2/11/2020 Township Board of Trustees meeting Agenda

2/11/2020 Indexed LivePacket     - What's a LivePacket?  It's a packet with a table of contents.  You can click to jump to the individual documents.

 

- and to think, only three short weeks ago Boardmembers Otto, Chick, and Chockley assured us that nothing was even close to being sold...

1/14/2020 Town Hall LiveTimeline 

1/7/2020 LiveTimeline: Northfield Township Board special meeting about the North Village Tract Housing bidders

 

[Regarding the following summation: I wrote this with just an edge of snark.  The facts stand on their own.  They're damning.]

Long story shortened:

  • The Board plans to sell North Village Park property for a song, in exchange for cheap single family homes on doublewide sized lots, 4,400 square feet max, 1/10th of an acre.  Something like the size of the Hamburg Lake cottage postage stamps. Just enough space to park a lawn mower and stand to pull the starting rope. 

Don't get me wrong.  Hamburg Lake is a cool community, but it wasn't dropped from an overpass, cookie-cuttered into existence.  It evolved.

What makes this situation Comedy Gold?  On the Agenda also is the hiring of a new Township Attorney to replace longtime Township Attorney Paul Burns.

In other words, this genius level land deal was done without an Attorney. 

Nor has Manager Aynes or the Board brought in a real estate professional.

 

  • The DDA has changed its mind again about 75 Barker Road. Dreams of boutique retail dance in their heads. Attentive watchers may remember that only a few short months ago, the DDA insisted on demolishing 75 Barker. WTF are those people on?

 

  • Supervisor Chockley now wants to renege on the agreed upon terms of selling 75 Barker. She wants to split the parcel, to keep the town's only parking lot. The neglected 75 Barker Road Firehall, a beloved but crumbling relic of yesteryear, is to be sold on its approximately 3/8ths of an acre and a sliver of parking spaces, separately.

Context:

We, the Township taxpayers, the Township's owners, have been offered $420,000 for the 3/4 acre Barker Road building - as is.

That offer is contingent upon the offering party's success in obtaining a marijuana business license.

Is that price exhorbitant?  Over the top?  The Township has listed 75 Barker for only $275,000.  Now business is fighting to buy it.   $420,000 was the latest bid.

Right next door, to the north, less than two hundred feet to the north, our Township Board plans to sell over 15 acres of what was promised to be our Lakeside Park. That 15+ acres, twenty times the acreage of 75 Barker, will be sold to a tract housing developer for only $765,000. 

20 times the acreage for less than twice the price offered for Barker Road.  How does that make sense?  Does land plunge in value 200 feet north?

$765,000 would make more sense if the proposed North Village developer were building more than houses and a space destroying berm.

It would make more sense if the revised plans left any trees in its path unbulldozed. 

It would make more sense if the revised plans hadn't beggared the dreams now entombed in the North Village Synthesis plan. 

It would make more sense if the developer were building a real park and a real beach instead of sticking Township residents with the bill, a bill we don't understand because of our Board's refusal to plan, our Board's refusal to do any of the hard work. 

What do we get instead of hard numbers?  Chockley's handwaving.  Otto's handwaving.  Chick's handwaving.  Three Trustees are placing their pride and personal ambition above the interests of Township citizens.

Over 15 acres of real estate, what any marginally aware community would call the prime-est real estate that exists, lakeside and downtown - will be sold for a song.

In exchange for what? For the promise of property taxes that will cover less than the expense of serving those properties and those new residents.  In this case, that's worsened by the parasitism of a DDA that will scoop up half the tax increase into its own - PRIVATE - coffers to spend however and anywhere they want.  Nobody elected these people.

That's money taken from the Police and the Fire Department and Medical Rescue and road maintenance.  That's money taken away from providing services to people who are residents and given to people who aren't. 

We pay the cost of development.  Do Trustees even care?  No need - it's other people's money.  

 

  • Also on the Agenda: Raising the cost of taking a shit in Northfield Township

Every time there's a heavy rain the volume of wastewater flowing into the Wastewater Treatment Plant rises.  We're told that the cause is "infiltration."  We're told that the pipes are old and they leak. 

Apparently they only leak inward.  Leaking outward would imply that they're leaking sewage into the environment.  Apparently our sewer system is comprised of pipes that leak in only one direction.

So we've got "infiltration" every time there's a heavy rain, the only time our Wastewater Treatment Plants nears capacity for which Chockley and Otto demand this $7,000,000+ expansion tank.

 

"Infiltration" from illegally attached sump pumps is more likely.  Boardmembers want you to pay the price.

So quit lying about the reason.

 

Boardmember Bullshit is the real infiltration.