(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 436: Fabulous Ferndale

This week we chat with Melanie Piana, the Mayor of Ferndale Michigan. We chat about her city’s Woodward Avenue road diet, the city’s bike plans, and how parking is part of too many urban issues.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or our archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood (2m 38s):
Well, mayor Melanie Piana, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Melanie Piana (2m 41s):
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk about all things mobility.

Jeff Wood (2m 45s):
Awesome. Well thanks for joining us. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Melanie Piana (2m 50s):
I have been the mayor of the city of Ferndale for the last four years and I was on city council for 10, so almost a total of 14 years of public service. And prior to being elected, I really am a nonprofit advocate and I have been in nonprofit executive leadership for the last 20 years. And I left the automotive field in the early two thousands in the marketing web development space. I actually worked on the second generation of Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep International websites. And I left that field to go get my degree in urban planning. Six months after I went into grad school at Wayne State University, I received an invitation to apply for the Michigan Suburbs Alliance, which was a startup nonprofit that was designed by city managers and mayors to help bridge the divide of the entering suburbs and the city of Detroit.

Melanie Piana (3m 48s):
At the time, Brookings Institute was doing a lot of research on entering suburbs and Myron Orfield was also doing some studies on entering suburbs at the time. And that was sort of the impetus for helping create this nonprofit. And I jumped ship from the automotive field into urban planning while I was an urban planning school at Wayne. And that is where I really learned how local government works and doesn’t work, the leadership of local officials and really dove into the pressing issues of our region. And a lot of it is municipal finance reform, transportation transit specifically in southeast Michigan.

Melanie Piana (4m 29s):
And I just really loved working on these regional issues. And my career started growing after nine years I left, I went to the downtown Detroit Partnership, worked at one of the largest downtown organizations in the US and also ended up in a Detroit neighborhood nonprofit Jefferson East as the chief operating officer helping do equitable and inclusive development redevelopment of a historically disinvested in community. And so really have a deep understanding of what residents want in Detroit from listening to them. And my role as an advocate on their behalf as a nonprofit and executive and more recently was at the Detroit Regional Partnership working on the build back Better regional grant, which is the 52 million grant.

Melanie Piana (5m 17s):
Our region got to help shift our region from ICE to ev. But mostly I ride the bus, I ride my bike, I just bought an e cargo bike. I commute from Ferndale to downtown Detroit for work. I commute my bus, I have an ev, we’ve been driving an EV boat for four years. So I really try to have the choices in my own household of getting around and really trying to understand connectivity in our communities cuz that’s what makes all of our neighborhoods and cities work is connectivity to one another, connectivity to our downtowns and neighborhoods and connectivity to other cities. And that has helped people live their lives here.

Melanie Piana (5m 59s):
And I just try to represent that in my role as mayor in the city of Ferndale.

Jeff Wood (6m 4s):
You mentioned the transition to thinking about city planning and getting away from your car company job before. I’m wondering if this was something that was already instilled in you when you were younger, you know, was city something that you were interested in or was it something that kind of triggered your transformation to thinking about cities more as these livable places without cars or you know, living in an urban planning world where we talk about all the time, you know, having different choices and all those different things.

Melanie Piana (6m 31s):
Well I grew up in a rural area and around cornfields and it’s not rural so much anymore due to suburban sprawl. My parents still live in my childhood home and my first bus was the yellow bus to school. My first public bus though was in Tasmania, Australia. I was an exchange student when I was 14 and their public buses convert to school buses and that’s how I got to school for the year. I was an exchange student in Tasmania in 1988, long time ago. But I also lived in Sweden. I was an exchange student in Sweden for three months and their daughter lived with my family my senior year in high school I was a German major and lived in Munich and Munster and Munster was the second largest bicycling community in the early nineties in Germany.

Melanie Piana (7m 24s):
And that is where I learned to live by bicycle because that is all I had to get around. I would put my laundry bag on the back of my bike and head to the laundry mat and that is how I got around. So I really learned how to live differently with trains, buses and bikes. And I think that is just when I finally saw urban planning. Cause I had never heard of urban planning in undergrad. When I finally learned about it, I decided that this was the right thing for me to do and shift. And boy it was, it really changed my experience traveling to international cities because I did all this international PR travel pretty young, but I didn’t have the urban planning training.

