Issue of the Month: Kent County Children’s Care

Kent County has about 900 abused, neglected, and delinquent children in care situations. Approximately 500 of those are in foster care, 100 in various residential settings throughout the County, and the remainder in supervised ‘In-Home” care. The cost is approximately $11 M per year, evenly split between the County and State Department of Human Services (DHS). In the FY 2013 State budget, the Legislature required DHS and Kent County to collaborate with local courts and private agencies to develop a 100% private ’purchase of service’ (POS) model for child welfare services in Kent County. Since then, the County DHS office—in conjunction with Kent County Community Mental Health—and the above entities have developed a plan that will move our county from having 85% POS arrangements to 100% POS. The goal is to create a ‘Care Management Entity’ which will utilize a fixed fee financial model that provides reimbursements to private agencies to come up with creative, community-based programming where residential and out-of-home placement savings can be reinvested into prevention/family preservation activities. County Administration recently unveiled this work to the Commission. We will continue to hear how this collaborative work within the county, private agencies, and state department unfolds. I will keep you posted. Hopefully, it will result in better outcomes for our County’s children.

Issue of the Month: Kent County Treasurer

As we all receive our winter taxes, it is timely to give a report about the County Treasurer and his functions. The Treasurer is one of 4 county individuals elected on an every four year basis. The Treasurer is responsible for collecting and taking custody of all County funds. This includes general tax revenue and the County’s share of state sales tax—revenue sharing monies from the state. He is also responsible for collecting delinquent taxes and holding a tax foreclosure sale after receiving a court order of properties that have been delinquent for 24 months. Usually the tax sale occurs during the 12 months following the initial foreclosure action, so delinquent taxpayers have essentially 36 months to take care of back taxes. The Treasurer also collects and audits hotels for compliance with the county hotel/motel tax collections. In terms of numbers the Treasurer takes in over $85 million in general county taxes, $15 million in special tax for the county correctional facility, $6.5 million for seniors, and $6 million hotel/motel tax. We receive about $11 million in state sales tax revenue sharing. The Treasurer also serves as the Investment Manager for all county funds that are not immediately required for operations. This Investment Fund is made available to all local municipalities. By combining funds the Treasurer is usually able to obtain a better rate of return for all local governments with their available investment funds.

Issue of the Month: Grand Valley Metropolitan Council

The Grand Valley Metropolitan Council (GVMC) was formed in 1990 to be a place where area governments of all types could work together to enhance the quality of life for citizens of West Michigan. It started with 13 members, and today there are 35 governments entities representing 650,000 residents doing regional collaborative efforts together. The GVMC is the designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for West Michigan and is responsible for planning the expenditures of $100 Million state and federal monies on all modes of transportation. The benefits to a government entity being a member include (1) participating in the decisions of MPO and having a say in area transportation improvements; (2) working together on state and national legislative advocacy; (3) implementing the Regional Geographic Information System (REGIS) (see my newsletter of last month about access to REGIS now being free to all citizens); (4) being part of the Lower Grand River Organization of Watersheds, and (5) being part of implementation of other instances of local and regional governmental collaboration. The GVMC recently was designated as the organization to lead the Governor’s efforts to consolidate our states’ 55 different regions into ten large regions to cover all government business. This will be a two year project. The operational and staffing costs of GVMC are funded by dues payments from participating members.

Issue of the Month: Kent County Sheriff’s Department

As our county prepares a new budget for next year I want to discuss the department that takes the biggest share of the general fund. This is the Sheriff’s department with its 550 employees. The Sheriff is responsible for enforcement of both criminal and civil law in the areas surrounding the immediate six city jurisdictions. It is responsible for operating an emergency call dispatch center for answering all 911 calls in the county, as well as operating the countywide emergency management center in the event of natural or man caused disasters—such as the recent flooding conditions this past April. The county Correctional Facility houses up to 1,100 inmates, and is available to all police departments and courts for housing individuals breaking local and state laws. Judges can assign up to one-year county jail terms. The total budget for the Sheriff’s Department is projected to be nearly $70 million. Nearly $60 million of that is received from general tax revenue, and the remaining $10 million through a special ’correctional center’ tax paid by all county citizens. Although the normal budget gives sufficient funds to the Sheriff to provide minimal road patrols to all townships, the Sheriff does maintain contracts with several of the more populated townships for enhanced patrol services and the townships pay for these extra services. The Sheriff does have a mounted patrol to provide specialized services to cities and areas at request.

Issue of the Month: Kent County Road Commission

One question I am asked a lot is to do something about our roads in Kent County. I always answer that roads are the purview of the County Road Commission, and the County Commission does not have direct approval/disapproval authority to spend road money. That is written into the State Funding Act. The County Commission only gets involved with Road Commission activity through the appointment of a five member Road Commission. The allocation and decisions about actual road projects is made by that body. The Road Commission is managed by a Director and has 226 employees to carry out their duties. There are nearly 2,000 miles of county roads and 177 bridges maintained by the Commission. In FY 2012 the Road Commission had less money to spend than in the early 2000’s ($48.5 million vs $54.2 M). The biggest share of this funding comes from the state, although there are local match funds with some projects, and periodic federal grants for specific projects. As all of you know, the state’s ability to fund road improvements has been diminishing the past decade, and our roads are getting worse. Because of limited funds, the Commission is forced to spend an increasing amount on ‘road maintenance’ rather than ‘construction and preservation’. Like all governmental entities, the Road Commission is reaching out to other units of local government to do things more cooperatively, and this results in some savings.

Issue of the Month: Kent County Clerk/Register of Deeds

The Kent County Clerk’s office, with a budget of $3.7 million, has four functions: (1) manage County elections, (2) maintain county and citizen vital records, (3) serve as Register of Deeds, and (4) process and maintain 17th Circuit Court records. There are 44 total employees assigned to these responsibilities. The office is supervised by an elected Kent County Clerk, which is a partisan office with an election every four years. The Elections Division oversees all elections conducted in Kent County including school and local elections, and monitors campaign finance law. The Vital Records Division files, stores, and retains 20,000 vital records annually such as birth, marriage, and death records and makes them available to citizens. This Division also processes licenses for concealed weapons, business registrations, and records military discharges. The Register of Deeds office records nearly 125,000 documents annually pertaining to real property including deeds, mortgages, land contracts, liens and other real estate documents. The Clerk’s functions with the 17th Circuit Court includes keeping over 350,000 court records including records of court proceedings, judgments, fines, and other court related issues. This function involves the largest number of staff in the Department. A significant accomplishment the past year was implementing ‘e-business court’ mandated by the Michigan Supreme Court to streamline court procedures.