Springing into Action
I will buy whoever is first to correctly name the movie referenced in this post their drink of choice from Kekoa.
Hey Neighbor,
I hope this (true? real? semi-permanent?) spring weather finds you well!
As the weather warms up, so does programming in Wyandotte! This weekend kicks off restaurant week—it’s a great time to check out a new spot in town or revisit an old favorite. If you’re ever looking for local food recommendations, whether in Wyandotte or the greater metro Detroit area, don’t hesitate to give me a call. One of my favorite underutilized talents is finding a spot that will meet your group’s allergen needs, dietary restrictions, and taste preferences.
If food isn’t your thing, there is still plenty happening in Wyandotte–whatever you’re interested in, there’s a community for you. Some things that have me personally excited are the new craft club that meets on the first Thursday of the month at First Congregational Church; Downriver Poets and Playwrights, which meets at the library on the first Tuesday of the month; and the reinvigoration of the Wyandotte Garden Club, which will be taking over the management of the community garden this year. The club was originally started in 1924 by Ella Bishop (yes, that Bishop), and I am so thrilled to see her legacy picked back up by residents! If you’re not sure where to start in finding a group that’s a good fit for you, I would highly recommend checking out the calendars at the library and Copeland Center…and if all else fails, send me a message with your interests and I’ll help find a place to plug you in!
On a personal note, this is my last e-news before the election, and I want to thank you so much again for your friendship, questions, and the community we’ve built over the last four years. Hopefully I’ll see you for another term! If re-elected, I will follow up just after the election with a shorter e-news to share my upcoming coffee and cleanups and continue a conversation on social media that starts below.
If you have any pre-election conversations you’d like to have, we’ll be hosting a small fundraiser at the PRCU (1430 Oak) tomorrow, April 24, from 4:30-7pm. Come eat a coney and ask away!
All the best,
Kelly
Community Calendar
Please contact the host location with any questions!
Thursday, April 24
Coneys with the Candidates, 4:30-7pm at PRCU (1430 Oak St.), $10 ticket
Saturday, April 26
FREE Heart Health Screenings, 7-11am at Henry Ford Wyandotte (2333 Biddle Ave)
Spring Cleanup Downtown, 9:30am-12pm, meeting at corner of 1st and Elm
Independent Bookstore Day! Visit Brooks Books (1805 Ford Ave.) at 11am
American Heart Association Benefit Dance, 5pm doors at PRCU (1430 Oak St.), $25
The Odd Fellow Concert Lounge, 6:30pm at the DCA Building (81 Chestnut), $10
Monday, April 28
Council Meeting at 7pm with Audit Presentation at 6:30pm, 3200 Biddle or via Zoom–see City website for Zoom details
Saturday, May 3
Wyandotte Garden Club Community Garden Cleanup, 10am at the Community Garden (corner of Biddle and Grove)
Tuesday, May 6
City Election! Polls are open from 7am-8pm. Make your voice heard!
Monday, May 12
Council Meeting at 7pm, 3200 Biddle or via Zoom–see City website for Zoom details
Don’t forget to check out what’s happening at the clubs! FOP and KofC both host music bingo every other week, and PRCU hosts bar bingo weekly on Fridays. Also, Sunday Socials will be restarting downtown shortly. Come check out this family-friendly event!
Let’s Talk Lawns
I hate lawns. Can’t stand them, even. If I had my way, I’d rip out all the grass in front of my house and put in clover or native flowers or literally any other living thing. But I know most people don’t share that sentiment, and many of us who do still begrudgingly maintain our front yards. Whether you’re a lawn lover or a grass grinch, here are some things you need to know about maintaining our outdoor spaces this summer.
How high can my grass be? The newly updated ordinance caps the height of lawns at eight inches, down from the previous 12.
What happens at eight inches? When someone calls in a long grass complaint, the city sends someone out to measure the lawn. If the lawn is below the ordinance height, nothing happens. If it’s above that, DPS leaves a sticker on the door informing the person that their grass is too long and needs to be cut. Typically a week (though sometimes a few days in either direction) later, an employee will return to check on the address. If the lawn has been cut, great! If it has not, the address gets put on a list to our lawn care contractors, who then go out and cut the lawns. The resident is then levied a fine plus the cost of the cutting.
Why have a fine? According to Michigan law, local units of government are not permitted to collect money in excess of the costs of providing services. In other words, the City is not doing this to make money off of people! The fines are a partial recouping of the staff time it takes to visit addresses, log complaints, and do all of the administrative work that comes along with it. Additionally, every lawn that makes it onto the contractor list costs the city money–even if the resident cuts it between the second DPS visit and the professional cutting, which happens pretty often! The fine also provides an offset to that City cost.
Well why does the contractor do that? Our contractor builds out staffing and schedules based on the list of addresses they receive. They have made the time to cut this lawn and are losing money by leaving, for lack of a better term, an “appointment” open. Charging this fee allows them to ensure they remain financially solvent, but it is reasonable for the City to pass this cost along to the resident who did not solve their ordinance violation in a timely manner.
