Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

So we'll go ahead and call the meeting to order and we will start with the Pledge of Allegiance. Okay, welcome everybody to the September meeting of the Union Township Planning Commission. We have Pledge of Allegiance. Roll call, please.

Bradshaw.

Here. Thompson. Here. Squadrillo. Here. Brown. Here. Lapp.

Oh, I'm sorry. She's excused. Over.

Good evening.

Hayes.

Here.

Vicking.

Here.

So we'll take this opportunity to officially welcome our new member Eric Davis. Glad you're here, welcome. All right, so next item is approval of the agenda. So in your packets, you have your agenda for tonight, fairly short agenda, but we have a public hearing on the zoning text amendment, and then we have a data center presentation. Are there any, and the usual reports and so on, are there any other items that anyone's aware of that needs to be on the agenda or any issues with the agenda?

Move to approve the agenda. Second.

Okay, so we have a motion by Oliver, second by Bradshaw to approve the agenda as prepared. Any further discussion? If not, all in favor, please say aye.

Aye. Any opposed?

Okay, so our agenda's approved. Next item is the minutes. So we met on August 18th, that was our last meeting. And you have the August 18th minutes in your packet as well, starting on page three. And there were seven of us here, so I assume those people will have some sense of what took place. But in any case, are there any corrections to the August minutes, August 18th minutes.

On the last page, the time it opened, there is no 8-8. Missing a four there. Obviously, John Hayes is not the vice secretary, but that's it.

Oh, yeah. So yeah, there's a, the time on the public comment is messed up. But then, also, we want to correctly identify our officers. So They're correct on our roster that's on the all the boards. So it's correct on there. Any other any other corrections the minutes? Okay, we'll make those corrections. But we want to have a motion to approve the minutes as amended.

So moved.

Okay, is there a second?

Second.

So motion was by Thompson, second by Brown to approve the minutes from August 18th with a couple small corrections. Any discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, so the minutes are approved. Now we move into correspondence, board reports, presentations. And first item always anxiously awaited. Updates from Board of Trustees, Commissioner Oldman.

Thank you, sir. My apologies for missing the last meeting. The family was trying to juggle four open houses all at the same time, and so I wasn't able to make the meeting. But the trustees' meetings have been very active. We did approve the 2026 tax rate request resolution, which keeps the funding at one mil for operating. and 2.25 mils on the fireside. That was approved unanimously. There was a first amendment to the site lease for the water tower use by Sprint Telecom. That's been a long time lease over in the Broadway area, if I remember correctly. for their cell towers on top of the water tower. So that is staying at roughly $1,700 a month and increases annually at about 3.75%, which the current rate is about the same as what it was in the previous arrangement. It was a 25-year lease that started around 2021. 2022 and so this one will continue to extend that by 15 years. Continue to review policy governance as the board does at its second meeting each month. Last time around it was collaboration with other entities around the communities and accountability of the township manager. And that coincided with the annual evaluation of the township manager going through the process as it relates to the global ends of the board. And then just last week, we had the exciting news that's already been shared that Eric Davis has been appointed to the planning commission. So on behalf of the board of trustees, thank you for your service. And the presentation from Manager Stuhldreher, the initial round regarding the operating budget for 2027, that will continue over the next few months with public hearings and more evaluation, discussion, group study sessions, et cetera. And we'll head toward approval hopefully at the second meeting in November and be a little bit ahead of schedule. That's what I have on behalf of the Board of Trustees. Other than to mention, we do have the cleanup day coming up September 26th from 8 to 11 at Commission on Aging. So great chance to meet some of the citizens and have a chat, talk about all things that are going on within the township.

Okay, thank you. Any questions from commissioners for Commissioner Oliver on Board of Trustees related matters? Okay, thank you. Next item is Commissioner Thompson updates from ZBA. They meet quarterly, so I don't know if they've met since our last.

They've been really busy. We have not met.

Okay, well, for that group, not busy is better than busy. Any questions about ZBA from anybody? Okay. Next item is another popular item on the agenda. That is the Community and Economic Development Monthly Report. And I will thank Commissioner Thompson for a series of comments. probing questions in advance of the meeting that were raised some good points but i don't know if you want to give voice to any of those now or whatever but in any case community and economic development monthly report is in your packet it starts on page Seven, I think? No, eight. And we always pause and give commissioners an opportunity to ask about anything you might have seen in the report. Covers almost everything that is going on in the township office, certainly in relation to our stuff. So, on the floor.

I have a question about the airport. So if they extend the runway, is that just for bigger planes?

