Who should organize Culver?

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There was an interesting discussion at the Culver Redevelopment Commission (CRC) last Thursday about potentially hiring someone to coordinate the various volunteer efforts in town. At one point the Town Manager referenced my post: Culver needs an Infrastructure Czar, saying that he felt this was a similar situation where Culver has lots of volunteers, often with the same people on different committees, but there was no coordinated effort. Years ago, this was the reason the Culver Second Century Committee was created… to coordinate all of the volunteer efforts. This sounds similar, but with paid staff. Can’t believe I haven’t written the story of the Second Century Committee, so I’ll put that on my list of things to do here. It was basically started as an off-shoot of the Culver Chamber of Commerce in order to coordinate the volunteer effort of the various Culver Not-For-Profits. It flourished and morphed, but eventually became defunct over time.

One board member spoke about the success of the Culver Stellar Committee and then Marshall County Stellar Committee (Marshall County Crossroads), but then expressed disappointment that the offshoots, the Culver Crossroads Committee and the One Marshall County Committee haven’t moved projects forward post Stellar. Her take-away was the need for paid staff to direct the volunteers and keep people on task. This is the route One Marshall County is pursuing, while Culver Crossroads basically hasn’t met since completing the new (2024) Culver Comprehensive Plan.

I think the discussion was good, but I think there was a point missed about why the Stellar committees succeeded and the follow-up committees are failing. In my opinion, despite labeling themselves as committees, both the town and county Stellar groups were actually task forces. A Task Force by definition is a temporary group created to deal with a specific issue, usually made up of people chosen for their knowledge or experience in the subject. This is a key difference, since with a task force, there are defined goals and a deadline or deadlines to meet those goals. With a deadline, there comes a sense of urgency. This is what the Culver and Marshall County Stellar groups were.

I liked a lot of the points made at the CRC, such as reducing the number of meetings and organizing the various groups to keep them focused on common tasks. (When I was on the chamber board, we talked about “The 10 people that do everything…”. They were generally involved in all the various organizations, often in leadership positions, until their time was stretched, their efforts were diluted and they eventually burnt out and disappeared.) But… A town employee doing this is expansion of bureaucracy and most of us know that this could easily become the camel’s nose under the tent. My experience is that bureaucracies tend to be more about self-preservation than accomplishing things. I look at the City of Plymouth that had an engineering consultant a couple of decades ago, which became a full-time engineer, which became a full-time engineer with an assistant engineer, which became a full-time engineer and assistant engineer, farming work out to an engineering consultant. All with little change to the City of Plymouth population. Metrics of what success looks like as well as deadlines for that success are critical in my opinion. Mission creep isn’t automatically bad, but needs to be controlled and subject to oversight and approval.

From a serial volunteer’s perspective, I know committees tend to talk things to death and committee members that volunteer to do something are easily side-tracked by work, family and general life obligations. If Stellar committee (task force) items weren’t completed, well and on time, the Stellar reward was off the table. There was a sense of urgency that a standing committee rarely, if ever, feels. It takes a special employee to maintain that urgency on a consistent basis.

It will be interesting to watch how this plays out. If the town does pursue this, I hope they find that special employee.

Collaborate Culver

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I attended the first Collaborate Culver meeting on March 5th. The group is mostly downtown merchants, so I’m not sure why I was asked to attend. I’m always interested in what’s going on in Culver, so I decided to spend a couple of hours and see what I would learn.

The group was mostly comprised of downtown merchants. The stated goal was to bring together business interests and prepare a list of wants and needs for the community assessment being put together with funding from the Culver Redevelopment Commission. For those interested, the first Downtown Strategies community assessment meeting will be at the Culver Union Township Public Library on April 1st, Noon to 1:30.

For better or worse, I was the oldest business represented there as well as the person with the longest history of community involvement. As such, I tried to sit quietly (hard for me!) and not squelch any enthusiasm. The reason I say that, is many of the ideas brought up were not new… either having been discarded or having experienced trial and failure in the past.

It was great to see a large number of new faces there. In fact, other than myself, none of the more established businesses were represented. Some of them may be jaded, like myself, and have a “been there, done that” attitude towards starting a new group. I get that, but if that’s the case, I hope they at least stay out of the way, if they choose not to directly support the new group. We always talk about wanting “new blood”, but we need to support the new people and not be wet blankets.

One of the more important discussions was regarding Zoning. There was no consensus from the group, but the discussion points were salient. Some wanted to see more downtown buildings converted to housing. Others were adamantly against that. There seemed to be consensus that a mix was good and encouraging second floor housing was positive. There was also a discussion of the limited commercial lots available. I mentioned that the Plan Commission had rezoned the Easterday Dentist office back to residential after the dentistry shut down. There seemed to be consensus that the change was not positive. I couldn’t speak to the status of that going forward, since the Plan Commission had discussed rezoning the other houses used as businesses back to residential, but the Comprehensive Plan advocated the other direction, suggesting allowing expansion of the commercial areas. (A better compromising solution would be Hierarchal Zoning rather than Euclidian Zoning as is used in Culver now.)

