Civil Municipal Magazine - Nov 2023

130 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 11 interest in additional housing. We’re starting to see it transform the community and we’re excited to see over the next ten to fifteen years how different Saginaw will look.” Ongoing projects Meanwhile, as is the case with any city, Saginaw has an ongoing list of infrastructure projects under construction. “We’re currently switching all of our water lines from lead to copper throughout the city,” Zimmerman reports. “That’s a multi-year project that started a couple of years back; we’re always working on water and sewer. We do have a few state highways that run through the city, one of them being Washington Avenue, or M-13, a main thoroughfare that goes right through our downtown. We’ve been working with the Michigan Department of Transportation, especially with some of these new medical projects that are in the hopper, to try and do some traffic calming on those roads.” “We did get a pretty large allocation from the state totaling about $33 million for some infrastructure upgrades like burying high voltage utility lines and preparing a big stretch of Washington Avenue for development. That’s going to be transformational over the next few years,” she further illustrates. Saginaw is also working on its portion of the Iron Belle Trail, a 2,000-mile bicycling and hiking route that crosses route 48 different Michigan communities from the far western tip of the Upper Peninsula to Belle Island in Detroit. “We’ve been working to make sure that every portion of that trail is separated for cyclists and pedestrians,” Zimmerman says. “And we’re very close to getting that done. We have just one more link that we have grant applications out for. If those are accepted, we will have 100 percent separated trails throughout the city.” The Memorial Cup Perhaps the most positive and powerful event that may soon help Saginaw achieve many of