So, the reason this is on my report is I have the privilege of serving on the airport joint operations from City of Mount Pleasant, Union Township, Isabella County, and also the tribe, and then the Minimalist Youth Development Corporation, the five entities that created this, and essentially helped to provide some financial support for the airport, but this body was created to to focus on the long-term viability of the airport. And the runway was one of those items that was on our list right from the beginning. The runway is, at 5,000 feet, it's long enough to support the types of aircraft that we're seeing in good weather. But one of the challenges we have is that if it's wet, certainly if there's snow, that those planes need a longer stopping distance. They also need a longer run-up distance to take off. And it becomes marginal for that purpose. And so there are times, for example, when planes coming in either for CMU or for the casino and other purposes have to divert because weather conditions are not conducive. Or they have to come in with less than a full load of fuel, for example. Or probably less than a full load of fuel. So with types of planes we see on the commercial aircraft side, there's great value in increasing mobility. That's really the purpose, increasing the safety margin, increasing So that's, as I mentioned in the email, there's really two projects. One is resurfacing the existing runway, it's due, and then the other part is trying to extend it. The extension part is longer term. The funding is just about there for the rehabilitation of the existing runway. Finding the funding and such and getting approvals needed for the extension is a bit longer term.

I had a question I saw on the zoning administration activities. Mobile response, rapid response incorporated site plan. It's cancelled. Was that the MMR development for the training facility over there? They just pulled the project?

They did. That's what that was for. The contractor pulled the project. between the contractor and the client. They've decided not to pursue it further. So, it certainly may come up again at some point. I mean, there's interest, but at this point, that project we were looking at is closed down.

It was instigated the canceling by the contractor. That's correct. Not the party that was facilitating it. So, you know, we could be seeing MMR in front of us again with another plan. We could.

And they certainly can pick up where they left off with what they did. They have a preliminary site by approval. It's good for 545 days. It can be renewed if they wish. So they can pick up where they left off.

They can pick up with the same site plan with another contractor. Good.

Other questions? Okay, so the report's there for your reference. So if anything does come up, you can always contact Rodney with your questions. Okay, so now we have the first of our public comments. We have two public comments that are always in our agenda. The first is restricted to items that are not on the agenda. So if there's anybody who would like to address the Planning Commission on an item that is not on tonight's agenda, they're invited to do so at this time. If you're in the room, come to the podium and give us your name and address for the minutes. If you're online, make your presence known and we will make it possible for you to speak. We have a public hearing. This is not that, this is just the public comment. So public comment on non-agenda items is open at 7.14. Okay, so we have nobody in our online environment. And we don't have an audience tonight. So last call for public comments. So we'll go ahead and close public comment also at 714. So we'll move on to new business. As I mentioned, we have two new business items. The first is the public hearing on the zoning ordinance text amendments that deal with specifically with agricultural and residential zoning district dimensional standards. We looked at this last month and we decided to hold the public hearing but I guess for Eric's benefit and maybe for our benefit to remind ourselves if you want to introduce the topic and then we'll have the hearing and proceed.

