Mulliken trustees approve plans for village’s first art fair, put brakes on costly road grant

An event organizer pitched Village of Mulliken trustees on hosting the community's first art fair, likely in a village-owned field, with room for as many as 100 vendors. The organizer, who runs a long-running art fair in Grand Ledge that has drawn crowds as large as 10,000 people, told the board that parking and traffic control would be the biggest challenges, and suggested pairing the new event with an existing August motorcycle event already held in the village to take advantage of that weekend's crowds. Trustees approved a motion to move forward with planning; a specific date and a name for the event will be settled at the board's January meeting.

Early estimates put the first year's cost at roughly $2,000 to $3,000, covering items such as portable restrooms (about $1,000) and possibly golf carts to shuttle attendees between parking and vendor areas. The organizer said she could likely secure an $800 radio sponsorship and suggested the fair could double as a fundraiser for a local charity. Trustees agreed to let the organizer use village-owned land for the event and discussed the possibility of closing nearby streets to handle the expected traffic.

On the financial side, Treasurer Kelli Waldo reported the village currently holds about $185,000 in its major street fund and roughly $100,000 in its local street fund — a combined $285,000. That's a concern because a state road grant the village is pursuing requires a local match of up to $250,000, and the engineering costs for the project were now estimated at roughly $150,000, considerably higher than the $50,000 trustees said they had originally expected. Board members worried that spending the full match on top of that engineering bill would drain the street funds needed for other work, including a planned project on French Road. They also noted that reducing the size of the grant request could force the village to reapply, with no guarantee of receiving it a second time. After discussion, trustees voted to table the decision and gather more information before committing.

A bid for replacement crossover tubes at the sewer lagoon was also tabled. Trustees said only one of the tubes is currently broken and were advised to hold off on the repair for now so it doesn't interfere with other planned lagoon work.

Trustees continued discussing the future of the village's recycling program, which costs the village around $12,000 a year (and roughly $15,000 for the township). Following talks with the township, the board leaned toward putting the question to voters on the August ballot, asking residents to decide whether to fund recycling through a card- or fee-based system rather than have the village absorb the cost outright. The board also reviewed pricing from a hauler for an alternative roll-off collection option, which would carry per-ton charges of about $85 for contaminated loads and roughly $137 for processing clean recyclables. No final decision was made.

The treasurer's monthly report showed sewer repairs and maintenance spending of about $24,700, mostly tied to new fencing work, with an invoice for new gates still outstanding at the time. Trustees said the newly fenced storm retention pond area "looks totally awesome." The board approved the treasurer's report. Trustees also discussed routing questions to the village's engineering consultant through a single point of contact, since she bills for every inquiry she receives regardless of who sends it.

Trustees again thanked the village's maintenance crew for a thorough fall leaf pickup and for quick work clearing a recent snowstorm, despite a hiccup with the salt spreader. The maintenance report noted the fence around the sewer lagoon is complete except for required warning signage — an estimated 33 signs are needed along the roughly 3,300-foot fence line, spaced every 100 feet — with that cost expected to come from the sewer fund, which stands at about $215,000. Lagoon discharge was expected to begin the day after the meeting pending permit approval, and the village recently paid a $4,780 invoice for new gates at the site. Crews also repaired a generator that had developed a propane leak, cleared brush around the stormwater retention pond (with about ten large trees still to be removed this winter), and spent roughly $2,000 repairing the salt spreader after a chain broke; grates will be added to keep debris out of the mechanism going forward.

During public comment, a county commissioner attending the meeting offered his contact information to residents and trustees, said he is working to connect the village with state and county resources — including possible help with the sewer project and cooperative recycling arrangements — and shared county dispatch statistics for November, including several medical runs and a handful of law-enforcement calls in the area. Separately, the ordinance violation report noted that a previously flagged abandoned-vehicle complaint was resolved after the vehicle was towed away and sold.

Committee reports touched on holiday decorations, with plans to put lights on village buildings and possibly add candy-cane decorations downtown before the season is out. The zoning administrator reported no new zoning requests in November. Looking ahead, Michigan Rural Water will conduct smoke testing on the village sewer system December 9 and 10; the village plans to mail notices to sewer customers beforehand, at an estimated postage cost of around $170, advising residents to run water into unused floor drains to keep smoke from entering their homes, and will alert the fire department ahead of the testing to head off false alarms. The board's next regular meeting is scheduled for January 5, 2026.

How this report was produced

This article was generated by an automated pipeline, and we think you should know exactly how. First, the audio of the meeting was converted into text by automatic speech recognition — software that infers words from sound, without a human listening along. That machine-made transcript was then read by Willbot, American2Day’s AI reporter, which condensed it into the report above. No human transcribed the meeting, and no human wrote this summary.