Cliffs Riffs - Stuph n Nonsense

 Originally published in The Lowell Ledger 7.12.23 The Streets of Lowell – USDA Loans, Revenue Sharing, and Marijuana Taxes It is safe to assume that everyone reading this will agree that the streets in Lowell, and most other communities in Michigan, are a mess. Our recent unscientific, purely speculative, hunch based opinion would award Washington street as the most pot-holed stretch of pavement in the City. (My bet is that some other ones might be coming to your mind.) For the sake of this article, how about we pretend that Washington is the worst. Then why the heck is Monroe getting a total make-over before Washington? The USDA provided funding for the Monroe Project. Here are some other questions we can examine today: Why is Lowell borrowing millions of dollars to fix our roads? Does the USDA fund road repairs? What happened to all the money from marijuana sales in Lowell? What is the difference between a storm sewer and a sanitary sewer? And the one that seems to never go away on

  Main Steet Housing Is Changing Lives Originally published in The Lowell Ledger 7.5.23 What do you think of when the words “Flat River Outreach Ministries” (aka “FROM”) come to mind? Most of us will probably think of Food Fight filling up the Food Pantry to help our neighbors or maybe their Thrift Shop. Others may be well aware of more ways that FROM helps people in the area – from the loaning of medical equipment to helping people with their taxes. All of these are really great programs, especially when you consider that the genius of FROM is that it involves the resources of several area churches which allows it to tackle these critical issues on a much larger scale than if it were the efforts of a single congregation. For the past seven years, FROM has been tackling one of the most needed issues facing Lowell and most other communities: affordable housing. In 2016, FROM launched Main Street Housing (MSH) when they purchased five city lots in Lowell. The most visible effort to d

  Luke Marin – The King of Window Fishing Published in the Lowell Ledger 6.21.23 Spend any time at all with Luke Marin and his love of fishing will make itself known. It is no wonder that he and his wife Rachel decided to open Fish & Finn Outfitters and Consignment in 2022. Their shop is the best example of the truth that can be found in the real estate mantra of “location, location, location” this reporter has ever seen. The building at 98 East Main Street in Lowell is actually built over the Flat River. You read that correctly. Fish & Finn is one of a small group of stores on the south side of Main Street situated between two dams. The store is built on stilts over a small island. Location, location, location - Fish & Finn is the brown building on stilts over the Flat River in Lowell, Michigan. Luke and Rachel jumped at the chance to be so close to a great fishing river, but the brainstorm to actually fish out of one of the windows at the rear of the store did not come