There are more fun ways to measure a year than in months, days, hours, or minutes. How about by record-breaking airport traffic, or by the impact that an unprecedented Hollywood phenomenon had on local movie houses, or by how many people took a lap around the extremely popular Boardman Lake Loop Trail? For The Ticker’s annual roundup of unique, fascinating, eye-popping local statistics, we measured 2023 in these ways and many more.

City stats

Here’s a 2023 by-the-numbers rundown for the City of Traverse City, courtesy of City Clerk Benjamin Marentette.

210: Full-time and part-time city employees, including Traverse City Light & Power. Another 95 employees are seasonal.

38: The percentage of registered City of Traverse City voters who turned out for this fall’s election, which decided matters like a fire department millage, the expansion of Brown Bridge Quiet Area, a mayoral race, and three city commission seasons. For comparison’s sake, last year’s midterm election drew a 67 percent turnout in the City of Traverse City.

6: PILOTs (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) approved by the city for affordable housing projects.

14: Graduates of the city’s inaugural City Academy program. The city’s website encourages locals to “look for an announcement for the next City Academy in early 2024.”

16: Adult-use marijuana licenses issued by the city.

3,541: Plantings done by the City of Traverse City, including 2,400 annual flowers, 300 perennials and native flowers, and 841 trees.

2,250: The number of lights that bedeck the holiday tree at Cass and East Front Street. For reference, the average seven-foot-tall Christmas tree uses around 700 lights.

9,194: Cubic yards of leaves picked up by the city. That’s enough to fill the majority of three Olympic swimming pools. (The regulation size for an Olympic swimming pool is 3,300 cubic yards.)

$11,605,451: What the city invested into water and sewer infrastructure upgrades this year.

Sports, recreation, and leisure

14: The number of Big North Conference titles won consecutively by the Traverse City West Senior High boys soccer team.

6,124: Runners who finished a race in this year’s Bayshore Marathon. According to the Traverse City Track Club (TCTC), that group included runners from 42 different states and 10 different countries – and went through 400 gallons of Moomer’s ice cream during post-race festivities! This year’s Bayshore took 1,000 volunteers to pull off.

3: Finishers from the full marathon at this year’s Bayshore who clocked qualifying times for the 2024 Olympic Team Marathon Trials, to be held in Orlando, Florida on February 3 of next year. The runners in question are Zachary Ripley (2:16:35), Noah Steffin (2:17:00), and Hannah Becker (2:36:58). In total, exactly 400 athletes qualified for the marathon trials nationwide, including 227 men and 173 women. Notably, of the 400 qualifying standards submitted to United States Track and Field (USATF) by those 400 runners, the only three qualifying times run at Michigan-based marathons were the ones at Bayshore.

7,000+: The number of visitors who hit the ice at the new Traverse City Curling Club Curling Center “through beginner classes, leagues, junior programming, tournaments, and special events,” according to Executive Director Kate Sterken. Among the visitors? Two gold medal Olympians (Canadian Brad Jacobs and American John Landsteiner, who won Olympic gold in 2014 and 2018, respectively) and one world champion curler (Debbie McCormack, a four-time Olympian who clinched the world championship title in 2003).

79: Junior curlers enrolled in the TC Curling Club’s “first-ever junior curling afterschool program.”

212,243: The number of trail counts tallied in the first 11 months of the year by the TART trail counter at Medalie Park/Logan’s Landing, which records trail user numbers for that portion of the Boardman Lake Loop Trail. 69 percent of those counts were pedestrians, while the other 31 percent were cyclists. TART also has a counter on the other side of the lake, at Hull Park, which recorded slightly different stats: 188,152 trail counts in the first 11 months of the year, with 64 percent being pedestrians and 36 percent being bikes. 2023 marks the first full year that the entire loop has been open.

10,059.6: Total volunteer hours tallied by TART Trails this year, from 357 different volunteers. 112 of those people volunteered with TART for the first time this year.

5,839.5: Miles “smart commuted” during Smart Commute TC week, which takes place during the first full week of June and encourages locals to use alternative means of transportation. Per TART, those miles equate to 2.57 tons of carbon dioxide “sequestered from the atmosphere.”

