Below is a modified transcript of the conversation above. Peck, Michigan is easy to miss. It’s a village of about 570 people in the thumb of the state — blink and you’ll drive right through. But over the last few years, Peck has quietly become a model for how small rural communities can punch well above their weight when it comes to securing and deploying public infrastructure money. They’ve secured roughly four million dollars in grants, completed a solar project that cut their electric bill by $140 a month, replaced aging water mains, and are now looking at extending their water system to support new housing. I sat down with Tim Heiden, Peck’s Village Manager, to talk through how they did it — and what other communities can learn from the approach. The conversation was brought together with the help of Danielle Capers, who connected me with the project. Partners for Public Good — led on this work by Dr. Karl Hoesch — has been working with Peck on structuring and communicating their procurement process, and that partnership is a big part of what makes this story worth telling. Together, they were able to successfully apply for, win, secure Federal funding, and procure a qualified contractor to carry out the work. This is how change starts. Right now, Peck, MI, is the gold standard for procurement reform across the entire United States. The Project Sam Sklar: Can you give a quick overview of what the project is and where it came from? Tim Heiden: In 2023, I applied for a Congressional Spending Program grant through Rep. Lisa McClain’s office (MI-09). The original grant amount was $762,000, with a total project cost of just about a million — we had to come up with a $176,000 match. We’d already secured a couple of other grants, but we were finding it tough to get bids. We’d only get one or two, so the pricing wasn’t great. The project involves replacing some older, smaller water mains for about two and a half blocks in the village and then extending our water system another two and a half blocks so we can support some new housing development and run water services out to one of our parks. SS: And so what I’m hearing is this was an EPA grant, used to replace and extend water mains — but that the really interesting part of the story is how you rethought procurement. Where did that start? TH: When I got the EPA grant, I got a cold email from somebody at Partners for Public Good. It piqued my interest, so I reached out, and we sat down and talked. It made me realize that we’d been relying on the old way of doing things — we had an engineering firm post bids on BidNet and the statewide procurement sites. Some local contractors didn’t even look at those unless I called them directly. And honestly, I didn’t have a lot of contact information, because the village hadn’t had a manager before 2022, when they hired me. For years, things were run by a council that met once a month. There hadn’t been any major infrastructure projects done in probably fifteen years or more. How Tim Got Here SS: Was the hesitancy in the past because the town felt like it didn’t have the internal capacity to manage a grant this large? Why 2022? TH: In 2018, a council member approached me about filling a vacant seat. I was hesitant — I was busy doing other things — but they pestered me for about two months, and I finally said yes. Once I got talking with our DPW supervisor, we realized there was a lot of deferred infrastructure work. I started looking into grants, and the village sent me to a two-day online grant writing course. We wrote a few smaller grants, got those, and figured: why not go after some bigger ones? At the time, I was a corrections officer working a swing shift, so I was in the village office fairly often. After a couple of years, council decided they needed a full-time manager. I was going through some medical issues that were going to force me to retire from the sheriff’s department, so I threw my hat in the ring. Since then, we just keep a list of projects and go after grants as they come up. We’ve secured about four million dollars so far. SS: Four million dollars for a population of 570! That’s punching way above your weight. And I think it’s genuinely inspiring for other communities around the country that might feel hesitant to approach state or federal grant programs with that level of enthusiasm. Too often, what we see is a game of telephone — the local community has a problem, doesn’t know who to talk to, the state doesn’t know how to talk to the federal government about what the program should look like to fund communities, and nothing gets built. What Peck has done breaks that cycle. Rethinking Procurement SS: Walk me through how the bid was structured differently this time. What changed? TH: One of the biggest things we did, working with Karl and his team at Partners for Public Good, was build out a contractor list from scratch — water, sewer, roads, sidewalk, all of it — with actual contact information. We sent a survey out to close to fifty contractors. That alone gave us useful feedback on why some of them hadn’t been bidding on Peck projects. A lot of it came down to timeline. In the past, you’d post a bid and they’d want it done in three months. That turned people off. I sat down with council and said, “If you want to not get reelected, that’s one way to do it.” The other thing was, instead of just posting the bid and hoping somebody saw it on BidNet, I was able to email the bid packet directly to contractors with a note explaining the project — where the funding was coming from, that the money was already secured, and how to reach the engineering firm for the drawings. That last part matters more than people think. Contractors want to know that the grant is locked in before they spend time putting a bid together. Sending a personal email that says, “I have an EPA grant, here’s the amount, here’s our plan,” is a completely different experience than a posting on a procurement board. It was more personalization than the standard ‘here it is, hope somebody saw it.’ SS: This is what I’d call stakeholder mapping — actually understanding the environment you’re working in, rather than hoping the right people happen to be watching the right procurement websites. The two big takeaways I’m hearing: one, be proactive and do targeted outreach to firms. These grants still have to be competitive — you can’t sole-source this kind of work — but as long as your outreach is broad enough to capture the firms that can realistically do the work, you’re already doing it better than most. And it’s not an expensive process. A week or so to compile names and contact information and do the outreach. The payoff is a more competitive bid, better pricing, and you start building actual relationships with contractors in your region. The second takeaway is cost savings that get passed directly to residents. What’s your perspective on that side of it? TH: Absolutely. I live in the village I manage. When we raise utility rates, it affects me too. I tell our residents all the time — it affects the council. I don’t take raising rates lightly. The problem is that Peck, like a lot of Michigan municipalities, went years without raising rates on a consistent basis, and now the newer generation is paying for that. Michigan Rural Water came out last year and recommended roughly a $45 increase between water and sewer. I sat down with council and said, “If you want to not get reelected, that’s one way to do it.” We compromised at $20 last year, with the plan to do the other $20 this year. But with the economy being what it is, we were able to complete this project without touching any of the funds we’d put away — so we could go another year without that increase and then reassess. SS: That’s the point I keep coming back to with this project. What the government can do here is unleash other operations. Every dollar spent well today is another dollar that can go toward a more expensive project later — and the cost of doing nothing compounds too, because inflation affects what your savings can actually buy. Residents care about this even if they’re not in the weeds on water main replacement. What they can grasp is that they’re saving several hundred dollars a year because of a government investment. That’s money being reinvested in the community. The circular economy argument. And I think where a lot of projects miss the mark is they don’t communicate these benefits clearly. Peck, with the help of Partners for Public Good, is doing exactly that. That’s what got me interested in the first place — good spending, good communications, and the people it’s actually affecting. Lessons Learned and What Surprised Them SS: What surprised you during the process? What came up unexpectedly that changed how you engaged with partners and stakeholders? TH: A lot of it was just making contact with contractors. Peck hadn’t done any major utility work in a long time, so we’re not on anyone’s radar. Some of the local managers around me and some of our commissioners used to say, for years, Peck did nothing. And now we’ve completed a solar panel project at the community center that reduced our electric bill by about $140 a month. We’re looking at CDBG funds through the Michigan Housing Development Authority to extend sewer to eight new housing units — units the developer doesn’t have to pay to connect. If we get another eight units on the same system after that, we spread the cost of the infrastructure across that many more customers without raising rates. The biggest thing was the feedback from contractors who said they’d seen Peck bids before but figured they never got selected, so they stopped looking. By reaching out personally and walking them through what we’d actually built over the last few years, I thin
