Is a Cheboygan Meijer a One in a Million Chance?

I attended a Tuscarora Township Board meeting on Tuesday night. Not my first and it will not be my last. Tuscarora has become my go-to first Tuesday of the month township meeting. There is no shortage of Tuesday night meetings with many of Cheboygan County’s 19 townships holding board meetings at the same time each month.  I attended years of Mullett Township Board meetings that included the monthly Tuesday meetings and numerous Special Meetings, some without legal notice, that were held virtually every night of the week including Saturday, Sunday, and even on a legal Holiday. You just never know when a real emergency might need immediate action and a decision by the board. The Mullett Board, despite some changes in office holders, will probably forever retain the local record for hasty and foolish decisions to spend taxpayer dollars made at Special Meetings.

There was a time when the Topinabee Development Association was dreaming large and chasing Federal TAP Grants to build the $2.8 million dollar “Green Corridor” Streetscape in Topinabee. The next year the TAP Grant application shrank to $1.2 million dollars with a “capped” local match of $200,000. Tom O’Hare, the always-present voice behind the TDA movement decided that the matching grant needed an increase over the previous Mullett Board approved amount. 

Mullett Clerk Rachel Osborn's "Pet" Project-Building the TDA's Vision

At a hastily called Special Meeting, Mr O’Hare pleaded, cajoled, and did everything except stamp his feet to get his way because his grant writer had already submitted an application for a $1.59 million dollar project. The Mullett Board uncorked the capped amount and hung the Mullett taxpayers out in the wind for a possible $259,000 match.  Like the majority of the TDA’s efforts seeking grants for porky projects, that second TAP Grant application also failed. The TDA has since scaled way back, limiting recent efforts to deforesting the village center and paving over parkland paid directly from Mullett Township funds.

The lesson learned is that nothing good ever comes from Special Meetings and that probably applies to the recent Inverness Township Special Meeting. Most of the decisions made by our township boards are recurring actions: set meeting schedules, collect property taxes, hold Board of Review meetings, brine the roads, pay the monthly bills and give themselves a raise when they think nobody is looking.

I have only attended two Inverness Township meetings. I observed enough to recognize what I know as the Dunning-Kruger effect. These social psychologists published a study in 1999:  Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. In 2005, Dunning wrote, “If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is”. This observation is nothing new. Confucius said “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance” and 2500 years later Darwin said, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”.

We have a somewhat foolish expectation that our elected officials are always going to make smart choices. Well-meaning people, like the Inverness Board, sometimes ignorant of their ignorance must still make tough choices and public decisions. Unable to prioritize or narrow the choices, they fall into a pattern of procrastination. The numerous options offered to Inverness for utility services to serve the Meijer site, the differing opinions offered from their legal counsel and input from others created the perfect storm. Two years lost forever if you are counting. It comes with a reality that Meijer’s business model may have materially changed. The big ship with 250 jobs was in port, ready to dock, and Mr Neuman and his fellow dockhands were unable to catch the tossed lines. That ship is now barely visible on the horizon. Thank God the Inverness Board were not preparing for a hurricane. Their township taxpayers would be bobbing in the water and halfway to the Atlantic Ocean by now.    

Has This Ship and 250 Jobs Sailed?

All of us are poor judges of our own competence or skills. What I observe occasionally with township boards, appointed boards and committees, and even some higher office holders are individuals who think their position sitting at a table means they are smarter. In plain language, scientific studies have determined that the stupidest among us think they are, like Yogi, smarter than the average bear.