Rogers City Reflects on Growth During 2023

2023 was a year of growth for Rogers City. They put forth effort towards maintaining their Main Street Community status they recently earned, and continued as a Redevelopment Ready Community, only one of eight communities in the state of Michigan to hold both designations.

They gathered more data throughout the year to determine how they should proceed with some of those redevelopment efforts.

“So it was saying, ‘we’re ready and open for business,'” said Rogers City Mayor Scott McLennan. “Well, a lot of people took us up on that this past year and you’ve probably seen that a Tractor Supply Co. opened in town, O’Reilly’s Auto Parts came to town and said, ‘we want to invest here locally,’ and then a slew of just really cool downtown businesses.”

One element mayor McLennan highlighted was a new housing unit for families who have autistic children. They are hoping to break ground on these new buildings in the summer. Dr. Tanya Ryan purchased the land, and wants to build an autism research center in Rogers City eventually as well.

“Autism is something that is in every community with so many children now suffering from autism and as well their families, so this sort of research is so critically important and we will be hosting that research center here in Rogers City,” said McLennan.

Another element taken into consideration when evaluating what businesses or amenities Rogers City needs is residential input, which McLennan says he receives nearly on a daily basis.

“Community input is critical and we look for that, we listen for that, we do surveys, we do essentially fireside chats and listen to what people have to say, and then we do look at the data to merge those two, ‘does this make sense?'” said McLennan.

When the calendar turns to 2024, McLennan says Rogers City wants to put itself out there even more.

“We need more marketing, believe it or not,” said McLennan. “We need to market this beautiful area that we live in called Rogers City and northeast Michigan, so it needs more marketing and we need to be working on that going forward.”

McLennan also wants to look over data and figure out how to tackle the housing crisis that northeast Michigan is currently facing.