Kris Olssen of the Huron River Watershed Council will present their report on Northfield Township.  This is a follow up to the May 20, 2015 presentation and Green Infrastructure workshop.   Her report may be viewed or downloaded below.  It is large, 5.2MB.

Also on this Agenda, a discussion of the P.C. Bylaws and the format of Meeting Minutes.    This discussion was carried over from the 8-5 meeting.   You may remember that P.C. Secretary Stanalajczo claimed the authority to demand that the Minutes be recorded in a spartan, commentary-free format.  He attempted to order Recording Secretary Lisa Lemble to produce Minutes in that format.  Twenty minutes of argument ensued.  The Bylaws are included in the meeting packet so I extracted them into a separate 72 KB document, which you can view or download at the bullet-pointed link below.

Nowhere in the 13 pages of Bylaws is P.C. Secretary Stanalajczo given the power to unilaterally dictate the format of Meeting Minutes.  The Bylaws do not prescribe a format for meeting Minutes.  Here are the P.C. Bylaws adopted March 19, 2014.

Wednesday, August 19th: Planning Commission:  

• Tonight's Topics: Huron River Watershed Council report, Discussion of Bylaws and Minutes format
• Click here to view or download the Planning Commission Bylaws, dated March 19, 2014
• Click here to view or download the Huron River Watershed Council report (5.2MB)
• Green Infrastructure Planning for Local Governments - This is the Huron River Watershed Council Planning webpage.  It has links to Green Infrastructure plans of many local townships

Click here to watch parts of the meeting using LiveMinutes

Click to watch the entire Meeting on Livestream

Click here to view or download Meeting Agenda

Click here to view or download Meeting Packet

Click here to view or download the DRAFT Meeting Minutes (as extracted from the 9-16 PC Meeting Packet)

Click here to view or download the FINAL Meeting Minutes (when available on the Township website)

Between 8:46 A.M. and 9:45 A.M. Monday morning, a notice was posted on the Township website informing of the cancellation of the August 11 Board of Trustees meeting.

I had been watching and wondering when the Agenda and Meeting packet would be posted.  In the past we've had at least the weekend before meetings to view and consider the Agendas and Packets for upcoming meetings.

What's this mean?  One less summer evening spent inside watching a meeting.  This has been a beautiful temperate summer.  Every evening is precious.

That's what Trustee Chick said at the August 5th Planning Commission meeting.  It's perceptive, illuminating, and troubling.  If other board members really see this debate as a choice between growth and no growth, we are looking at a deep and apparently immoveable bias.  These are people of good will and good concience.  Is that all they see after a year of Citizens telling them that development supported by our Master Plan is ok?  Really?  

Framing the debate as growth vs. nogrowth - with no in-between, is a false representation of our choices.  The Master Plan contains a multitude of available and publically agreed upon development options.  This survey looks more and more like a fishing expedition.  The Board is gambling $17,000 on the hope that this survey will give them what two previous surveys have not.

Chick also said that "it's been a discussion in this township for twenty-some years."  Kudos for noticing that this debate over the Master Plan precedes the existence of Northfield Neighbors by a long time.

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Read more: "Biltmore is just the name we're giving to 'Do we want growth in the township or do we not want...

Meeting notes: [expanded]

This meeting began with a bang.  P.C. Secretary Stanalajczo decided that his sparse and uninformative minutes for the previous meeting should be the new standard.  He informed Recording Secretary Lemble of this in an email.  He said this was according to the P.C. bylaws but as was revealed later, he had no authority to demand any such change.

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Read more: August 5th Planning Commission