257: Water samples collected as part of the Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay’s beach monitoring program, which, for 13 weeks in the spring and summer, conducts weekly tests of 19 local beaches for E. coli contamination. Through that program, the Watershed Center posted nine beach advisories, though 96 percent of water samples came back “within water quality standards.”

2,920: Trees planted by the Watershed Center this year as part of the Kids Creek restoation project, all along the 3,000 feet of Kids Creek between Meijer and Silver Lake Road.

250+: Pounds of trash collected by 100-plus Watershed Center volunteers during cleanups of two Traverse City shorelines. In addition, BeBot – the organization’s beach-cleaning robot – sifted sand at seven area beaches and collected more that four pounds of “micro debris,” including 2,700 plastic fragments and 1,350 cigarette butts.

Travel and economic development

680,000: The approximate number of passengers who will have flown through Cherry Capital Airport (TVC) this year, when all is said and done. Per Airport Director Kevin Klein, that number is a record for TVC – the airport actually surpassed its previous full-year passenger record back in October – and puts TVC “solidly third” among Michigan’s airports, behind Detroit and Grand Rapids and with “over 100,000 more [passengers] than Flint,” which is fourth.

140,000: Visits to Traverse Connect’s Creative Coast job board, with more than 13,000 users viewing multiple job listings.

Arts and entertainment

$126,000: The final collective gross for Barbie and Oppenheimer at the Traverse City State Theatre and Bijou by the Bay. Both films released on July 21, with their polar-opposite moods launching a phenomenon called “Barbenheimer,” where many moviegoers saw the films as a double feature. The State and Bijou got in on the action, with Oppenheimer originally opening on the larger screen at the State and Barbie notching a record-setting 23 sold out screenings at the Bijou. The films swapped theaters in week three, with Barbie ultimately heading back to the Bijou in the eighth of its 10 weeks. Per Michael Moore, Barbie not only holds the record for the most sellout shows between the two theaters, but is also “our largest grossing film of all time, since we reopened the State in 2007 and the Bijou in 2013.”

For reference, Barbie and Oppenheimer are the first and third-ranked films of the year at the worldwide box office, with earnings of $1,441,817,322 and $951,996,130, respectively.

446: Season pass sales for the State Theatre’s new “TCFF Tuesdays” series during its inaugural autumn season. Moore and co. announced TCFF Tuesdays this year as a replacement for the Traverse City Film Festival.

29: Applicants who threw their names in the ring for the Traverse City Arts Commission’s Bryant Park mural project. According to Harry Burkholder, COO for the Traverse City DDA and the city’s staff liaison to the Arts Commission, that’s the most applications the commission has ever received for one of its RFPs. The Arts Commission ultimately selected artist Katherine Corden, who is two-thirds of the way done with the mural; the remainder of the project will be completed in the spring.

Miscellaneous

$1 million: The value of a winning Mega Millions lottery ticket purchased at the Miracle Mile E-Z Mart at 509 Munson Avenue on October 27. The story was picked up by publications statewide – including MLive and ClickOnDetroit – but the winner remained a mystery until late last month, when the USA Today identified Kyle Becker of Interlochen was the big winner. Becker told the Michigan Lottery that he plans on using the money to live debt-free and to have “a nice financial cushion for me and my family.”

Becker’s win marks the second $1 million Mega Millions victory for Traverse City in as many years: In October 2022, a group of 78 Traverse City-based healthcare workers called “the Heroes to Zeroooos Lottery Club” won $1 million in a Powerball drawing. Per The Detroit News, each member “received around $12,800 from the winnings.”

101: Years that a Traverse City temperature record for the date of October 3 stood before this year’s fall heat wave broke it. The previous record, set in 1922, was 87 degrees. This year’s summer-in-October weather set a new mark of 88 degrees.

11,000+: Member-owners at Oryana, as the cooperative closes out its 50th anniversary year. That’s more than double the 5,000 member-owners Oryana reported to The Ticker in June 2013 as it marked its 40th year.