So why eight inches? We give a grace period for residents to resolve the violation before the contractor is called–I think this is an absolute must for a policy like this, as life happens and people might not initially realize how tall their lawn has gotten. Under the previous policy of 12 inches, lawns could get pretty unruly by the time the initial call was made, let alone a week to self-remedy or another few days for the contractor to get there. With the right summer conditions, grass can really go wild in a few short days! Cutting the initial height to eight inches helps provide some buffer and protect everyone’s lawn equipment from damage.
What about no-mow May? Honestly, if you have a sign up and tell your neighbors in advance, you are probably not going to get a call if your lawn gets a little higher than normal. That said, consider planting some native, pollinator-friendly plants so that your yard can help support our insect friends every month!
Any other things I should know about yard maintenance? Try your very best not to let brush or weeds pile up on the alley side or in your backyard! We have both paid curbside yard waste pickup and free drop off at the Recycling Center. If you need help, let me know!
Why have these policies at all? I’ll give you one guess (it’s rats).
Dr. Commonhate, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave Social Media
I have a confession to make: I am, by nature, a pessimist.
I do not want to be! I would love to be a person whose outlook on the world is naturally sunny, but I have to make do with being a person who—despite all inclinations to the contrary—tries to plug in one of those Vitamin D lights every day. Sometimes it works: for example, I am very hopeful about continuing to build genuine community in Wyandotte, bullish on the future of Downriver- Dearborn-Detroit as a business and tourism destination, and incredibly excited about my impending marriage.
But sometimes, no matter how many outlets I try or no matter how many different light bulbs I attempt to get glowing, I simply cannot bring myself to see the net positive. This is increasingly true of my view of social media.
These are scary times for many: whether you love or hate social media, it is indisputable that it has changed the way we live and the way news and culture are communicated. It exists, and it has real implications for life outside the internet. But maybe it’s time to question whether our societal relationship to it is healthy—what are we gaining? Is it more than we lose?
I’m old enough to have been in high school when social media really took off. I can remember the incredibly spirited, teenage, stupid fights I had with my parents about whether I should be allowed to use it (“AIM only lets you have buddies. Facebook lets you have FRIENDS!”), and the equally unhinged arguments I had with friends and younger siblings posting pictures with cups that might have held alcohol in them (“You’re underage!! What will an employer think when they see this?!”).
Weirdly, I am grateful to have experienced social media circa the early 2010s. It was messy, even then—I can remember learning for the first time how much of my data third party apps on Facebook were collecting in exchange for telling me what Harry Potter character I was most like or the ability to play a Scrabble-like game with my friends from high school once I was away at State. But at that point in time, feeds were mostly chronological. In fact, I’m old enough to remember actively complaining when they changed it to an algorithmic model!
And that changed everything. I could swallow knowing how much about my life was being tracked by them, but when the platform shifted from something I could reasonably use to see what the people in my life were up to to something I found was making me so mad, but unable to put it down, I knew had to reevaluate the relationship. I hemmed and hawed about it, wondering if it was worth keeping for professional reasons or if I could just be better about not comparing myself to other bodies and lives.
Ultimately, the decision was made for me in late 2018: after a security breach, I changed my Facebook password and, in true Kelly fashion, never wrote it down anywhere, thinking it was impossible that I could forget it. But I did, and I was using a long-defunct email address for the login, and when I messaged Meta asking for help getting back into my account, they said it was no problem, that all I had to do was send them a copy of my driver’s license and they would let me back in. Reader, this was after the Cambridge Analytica mess. No way on God’s green earth was I sending this company a government-issued document with my personal details! I used my account on devices where I was still logged in until I wasn’t, and that was the end of my personal Facebook account (a note: if you have tried to add me as a friend over the last four years and it was never accepted, this is exactly why. They also needed the ID to officially delete the account, so it just hangs out in the internet ether).
This is not to imply, at all, that I stopped being online or think myself better than it. For a long time, I was an (overly) avid Twitter user, a platform that (at the time) was the fastest and most reliable way to get news about what was happening in Lansing. And I am still unable to cure my affection for Reddit, because Lord help me I love a topic-specific forum.
It is, however, to say that going on seven years clean of Meta’s algorithms, I feel like I have a pretty clear view of what it does to communities, and I don’t love it. Although there are some explicit goods—connecting with distant family, spreading the word about events, providing excellent reminders of people’s birthdays—I am afraid the cost is too great.
But I don’t want to preach about this to you–I want us to walk together through what we see, how it makes us feel, and where we think we ought to go. So between here and the election, I’m issuing a challenge to all of you:
For one week, I want you to use social media the way you normally do, but with a few questions in mind:
What am I on social media for?
How does scrolling make me feel?
Do I feel better or worse about my community after being on here?
Then, in week two, I want you to make a conscious effort not to open socials out of habit. If you’re someone like me who plays with their phone by default, I recommend downloading a puzzle or game app for fidgeting and the Libby app for media. You can attach Libby to your library card and open a whole world of e-books, audiobooks, and even virtual copies of magazines!
When I’m back in a few weeks, let’s talk about this. Don’t be shy about putting your answers to these questions in the comments of this post, sharing them with me in person, or writing me an email to talk about them. I cannot wait to hear your thoughts and see if you feel differently after week two, when we’ll come back and talk about the problems we see.
That’s all for this term, folks! Take a walk, enjoy the sun, be good to yourselves and each other.