How Townships Budget and Buy: An Insider's View | Podcast

When people think about government procurement and budgeting, they tend to think about states, counties, or large cities. Townships rarely enter the conversation. And yet for millions of residents across Michigan and the country, the township is the government they interact with most directly. It handles their water, their roads, their fire protection, their parks, and their police.
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On Episode 11 of In Pursuit, host Mike Vichich sits down with Glenn Caldwell, Township Manager of the Charter Township of Northville, Michigan. Glenn started his government career at 16 as a co-op student in the City of Novi's finance department, never left, and has spent his entire career working his way up through local government.

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He is now responsible for overseeing a township of roughly 31,000 residents, five unions, eight department directors, and a portfolio of capital projects including a recently completed $45 million essential services complex.
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What he shares is a ground-level view of how local government procurement and budgeting actually work at the township level, and what vendors and residents alike consistently misunderstand about it. Watch the full episode here.

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How a Township Funds Itself

Before getting into procurement, it helps to understand where the money comes from. For Northville Township, the primary revenue source is property taxes. Beyond that, the township generates income through water and sewer rates, fire department services, shared services agreements with the City of Northville, school resource officer contracts with Northville Schools, dispatch services, and parks and recreation operations.

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That last one is worth unpacking. The township and the city operate a shared parks and recreation department, with the township providing the service and the city contributing funding through an intergovernmental agreement.

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It sounds simple, but Glenn is candid about the complexity that two or three pages of contract language creates when you are trying to govern a relationship that involves shared costs, shared revenues, and questions that the original agreement never anticipated.

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"To me that should be thick. There's a lot involved. But that said, we're working on cleaning it up."

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The broader point is that townships operate within a web of intergovernmental relationships, with the county, the city, the schools, and various regional authorities, each of which has its own rules, its own funding streams, and its own priorities. Managing those relationships is a significant part of the job.

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How Township Procurement Actually Works

One of the most clarifying moments in the conversation comes when Glenn addresses a common misconception: the assumption that all public purchases must be competitively bid.

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In Michigan, a state law passed in the early 1990s required local governments to publicly bid any purchase over $20,000. A few years later, that law was rescinded. But many communities had already built bidding requirements into their own policies and kept them in place out of habit.

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Glenn explains that for Northville Township, there is no state law requiring bids for most purchases, though certain infrastructure projects over $50,000 have their own requirements.

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That does not mean the township does not bid. It does. But it also builds long-term vendor relationships based on performance and trust.

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"You also establish working relationships. And when you use a vendor and they do a fantastic job and you feel like the price is right, then you're gonna go back."

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On the question of low bid versus best value, Glenn is direct. Low bid does not always work. A contractor who bids low and then cuts corners, or whose bid did not account for something that generates a change order, can end up costing far more than a higher initial bid would have. For a township spending public funds, the goal is not the lowest number on a piece of paper. It is the best outcome for the money spent.

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The Capital Improvement Plan: How Big Projects Get Planned

Northville Township runs a rolling six-year capital improvement plan, updated every year. This year they completed the 2027 to 2032 plan. Next year they will do 2028 to 2033.

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The plan is not a binding document. It is a planning tool. Individual projects still require board approval before any money is spent. But the plan serves as a roadmap, a way of identifying what is coming, setting aside funds over time, and maintaining the flexibility to reprioritize when something urgent or opportunistic comes up.

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"You put the capital improvement plan in place as a placeholder for the funds that you have. These are the things we need to get done in the next five or ten years. But when something happens or a new opportunity arises, you shift priorities."

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Glenn gives a vivid example of opportunistic spending. A contractor was on-site doing pathway work in a park. The parks director noticed an adjacent gravel lot that was also on the capital plan and asked whether the crew could handle it while they were already there with equipment. A $40,000 budget item came in at $22,000 because the mobilization cost was already covered. That kind of on-the-ground judgment, enabled by a director who had the authority and the relationships to act on it, is what separates efficient local government from bureaucratic local government.

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How Capital Projects Get Funded

The $45 million essential services complex, which houses the new police headquarters, a second fire station, and the DPW headquarters, is a useful case study in how a township funds a major capital project without raising taxes.

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Glenn walked through the funding mix: capital reserves from police, fire, and DPW budgets built up over years; remaining ARPA funds; general fund contributions; and a $15 million bond at favorable rates thanks to the township's AAA credit rating. No tax increase was required.

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Each department contributes to its own capital fund over time by spending less than it takes in operationally and setting aside the difference. That surplus accumulates and becomes available for future capital investment. The township then tracks those funds through the capital improvement plan, matching available resources to upcoming project needs.