Melanie Piana (8m 7s):
You know, I just went there and partied and you know, transited and explored and was a young person just exploring the world. Whereas now I can’t go to a city and not see their ballers and the way the street’s designed and how people are interacting in a space and just being an observer and wondering what is making the space work well and what could make the space work better. And that is sort of what the training I’ve had over the last 20 years of my career that I parlay into my role as mayor.

Jeff Wood (8m 38s):
You know, I wish we had more educational opportunities to share with young people that urban planning is a profession. I had the same experience that you did. I went to school at the University of Texas at Austin and I, you know, got into geography and that was like the field that I was interested in. And then sitting in class with a friend, he was like, well, do you wanna keep doing this? And I was like, well yeah, that’d be cool. You know we, we have urban geography. But I was like, I don’t really know about geology or those other things that we cover in part in in the geography school. And he is like, well there’s this other thing in architecture called urban planning. You could do that and focus on cities. I was like, what? You can do that? And so I feel like a lot of my schoolmates at grad school at Texas and you know, people that I’ve met along the way, they met urban planning later on in life.

Jeff Wood (9m 21s):
And I think that that’s something that is unique almost to the profession because I feel like not a lot of people know unless like their family members or parents or somebody else was involved in planning, they don’t know that it exists until, you know, they see that, oh there’s college classes about this or there’s a a grad program about planning. And so your experience kind of mimics mine in that way.

Melanie Piana (9m 42s):
I had to do informational interviews when I decided to go into urban planning, one of the impetus was my best friend left this region to go to Chicago because she did not like to drive and she wanted to live a transit accessible lifestyle. And so I decided that I needed to figure out why when I started realizing and putting, putting the puzzle pieces together or why do I drive so much here in southeast Michigan? Why is that my lifestyle choice? When I started to apply to grad school, I actually had to do informational interviews and I sent out, you know, emails to my closest friends.

Melanie Piana (10m 23s):
I’m like, do you know anybody in urban planning? Because I do not and I need to talk to them to see if this is the right shift for me. A career shift. And then obviously it was and I got connected to some great people.

Jeff Wood (10m 38s):
That’s awesome. Well now you’re the mayor of Ferndale, Michigan. Can you tell us a little bit more about the city and a little bit more about how it’s situated in the greater Detroit region?

Melanie Piana (10m 46s):
We like to say we’re fabulous Ferndale. It’s been that way a tag for a long time. Ferndale is four square miles. We’re 20,000 people. Our median age is around 35. We are the largest L B T community per capita in the state of Michigan. And we also have one of the largest LGBTQ community centers called Affirmations. We are, I would say a strong activist community. We have a lot of great residents and business owners who get involved and contribute to the progress of our city. So much so I’ve had other elected officials say it’s great how easy it is to get people involved in your community.

Melanie Piana (11m 33s):
So I am thankful for our, our residents who have helped change the trajectory of Feil over the course of decades to be sort of a, a leader in a lot of progressive changes for communities, whether it’s designing public space, mobility or transportation. We really have tried to become a welcoming inclusive community and we always say you belong here. And we really try to live those values as a city government.

Jeff Wood (12m 4s):
What’s the transportation landscape like?

Melanie Piana (12m 6s):
Our region has multiple transit agencies. We have smart regional bus service, which serves the entire region well entire three county region, Macomb, Oakland and Wayne County and goes into Detroit. DDOT is Detroit Department of Transportation and the city of Detroit is required to provide transit services in their city charter, which is why VDOT exists. We also have the Q line, which is a six mile street car. It’s 3.3 miles one way and you add it up. So I guess it’s 6.9 miles round trip. So we have lots of different transit systems, I would say created at a time where demand for transit was needed.

Melanie Piana (12m 54s):
But the way I, we structured our transit systems here, I would say has always been defined on, I would say racism and who, who gets access to transit, who pays for it and who doesn’t. And I think over the years and as demands have changed, some of these ways that these systems have been created are now some of the challenges facing governance challenges facing the region in terms of providing more frequent and reliable service. We have under-invested and I would then any other region in our transit system and we really just need to get people to work into healthcare, access into school.

