Sam Iaquinto was referring to the D grades given to the two North Village developer proposals. 

Chick's Response?  Denial delivered at warp speed, almost unintelligible, like the chattering of an Adderall enhanced chipmonk.  Why I have no idea.  In ordinary Board meetings, on subjects Trustee Chick is confident about, she is quite capable of normal speech.  (Any fans of David Mamet in the audience?  House of Games?  Do you know what a Tell is?)

Since then one developer has revised his proposal, revised it to the point that the township taxpayers are completely on the hook for providing a park and a beach, not for the Township citizens but for the developer's 90 homes. He's also required to build barrier between the homes and the empty space formally called a park.  What pittance remained allocated for park will be diminished by this barrier. That's whaqt barriers do.

Gone are the multistory apartments intended to concentrate renters, minimize sprawl, provide a gloss of modernity, and deflect highway noise.

Gone is the Park. Gone are the "amenities."  Gone is the Beach. 

Plenty of Fireworks parking, though: 21 whole parking spaces on Barker Road. 

Gone is any pretense that this was anything but a DDA tax grab.

 

Documents:

2/5/2020 Northfield Township Planning Commission Agenda

2/5/2020Northfield Township Planning Commission Packet


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.

 

 

 

 

Here's a Live Timeline / LiveAgenda for the 1/7/2020 Special Board meeting. 

- by Jim Nelson

 

This is a LiveTimeline.

Everything in this document is a clickable link to a moment of video.  It gets you close to the moment an Agenda item was reached, a question was asked, an answer provided or a barely grounded speculation was tossed into the air to see if it would float or thrown like a plate of soggy spaghetti against a wall to see if it would stick.

This is made possible by hosting the video on Youtube.  B-Cam footage is edited in to eliminate most of the distracting camera motion you may have seen on the Livestream.  The pans, the tilts, the zoomings in and out.  With only one meeting room camera aimed toward the Board, those motions can't be avoided.

This transcription is incomplete. I handled as much as I could stand. Much remains to be transcribed.

FWIW, I've deleted the editorial asides. As on point as they may be, it is unnecessarily cruel to tell people the truth about themselves.

Planner Paul Lippens' presentation comparing the Synthesis, AR Brouwer, and Livonia Builders site maps begins here.

I greatly enhanced the Lippens segment with higher quality artwork and mattes.

Here's a portable copy. Pass it around. Watch your community leaders shuck and jive.

 

 

Call to Order

Invocation

Pledge

Roll Call

Motion to adopt the agenda

First Call to the Public

Board Member Response

Correspondence

Chockley: Moving on to the Agenda item

Belliger: Can I make a motion to entertain negotiations with Livonia Builders with a counter offer of 1.1 million?

Beliger: I can make the motion. I move to reject the current offer from Livonia Builders

Beliger: I move that we ask for a response from Livonia Builders by January 17th

2nd Call to the Public

Board Member Comments

Motion to Adjourn

Meeting adjourned

 

I've added a Table of Contents to the Board packet.

The 33 documents inside the packet are now a single click away.

The Board meets in a special session tomorrow, January 7th, to consider robbing Whitmore Lake of its park.  Thoroughly.  Forever.

But hey, if you don't care, why should I care? I don't live in Whitmore Lake.

Neither do six of the seven Board members.

 

1/7/2020 Indexed Northfield Township Board special meeting packet

 

To the packet's end I appended the original color coded scoring matrix. This was created - not before the proposals were asked for or submitted, but afterward by "our" Planner, McKenna's Paul Lippens.  It's Bespoke, a custom fit. 

Trustee Zelenock repeatedly asked for the scoring matrix to be delivered before requesting the Developer proposals. It was a necessary preliminary. Define what you want before asking for it. That's how you plan. 

The Board did nothing. Well, almost nothing: they nodded their heads. "Our" Planner took the hint. He did nothing.

Does anyone remember a less than 10,000 foot square Village Green being a requirement?  Less than a quarter of an acre?  A freaking homeowner's building lot? 

According to Lippens' post-proposal rewrite of history, it is, was, or something.  My money's on something. 

All eight evaluators of the proposal dutifully rated that sickening distortion with their 1-5s.  

That Quarter Acre Park first showed up in the Lockwood Assisted Living Apartment proposal. The overall proposal was derided by the Board. One of the deciding derisions was that Lockwood leaned heavily on the same State of Michigan low income housing grants (MSHDA) and confusing Payments in Lieu of Taxes scheme (PILOT) that AR Brouwer intends to use to build their low income North Village housing.  In what is surely a fantastic coincidence, AR Brouwer's finance guy presented for Lockwood also and in the same capacity.

1/4 Acre is a horrific diminishment of the original Park dream, the one celebrated in the banner photo above,  This park was the dream that over sixty percent of the Community - en masse - said they wanted. 

A park was what they wanted as the only use of the once in a lifetime land deal arranged by our former Township Manager, Howard Fink.  Ten cents on the dollar was the deal he arranged.  Van Curler was dead, buried.  His heirs had placed choice Van Curler property into conservancies around the county.  They apparently believed we'd care enough to treasure the land like the gift it was. 

For decades that land has been the de facto backbone of Whitmore Lake's public events.  Parking.  Tents.  Trunk or Treat.  Fireworks.  Ice Hockey Tournies.  Parade parking.  But every time we wanted to park there, to stage something there, we had to ask.  Now we didn't have to.  It was ours.

In a laughable parody of the Fireworks parking we've long enjoyed, AR Brouwer's proposal cedes us only 102 public parking spaces, less than half a space for each of your new North Village, parking constrained neighbors. 

Livonia Builders allocates 2 full acres to retention ponds.  AR Brouwer admits to only two small areas, totalling much less despite the vast square footage of roofs and asphalt with which they've blanketed your park.  Are they planning a site plan approval process surprise? 

So. Much. Bullshit.

Adding insult to injury, Livonia's two acres of retention basin area count as open space in your park. Soccer balls float, right?  Who am I kidding - with all those kids in the new housing, the fresh meat for the Whitmore Lake Schools you think you're netting.  Can't have them drowning, so it's gonna be fenced.

The Board fanboys are not even good at pretending to care about the loss to Whitmore Lake.

 

1/7/2020 Indexed Northfield Township Board special meeting packet

 

The Table of Contents is a list of the documents in the packet. Clicking on a document in the list will take you, like magic, to that document.  To return to the Table of Contents, clicking the Home Key usually works. 

Most of the documents in this packet first appeared in the 10/22/2019, 11/26/2019, and 12/10/2019 Board Meeting packets. Where better copies of the documents were available in the earlier packets, I replaced those in the Township distribution of this 1/7/2020 Special Meeting packet.

The Livonia Builders and AR Brouwer site maps are the most useful and damning of those improvements.  

The Livonia Builders zoomable vector drawing has been moved into a separate file. This eliminates the rightward displacement and shrunken document pages noticed in planning commission packets when the applicants are kind and 21st century enough to submit vector artwork for their plans.  It's easy to do in a pdf.

Don't know what I mean? It's the difference between looking at plans on a CAD system screen and looking at a photograph of that screen. The first is useful. You can examine features in detail. The second is what someone wants you to see and no more.

  

1/7/2020 Indexed Northfield Township Board special meeting packet