The population in Grand Traverse County has expanded by 25 percent in the past 25 years, compared to 1.9 percent for the state of Michigan as a whole. “It’s pretty remarkable growth,” says Traverse Connect President and CEO Warren Call, and with the trend projected to continue into the foreseeable future, Traverse Connect is launching a new initiative to help the region navigate it.

Next Monday, as part of its annual economic summit, Traverse Connect will officially unveil the Grand Traverse Regional Readiness Index, a new “interactive, continuously updated tool that scores the county and its 16 cities, townships, and villages against a transparent, evidence-based rubric.” The goal? Determining how prepared the county is for future growth.

According to a white paper Traverse Connect will publish to coincide with the launch, projections show Grand Traverse County’s population swelling by another 5.5 percent between now and 2035, compared to a 1.5 percent growth rate for Michigan overall.

“Growth at this scale is an opportunity for the regional economy, and making the most of it depends on coordination and preparation, with local governments working together across boundaries, current plans and zoning, infrastructure capacity in place ahead of demand, the tools to support businesses, and housing supply that meets and paces demand,” the white paper states.

Call says the seeds for the Regional Readiness Index were planted back in 2019, when Traverse Connect drafted its current strategic plan. Priorities in that document included achieving more competitive wages across the region and attracting more workers in the “prime working age” demographic of 35-49.

“I give an update at our annual economic summit each year on the five key metrics we've been tracking since 2020, and we’ve been seeing some pretty good results there,” Call tells The Ticker. “For instance, we had lost ground in that core working age population prior to 2020, and our goal in the strategic plan was to reverse that trend and grow that demographic by 5 percent by 2030. We’re already at 10 percent.”

But Call says Traverse Connect hears regularly from the local business community “that there are still some key barriers they continually rub up against that they’d like us to talk about more.”

Enter the Regional Readiness Index, which grades the county in five new categories – regional collaboration, zoning and land use, infrastructure readiness, business climate, and housing supply – to determine overall growth readiness. Traverse Connect then compares those metrics to other similar counties in Michigan to flag areas for possible improvement.

Key comps, Call says, include “the fast-growing bedroom community of Livingston County, the tech and innovation county of Washtenaw County, and the ag production, manufacturing, and hospitality county of Ottawa County.”  Per the white paper, Grand Traverse County trails all three “on every category except business climate (where it edges out Livingston).” While Grand Traverse lags the furthest behind in the housing supply category, Call is actually bullish on that metric.

“While it's understandable that we aren't getting 100 percent scores on housing, I also think we need to acknowledge that we really are building a lot of housing right now,” he says. “And so, while it's a big issue, housing is actually not the most concerning [obstacle for growth].”

Instead, Call points to regional collaboration as “the biggest lever to pull” for alleviating future growing pains. He says local units of government tend to be too siloed in everything from infrastructure to public services to zoning codes, and argues that more collaboration could reduce costs, create easier pathways for development, and build a friendlier business climate. Possibilities for bringing townships together include joint planning commissions, unified zoning authorities, shared water and sewer systems, and countywide fire and emergency medical services.

“There are good examples, right here in the state, of communities that have taken some of those things and run with them,” Call says. “We don't have to reinvent the wheel; we can just take what other communities have done and use it as a model.”

“I talk about this topic daily,” Kingsley Village Manager Charlie Jetter says of regional collaboration. The Readiness Index flags Kingsley as the “most improved” of northern Michigan’s jurisdictions in terms of growth readiness, praising its recent work to replace lead service lines, upgrade water mains, and redevelop South Brownson Avenue and Brownson Memorial Park.

Next up? A sewer and water feasibility study, which Jetter says will follow pathways already blazed by other jurisdictions.

“We want to know where we stand with our water and sewer infrastructure, because we’ve had quite a bit of growth already and I want to have a plan in place for any future growth,” Jetter explains. “One of the things our engineer said is that the county’s Department of Public Works just went through something similar to this. So now, we’re pretty much piggybacking off what they did.”

“‘Regional collaboration’ is one of my favorite phrases, and it’s one of my favorite things to do,” concurs East Bay Township Supervisor Beth Friend. East Bay is another jurisdiction that performs well in the Regional Readiness Index, and Friend credits collaborations “with many other entities, agencies, and jurisdictions,” including Garfield Township, TART Trails, Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy, Norte, Safe Routes to School, and BATA. “Our trail systems, our conservation efforts, our recent water and sewer projects – none of that would have been possible without the high level of collaboration we do,” Friend says.

Bill Myers, who serves as CEO for local manufacturer Promethient and chairs the Traverse Connect board, acknowledges that growth has become a contentious subject for many Traverse Citians. The region has transformed substantially in the past 20-30 years, and some locals miss what it used to be. While he doesn’t view the Regional Readiness Index as a silver bullet to fix those tensions, Myers does see the initative as a necessary and proactive step forward.

“Growth is difficult, but I don't think anybody wants to sit by and just let it happen,” Myers says. “Unfortunately, just locking the doors to the region is not an option. So, what do we do as a community to be a productive part of that process? A huge part of that is our local units of government being able to collaborate with one another and have honest discussions, and I think this tool will offer a really good starting point.”