Melanie Piana (13m 40s):
And people have a really hard time doing that and our system is really inequitable across the region and I’m excited to be a part of the change. I start my new job on Monday as the program director of the Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan. So that’s something I care deeply about and we’ll be diving more into the specifics of all of that

Jeff Wood (14m 8s):
Of course. And there’s recently some funding measures passed as well.

Melanie Piana (14m 12s):
Oakland County recently passed a village that provided all communities in Oakland County to contribute to bus service. So there are multiple smaller transit agencies that are serving North Oakland County communities in the smaller communities that are underfunded as well. And this Oakland County all in for cities is a way to equalize funding for those communities. So I used to be the chair of the Oakland County Public Transit Authority, which was created in the nineties to represent the 13 communities that were opt in.

Melanie Piana (14m 53s):
Only 13 communities out of the 62 communities of Oakland County for over 30 years were paying for regional bus service for smart. And so the Oakland County Village was really ending that inequitable approach to paying for transit service. So while the 13 communities, we didn’t pay more millage, we are status quo in what we’re paying as well as the service. But the county is expanding and connecting those other service providers to the broader regional transit picture. So it’s a step forward of progress that I think will be good for Oakland County in expanding transit service.

Jeff Wood (15m 40s):
Can you explain the millage to me? It’s a term I hear when I look at, you know, ballot measures across the country, but it’s something that I, I’m not sure I quite understand is that, is it sales tax? Is it a property tax, is it the property tax sort? Other tax,

Melanie Piana (15m 51s):
Property tax. And the Oakland County Board of Commissioners are the body, the governance body that approves to put it on the ballot.

Jeff Wood (16m 0s):
Cool. Well let’s talk about the Woodward in the room. I wanna talk about Woodward Avenue. It’s a state highway, bisector city and I imagine it has big impacts on how Ferndale and other cities along the way and as well as Detroit do things because it’s such a kind of a main artery for the region.

Melanie Piana (16m 19s):
Yeah, Woodward is the spine of the region. It is 26 miles from downtown Detroit to downtown Pontiac. I believe it spans 13 communities. Ferndale is at sort of like the apex of it at eight Mile in Woodward, which is the border, the north border of the city of Detroit. And as you said, it is eight lanes of highway that bisects not only downtown Ferndale but downtown Birmingham and really poor decisions made decades ago about the city of Pontiac. They created a loop around downtown Pontiac on Woodward that bypassed the downtown.

Melanie Piana (17m 0s):
And fortunately the city of Pontiac will be removing the loop in 2020 25 and putting back together more of a connected street grid that supports connecting people into their downtown from all of their streets and not this just big grand loop around.

Jeff Wood (17m 19s):
So Woodward Bisex the city and you said it’s eight lanes wide?

Melanie Piana (17m 22s):
It is eight lanes wide. That is the typical end state highway. We are also bisected by eight mile, which is also eight lanes. So that is the south border of Ferndale at the Detroit North end. So we have 16 lanes of highway that really define our community. Woodward cutting through the heart of our downtown and then eight mile defining our southern border. And it’s intensive to have 16 lanes of highway in your community, but the number one barrier and safety concern with our residents and business owners is crossing Woodward at our heart of our downtown at Nine Mile in Woodward.

Melanie Piana (18m 6s):
Woodward was the first pay road in the United States, not in Ferndale but two miles up in Detroit at seven miles. So we really are here talking about innovation and pavement and innovation and road design. And where we are now in the city of Ferndale is helping to evolve it to modernize Woodward to better serve the residents. It has a long history, we wanna acknowledge the history, but the design of Woodward is no longer providing the types of needs that the community and residents want, particularly crossing nine and Woodward. The pedestrian traffic lights are too short.

Melanie Piana (18m 47s):
I call it the Woodward run. There’s five to eight seconds at the end of the countdown where you can literally see most people pick up their gate and or run to finish crossing nine in Woodward and one traffic light. We also have only five major crossings, so the crosswalks are half mile spaced apart. And when you’re in a walkable community, that is really not enough crosswalks, but that is gonna be for future planning under reconstruction. Right now we have orange barrels on Woodward because we created a project called Woodward Moves and it has aligned with NDOs repaving schedule.