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One of the structural challenges Glenn describes is the board approval requirement for any expense over $20,000. In normal operations that is manageable. During the construction of a $45 million building with dozens of expenses exceeding that threshold happening simultaneously, requiring a monthly board meeting to approve each one would have ground the project to a halt.

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"Our board, also understanding efficiencies, put an accommodation to our procurement where for this project the manager has the authority to approve purchases over $20,000 so that we don't have our trades and our contractors waiting."

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That kind of situational flexibility, delegated by the board for a specific project with clear parameters, is an example of local government adapting its processes to meet the practical demands of a major initiative without abandoning accountability.

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Shared Services as a Revenue and Efficiency Strategy

One of the more interesting dimensions of Northville Township's financial model is its use of shared services, not just as a cost-saving measure but as a revenue generator.

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The township provides dispatch services, lockup, and 911 services to the City of Northville. It contracts school resource officers to Northville Schools. It operates parks and recreation for both the township and the city. In each case, the township is leveraging existing capacity and infrastructure to generate income while providing services that the partner entities need.

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The water tower project is another example of this kind of thinking. The township invested $4 million to build a second water tower that allows it to purchase water from the Great Lakes Water Authority at off-peak rates and deploy it during peak usage hours, effectively smoothing its water costs over time. Glenn estimates the payback period at four to five years.

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"You spend money to make money. I know that's kind of a unique concept in government, but it's effective."

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For vendors serving local governments, this framing matters. Township officials who think this way are not just looking for the cheapest solution. They are looking for solutions that deliver measurable value over time. A vendor who can help a township quantify long-term savings or revenue opportunities is going to have a more productive conversation than one who leads with price.

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Working With Five Unions

Northville Township has five unions covering police officers, command officers, firefighters including fire command, DPW and water and sewer employees, and clerical staff. Glenn has spent most of his career in HR and approaches labor relations the way he approaches everything else: with transparency, directness, and relationship building.

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Contracts typically run three to four years. Glenn advocates for staggering them so the township is not renegotiating all five at once every few years. His approach to negotiations is to open the books, literally.

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"It's essentially, here's the book. This is all public information. Here's our budget. You're asking for ten thousand, we have eight. The math needs to meet the math."

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He does not use attorneys on the township side of negotiations, a deliberate choice rooted in his belief that when both sides know each other and communicate openly, formal legal representation creates more friction than it resolves. He acknowledges the union side sometimes has a business agent or attorney, and that is fine. But the township's approach is to negotiate as directly and plainly as possible, writing contracts in language anyone can understand.

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Leadership Philosophy: Hire Well, Then Get Out of the Way

Glenn's management philosophy is straightforward and consistent: hire good people, set clear expectations, and trust them to do their jobs without being micromanaged.

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He meets weekly with each of his eight directors in informal one-on-ones. Some bring agendas, some do not. The conversations cover what is happening, what the challenges are, and what people need. The goal is to catch problems early, before they become bigger problems, and to maintain the kind of communication that makes formal escalation rare.

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"Give them the expectations and let them do their job. When they have the ability to make decisions without having to run everything by me, they make really good decisions. They're really effective. And then they delegate to their people and it's just a cascading flow of efficient work."

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On the question of performance issues, Glenn is equally direct. Problems do not get better by being ignored. He prefers informal conversations first, moving to formal documented counseling only if the informal approach does not move the needle. The goal of discipline is always correction, not punishment, and he is clear that allowing chronic underperformers to continue is one of the most damaging things a manager can do to an organization's culture.

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AI at the Township Level

Glenn is thoughtful about AI, neither dismissive nor uncritically enthusiastic. The township has an innovation committee led by the IT director with representation from all departments. They are working through governance and usage policies before deploying AI more broadly.

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His view on what will stay the same is clear: customer service. Residents want to talk to a real person who knows what they are doing and can actually solve their problem. No AI agent replaces that.

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Where he sees immediate value is in efficiency: reducing data entry, making sense of information that is currently scattered across multiple systems, and helping staff start rather than stare at a blank page.

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"There are so many mundane tasks, there's so much data entry. If we can get that together in some kind of AI platform, it just helps with efficiency. And people are gonna lose their job if they don't want to accept that AI is here and embrace it."

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His caution is grounded in a practical concern that every local government shares: townships hold a significant amount of sensitive resident data. Before any AI tool touches that data, the governance has to be in place to ensure it stays where it belongs.

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This post is based on Episode 11 of In Pursuit, featuring Glenn Caldwell, Township Manager of the Charter Township of Northville, Michigan. Watch the full episode for more on union negotiations, the essential services complex project, intergovernmental agreements, and how townships think about long-term capital planning.

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