There was also discussion of more collaboration. I repeated my Main Street Mantra, suggesting that they need to work like a mall and coordinate hours of operations, sales events and other things that create a place people want to stay after visiting one location. I also reiterated my admiration for Wabash and their efforts to cross advertise the commercial areas via sidewalk ads. I asked how many of them had ads for other Culver businesses at their locations and suggested collaborating on that would create more of a Culver Destination, cultivating those that already came for their merchant of choice.

The only thing I felt was a negative was a list of missing businesses and a desire for the town government to somehow foster them. I am always surprised when this kind of thing comes up amongst a group of entrepreneurs. They should understand the difficulties in creating a start up business. If they were truly convinced that these missing ventures would be successful, why aren’t they investing and profiting from them on their own? I did suggest that if this was truly a need they saw, maybe the approach would be to recruit an existing business from a neighboring municipality to set up a trial satellite facility and test the waters. Setting up in some incubator space would be a much more economical venture than going all in on a new store or business. We already have several of these operating in town.

The thing I thought was missing in the conversation was The Dunes. No one truly knows how that project will affect the town. The percentage of full time residents will remain a mystery until leasing reveals it. That still doesn’t change the fact that there will be an additional influx of residents, if it is successful in any form. If it successfully brings in people from outside Culver, the local merchants need to become known. I pointed out that Culver doesn’t have a Welcome Wagon or an active Chamber… two of the main methods that outsiders learn about the community and it’s businesses. Getting something in front of them as them move in could make a critical first impression.

Chamber of Commerce in Culver

There was further discussion about the Culver Chamber of Commerce (CCC) and its rocky relationship with the town government. I suggested that I thought that could be reformed. I also suggested that reviving the CCC would be more effective than creating a similar entity, since Chambers are a known entity and often the first place visitors and new residents turn to learn about their community. This discussion was left with the group assigning several volunteers to look into this further.

All in all, it seemed like a good group and I wish them the best. I hope the group gels and is able to do some good things. I don’t know how much I’ll participate going forward as I don’t really have a retail presence nor much of a connection to it, but as always, I’m more than happy to kibitz and share my experience and knowledge.

Jackye Berger’s Passing

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Jackye Berger

Easterday Construction lost another of its third generation last week. Jacquelin (Jackye) Berger passed away Monday evening, February 9th, after the long good-bye of Alzheimer’s disease. You can read her obituary here: https://mountainviewfuneralhomeandcemetery.com/obituary/jacquelin-jackye-berger/

While never an actual employee, Jackye was an integral part of the ECC supporting cast. She would run errands, pick up supplies, help with entertaining clients and hosting company gatherings. While Larry Berger ran the company, Jackye was a stay-at-home mom. Larry was fortunate to be able to walk home for lunch most days, so he was able to spend lunch hour breaks with her. She served as a reassuring break from what was often a stressful job.

As outlined in her obituary, Jackye was also very involved in her community, volunteering and and serving on multiple boards and service entities. Her willingness to give of her time, knowledge and talents had an outsized effect on the Culver community.

Alzheimer’s is a horrible disease and the ECC family was saddened to watch her decline.

There will be a Celebration of Life this Summer when Larry returns to Culver, date yet to be determined. For those so inclined, her family requests in memoriam donations to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Arbitrary and Capricious Fees

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Letter to Culver Town Council

I just received the billing for this year’s Fire Protection Sprinkler System fee for Sand Hill Farm Apartments in Culver. I have discussed this fee here and here in the past. Despite protesting the initial basis for this fee, and the proposed increase during budget season, an 83% increase was passed.

The previous cost, $1,203.81 + sales tax was excessive and unjustified. The 83% increase to $2,198.98 + sales tax is nearly twice as onerous! There is no inspection or scheduled inspections, no maintenance, and no record-keeping. The only justification given is the cost of bringing water to the site, which the municipality would do anyway for residential service. Reasonably, water usage for a fire in a building with sprinkler system would be significantly less than that used to fight a fire using traditional methods, since fire sprinklers generally put out the interior source before the building is engulfed. I’ll just skip over the whole idea of why there’s sales tax applied, other than to ask, what is being purchased?!

In the United States we have a generally progressive income tax system where individuals are taxed more when they make more. Conversely, we often have regressive fees that disproportionately hit the lower end of the income level. Culver’s Fire Protection Sprinkler System fee is an example of a regressive fee. There are not that many buildings with fire protection sprinkler systems in Culver, but those that do have it vary widely in size. A one-size-fits-all per building fee doesn’t take this into account. Of the buildings being affected by this fee, five of them are residential and subject to some form of rent control. Since there was a rather large rate increase to the water bill passed at the same time, this puts these lower income residents subject to a double hit.

7-24-25 email to Council President

Culver recently adjusted building permits. They were changed from a because-we-can high rate to a cost-of-service rate, justified by time tracking completed by the Culver Building Commissioner. This is a much more reasonable and defensible way of determining fees. If this were applied to the Fire Protection Service System fee, it would likely be zeroed out.

In the current Town Council’s defense, the water service fees have been left unchanged too long across the board, resulting in a larger than average increase. The blame for that lies on previous councils. That said, it’s not appropriate to hit the most vulnerable in the town’s population with an extra fee just to save a few cents on everyone’s water bills as the new fee structure is rolled out.