Melanie Piana (19m 30s):
We started in 2018. It took four years to get the safety improvements added on to the repaving schedule with the support of an Ndot grant as well as a transportation alternatives program grant through which is the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments. So working with my stellar urban planning staff and my city manager and the city manager with support of the city council in Pleasant Ridge, two cities went in to apply for these grants to put safety improvements on Woodward. What we’re getting is better crosswalks, better bus bump outs. We are getting a lane reduction retaking one of the curb lanes and putting in protected bike lanes with parking.

Melanie Piana (20m 18s):
So there’s gonna be curb bike lane, delineators, and then parking and then a travel lane on each side. So, and it’s gonna be a two-way cycle track because the eight lanes are one way, four lanes north and four lanes south. So we are going to be also having our first bike traffic light at nine Woodward as well.

Jeff Wood (20m 39s):
That’s really awesome. And I wanna talk about kind of the process of getting to the point where you’re at now where you have this amazing kind of cross section of a street and then you implement a road diet. Ferndale, it seems like, from my understanding at least, has always been thinking about road diets and, and how you can kind of improve the streets at least for the last, you know, 10, 20 years or so. And so I’m wondering what the inflection point is at which you talk to Mdot about actually making a change to a state highway like that.

Melanie Piana (21m 7s):
First I want to say how did we know we had the support from residents and business owners in 2018 to even ask and for delaying the road project, the repaving project they wanted to repave in 2020 and thank God they didn’t because that was the year of the pandemic and I can’t imagine a complete repaving during shutdown. So I think we dodged something even more critical by asking them to delay the repaving. But what we have done with the communities along Woodward, at least from Ferndale to Pontiac in Oakland County 2013 and 14, I helped create a Woodward task force of elected officials where we started working together to say how can we advance some of our common shared goals.

Melanie Piana (21m 57s):
It led to a complete streets plan for all of Woodward from Detroit to Pontiac. It was adopted in 2014 and then we received a federal transportation administration grant for an alternative analysis of 2.5 million that unfortunately did not get invested in after the 2016 regional transit bail went down by 1%. Those two projects required intensive public engagement and we also updated our master plan twice in this 10 year period. We also had two versions of our non-motorized plan started one in 2000, I think 1213 and then updated again in 2018.

Melanie Piana (22m 40s):
We also did a bike in pedestrian safety audit in 2019. So we had ample evidence that the concerns that we’ve heard from our residents and business owners was going to be supporting a request from MDA or two MDA to delay paving and then work with us to apply for grants. Some cog, the staff there were instrumental in helping guide us through mdot S required road diet checklist, which is a pretty lengthy process that they require cities to show that the delay in traffic flow won’t be intense and create more backup and congestion on Woodward.

Melanie Piana (23m 24s):
Cities are required to pay for those studies independently to show that you are going to meet the requirements of mdat. So while it’s an intensive process has been supportive and changing what they typically would say no to, and I think we are, Ferndale is a pilot city in many respects on how to do this differently and we have other cities now along the Woodward corridor looking at doing the same. Going through the road diet checklist, which is a specific requirement by mda,

Jeff Wood (24m 1s):
How important is it to get those policy goals aligned with the, the budget priorities and timelines? Cuz you said that MDOT requires the cities to pay for, you know, any improvements that you make outside of a a regular repaving. So I’m wondering like how, well

Melanie Piana (24m 15s):
Hang on, they make you pay for the studies to prove that you can do a road diet as part of this checklist. So the consultants, the traffic studies, those are the expenses where the city has to take on through their process. And then once you do and they say, okay, then you apply for the grant funding and go through that process. So this process from asking them to delay to actual barrels on the ground was 2018 to October of last year. There’s two phases of paving, so it took a long time.

Jeff Wood (24m 48s):
The traffic on the street, I think I read formerly around a hundred thousand cars a day and now it’s maybe around 40,000. Is that the correct numbers?

Melanie Piana (24m 56s):
42,000, yeah. Really access capacity.

Jeff Wood (24m 60s):
So that makes it easier to, you know, kind of sell the road diet as a, you know, an optimal solution for the city.

Melanie Piana (25m 5s):
Correct. We also have a term, we don’t call it a road diet, we call it a lifestyle change. That’s part of our, our messaging who wants to be on a road diet, Jeff, who wants to be on a diet? No one. So we really say this is a lifestyle change because this is something we’ve been doing on all of our major corridors in the city of putting the bike lanes in and the investment that we’re getting from it, from private investment. We have business owners, particularly Ferndale Project Brewery, you know, they moved here and set up shop as a brewery because of the bike lanes on Livernois and connectivity to De Detroit, which is also has beautiful protected bike lanes on the other side of eight Mile on Livernois.