Well, thank you. Everybody should have a copy of the report dated September the 3rd, and a copy of the proposed ordinance as well. As was mentioned, as I said, this is for a public hearing, so you did also see a copy of the public notice, which has been published and posted in all the places it needs to be published and posted for the hearing. This proposed amendment covers a couple of different things. The first two we'll talk about are essentially dimensional standards related to, primarily related to residential development, homes and apartments and duplexes and things like that. The standards in our current zoning ordinance, our current zoning ordinance was adopted in 2020, actually just about this time, late September 2020. And it was an update that had been in process for about a year or so. It was updated to what the previous ordinance was our 1991 ordinance. And so these standards, these dimensional standards, were essentially, for homes, were essentially carried forward from that 1991 ordinance without any significant change. And in fact, the 91 ordinance was based on a 1981 ordinance that had also the same basic dimensional standards, setbacks, height, lot area, all those things. So these standards all had remained in place for close to 40 years. And as we were looking at this, what we were running into in terms of administrating the ordinance was that there were challenges with folks in existing neighborhoods with being able to modernize homes, with being able to add, put additions on homes, or just do basic things to modernize an older home, because the setbacks were essentially crowding the site. Part of this came about actually because of what we did with adopting new ordinance. As part of that, we eliminated what was then called the R5 single family zoning district. It was appropriate to eliminate it. It was focused on essentially mobile homes in residential neighborhood. It was a district that was not consistent with state law in terms of how we treat residential housing. And so the properties were rezoned into essentially the closest existing zoning district, typically the R2B district. But the dimension, the setbacks and such were not the same between the two. And so what happened is a lot of these older R5 neighborhoods, the homes there became non-conforming structures in that they might be located a little bit into the setback area. Or if they met the setbacks, it was very tight, there was not any room to do anything more. In addition to that, we noted that, as I said, there is a need to modernize in this older housing. We have a lot of homes from the day back in the 60s and 70s, but even homes in the 80s and 90s at this point are in need of updating. We live differently than we did when these homes were developed. And there's a desire and an interest in modernizing. And these setback environments were crowding that and limiting that ability. So what we looked at was how could we adjust that? How could we provide some additional space, work with the existing character of these neighborhoods? And that's what led to what you see for the single family neighborhoods. This is primarily R2A, R2B. We also did the same thing for the multiple family areas, the multiple family zoning, the R3A and R3B. They have fairly wide setback requirements around the perimeter of a development. So if you had a group of partners there was a very large setback needed around the perimeter of that development. But today, in our current ZOE ordinance, we have much better screening and buffering standards than the older ordinances did. And so what was done then with distance we can do with screening, with landscaping, with berms and other features and design elements that provide the same buffering between land uses, between apartment communities, single family homes, that distance provided, deeper distance than the older ones. And so there, too, we looked at reducing those setbacks to make better use of these properties. We also made a couple of adjustments to the AG district, the R1 district, to make them consistent as well, a little easier to work with. Then we looked at lot area. And here again, what we found as we were looking at the residential districts, especially the R2A and R2B districts, was that those lot areas didn't really match both the market, the types of lot sizes that developers are looking to build, but also the needs of those neighborhoods. So those existing neighborhoods, the lot area that was required was significantly larger than the existing lots in those neighborhoods that were zoned, R2A or R2B. So again, we proposed to reduce the lot area in a reasonable way that allows for these homes to no longer be legally non-conforming, allow them to be developed and modernized. But what we've added is some standards related to residential density to ensure we're not actually increasing the number of homes that can be put on a piece of property. As we talked about previously, I'll just mention again, the reason why we added this maximum residential density standard to each of the districts is because of our sewer system. our sanitary sewer system was designed based on our existing zoning. So it's designed based on the existing number of homes that can be built per acre, essentially, the number of dwellings per acre that can be developed in the township in single family to multiple family districts. And so by reducing lot sizes, if we're talking about a vacant piece of property like some of the land to the north of us along Lincoln and Bamber, some of the vacant acres there, the zoned single family residential, Reducing minimum lot sizes would significantly increase the number of homes that could be built on that property. And that's not a bad thing, but it doesn't necessarily match with our sewer capacity as it exists now. And so we didn't want to create a conflict with our sewer system with this change. And so what we did is we added the maximum dwelling unit density so that even though an individual lot can be smaller, the overall number of homes that can be built on the property is the same as what our current ordinance would allow. As we talked about as part of the master plan update, we certainly will look again at residential density because there are opportunities and good reasons. to increase density in certain areas of the township. But we'll do that in conjunction with looking at those areas where our sewer system can most easily be expanded to match. Usually the issue is with pump stations, where we're transferring that flow into the lines that will go to our sewage treatment plant. Those usually, that's usually where the limits are. So updating those pump stations is what would typically be needed to add capacity. And so we'll work with our public service department to look at which stations can be most easily updated, what are the costs, and try to put that into our plan as part of allowing additional density in certain areas. So that's a master plan out of a longer term project. The other item that's part of this is about accessory buildings, accessory, this is pole barns, the sheds, garages and such. In the rural areas of the township, which is primarily the ag district and the R1, on very large lots, our current standards, which are in Section 7.5, are deliberately limited. We limit the size of these structures and the number of structures that can be built in the lots. And we do that as we talk about in the report because We have run into issues with some of these larger pull bar buildings in the rural areas of the township being very attractive for businesses. And we've had, as I mentioned in the report, we've had a couple businesses that have purchased these sites thinking they could move their business in there. In one case, a machine shop. In another case, a shop that did graphics and vehicle graphs. In both cases, we had to let the and work with them to get those violations resolved. Both cases they were. In one case, the business was closed for other internal reasons for the owner. The other one, the company still exists. They moved to a site in the city. More recently, they moved to a site in the township over in the Dogtown area. They're very successful. So we don't want these pole barns to be large enough to start attracting more of these things. But we also understand that people have a need for RV storage and other things that might have a larger space need. And so this is proposing to extend the maximum floor area to maximum height for some of these larger lots. It's not a big extension, but it's allowing some more space for those larger lot sizes. while still trying to keep it limited to residential activity. So with that in mind, if you go on, I'm happy to answer any questions you have. Is there any changes, anything we can do with this? Even though we're holding a public hearing tonight, Changes can still be made to the draft before it proceeds further. You, as Planning Commission, are a recommending body. Ultimately, you make a recommendation to our Board of Trustees after a public hearing and after your deliberations. And because this is an amendment to our ordinance, it does require both a review by our county Planning Commission. They get an opportunity to review and comment. And then ultimately, our Board of Trustees is invited to take action on it in the that answer your questions.

Okay, I'm going to follow our agenda and it says the next thing is the public hearing then commission questions and discussion. So go ahead and do that. So because this is a text amendment, change to the zoning ordinance, it requires a public hearing. So as Rodney indicated, this was published in the paper and the appropriate notifications were made. So as always, we want to give anyone who wants to speak on this topic an opportunity to speak. So when we open the public hearing, if anyone is in the room and wants to speak, we'll ask them to come to the podium, give us their name and address for the minutes, and limit at least their initial comments to three minutes. Once everyone who wants to speak has had an opportunity to speak, we'll consider recognizing people for additional questions. for additional comments. If you're online and wish to speak, make your presence known, hit the raise hand button or what have you, and we will facilitate your ability to give your comments. So the public hearing on P-TEX 26-01, zoning ordinance, text amendments, the updates as indicated, is open at 7-27. Anything received by email or in writing? Okay, so there were no written comments submitted. And there's nobody online?

