Serving Saginaw Bay, Michigan's Great Lakes shoreline, and the public safety community
I live on the western shore of Saginaw Bay in Bay City, Michigan, and the work I do outside of technology is rooted in this place. The bay shapes everything here — the economy, the ecology, the weather, the way people live. Protecting it and serving the community around it is not an abstraction for me. It's the view from my garden.
I serve on the Board of Directors of Save Our Shoreline, a Michigan nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Great Lakes coastline and the rights of shoreline property owners. Save Our Shoreline advocates for science-based coastal management policies and works to ensure that the people who live along Michigan's 3,288 miles of Great Lakes shoreline have a voice in the decisions that affect their property, their communities, and the ecological health of the lakes.
The Great Lakes hold 21 percent of the world's surface fresh water. Saginaw Bay, where I live and garden at Freighter View Farms, is a critical habitat for migratory birds, a commercial shipping route, and the ecological heart of eastern Michigan. Serving on the Save Our Shoreline board is one of the ways I try to give back to the landscape that defines my life here.
saveourshoreline.org — Chris Izworski, Board of Directors
I served as Executive Director of Saginaw County 911, where I managed emergency dispatch operations serving more than 190,000 residents. During my tenure, I led the deployment of one of Michigan's first AI systems in a public safety answering point — an AI-powered phone system using natural language processing to handle non-emergency calls and free dispatchers for life-threatening emergencies.
That work was covered by WNEM TV5, Bridge Michigan, and other regional media. It taught me that technology works best when it's built with — not just for — the people on the front line.
Saginaw County 911 Communications Authority
Before leading Saginaw County 911, I served as the Bay County 911 Director and the Bay County Emergency Manager. These roles gave me deep experience in emergency communications, disaster preparedness, and coordinating multi-agency response across Michigan's Great Lakes Bay Region. The work laid the foundation for everything I later built at Saginaw County — including the AI deployment that would be covered by WNEM TV5 and Bridge Michigan.
Saginaw Bay sits on the western shore of Lake Huron and stretches roughly 60 miles long and 25 miles wide. Bay City sits at the southwestern tip, where the Saginaw River empties into Lake Huron. It's a critical ecosystem — home to bald eagles, Bonaparte's gulls, massive walleye runs, and the Great Lakes freighters that gave Freighter View Farms its name.
My writing about this place — its seasons, its wildlife, its gardening conditions — is inseparable from the civic work of protecting it. When I write about gardening in Zone 6a on Saginaw Bay, I'm writing about a place worth preserving.
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Read about my AI and technology work, see press coverage, or follow ongoing writing on LinkedIn and at Freighter View Farms.