Melanie Piana (25m 52s):
So we really have tried to make better connectivity to our neighbor in the South Detroit and it’s being noticed by entrepreneurs and seeing that as an investment opportunity to support their business long term.

Jeff Wood (26m 7s):
Tell me more about the bike infrastructure in the city because I, I understand that you know, folks even move to Ferndale because of the walkability and the bikeability of the place and the ability to get around without a car. You hear that from folks who are wanting to find a place to live in the region and they’re like, oh I wanna pick that place cuz that has all the things that I want.

Melanie Piana (26m 27s):
Oddly enough, the city manager in the early 2000, the former city manager put down a white stripe and called it a bike lane and it was the first white stripe bike lane in the region and it caused a lot of consternation and news saying, what is Ferndale doing? But it was the courageous move at the time where there was no complete streets ordinances in place. And that is where I think the innovation that the local government was supporting because having a city council support a city manager who does that means the policy change just by putting in a white stripe paint down. So that is really in the early two thousands is where I came into the scene in 2009, I got elected and really started saying, okay, if this council had the courage to do that, then me as a council person, I need to elevate their legacy and do and build on what they started.

Melanie Piana (27m 22s):
And that is kind of how I’ve seen my role on city council from what I inherited from the leaders before. In 2012 when I, my second year in, I led a Complete Streets ordinance in the city. I had some help from my planning commission members and really help get that over the finish line. And that’s when we started changing the culture in the Department of Public Works, which if you don’t have of your department of public works on board with Complete streets infrastructure, that it’s really hard to pair up the planning of actually implementation. Over the years I’ve been so impressed with our city staff because they have created this, what I call grant writing machine of doing the policy and plans and taking what’s in the master plan and the non-motorized plan and using this complete streets and leveraging that and saying, these are policy decisions that council has supported.

Melanie Piana (28m 20s):
Let’s find out how do we bring more grant money to offset the implementation of these investments on safer street infrastructure. And so that is really how we’ve been able to make it work because the city of Ferndale, we’re a small city Michigan disinvest in local government through revenue sharing and doesn’t pay enough. And so small cities are always looking at to offset installing and implementing safer infrastructure. We could never do these bike lanes on our own. Almost every bike lane in the city protected bike lane in the city of Ferndale has been offset by grant funding.

Jeff Wood (28m 57s):
Streets are more than just transportation, obviously there were runoff is collected, they interface with the surrounding environment. There are conduits for sewer pipes and rights of way for power and those types of things. How do you think we should be looking at streets, given all of you know, the improvements that you all have made in Ferndale over the many years?

Melanie Piana (29m 15s):
Well, I always think of streets as the skeleton of, you know, a living community. You need to take care of the echo skeleton and that is what is underneath your streets. That is what your streets are. And if they aren’t unhealthy, then it will reflect into your community about how people are interacting with each other because of the type of access they have to get around and how comfortable they feel using that infrastructure to get around. We have lead pipes here. We are actively trying to change them over. We’re an older community so we understand the health implications about lead service lines.

Melanie Piana (29m 57s):
So we are paying attention and contributing more than we need to by state mandates to change over our lead lines sooner than the deadline that the state has provided. So we’re doing lead lines, we’re doing stormwater infrastructure planning more trees, which is something that we desperately need on Woodward as an example, Woodward median is very large and we’ve done a tree inventory and 76% of our trees on Woodward are in the median. And the median cannot be used by people and that won’t allow people, it’s not a park, it’s just a median to get across the road.

Melanie Piana (30m 39s):
But that is where they have invested money. Mdot has to beautify an eight lane corridor when only 26% of the trees are on the sidewalks and the sidewalks are so narrow that we can’t put in tree wells to actually do more tree infrastructure that would beautify the experience of actually walking on the sidewalks and trees increase the amount of revenue businesses can get. So when you look long term at reconstruction of Woodward, the goal is wider sidewalks, but that is probably a decade away, but put planting the seeds now. So when you look at holistically of your infrastructure, getting back to your question, you gotta pay attention to all of it.

