The Traverse City Business News is out with its annual "What To Watch" list for 2025, and we're highlighting a few key items in today's Ticker:

Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail's Segment 9
A controversial expansion of the Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail may be dead in the water, but 2025 will reveal the ultimate fate of the project.

One of the biggest stories of 2024 in Leelanau County was the debate around Segment 9, a proposed 4.25-mile span of trail that would have extended the Heritage Trail from its current stopping point at Bohemian Road to its long-planned northern terminus at Good Harbor Trail. That segment would have finished up the full 26-mile vision for the Heritage Trail, which the National Park Service and TART Trails have been working to bring to fruition since 2005.

However, controversy around Segment 9 and its potential environmental impacts reared its head in early 2024 and became one of the year’s key tug-of-war narratives. Last January, the local property owners group Little Traverse Lake Association (LTLA) released a study they’d commissioned from Borealis Consulting in Traverse City, which estimated that that Segment 9 location would require routing trail through sensitive dune and wetland ecosystems and removing nearly 7,300 trees. The study touched off a torrent of bad press for the trail, and caused other entities – including the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians (GTB) – to denounce the project.

All the pushback had an effect: In November, Scott Tucker, park superintendent for the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, announced the park was pausing design work for Segment 9 indefinitely. Tucker pointed to the GTB’s concerns about the trail, pledging to the Leelanau Ticker that the project wouldn’t resume without the tribe’s blessing. Tucker added that he hoped to continue talks with the Tribe in 2025.

“It's paused, and if it restarts up again, it will be in conjunction with the GTB for a new planning effort,” Tucker said.

A press release sent out by the park in November added that the existing Segment 9 design – which was set to be completed sometime this winter – would “serve as a foundation for future planning efforts,” if/when the project resumes.

New Michigan Cherry Grower Alliance Aims for Fresh Industry Narrative
2024 was one of the worst years on record for Michigan’s cherry industry. State estimates indicate that at least three-quarters of the Michigan cherry crop were lost due to unfavorable weather conditions, disease pressure, and invasive pests, among other problems.

The blast radius from 2024 makes the local cherry industry a must-watch sector in 2025, first to see how farmers will bounce back; second to see what growing conditions might look like come spring and summer; and third, to monitor the progress of the Michigan Cherry Grower Alliance (MCGA), a grassroots group launched in 2024 to identify paths forward for the state’s embattled industry.

Leelanau County’s Leisa Eckerle-Hankins formed the MCGA in spring 2024 to serve as a convener. Since then, the group has held regular meetings where stakeholders from throughout the state get together in the same room, talk about challenges, and brainstorm ways to make things better.
While the MCGA was technically up and running before the Michigan cherry sector’s dire year, Eckerle-Hankins already felt at the time that doom and gloom had become the chief narrative in the industry. The MCGA was intended as an antidote – a way to get proactive and find a path forward, rather than wallowing in bad news.

Eckerle-Hankins, a fifth-generation farmer and owner of the Traverse City cherry-centric gift shop Benjamin Twiggs, is optimistic that the MCGA will make a difference in the future. She’s particularly hopeful that banding together will give Michigan’s cherry growers more of a voice for change with state and congressional legislators, as well as with cherry industry boards like Cherry Marketing Institute (CMI) and the Cherry Industry Administrative Board (CIAB).

On the legislative side, the MCGA is after things like bigger tariffs on fruit imports, better pricing for tart cherries out in the marketplace, or other farmer-friendly policies. On the industry boards front, goals include new market prospects and better marketing and promotion.

The big-picture goal, though, is nothing less than saving the Cherry Capital of the World.

“People say, ‘Is the Cherry Capital going away?’ No!” Eckerle-Hankins said. “In Michigan, we still produce over 100 million pounds of cherries. Utah produces 35 million. So, we're not going to lose that status. But it's important for us to change the narrative. We have to look at the positives and at what we can do to move forward.”

TCAPS Revisits Indoor Sports Complexes 
2024 proved to be a timeout for talks around bringing an indoor sports complex to Traverse City. 2025 could be game on.

For years, the Traverse Indoor Sports Coalition (TISC) has been looking for a way to build indoor sports facilities in Traverse City. The hope is to provide dedicated turf and courts for year-round tournaments, practices, and league play, both for students and community members. TISC, a collective of government, nonprofit, and business partners, has repeatedly touted the potential economic, tourism, and quality-of-life benefits these facilities could have.

