Now that you have clarified the situation, I think that many people's opinions will be quite different. First, I think it's great that you have a neighborhood radio net. In such a situation, a FRS base station-type radio, with some sort of battery backup, sounds like a good choice.

I don't have any experience with the Midland you mention.The one thing that comes to mind is whether the internal recharageable battery can tolerate being plugged in all of the time? If it doesn't have some mechanism to stop charging when the battery is full, I think the battery won't last very long if the radio is left plugged into the wall outlet. I pretty quickly killed the NiMH battery in one of my AM/FM radios this way.

I am still skeptical of using a crank for a two-way radio, so if the battery becomes empty, I'm not sure how practical it is to use the crank to maintain power since transmitting take a decent amount of power, even for FRS. But it could certainly be useful for listening to AM/FM, or just listening to FRS broadcasts, I would think.