Okay.

I'll mention that when we were going through this, when we looked at it last month and I think even before, there were some comments made by folks who were in those meetings.

So it has been looked at by people outside of the township office and the commission.

But second call for public comments at the public hearing. Comments at the public hearing. If the ground is still wet outside, that might interfere with the squealing of the noise of the tires that I always listen for. We want to make sure anybody who shows up has an opportunity to speak. And last call for comments at the public hearing for this zoning ordinance amendment. okay so let the record show that no public comments were offered at the hearing and none were received by mail so the public hearing is closed at 7 28. so now we move to commission questions and discussion so as rodney indicated our action would be to recommend that the board of trustees adopt this or recommend that they reject it or

recommend that they adopt it with revisions or postponing action but so does anybody have any questions or anything you'd like to say about it yeah so obviously the biggest factor to have that maximum housing units is sewage um is it understanding that that density is from the 80s as well that you were referring to, or is that density from the 2020?

So our sewer system was designed in the late 70s into the 80s. There's some areas that are newer than that, but that's the thing started then. And so it was based on zoning at the time, and that zoning is essentially the same as what we have today in terms of residential density in various areas of the country.

Okay, so when you go to improve the insertion areas, how would they get above, like would we have to see them when they come in and say, hey, we want to go above this maximum dwelling, or would you guys shut it down first, or...

would that work if you want to have extra density beyond what's listed there beyond the existing existing zoning we have what's called the prime unit development option pud and uh that's a that's a that's a flexible approach to land development it's in the ordinance um section 3.19 of the zoning ordinance is part of the state zoning act and and what it allows is the township to consider unusual projects, innovative projects. Projects that don't fit neatly into the boxes of zoning. But nonetheless, it might be appropriate or it might be positive and beneficial to the community. And so, if a developer wanted to do something like that, like have a site that had more density or a different mix of housing, or maybe a mix of housing and commercial or other things, the PUD would be the way to go. And as part of that We would review utilities, we'd be looking at capacity, and if there is a need to increase, if there's a need for new infrastructure or improvements in some way, the PUD provides an opportunity for a development agreement between the Township Board and the developer where those kinds of improvements could be agreed upon. How will they be put in, who's responsible for them, how will they be paid for, all those details could be wrapped up into a planning and development project. So right now they can do it. That's the way to do it right now.

Okay.

I have a question.

So what are the issues with people running businesses or rental storage space or whatever out of their pole barns?

So the two I mentioned was JustFab Graphics, right? JustFab Graphics. They're an existing business. As I said, they're... North Mission, and they had purchased a property in the township, in the rural part of the township, to the west of us, whole barn at a site that they loved. It was perfect for what they wanted. And they started operating there. This was during COVID. I think they may have been purchased while we were shut down here. But anyway, we found out very quickly, neighbors started letting us know that this thing was going on there. And we contacted them, sat down with them, and let them know that property's not its own agriculture. It can't have this kind of a business. It's a commercial or industrial type of business. They were doing vehicle wraps. They were wrapping semi-trailers and buses, as well as cars and other things. Anyway, so, unfortunately, I can't be here. And so we worked with them, and it took quite a number of months. I don't remember how many now. It was maybe eight or nine months, something like that, for them to make the transition. And we worked with them, and we were trying to shut them down. We just, we gotta see a change. So they had a plan, they worked the plan, and they moved, and also they initially moved into a space in the city over just down the road here in Pickard, and as I said, they've expanded and grown, and now they've moved into their own building back in the township. So that was one. The other one was a machine shop, and as I understand it, and correct me if I make an error here, as I understand it, this was a business owner that was more or less downsizing. He was an older guy, if I recall. Younger guy, but he was

And so basically with him he had a it was his stuff and Basically, my concern was because he viewed it as all his own personal Stuff that basically there couldn't be any business operation. So the operation had to cease and basically you know, he was able to keep his his personal property and but just not operate the business out of there.

Okay, so it was, in those two specific cases, you're operating in an agricultural district, something that's not appropriate or approved for that type of use.

In the second case, he put up a sign. That's how we found out he was there. Okay. We'll find out. In this case, he put up a sign. And here again, we work with him. If you would like to move somewhere else, We'll work with you on time-wise. But ultimately, he chose to simply not do it at all there.

Okay. So like additional living space or rental storage space for non-household vehicles, is that like a similar issue where you're trying to do something in an area that's not zoned for that?