Melanie Piana (31m 24s):
It all matters. I also see big changes in EV infrastructure. We’re one of the few cities in South Oakland County that actually have an EV ordinance to help take advantage of all the EV money coming out of the state as well as the Inflation Reduction Act. Ferndale is about to put in 10 more in partnership with a dealership and GM who it’s a rebate program and we’re going to start putting more BB charging stations in our library, public parking lot and one of our other main parking lots downtown. And we built a parking structure unfortunately during the pandemic, but we have six new charging stations there as well.

Melanie Piana (32m 12s):
Our residents are very community MI or climate focused. I helped set a carbon neutrality goal when I became mayor and became part of Climate Mayors and Leys Race to Zero. We have many people here who are driving EVs and plan to switch. And so when you look at mobility, when you look at transportation, it’s not only bike lanes, but it’s also planning for the transition to EV infrastructure. Also for, we also have regional bike share through Mogo Detroit. We are connected now to the city of Detroit and four other cities through this regional bike share system. So EV infrastructure, regional bike share, I see more people riding e cargo bikes and e-bikes and Ferndale and our bike racks are now too small to handle some of these new larger bikes.

Melanie Piana (33m 5s):
We also have curb management changes. We have a lot of drop offs, pickups with our restaurant bar service. So when you look at the whole picture and totality, we have changing needs, we have changing technology and I foresee that is going to be more pressure on the infrastructure that we have. Longer term, I have eter companies who wanna come in and I’ve said, wait until we’re done with the Woodward project because nobody wants to deal with orange barrels and scooters on sidewalks that are too small to handle that type of scooter population. So the demands are increasing of being a little bit more agile with how you’re dealing with mobility.

Melanie Piana (33m 51s):
And it all comes back to infrastructure. It

Jeff Wood (33m 54s):
Also kind of points to some coordination issues because you are a small town, you’re doing all these things, but you know, you have the towns around you. And I’m curious, you know, how that works out where you’re building a bike lane and does it end at the, at the end of the city, you know, where the city ends or you know, you have a, a wonderful new bike room that you’ve, you’ve created where people can get to the, to downtown, but, but you know, if people wanna come from outside the city, do they have to kind of navigate harsher streets to get to the the beautiful streets of Ferndale?

Melanie Piana (34m 21s):
I am so grateful that Ferndale is part of a multi-jurisdictional collaboration of cities. We got a safe streets for all grant, the planning grant between nine cities in South Oakland County from Ferndale, Hazel Park, Madison Heights, Oak Park up to Berkeley. We are really looking at how do we need to change our complete streets policies, but also how do we better align our connection points on safe street infrastructure investment. We are going through that grant planning process now, so I will have more information later about how we’re going to do that.

Melanie Piana (35m 5s):
The important point is that these cities recognize we need to do more together and that is the goal of improving safety across jurisdictional lines because people commute, people travel, they visit and they don’t care about the jurisdictional lines. They just care about getting safely to their destination. And that is where we, I go back to creating safe connections between communities is really important. We also have another grant coming for planning for a nine mile from Hazel Park to Southfield. So going east to west through another set of, I think five communities to look at how do we create nine mile more of the greenway connecting us east to west.

Melanie Piana (35m 49s):
So that is underway as well. So lots of different planning efforts, hopefully positioning us to go after safe streets for all phase two of implementation funds as a collaborative group of cities.

Jeff Wood (36m 2s):
You mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act, but then there’s also the infrastructure bill, the I I J A as a, I guess the acronym goes. But how much do you think that the infrastructure bill will change how cities like yours kind of apply for federal money or, or get access to funding that can actually help you do all the things that you’re trying to do in the city, but also with your partners in surrounding cities?

Melanie Piana (36m 22s):
One of my highlights leading up to the passing of the I J A bill was presenting to transportation Secretary Pete Butti Hedge through the National League of Cities. For the last four years I’ve been on the transportation Infrastructure Service committee representing Ferndale Promoting Infrastructure Week. Unfortunately we had one successful one where it led to an actual passing of a bill. The importance,

Jeff Wood (36m 47s):
The joke, yeah,

Melanie Piana (36m 47s):
Yeah. The importance of that bill and the investment really opened up for small cities is the transportation and block of grant funding, which provided more flexibility for small cities to apply directly for these funds and not having it redistributed through the state. So many cities through this process, through the National League of Cities said, Hey, we wanna make it easier to access funds and not have, you know, the state being a gatekeeper. Where I see the policy changes more progressive in the communities looking to do complete streets and improve safety reduced crashes and death taking on the safe systems approach, which the state of Michigan has too.

