Supervisor’s State of the Township message: ‘Shelby Township is excellent’

SHELBY TOWNSHIP — Shelby Township Supervisor Rick Stathakis delivered his State of the Township address April 10 at The Palazzo Grande.

“The state of Shelby Township is excellent,” Stathakis said to the crowd. “We will continue to strive for that, and we will continue striving to meet or exceed your expectations.”

The township supervisor says “everyone” is responsible for making that happen, from the residents and business owners who pay taxes, to the strong Utica Community Schools system, to the developers and builders who create tax revenue and provide jobs.

“For eight years in a row we have been rated the No. 1 place to live in Macomb County and we’re pretty proud of that,” he said.

Nationwide, Shelby Township was recently recognized as a “Best Managed” community for 2025 by Business View Publishing. The distinction places Shelby Township among a group of 16 communities.

“I think the closest one to Shelby Township, Michigan, is somewhere in Indianapolis, so we’re pretty proud of that,” Stathakis said.

The township, he said, operates with two core principles — its mission statement, ‘the citizen is why,’ and the goal to always strive to meet or exceed the needs of residents without increasing taxes.

These principles, he said, help assure that the township is affordable, valuable, stable and fiscally responsible.

“Affordability, as we see it in Shelby Township is, if you want to come to Shelby Township, we’ve got something for you,” Stathakis said. “It’s really what sets Shelby Township apart.”

Whether it’s a mobile home, an apartment, a condominium or a single-family house, he said the township has a home for everyone at just about every price point.

Many developers and builders choose to invest in Shelby Township as well.

“They have, and they continue, to spend millions of dollars. They take on very complex sites because we don’t have very much green land left here,” he said.

Amazon chose to open a fulfillment center in the township at 50500 Mound Road, a $115 million investment that transformed 85 acres of contaminated brownfield land that was vacant for nearly a decade and created 900 jobs.

Niagara Bottling, he said, made a $100 million investment, transforming a precast concrete plant into a 446,628-square-foot Niagara Bottling Center at 50206 Birch Drive.

“They are great, great corporate citizens,” Stathakis said. “This is a big, big piece of success for Shelby Township.”

The township, he said, is more fiscally secure now than it has been in many years.

In 2008, when the supervisor got elected, he thought the township was about $80 million in debt. But when his staff looked through the books, they discovered the figure was actually about $129 million.

“To put this into perspective, our total revenue is $60 million dollars a year for the police, fire and our general budget,” he said.

When you’re that much in the hole, he said, you need to have a simple strategy that everybody understands and commits to.

“We said, from here on out, we are going to pay cash, we aren’t going to borrow, that’s the way we’re going to do it and we’ve been doing this since 2008. We’ve been balancing that with infrastructure needs and what have you,” Stathakis said.

The board’s efforts have now gotten that $129 million debt figure down to under $15 million.

“The key message here is we’ve made a conscious decision not to push costs into the future with taxpayers. We pay in cash, no debt, no borrowing, and no increase in taxes. We’ve done it because we’re a developing community. We’re out of space, but all that money we collected because we’ve been developing, we pushed it out and paid off our debt, and that’s how we were able to get out of this hole,” he said.

While chipping away debt, he said the board was able to retain Shelby Township’s local millage rate of 9.2999, which has remained unchanged for decades. The rate, according to Stathakis, is the lowest among all Macomb County communities that provide residents with full-service, full-time police and fire protection.

“We don’t just spend less; we try to spend smart,” he said. “We maintain service levels, we keep taxes low and we build long-term financial stability.”

And, in 2032, Stathakis said the township will be totally debt-free.

“One thing I promised my wife and our financial counselor: the day that we’re debt-free, that’s the day that I’m out of here. That’s the only thing I care about,” he said. “Once we are out of debt I think it will be nice for the next board to start over, have a clean sheet and take it from there.”