Susan Rowe spends her weekdays keeping the U-M-Dearborn government relations office running smoothly. After work—and sometimes during her lunch break—she’s focused on a different office.
Rowe is one of six Wayne City Council members who oversees budget and services for the small, 20,000-person community in western Wayne County. Serving her first four-year term, Rowe is no stranger to public service. She also is an ex-council member for Madison Heights in Oakland County.
Rowe’s extensive knowledge of government, budgets and the legislative process not only are valuable for her as executive secretary to Edward Bagale, vice chancellor of government relations, but also were a hallmark of her campaign for city council.
“There were some decisions that had been made by the prior city council that some of the people in the city weren’t pleased with,” Rowe says of her 2003 run for office. “It made me think that maybe I could do something better. I had been on a city council before, so my learning curve would not be as great as someone starting brand new. I thought I could offer a different perspective.”
The council meets every first and third Tuesday of the month for 2-4 hours. A packet of information is sent to Rowe every Friday and she spends her Monday and Tuesday lunch breaks looking over agenda items and making calls to prepare for the meeting.
Rowe, who earns $2,400 a year for council service, says Wednesday mornings after meetings are tiring because it’s difficult to go to sleep immediately following a council meeting.
Even at home, Rowe can talk politics with her husband, former Wayne City councilman Edwin Rowe, who served for eight years. The couple met in 1985 at a National League of Cities conference in Seattle, while she still was serving on the Madison Heights City Council. He works as the chief electrical inspector for the city of Wayne, but back then they were just colleagues and friends who shared experiences as public servants.
“We never dreamed that one day we would marry each other,” she says.
Rowe started in politics in 1978 as a stay-at-home mother looking to get involved in her community by coordinating candidate forums for the League of Women Voters.
She served as president of the Royal Oak area league and then was appointed to the Madison Heights Zoning Board of Appeals in 1980. Soon after she was elected to the Madison Heights City Council.
Rowe moved to Wayne when she re-married in 1990.
She recently was appointed chairwoman of the Southeast Michigan Council of Government’s Community and Economic Development Advisory Council, which studies and advocates for legislation affecting regional development.
Prior to her three years in government relations, Rowe worked in the College of Engineering and Computer Science with international researchers who came to the University. She helped them get adjusted to the area by doing things such as setting up housing arrangements, driver’s training and professional development and English classes.
Rowe says she’s open to different people, cultures and experiences. As a councilwoman, she’s gone on ride-alongs with police officers and spent 24-hours stints at the fire department to help assess their needs as well as experience some of what they do in a day. But she says dealing with the public is her most important task.
“You have people in the community who are always there and somebody is not pleased with something,” she says. “Those are the people who keep us honest.”