TISC had its biggest breakthrough yet in 2023. That year brought talks of a potential public-private partnership between TISC and Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS), wherein the two entities would collaborate to build a pair of community fieldhouses on the campuses of Traverse City Central High School and West Senior High. Had TCAPS gone for the plan, the facilities could have opened as early as this year.

But TCAPS opted not to include the fieldhouses – which carry an estimated price tag of $10 million each – in the bond proposal it took to voters last summer. When asked why the complexes weren’t a priority, TCAPS Superintendent John VanWagoner told The Ticker last summer that district needs and focus group feedback showed that the bond proposal “really needed to be concentrated on keeping our kids safe, keeping our kids warm, and keeping our kids dry.”

Now, fresh off a successful $180 million bond proposal in August and a separate millage rate renewal in November, TCAPS is revisiting the sports complex conversation. VanWagoner says there is still “a lot of excitement” around the project in the TCAPS community, noting that the district has pulled together a group of stakeholders and philanthropy experts and is currently working on a feasibility study. That study will assess how TCAPS might approach the project “from a fundraising perspective.” VanWagoner expects the results could be ready to share with the public before the end of Q1 2025.

The main goal of the study is to determine whether TCAPS and TISC could raise funds for the fieldhouses without the school district having to push through another big bond.

“I think we’ve kind of reached our capacity already,” VanWagoner said of the bond situation, noting that it will likely be several years before the district goes back to voters with another big tax-related ask. “Because of that, I think the sports complex project is going to have to be something we look at from a state support angle. Frankenmuth, for instance, got $10 million from the state legislature in June to build a sports complex. I’ve been having some conversations with our local legislators about that, because kids downstate have these opportunities, but we don’t.”

Whether the sports complexes move forward in 2025 or take a little longer to come to fruition, VanWagoner is adamant that he and the current TCAPS Board of Education are eager to keep working on the project.

A Big Year for Elk Rapids
Elk Rapids is gearing up for an action-packed 2025, with several infrastructure improvements and business initiatives on deck.

The village has long been a special spot for residents and visitors alike, but leaders there want to make it more attractive, walkable and easy to navigate in all four seasons.

First off, more improvements to the Ames Street corridor are scheduled this year. Work across all phases of the project includes sidewalk connectivity, pedestrian safety upgrades, traffic calming measures, new trees and greenery, bike lanes, new lighting and more.

Elk Rapids DDA Director John Mach says all of this work is intended to bring a sense of place and vibrancy to the Ames Street corridor, which sits across U.S. 31 from downtown and might seem like an afterthought compared to the village center.

“I think that we're going to be adding somewhere along the lines of five or six pedestrian crossways, so that is just going to make it a lot easier for mobility,” Mach said. "And one of our big (goals) is really to create more interconnectedness between Ames Street and the traditional downtown or River Street, which is hard to do when you have a highway passing right through.”

Along those lines, the village will also launch a project to update and upgrade its signs throughout the village.

The village/DDA also landed a Community Economic Development Association of Michigan (CEDAM) fellow from now through April 2026, which will allow the village to pursue a variety of business incentives and initiatives.

“The CEDAM fellow will help build capacity to take on additional projects including developing an economic plan, creating business incentives, and collaborating on launching a business incubator to promote local growth,” Mach said.

And improvements at the village marina are scheduled to kick off this year. Harbormaster Mike Singleton says public visioning sessions conducted over the last year have led to a plan to improve walkability of docks along the river and upgrade lighting, which will happen in 2025.

Meanwhile, an engineering firm is in the process of drawing up plans for much more substantial upgrades to the harbor itself, which could include a realigned breakwall to combat sand accumulation at the harbor’s entrance and the potential for new boat slips, Singleton said.  

Other things to watch in the New Year include the following (click here to read the story in its entirety):

- Benzie Wellness and Aquatic Center Capital Campaign Launches
- Conservancy’s Purchase of Elberta Property
- Garfield Township's First-Ever Township Manager
- Big Year Ahead for Freshwater Research & Innovation Center
- Train Project Chugs Along
- Kalkaska Memorial Health Center Gains Flexibility
- Fast Tests, Faster (PFAS) Cleanup
- Leelanau's 'Lemonade Bartender' 
- Leaps Forward in Fight Against Homelessness
- Trump Tariffs and Potential Impacts on Local Manufacturing
- Medicine Drone Testing