Norm Gruber waited thirty-two years for the chance to kick back in the late morning and sip cappuccino at a Marquette coffee shop.
He enjoyed just such a pleasure recently after retiring as Marquette’s city clerk and one-time planning and zoning administrator, posts he held for nearly a third of a century. At sixty-one, he plans to enjoy more leisurely, java-filled mornings, as well as rock hunting, bird listening and maybe even a drive across the country on rural roads with no real plan in hand.
No real plan: there’s an interesting idea for a man whose life was dedicated to planning for the city’s future under the reign of four city managers, three interim managers and about twenty different mayors.
“Theoretically, I hunt and fish, and I intend to do a lot more of that,” he said while sitting in his kitchen on an overcast morning with a cup of coffee, scratching the neck of his yellow lab Ginger and enjoying the view of the Dead River out his rear windows. “Oh, and there are lots of projects here around the house. I’m supposed to be cleaning out the basement and finishing the bathroom I’d intended to finish before my daughter’s high school graduation.” She’s now a sophomore at Albion College.
Gruber was born in 1944 in Utah. His father, born and raised in lower Michigan, was active duty in the Army at the time and stationed in that western state. Gruber’s mother is an Upper Peninsula native from Hancock.
His parents met when his father attended Michigan Tech in Houghton. They married and Gruber’s father graduated from MTU. That was during the depression, Gruber said. Jobs were scarce and after a few short-lived careers in manufacturing, Gruber’s father made the move from Army Reservist to full-time military.
The Army sent him to Africa. But a bout with malaria sent him back home. Gruber’s parents moved often during that time before settling in Grand Ledge, where Norm grew up with a younger brother and sister. After high school, Gruber attended MTU for a while, then transferred to NMU, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in geography.
“I found out I couldn’t do calculus, so I gave up trying to be an engineer and became a geographer,” he said.
He went on to graduate school at Eastern Michigan University.
“I was originally intending to teach college,” Gruber said. “But the bottom dropped out of the job market. About half the guys I was in graduate school with ended up in some kind of planning job, and I did too.”
Gruber worked in the planning department in Lansing for a year and a half before returning to the Upper Peninsula.
“I really liked the U.P. after living in Houghton and Marquette, and I was looking for a job most anywhere in the U.P. and this one came open,” he said.
Gruber was hired as Marquette city’s planner in July 1973, a job he said then-city manager Thomas McNabb was pressured into creating after residents expressed displeasure at what they perceived as uncontrolled growth in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
“The city grew a lot at that time—part of the baby boom,” he said. “The university grew very rapidly, there were lots of apartments being constructed and new businesses and stuff. At that time land use planning, zoning and controls were pretty lax and a segment of the community was upset about it.”
As planner, a job Gruber held until 2000, he was the staff employee for the planning commission and the zoning administrator.
“Essentially, my job was to work with the public and the planning commission to try and develop guidelines for where the city wanted to go,” he said. “There are all sorts of components to that: public facilities, transportation, housing, business, industrial, recreation, etc.”
The city has a master plan that serves as the basis for zoning laws, which are a local government’s way of controlling development. Ideally, the master plan is something that changes and grows with a municipality.
“The plan doesn’t have any teeth, as such, so you adopt zoning as an enforcement tool,” he said.
Zoning laws set guidelines for where buildings can be constructed, what type of buildings are allowed in areas of the city, how space on a property can be used, requirements for parking and other aspects of development. The city planner spends the majority of his or her effort analyzing zoning requests, conditional use permits and variance requests, and reporting to the planning commission. That person also sends out notices for public hearings and records minutes for planning commission meetings.
A year after Gruber was hired, he was given the additional responsibility of city clerk, a position he held until late 2005. As clerk, Gruber wrote the agendas and minutes for city commission meetings, published notices, ran all aspects of city elections including voter registration and was the keeper of official documents such as contracts, deeds and easements.
He saw thirty-one years of city commission meetings and recorded what are called summary minutes—an outline of the meeting contents. The meetings were recorded on video tape, too, and Gruber kept tapes for all commission meetings back to the creation of Michigan’s Open Meetings Act in 1976.
“Some years ago, the attorneys of the Michigan Municipal League started telling us to use the tape to prepare the minutes and destroy it because there were (cities) losing lawsuits after people came in and got the tapes and made a transcript,” Gruber said. “My experience has been just the opposite. [Marquette] won lawsuits because of the transcript. If you’re doing the right thing in your meetings it’s a good defense. And I view that sort of stuff as historical record.”
Gruber worked for city managers McNabb, Dave Svanda, Dale Iman and Gerald Peterson. Without hesitation he named Peterson, who resigned last fall, as his favorite.
“Tom McNabb was a good friend and a very good manager for the city,” Gruber said. “He was good at saving money. But the thing about Gerry, the thing people have no idea about, is that he worked way out in the future. He thought intensely, and usually correctly about where things were going. He had a vision for the city and I think we’re going to miss that.”
The ability to plan for and be able to predict the future somewhat is key for a city manager, Gruber said.
“If you don’t, you become reactionary,” he said. “A lot of the things that people don’t like about Marquette are things that were allowed to happen because the City wasn’t paying attention or because it didn’t have the rules in place or hadn’t planned for growth.”
He cited as an example the traffic flow at the intersection at US-41 and McClellan Avenue near Econo Foods, and the difficulty for vehicles to enter and exit O’Dovero Drive near that intersection.
Gruber said the extension of McClellan Avenue south to its merger with CR-553 and plans for extending the same road north to Wright Street are examples of good, long term planning, particularly now that the state Department of Transportation is exploring the possibility of moving US-41/M-28 south to where CR-480 is now.
Building the bike path around the city, which required numerous grants and even getting the National Guard to build a section was another smart move by the City that took long-term planning, Gruber said.
Gruber said he thinks the biggest challenge facing the city is finances.
“Proposal A and the Headlee Amendment created a structure where the very best a municipality can do is keep up with the rate of inflation,” Gruber said. “And if your costs are going up at greater than the rate inflation—health care and fuel are two big examples—you’re losing ground. Marquette has been doing all sorts of things to keep the city going without any apparent loss. But without a some new source of revenue, the city will continue losing staff and cutting services because you just can’t even hold steady.”
But for the first time in a long time, Gruber won’t be planning how to face that challenge. Instead, he’s looking forward to participating in U.S. National Forest bird counts, riding his bike and picking his way around the abandoned Copper Country mines where his ancestors once worked, looking for interesting rocks.
“My great-grandfather was killed in the Osceola mine fire in Calumet and my other great-grandfather worked in mines until the strike, and my grandfather was a hoisting engineer,” he said. “So I was always interested in the mines. I’d kind of like to go underground like my ancestors and explore some of those places, but unfortunately you can’t do much of that anymore.”
Instead, he takes trips to the Keweenaw Peninsula in search of interesting geology and occasionally tags along with the Copper Country Rock and Mineral Club.
As for that trip across the country by back roads, well, that might have to wait until Pat, his wife of twenty-seven years, retires.
Pat too is a planner, whom Norm came to know when she worked at the city. Since that time, she’s worked for Marquette County as well as other local companies, and the Central Upper Peninsula Planning and Development (CUPPAD) Regional Authority and now she’s back with the City of Marquette.
And while she’s working, well, there’s still that bathroom and basement project for Norm. And, of course, cappuccino at the local coffee shop, too.
—Matthew Williams

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