• 5-02-2016 Northfield Township Board of Trustees special meeting Agenda
• 5-02-2016 Northfield Township Board of Trustees special meeting Packet
  
  • This contains copies of two unsigned purchase agreements
• Watch the meeting with the 5-2-2016 Northfield Township Board of Trustees LiveAgenda

Issues:

A $2,000 Deposit was offered.   A $20,000 Deposit has been demanded by Seller

US-23 Right of Way issues.  MDOT plans to expand US-23 and will be acquiring easements carved out of the Van Curler parcles.  When that will or may happen is unknown.

Township Manager Fink was very concerned about the possibility of Conditional uses being overcome by voter referendum.

Three contingencies deleted by seller

• easements
• zoning approvals
• financing contingency   

Fink recommended financing.

Watch the meeting on Youtube with the 4-26-2016 Northfield Township Board of Trustees meeting LiveAgenda

This is the lake access portion of the Van Curler property.  Saying it was hard to visualize its actual extent, at the 4-26 meeting Wayne Dockett asked to have this part of the Van Curler acquisition surveyed and staked so that people and Boardmembers would have a better idea of what they were committing $329,000 in tax dollars to buying.  The Board refused to consider the Motion.  

Anyway, this is what Dockett called a "sliver of land."  It is about 223 feet long on the lake side.  It is slightly deeper than Wayne Dockett's remembrance.  Not measuring the area inside the Main Street right of way, the north end of Van Curler Beach is about 23 feet wide.  At the south end, it's about 61 feet wide.  The area outside the right of way totals about 1/4 acre.

Mouse over the map to view a larger version of this image.

The aerial photography, plat boundaries, and road easement boundaries were provided by eWashtenaw.

• Watch the April 26 meeting with the 4-26-2016 Northfield Township Board of Trustees meeting LiveAgenda

You can watch the 4-26-2016 Northfield Township Board of Trustees meeting here.  We'll be back later with a LiveAgenda and a full report.

Read more: Fink: More Debt? - Yes, Please!!!

Commissioners Dignan and Iaquinto were no-shows at tonight's discussion.  What did they miss?  They missed consideration of the process by which was finagled a Zoning change exclusively benefiting the Living Water Church.   Ken and Sam are both Leaders in that Church.   How much of McKenna Associates latest $4991.00 bill to Northfield Township Taxpayers is due to processing this special request?  No one knows; the almost unreadable photocopy of the financial ledger entry documenting that invoice does not specify the allocation.    The financials were included in the April 12 Board packet.

What else happened?  Lake Overlay zoning was discussed. 

Planner Sally Hodges' highly polished professional presentation of the Lake Overlay issue did not appear in this meeting packet.  Instead, the meeting packet contained a scan/photocopy which is as un-indexable and un-searchable as everything else in the packet.  It has that in common with all of the Planning Commission Minutes posted to the Township Website since May 6, 2015.    By a no-doubt absolutely incredibly fantastic co-incidence, that was the PC meeting at which Manager Fink admitted that there had been no competitive bids for the Community Survey.   Cobalt was the sole bidder.

Why does it matter to me that meeting minutes are published as true PDFs?  Because that is the form in which they can be readily read by the vision impaired and the form in which they can be indexed and searched on the web.  It is the difference between "transparency" used as an empty word and transparency with teeth.

• Watch the meeting with the 4-20-2016 Northfield Township Planning Commission LiveAgenda
• If that sounds too complicated, the video of the April 20, 2016 Northfield Township Planning Commission meeting is here.

Documents:

• April 20, 2016 Northfield Township Planning Commission Meeting Agenda [text]
• April 20, 2016 Northfield Township Planning Commission Meeting Packet
  
  • McKenna Associates April 13, 2016 advice on Whitmore, Horseshoe, and Wildwood Lake Overlay Zoning [scan]
  • Northfield Township Planning Commission Minutes for April 6, 2016 [scan]
• McKenna Associates' $4,991.00 invoice for ? - from the 4-12-2016 Northfield Township Board packet

SEMCOG report: Residential Construction in Southeast Michigan in 2015

MLive: Pittsfield Township plans $1.5M expansion of its greenway system, April 15, 2016