Bay Shore meeting canceled, rezoning application was pulled at last minute

BAY SHORE — On Wednesday night, half an hour after the Hayes Township zoning meeting was supposed to start, Kim Fary pulled up to the township hall to a full parking lot of people and cars.

“I came down the street and I pulled around the corner and the cars were just lined up on both sides and people were just standing outside and talking with each other. It was crazy. When I got there, I was so shocked,” Fary said.

“I think that Hayes Township woke up and rallied around a historical, generational community of hardworking people and made their voice heard.”

Fary had spent the previous two hours calling and emailing everyone she knew who was planning to attend the Hayes Township rezoning meeting at 7 p.m. The meeting had been called off at the last minute because Manthei Construction pulled their application to rezone two parcels near the neighborhood of Bay Shore.

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The decision to pull the application was met with relief, as many in Hayes Township had come together to oppose the rezoning due to a variety of environmental and quality of life concerns.

Fary was helped in her efforts by LuAnne Kozma, Jim McMahon, Janet Simon and Shelley Vanwart.

While Manthei has pulled its application, it's possible the company, or a different company, will submit an application at a later time.

For now, the property will remain agricultural and in the possession of the Emmet County Road Commission.

Manthei did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication, so the exact reason for pulling the application is unknown. According to Hayes Township Supervisor Ron Van Zee, the township had been working with Manthei for a year and a half on selecting a location for an unspecified industrial project.

Van Zee said they considered three properties, at least one was already owned by Manthei. The property in Bay Shore was one of those options.

“So we went through the processes over the last year and a half of, if it did happen, where would be the best and the worst places to happen. And we consistently told them that Bay Shore was probably the last on the list, that they probably wouldn't have any chance of doing that, but we couldn't speak for the board as a whole,” Van Zee said.

“But they chose to make that application anyway. As it got closer to meeting, we saw the amount of concern, and understandably so, that the residents had. We went back to (Manthei) yesterday and just said ‘Are you really sure? You may want to reconsider this.’ And they did.”

While the residents of Hayes Township are celebrating the stop to the rezoning, they continue to be concerned over the township's master plan that was passed in 2019.

Jim McMahon, a resident of the Michigan Shores subdivision in Hayes Township, a former planning commission member and a former chairperson of the zoning board of appeals, wrote a letter to the commission prior to the meeting being canceled to express his concerns.

In his letter, he asked how Manthei planned to use the land and stated that physical use information should be required for a rezoning. He also advised the commission to revisit the future land use map from the 2019 master plan.

“Did the (planning commission) consider the health and wellbeing of the communities of Bay Shore and Michigan Shores Subdivision when changing areas on the future land use map from mixed use residential to industrial?” McMahon wrote in the letter.

One of McMahon's biggest concerns is the township’s communication with its residents.

“I believe that the township and the township organization were not listening. In fact, they never gave the community the opportunity to provide them feedback. My observation of what went on for the development of this last master plan was that there was no outreach to the community who are being affected, zero outreach. In fact, their hired consultant, Beckett and Raeder, even recommended that. I read that off of one of the planning commission minutes and they didn't heed the advice,” MacMahon said.

Fary said she hopes this success will keep the people of Hayes Township engaged and show them how serious the situation still is.

“We're very grateful, I'm so grateful. But it's still something that we have to be very vigilant about because we are incredibly worried right now. This has not been amended with the industrial zoning here. We've got the planning commission that is ready to release all the new ordinances and the master plan is severely flawed,” Fary said.

“Not just for our little area here, just the whole entire township in general. There's a lot of concerned residents not just in Bay Shore here, but throughout Hayes Township because people are getting wind of this master plan.”

According to Van Zee, during the process of updating the master plan, hired contractor Beckett and Raeder put the Bay Shore property in the future land use map. The map couldn’t be changed because of the cost of updating master plans.

“Unfortunately, when the future land use map was made, the consultant that we had, at that time, believed that you can't just cut it off at a property line, that it needs to be expanded bigger than what you think the potential is for it. And that's how it got put on the future land use map and I think it just got past everybody,” Van Zee said.

“If you look at our future land use now, any changes that are different than what the zoning ordinance is, you'll see that that happened in most of those. A fault of the planning commission that wasn't their intent.”

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A municipality’s master plan is required to be updated every five years. This is a fairly long and often expensive process. Van Zee said the township did everything it could to make its residents aware of what was happening through notices in the paper, holding public meetings over Zoom and in-person and making documents available in the township hall, the library and online.

“If you're not interested and you don't attend meetings and you don't look at the website and you don't read the newspapers, (then) there's a lot of things that people don't know about. That happens on a regular basis,” Van Zee said.

“We noticed every meeting properly in the newspaper, we have them on our website, we have the packets available on our website. They're always available at township hall and posted on the township hall. So, we've exceeded the requirements for posting by 10 times.”

The next Hayes Township planning commission meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 20 at the township hall. The meeting will also be broadcast via Zoom.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Bay Shore industrial project application pulled at last minute