This is one where Peter gets questions. Folks, either their buying property has a big pole barn or they want to build a big pole barn. and they want to make some money by renting space to their friends or renting space to somebody to store a classic car or store household goods or whatever, but they're not there because they want to rent somebody else. And the problem is that that's a warehouse. That's a business use. And under a current zoning, there's not an option for that in the agriculture area and even in most of the residential areas. There are many business uses that are allowed in the ag area. Ag zoning is business zoning. Agriculture is a business. And there are a number of business activities that are allowed in the Ag district. And even in the residential districts, there are home occupations and various home-based businesses that are allowed. Some of which can use a pole barn. Cabin making and stuff like that. But it's limited, deliberately limited, because these are areas that are not designed, they don't have the infrastructure, they're not designed to support

full-scale business operations thank you I could piggyback off of David's question here I think it may give you a little clarity there's a big differential I think and maybe this comes up for you guys a lot when something goes from being run it's an agricultural storing their you know tractors and stuff on a large pole barn but then purchased by someone that wants to then turn that into a business because as we know Farming is a vastly larger area to build than when it comes to commercial stuff. So is that true in both of the, in this case there with the graphics company? Was it previously a farm and then got sold over?

I think the machine shop was the farm's name. I believe the Just Fat Graphics was kind of a rural residential property. It had a few acres, but a big pull right now.

That makes sense. I guess I was kind of wondering more from like a theoretical perspective of like, you know, we're letting you build a bigger pole barn, but we don't want you to do this here. So that's kind of what I was wondering. There's a tension there.

Yeah. The bigger the building, the more attractive it is to do some things. Unfortunately, the zoning, the lot doesn't support it, the neighborhood doesn't support it, and the zoning doesn't support it. So that's the tension of the accessory structure standards in Section 7.5 is to try to get that balance point. In this case, we're tipping the balance point a little bit more towards allowing a little bit more. That's the idea of this amendment. But without going, we're trying to still keep a balance. We're just letting the balance slide a little towards that.

Following the conversation, it's my understanding from the last time we spoke that one of the big reasons why we want to consider increasing the size, even though it may attract more unwanted business in the area, is because of larger standards for things like tractors, trailers, RVs, where they're not fitting in existing pole barns or pole barns built in the 80s and 90s. Is that correct?

That's correct. On the agricultural side, the farmers are already allowed to build the bigger buildings. Okay. So they're okay. They can build buildings that will fit their equipment. They have broad ability to have agricultural buildings as they need. You're absolutely correct. On the residential side, especially RVs, recreational vehicles are getting taller, they're getting bigger. And many of them, the air conditioning units on the roof are getting bigger as well. So in the past, you might have had an RV or trailer or motorhome that was, say, 11 feet high. Now they're getting up closer to 13 feet high. So I think we talked last time that your semi-trailers are typically 13 and a half feet high because that assures that they will be able to get in under all the normal bridges they would run into. And so the RVs are getting closer to that same limit. And as a result, a lot of your pole barns would have 10 foot high overhead doors or 11 foot overhead doors. So they're not tall enough for more modern RVs.

Thank you.

Other questions from people?

I just want to say, like, I remember when you first started presenting this proposal, you were talking a lot about just those lot dimensions and setbacks and how restrictive it could be towards people wanting to build, you know, a nice portrait front of their house or get something on the side lot there. And I think as we look at how pricey housing can get nowadays and how scarce it is in our community you know based on that last isabella county housing report that releasing some of these lines so that people can take what they have and make it last longer for them be more useful get more out of it and do this at a time we're still not increasing density i think is great you know and if we do want to look at building more pumpage so that we can up that down the road. It sets us up now to give people that are living in houses that have been wanting to do more to improve and increase their quality of life and the place they're at while still at the same time kind of, I think, maintaining what the status quo will be for as people looking and living in those communities and not seeing just an increase in density like that. I'm in favor of this. I think it's going to be a great move. Agreed.

Just out of curiosity, with the 2B, the maximum single and multi is where it's at. If those weren't there, what's the maximum you could get given those lot sizes?

Can you clarify that? I'm not quite sure what you're asking.

So it says that to be no more than 5.21 family dwellings per acre on however big a thing. How dense could you make that? I'm just curious.

Oh, I see.

What's the theoretical possibility? Yeah. Okay.

New York City, 100 units an acre, 500 units an acre with a high-rise building. It all depends on how small of a lot. If you're talking single-family homes, it's all about how small is the lot, how squeezed can you make the building. The Michigan Municipal League has come out with a set of, it's called a pattern book, and it's kind of based on an old idea. At least in part, yeah, the old Sears catalog where you'd order a home and have it delivered by train and build it like an Ikea house you'd build on site. But the pattern book had, the idea is that these patterns would be easily replicated. These designs that they basically take this and easily turn it into plans and get it built. They're trying to encourage more of these kind of classic home designs. And for them, they're actually looking more at the two family, three family, four family buildings than the single family. They want to see more of that in neighborhoods. There's real value in that, to have kind of a mix. In fact, all of our single-family districts allow both single-family duplexes, for example. And many of our neighborhoods have a very nice mix between the two. That's unusual. A lot of communities are very segregated that way. We're not. But you can do a duplex as a ranch style that's very flat and broad, takes up a lot of land. Or you can do a duplex that's very tall. and each unit's fairly narrow, and maybe the garages are back behind somewhere, and so you can do that duplex in a very narrow lot, and therefore get more density, reduce the lot width, you get more units on there. So there's ways to do it. What number, I don't know, but you could easily increase that significantly just by changing lot area and changing that home design.

