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