Waddell

HOUGHTON — Craig Waddell estimates he has put in about 2,000 hours over the past 18 months talking to Houghton residents, attending meetings and drafting documents for the council. Now, he’s running to join it.

Waddell, along with Robyn Johnson and Michael Salmi, is running for a Houghton City Council seat in Tuesday’s election. Whoever wins the partial term would then have to run again in November.

Waddell spent 37 years in college education, including 30 years at Michigan Technological University, where he is emeritus professor of rhetoric. He has lived in Houghton since 1996.

He has also had numerous community roles, such as founding the West Houghton Neighborhood Association, with projects including the pedestrian tunnel under M-26. He has also participated in city meetings, including being part of the city’s precharrette workshop on Houghton’s downtown last year.

His academic background also included work on public participation, such as several years of research on the council-manager form of government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and how it addressed public outrage over proposals to house recombinant DNA research labs for Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

With council talk about drawing on expertise from Tech, Waddell said he felt he had something to offer.

“At some point I became kind of concerned about areas where I thought there was room for improvement, and offered a lot of suggestions along that line,” he said. “And finally, I just decided that the best way to see any such suggestions implemented was to actually run for a position on the council when one became available, so I did.”

Regarding the Lakeshore Drive parking deck, Waddell looked through the minutes from past Houghton meetings as well as comments from the Facebook page of a citizens’ group formed in response to the deck issue. He had condensed the ideas to eight suggestions for what to put in place after the deck.

“There’s an old saying, ‘If you want to get a good idea, get a lot of ideas from a lot of different people,'” he said. “So it’s just listening respectfully to people and processing what they have to say.”

Waddell said he would like to have a public discussion of those ideas, and possibly others, in conjunction with a map prepared by City Manager Eric Waara that showed the mix of city-owned and privately owned property in downtown.

One idea includes building an elevated walkway on the north side of Lakeshore Drive combined with an elevator from the sidewalk, allow people to access businesses that previously had rear access on the parking deck. Development ideas included a taxable mixed-use development on the deck property west of Dennis and Illa Garver’s condo. He also suggested seeing if the council could still pursue a 2021 proposal from Jon Julien that would include a smaller footprint with more green space and public ownership.

Waddell also suggested working to make Houghton a more walkable community. Waddell cited a Tech senior design project to expand the Ambassador and Vault decks into multi-level parking garages. Another potential site is the area occupied by Gateway Laundry, he said.

Pointing to money in the 2022 federal budget for modernizing park infrastructure, he suggested working with the National Park Service to replacing aging buildings on park property with one multi-story building, which could open up room for more parking.

Additional suggestions called for enhancing waterfront access and greenspace, as well as enhancing the new Pier Placemaking Project. Waddell suggested making an offer to U.P. Kids to sell or lease the former Mineral Range railroad Depot as a museum, gift shop and concession stand.

Houghton was one of the few places in the Upper Peninsula to grow in the past U.S. census. Waddell sees that growth continuing thanks to remote workers and people leaving areas with more severe impacts from climate change.

Waddell said the city should increase efforts to aggressively recruit people with particular skill sets, such as medical professionals, K-12 educators, skilled trades workers and entrepreneurs, among others.

Additional housing has been created through rezoning near College Avenue to allow for denser development. In some cases, those rezonings, or changes to allow student rentals in residential districts, have met with pushback from neighbors who worry about changing the character of the neighborhood.

Waddell said he would look at historic preservation, as well as recognizing the concerns of residents. He contacted Habitat for Humanity about preserving some historic features of homes that would be demolished for new housing in a rezoned area near the university.

Waddell has also approached the city and Michigan Tech about setting up a workshop for students before they live off-campus explaining the importance of being good citizens in their neighborhood.

“I never said anything about, you know, not carrying through with that ordinance changed or carrying through that rezoning,” he said, referring to the recent rezoning of properties along east Houghton Avenue. “I just said, if you’ve got to do that, listen to what the people are telling you and try to respect that. And maybe there’s things that can be done to respond to their concerns.”

The city could also consider putting together a list of historic structures that would be prioritized for preservation, Waddell said.

Waddell has attended and frequently spoken at nearly every council and planning commission meetings since the parking deck issue came up, at times resulting in tense exchanges. He said he would “work with anyone who will help move forward concerns that come from the community, “whether they were elected in 2020 or 1990.”

He said he didn’t have a problem with what he identified as the three main sources of ideas coming to the council — the city manager, the planning commission and developers — but said the council should do more to solicit ideas from the public. He said the city should also be more proactive in getting information to the public, citing some residents’ initial surprise at the request for proposals on the parking deck.

“If you’re out there campaigning, talking to constituents, they should know what’s coming forward,” he said.

Waddell said voters should consider him because of his long record of public service and his willingness to do research.

“I do my homework, I think I’ve demonstrated my willingness to do that to put in a lot of volunteer hours,” he said. I don’t think it’s hard to figure out what I stand for, what I represent.”