Okay. I was just curious because with the lack of housing, like we want to, to his point, I don't see a developer would want to come in here to have a low density, trying to sell some small affordable homes to here, but they want as much density as possible. So how can we get that? Obviously the PD is one way, but it's like, what is that theoretical limit? Like how much are we cutting off having to go to that other route too?

Well, right now, I think the way they would do that is a mix of duplexes and single family. And I think they, even right now, they could get the density that they work with. The challenge is construction costs. When a 1,200 square foot home costs way over $300,000 to build, that's what I'm hearing from Habitat for Humanity, for example, a very simple home. and the price is way over 300 grand. These are numbers that just don't work well for anybody. And a lot of that is simply the availability of construction materials. used to be, pine is the building product for most residential projects, and it used to be the pine trees came from Michigan. They were our pine trees, and they were, our lumber mills were doing it, taking care of them right here. Well, I learned recently that most of our, they're using yellow pine now, and most of it's coming out of Georgia. It's shipping across the country to do residential development here. Similarly, other things coming from Canada. Things that are coming from out of state that really shouldn't be. And it's because, for whatever reason, we've let our local supply disappear. And until that changes, we're gonna have high construction costs.

Anything else? If not, we can have a motion if someone is so moved.

Is there a motion in the recommendation? The second paragraph is bolded. It's intended if you wish to use that as a motion. It's set up that you can either be adopted as presented at the bottom line or if you want to make changes. But I would just recommend using that bold print second paragraph on page 28 of the packet.

under the Michigan zoning act public act 110 of 2006 as amended the Planning Commission has a responsibility to hold the public hearing is that what I'm looking for the bold paragraph all right I recommend that the Planning Commission consider taking the following action by a motion to recommend the Board of Trustees that the proposed amendments to section 3 zoning districts and maps section 4.2 schedule of regulations Sections 6.16 Residential Design Standards and Section 7.5 Accessory Use, Buildings, and Structures of the Zoning Ordinance be updated to update dimensional standards for the agricultural and residential zoning districts. to confirm that both single-family dwellings and two-family duplex dwellings are subject to Section 1.16 and to expand the accessory building options for certain larger lots to be adopted as presented. Second.

Okay, so there was a motion by Hayes with a second by Bradshaw.

I have a clarification, question of clarification. Did you say 1.6 or 6.6? The section is 6.1. I'm going to say 6.16.

I apologize for any shambles. Okay, you did say. Okay, thank you.

So the motion, as was said, the motion is the bold starting basically to recommend approval of these things. Okay, so the motion was by Hayes, second by Bradshaw. Discussion? Any discussion? Okay, can we have a roll call vote, please?

Baking?

Aye.

Hayes? Aye. Brown?

Aye.

Thompson? Yes. Oliver?

Aye.

Bradshaw? Aye. Davis? Aye. Squadrito?

Aye.

Motion carries.

Okay, thank you. So Board of Trustees will get that relatively soon and we'll follow how that goes. So our second item, as some of you are aware, Rodney made a presentation to the Board of Trustees on data centers not too long ago, and we thought it would be a good idea, because if that ever did, you know, something like that came up, it would come through us, to... if we had an agenda like this one that was relatively light, to have him also present to us. So do we have any popcorn? Is there any stuff to have us enjoy? But anyway, without further ado, I turn it over to Rodney.

Black sheet presentation. I do not do dance moves. We'll see about that. While we're getting this set up, I'll just share a few things. This presentation, it's focused on that as a land use. Because that's what we deal with as a type of development. We'll be looking at data centers from a couple of different perspectives in terms of classifying them. relative sized element, but also from operational differences in terms of data centers. Many people are concerned about data centers today, and when they think of data centers, they think of what are referred to as hyperscale, very large data centers. But there's actually a far broader spread to this. We'll talk more about it. what that looks like as we go on. I chose this background that you see here because libraries are the original data centers and still one of the best data centers, in my opinion. This was a particularly beautiful stock photo of an older library. It's one that I would love to spend hours in if I knew where it was. I do not know where this one is, so I can't help you with that. We'll go ahead and get started. It says it's on.

It says it's got full power.

