Where Are the Concerned Citizens?

As a publication devoted entirely to local news in West Bloomfield Township, I hope Patch will help fill the void opened up in 2009 when the West Bloomfield Eccentric left town.

I, for one, bid this new kid welcome.

Opinions may differ as to the Internet as a whole.  Harvard’s Frankfurter professor of law Cass Sunstein said in 2009 that “it has a polarizing effect on democracies.”  (I wouldn’t mind hearing how he feels about the 2011 18-day event in Tahrir Square, though.)  New York Times columnist Damon Darlin, in that same year said that “we have gained much in the digital age,” but that we’ve also lost something — “the fortunate discovery of something we never knew we wanted to find.”  The digital age is “stamping out serendipity,” he said.

But who could deny the unparalleled role of communication, and now the digital version,  in society – whether it brings a thousands-strong, Facebook/Twitter-enabled protest in Egypt, a hundred-family turnout for a Winterfest in West Bloomfield, or a standing-room-only crowd to debate a zoning issue at town hall. 

In this 31-square mile chunk of southeast Michigan where residents are divided by lakes, with loyalties to seven different school districts, compartmentalized within hundreds of subdivisions, speaking dozens of languages, worshipping (or not) in the houses of many religions, I hope that Patch can help people to know each other better. 

Community collaboration has helped quality of parks

As a longtime “activist” in West Bloomfield Township and for many years board member and president of Concerned Citizens for West Bloomfield (CCWB), I look back with pride on the many significant quality-o-life projects which that organization initiated or supported, all of them before the digital age but all of them relying on the communication there at the time. 

In the early 1970s, using mimeographed fliers placed in doors, on the posts of mailboxes and mailed (when money could be found), phone calls by rafts of citizens, cooperation with many other organized groups, CCWB stopped Northwestern Highway from cutting a diagonal swath through homes, wetlands and woodlands to a terminus at planned I-275. Radio, TV, and newspapers helped, as e-mail and the internet were far in the future.

For more than 25 years, relying on a committed board and hundreds (often thousands) of supporters, CCWB initiated and pressed tirelessly to accomplish the purchase by of the 162-acre and the 4.25 mile West Bloomfield rail trail (now being extended more than two miles farther). When was under threat of development, CCWB intervened and was responsible for the park being given free of charge to West Bloomfield Parks and Recreation. When the township board refused to wire the new town hall for cable because they couldn’t afford to pay for personnel to “man the cameras,” CCWB members took the training to do so, leaving the township no excuse not to provide this service.

Volunteers currently needed to fill void

Every one of these projects has a story to tell, and Patch will make stories available for the telling, for us to learn from and benefit future generations of West Bloomfield residents.

Why am I talking about CCWB? Because there is apparently no longer any volunteer, broad-based, non-political group committed to identifying and pursuing some of the quality-of-life projects most needed in the Patch coverage area.

Newly minted Patch could provide the vital communication to help identify citizens just waiting to step into a role of service to the community, and also to provide the communication so essential to the citizen participation vital to democracy. 

Many quality-of-life projects are just waiting for a dynamic group of citizens to pursue.

Here’s one: How about revisiting the idea of “Continuing Residence,” whose time had apparently not come even after 11 years of work by a CCWB ad hoc committee? Doesn’t your recent college grad deserve to find an affordable apartment, to “continue to reside,” in West Bloomfield, or your recently widowed and now financially strapped neighbor, or your elderly parents who would like to live independently near you, but can’t quite swing the rent here?

Maybe you, as a reader of Patch, can add to a list of important needs not now being addressed. I know I will.