Melanie Piana (37m 32s):
But I think the cities did it earlier than ’em. And so really what I think you see is a federal policy reaffirming what these cities have passed, asking for all along and more flexibility in how they can design for safety. Whereas there was a lot of engineering restrictions of you couldn’t do those things because you would restrict the level of service for car travel. And the idea now is shifting and allowing for more flexibility and multimodal planning so that biking transit and other ways of getting it around are included in the assessment and evaluation for street redesign

Jeff Wood (38m 13s):
And your time as a planner and a and a public servant. Is there anything that you’ve been surprised about during your process to get things done?

Melanie Piana (38m 20s):
I have always been surprised by the emotional tie to parking Through all of this. The fundamental engagement in outreach is about parking, whether you’re trying to do affordable housing or Woodward is losing 65 to 70 parking spaces on street parking because there is a driver safety problem coming out of the side streets because Woodward is at a 30 degree angle and when you inch out, you have to inch out and sit as a driver in the crosswalk on the side street. But when you inch out, you can’t see past the first parked car.

Melanie Piana (39m 0s):
So it really is a sightline visibility issue. So having those conversations about if we want improved safety, we need to have trade offs with parking. And fortunately our residents are saying safety’s important and our business owners, some of our business owners are skeptical. And that’s okay, that’s part of the process and we will make adjustments where we need to. But I think parking has probably been on the hardest topic. I didn’t know I would need to become really adept at understanding the implications of parking, the cost of parking, the cost of parking on new housing projects, and taking residents and business owners through those conversations and process and education and learning.

Melanie Piana (39m 46s):
It really is intensive and I see it happen at every community along the Woodward quarter.

Jeff Wood (39m 52s):
Do you have any words of advice for folks who might be interested in running for office for their first time or thinking about even going to planning school?

Melanie Piana (40m 1s):
It was not in my cards to run for city council. I was in Urban Planning school. I moved to Ferndale pretty much the same weekend I started going to school and I immediately signed up to be a volunteer on our downtown development authority because I wanted to become a better urban planner. I decided that I needed to learn how the city functioned from the downtown standpoint. And I did that for five years and I got appointed by the former mayor to the zoning board of appeals. So I understood that process. So as a volunteer on two things in the city for five years, I was finally asked to run and I was skeptical, but I’m so glad I did it because it has been the most wonderful thing that I’ve ever done.

Melanie Piana (40m 46s):
And I now encourage more professionals, economic development, urban planners, designers, or architects to run for local office. We really do need change agents with that type per perspective on city councils. Everywhere. I inherited my spot. There was another urban planner from Wayne State onto city council who recruited me. So you just never know what will happen and you know, keep your possibilities open about running for council and volunteer and understand and build relationships in your community.

Jeff Wood (41m 22s):
So your term is up, are you finished with elected office?

Melanie Piana (41m 25s):
Yes, I am retiring after 14 years. At the end of the year, it’s time to pass the baton to other leaders, new leaders in the community. And I am excited to move on to my new job at the RTA and walk away with some proud accomplishments on city council and as mayor and the city of Ferndale, it’s visible. I can see them and I’m pretty proud of them.

Jeff Wood (41m 52s):
Yeah, I would be too. It’s pretty amazing accomplishments. Well, where can folks find you or find out more information about Ferndale if they wish to learn more?

Melanie Piana (42m 2s):
To learn more about Woodward moves, go to woodward moves.com and you can Google Ferndale or plug in Ferndale mi.gov. Be careful you don’t go to Ferndale, Washington or Ferndale, California. Cause I get mixed up with those mayors as well. They’re doing great things in there too. I, I stay on top of the other Ferndale, but you can go to Twitter. I’m Mel Piano on Twitter. I’m also the Mayor Melanie Piano on TikTok. I teach about local government and have fun on TikTok and I’m also on LinkedIn at Melanie Piano.

Jeff Wood (42m 33s):
Awesome. Well Mayor Melanie Piano, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. Thanks

Melanie Piana (42m 37s):
Jeff for having me. I love Streetsblog