So go ahead and give us the next slide. So this next slide really kind of starts us out with a definition of what data centers are. Kind of the key things to understand is data centers are warehouses for data. They're warehouses for the equipment that supports that data. Data centers are information technology, and they are the cloud. The cloud is a real place. I know some of us know that very well. The cloud is a real place, and it's a data center. Generally, if you are doing anything on the internet, in some way, you're going to be interacting with a data center of some size. So we'll be talking about here, in terms of how we structured this, we'll be talking about our top 10 list of challenges associated. The challenges we talk about are the hyperscale data centers. I want to emphasize that. Each time you see one of these 10 challenges, we're talking about the hyperscale data center product type development. And so we'll just talk here right at the beginning about from a land use perspective, data centers are not new, but they are kind of new to Michigan. This hyperscale of business is new to Michigan. And it's new to Michigan in part because we caused it. We mean our state representatives and state senators and governors. Not that long ago, just a couple years ago, they adopted some significant incentives to attract data centers as an economic development program. They have significant tax breaks, potentially, and all that was put into the law specifically to attract new data center development. In addition to that, we are attractive as a state because we have Most of these big facilities are water cooled, and we have ample water supply, or at least what looks like ample water supply. And finally, we have cheap land. Some of these companies, when they built in the southwest part of the country, they have paid a half million dollars or more per acre, per land, and they come here, and our farmland, remember they need big sites, these very large centers, need big, flat, open land, it's often farmland, and there's agricultural acreage, I don't know all the numbers, but let's say somewhere between probably eight, maybe $15,000 or $20,000 an acre, sort of depending where you are, but certainly numbers not anything like a half million dollars an acre. And so for them, we're cheap, and we have lots of water, and we have those incentives. So what we found was there was kind of a land rush that came in, and some of these data center companies, the big ones, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle, came up with projects where they tried to steamroller roll over some of these very rural communities, rural townships. In some cases, they succeeded. We'll be talking several times through here about the project in Saline Township, which is open AI in Oracle, down in Washtenaw County. I happen to know this one well. It's not far from my old stocking grounds. And basically building a multi-billion dollar project on 200 acres out in the middle of absolutely nowhere off of US 12, which is a two-lane, State Highway, no infrastructure around it. The only infrastructure, and this is the only important thing, was there was a big high voltage power line that ran through it. And it happened to be very high voltage, exactly what they were looking for. And OpenAI came in and just steamrollered Saline Township government. Bullied them into basically, they finally just threw up their hands and pretty much gave the developer whatever they wanted. There was no site plan review, there was no nothing, there was just consent agreement. The project's under construction, and it's interesting, it keeps evolving because there was really no approved project, and so it keeps changing and evolving. Anyway, we'll talk about that one more as we go along, but there has certainly been a pressure given and a desire, a push to act in haste, and we'll talk more about that as we go. This is the data center. This is what happens to be in Virginia. You'll see this one again, so I won't spend a lot of time on it here. This one is somewhere estimated. I don't have the specs specifically, but estimated based on scale at about 400 to 700,000 square feet. That's my guess. You can see lots of those dark rectangles on the roof. Those are industrial generators. The circles or oblongs on there are vents, off the rooftop vents. And what looks like semi-trailers along the side there are huge chillers, huge air conditioning units. We'll talk more about that one, but just keep that one in mind. In terms of power, this is in the megawatt range, probably hundreds of megawatts in terms of power usage. Megawatts, millions of watts. And this is also a data center. This is... What you see there, the dark area, that's two banks of server racks and air conditioning units that are lined up. There's kind of a plenum there in the middle. That's a glass door. That's basically a glass box. In the middle, that's kind of where all the heat ends up. And it circulates around from there. That's about 450 square feet of space in that building that's been used. The building's about 1,100 square feet. So there's room to grow. But that's also a data center. And in fact, if one of the server racks, which are about two feet wide, another quarter or so for the air conditioning unit, and about my height, about six feet high, one of those is a data center. So if one of those was in a closet here at the Township Hall, that would be a data center. So the data centers come in all different scales. Here it says from the closet to the And I apologize for the space balls in Bellbrook's movie reference all the way up to the ludicrous speed. I think that's a better name than hyperscale. We give you some numbers there. The numbers are very flexible. The 5,000 square foot building, that's half the size of the Walgreens store down the street here. That's a small unit that really has very little impact on the neighbors, even 50,000 square feet, which is about the size of the Ricks grocery store, maybe a little bigger than Ricks, but close to it. That's not gonna have a huge impact on the neighborhood around it. But there's larger facilities, hundreds of thousands of square feet, millions of square feet. that definitely can have impacts on their neighbors. And then we even have the possibility of, thanks to Elon Musk and SpaceX and his interest in putting data centers in space. So the size and location are quite a range for these facilities. I will mention, I may mention them again. You see there I mentioned two and a half million square feet. There's a project that was approved in kind of rural Utah. Originally approved at 40,000 acres. The building, not the property, the building at 40,000 acres. It has since been, I've learned just recently, it's been reduced now after some complaints. The approval has been reduced to 20,000 acres for building space for a data center facility. How big is the one in Louisiana? That one I don't know. There's some that are certainly in the millions of square foot. There's some projects in