Greening Mid-Michigan
Regional Workshop
5-8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 18
Hannah Community Center
819 Abbot Road, East Lansing
RSVP by Feb. 12

Cars don’t rule all of Michigan. You can hop on a bike and pedal straight from Kalamazoo to South Haven, or even 100 miles from Grand Rapids to Cadillac. Hikers and joggers can pound non-motorized trails all over northern Oakland County.

Most counties in western and eastern Michigan have extensive networks of bike trails, parks, and natural areas that cross dozens of jurisdictions, with new connections clicking into place every year.

But Ingham, Clinton and Eaton counties lag behind in what planners call “green infrastructure.”

“We’re the hole in the doughnut,” said Nancy Krupiarz, director of the Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance.

But that may change soon. Planners from the tri-county region are inviting policy makers and interested citizens to a public workshop Feb. 18, where they’ll sit down and draw fresh lines on county maps.

This is no idle connect-the-dots exercise. Over 80 public and private partners have signed on to the Greening Mid-Michigan juggernaut. A coherent green infrastructure plan, Krupiarz said, will help mid-Michigan cities and counties get state and federal money needed for new trails and natural areas.

For months, several regional land use groups, including the Michigan Natural Features Inventory, have been gathering information on what’s cool and green in mid-Michigan.

“We want people to tell us what is special in their eyes,” Krupiarz said. “You can’t connect everything, but we’re at the stage where we’re looking for information.”

At the workshop, Krupiarz said planners will look for “connections between green blobs” of high-quality conservation areas, high-value farmland, rivers and lakes, and historic and cultural destinations.

Across the nation, non-motorized trails are catching up to new roads as symbols of progress and a potential draw for new residents. The local green infrastructure push got a big boost last November when the Lansing Economic Area Partnership included “Green Infrastructure Connections” in its six-point plan for regional prosperity.

The glossy LEAP report, “Greater Lansing Next,” called a regional trails plan a “key placemaking activity” that will help make the region competitive in the new global economy.

After years of defending hiking and biking trails to granola-averse suits in business and government, Krupiarz can hardly contain her delight.

Unlike most roads, green infrastructure not only connects destinations, but creates them. “It’s not about getting to the place where you’re going to have fun,” Krupiarz said. “You’re going to have fun the whole time.”

Workshop participants will get a toolkit with everything from model ordinances to grant proposals they can take back home and use to set aside land, develop trails, protect rivers and otherwise green things up. When the tri-county plan is drawn up in April, they’ll have extra ammunition. State agencies like the departments of Natural Resources or Transportation favor projects that hook up to a comprehensive regional plan. Since 2001, the Southeast Michigan Greenways Initiative has leveraged its regional clout to build up a 100-mile trail system in the least green part of the state.

But which places should be connected, and how? When Krupiarz met with Harmony Gmazel, a land use planner with the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission, last Friday, the complexity of the task hit home.

At a conference room at the Lansing offices of the DNR, Krupiarz and Gmazel pored over a stack of maps prepared by a team of cartographers. John Paskus, a conservation planning expert with MSU Extension, led the mapping team.

Each map laid out a separate feature, from natural resources to demographics to land use, for planners to take into account. At the Feb. 18 workshop, the maps will be printed on clear acetate and stacked on top of each other so people can see what they are connecting.

It was easy to be distracted by so much information, displayed so colorfully.

“Look how many cemeteries,” Krupiarz said.

“There are a lot of farmers’ markets in Lansing,” Gmazel said.

When Paskus unrolled a map showcasing Clinton County’s recreational resources, there wasn’t much to see. It looked like a county golf course guide.

Krupiarz furrowed her brow. With hundreds of miles of non-motorized trails snaking through the east and west parts of Michigan, where were Clinton County’s?

“The dotted lines are proposed trails,” Paskus said, pointing to a grid of long dotted lines.

“But these are all proposed,” Krupiarz said. She bent over the map and squinted at a half inch of solid line. “Oh, here’s one.”

Taking a longer view, Krupiarz said the push to identify and preserve green infrastructure takes in a range of issues, from water quality to natural resource and farmland conservation.

Gmazel called green infrastructure “a way of life, a philosophy.”

“It’s not just trails,” Gmazel said. “It looks different depending on where you are. On a farm, maybe you’re not planting right up to the edge of the river. If you’re in the city, maybe you’re planting trees or putting in rain gardens.”

In 2004, a consortium of five counties and 200 groups in west Michigan produced a “vision of green infrastructure” Krupiarz hopes to emulate in the tri-county area.

The west Michigan map states the case broadly and boldly: “Green infrastructure is not a luxury or a amenity. It is a critical component of our community that needs to be planned for, invested in, and maintained with the same level of priority and urgency as … roads, bridges, buildings and utilities.”

Krupiarz said it’s time to apply that philosophy to Eaton, Clinton and Ingham counties.

“We always say, ‘You can’t do that, there’s a road or a highway there,’” Krupiarz said. “Well, maybe it’s time we started valuing and working around the green infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, back at the table, the scrolls were piling up. The thrill of seeing so much information in one place gave way to a nagging dread.

“There’s only so much information your brain can hold,” Paskus said.

He held a map of school district borders over a land use map. “You start laying this over that and you have some serious spaghetti going on,” he said. “Keep it simple and it will be fine.”

Two years ago, Paskus attended a green infrastructure workshop in Flint. “It was lively,” he said. “People got into it. They identified features that weren’t on the map.”

“That’s just what we’re hoping for,” Krupiarz said.

In the end, the planners rejected the colorful land use map as too blobby and busy. Gmazel rolled it up and took it under her arm. “Pop art for my wall,” she said.