Township Government Plans to Change the Master Plan: Why?

On Tuesday, August 6, 2002 at 7p.m., the Elmwood Township Planning Commission will accept public comment on a proposal by Chairman John Gallagher to amend the Elmwood Township Master Plan.  What is going on?

Briefly, the Elmwood Township Master Plan contains as one of its major themes the desire of the citizens of Elmwood to preserve the rural character of the Agricultural / Openspace District of the Township, and to ensure that new development in the Township proceed in an orderly fashion, with new neighborhoods being created close to or next to existing higher density development.  In this way, Elmwood will be able to avoid the kind of sprawling, haphazard development that follows when high density developments are randomly set down in agricultural land, with all the attendant problems of traffic congestions, higher requirements for services, and higher taxes.

One of the key strategies in the Master Plan to avoid this kind of sprawl is to limit high density developments to those areas which can be serviced by public sewer and water.  Beside protecting ground water resources, this rule ensures that development must proceed in an orderly fashion, from the developed areas of the Township outward.   While allowing for growth and development, it controls and guides that development.  According to the author of the Master Plan, this provision was to serve as the Township's firewall ensuring that Elmwood would not succumb to the kind of random, sprawling development all too common in areas like Garfield Township or numberless communities downstate.

It is this firewall that the Chairman of the Planning Commission hopes to remove.  Planning Commission Chairman Gallagher, who also serves on the Board of Trustees, has been the leading advocate of opening the Township to development, systematically and often arbitrarily shaping the new zoning ordinance now moving toward completion to ensure that the safeguards which have been effectively used by citizens to stop developments like Lincoln Meadows will be stripped from the new document.

According the laws which enable zoning in the state of Michigan, township zoning ordinances are to be based upon a master plan.  Elmwood's Master Plan, which was drawn up after an extensive public survey and other input, should provide the foundation for the zoning ordinance now being worked on.  Unfortunately for Gallagher and his developer allies, the Master Plan as it exists contradicts their agenda for the new zoning ordinance. 

By changing the Master Plan, Gallagher and his allies hope to erase an inconvenient fact of history: that the people of Elmwood Township, acting through the kind of open, democratic process that has been all too rare in the Township today, have already made a decision about how they want to see the Township developed.  It is the responsibility of the Planning Commission to conform the new zoning ordinance to the Master Plan--not the other way around.