By Jim Bloch
Vast, uniformly green, weed-free lawns — trimmed and edged more closely than the crew cut on a Marine — may be their own form of tyranny.
Lawns demand that their owners water them – lawns consume more water than drinking, bathing and cooking combined – and chemicalize them with fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and regularly cut them.
The costs of lawn maintenance are often daunting in terms of the environment, straining water resources, polluting nearby rivers and lakes chemical runoff, using mowers that burn gas and emit carbon dioxide that fuels climate change, and taking a toll on biodiversity insofar as turf grass is non-native, offering scant nutrition and shelter to birds, insects and other wildlife.
The residents of Port Huron recently got a peek at the costs of maintaining lawns around the city.
At its regular meeting Jan. 12, the city council voted unanimously to extend by three years the $100,200 annual contract of Major League Landscape & Lawncare to provide lawn maintenance services at more than 150 vacant lots owned by the city; the agreement comes with option to extend the contract by an additional two-years. The company mowed the lots 25 times in 2025. “They’ve done a great job for us,” said City Manager James Freed, as heard on the recording of the meeting posted on YouTube.
The council also voted unanimously to extend by five years the contract with Clean Cut Maintenance to provide lawn maintenance services at city parks and marina properties, with five optional one-year extensions – if Clean Cut maintains its 2025 prices.
In 2025, Clean Cut mowed the properties 22 times for a total of $60,500.
“The reason you have a five-year contract with one-year extensions is that they have offered to guarantee their price for another 10 years,” said Freed. “When someone offers you a price guarantee for 10 years, you take it.”
Unless the price is higher than you would have paid in the open market.
No bid extensions?
Neither contract went out for open bidding.
Both resolutions contained the justification that “it is anticipated that bidding this contract may result in higher prices; therefore, extending the existing contract is in the best interest of the City.”
But the only way to find out for sure is to go out for bids.
Earlier in the meeting, the council received its first report from the city’s new auditing firm, UHY.
“You did save us a significant amount of money, six figures, I believe, in that contract,” Freed told UHY’s Karen Shafik, who presented the audit findings. “So, it did behoove us to bid that out.”
In June, the council awarded UHY the three-year auditing contract with a bid of $276,000. UHY underbid Plante Moran by $529,215.
Plante Moran had been the city’s auditor since 2001.
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