Nevada. I don't know how big the Louisiana one is. These are all over. We'll talk more about Virginia in a minute, but they're all over. So here's Michigan. I want to keep in mind these data centers. We're using the internet more and more and more. There is a need for these types of facilities simply to support the lifestyle we have. We buy from Amazon and use Google and play video games. All those things use This map is, I think I told the board about 18 months old, so now it's about 20 months old. It's existing data centers at the time of the map was created. There were 77 operating data centers. You'll see one there in Michigan that covers up part of the word Michigan. And that one is directly over the city of Mount Pleasant. So we have one here. We'll talk more about that one. But you see most of them are in the populations in Grand Rapids, Detroit, Lansing. This does not show ones that were under development or proposed at the time. I mentioned the one in Saline Township, a big one that's under construction. That's not on this map. There's a Microsoft project in Southwest Michigan that is also going through the approval process. That one's interesting because there were local newspaper articles earlier this year that said, Union Township is getting the data center of Union Township and Branch County in Southwest Michigan. But we got all sorts of calls as a result of people doing internet searches and say, well, I see the article. What do you mean? When's the data center coming to Union Township? It's a Microsoft project down there. So... So let's talk a little bit more about another way to look at data centers. We've talked about size. Let's talk a little bit about operating characteristics. We've also talked about power. I did mention this with that smaller data center. I mentioned the bigger data center was megawatts, hundreds of megawatts of power usage. The smaller one I showed you, the 450 square feet of spaces used, that was about 40 kilowatts of power usage. So the kilowatt is 1,000 watts, so 40,000 watts, different scale. So now we'll talk about operational characteristics. We're going to describe it three ways. Enterprise data centers, this is one business, one entity that has a data center where the data center is just for them. And for example, here at the Township Hall, until not too long ago, we had a data center in the basement. We had a server downstairs. And that was the server that operated all of our computers and protected all of our data. And it was a data center downstairs, at the bottom of the stairs. And for example, it wasn't on the map, but Central Michigan University has a data center. They have their own internal operation where all their servers are on their campus. And that's a data center. It's an enterprise data center because it just supports the CMU operation. Bigger scale would be a large company that has a data center in their facility just serving their site, like Ford Motor Company or Delfield here locally, or wherever that might be. The other enterprise data centers could be very small. It could be a closet or it could be a hyperscale. But that is reserved for that one entity. Co-location data centers. Similar can be of any size, small or large, but these are more like the multifamily residential of data housing. These are facilities where space is rented for a variety of entities or companies to use. And so, for example, companies, hospitals, governments, various things, would all rent space for their equipment in a data center that's maintained by some other company. Just like you rent an apartment in a multi-family building where you don't own the building, you don't maintain the building, but you have your unit. And within that unit, you take care of it. Well, in this case, you take care of your equipment that's stored in its off-site location. The benefit is that entity that's managing that co-location data center, they're providing the power, they're providing the lights, the security, and you just need to maintain your equipment. So it's relatively expensive to have a bigger operation in terms of data storage. And then the last one gets us back to the hyperscale or that ludicrous speed. This is the AI, artificial intelligence data centers. This is the Amazon Web Services. This is Meta, Facebook and Meta and all that stuff. These are the monsters. These are the big facilities that are used for software as a service. For example, if you have an Adobe Creative Suite license, so you have Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Illustrator and whatever, part of that software may be on your computer, but a good part of it is actually located offsite. You have to access it through the internet. Anytime you're accessing software packages through the internet, you're working with one of these large hyperscale data centers, most likely. And that's more and more common. We don't own our software anymore. We license it. And it's stored elsewhere. They just keep updating it regularly. But you only have it as long as you have a license. This also is video games, most video games where you're working with and competing with folks from whoever around the world, perhaps. But it all happens through these large-scale data centers. We're gonna go back now, step back, talk about hyperscale. We're gonna wander back and forth through the scale a little bit here. We're dropping down the scale, we're going back to this same site. This is a CMS facility. CMS is our Township IT company service provider. There's a little yellow asterisk down low on the left-hand side. Those are the Township servers. There's a little stack there, the bottom part of that stack. But that's where the township data is. And let me go see it and take a good look at it. But this is our co-location data center. This is the data center that's on that map. And it's about 1,100 square foot building. It's about 450 square feet of the space they have there is used. So less about, not quite half. You can do a little bit more than half, again, what you see there. And they have, in the far right, in the back of the picture there, all the power elements, the power supplies and batteries and all that kind of stuff is back there. You see the yellow cables across the top, that's fiber optic cable. CMS has run fiber optic cable all over the township of the city. It all comes into this facility. In addition to the township, they also are an internet service provider. There are certain things you do on the internet that may be interacting with local websites. You're probably working with this site. You're not having to go to off-site locations, Chicago or wherever, So some of those local things can happen directly through here. Certainly if you interact with the township website, you're interacting with this data center. So this has plenty of room for growth. Neighbors would never know. I don't have any pictures of that outside. They asked me not to take any. I'm not gonna tell you exactly where it is, but it's in the city. And it's not hard to figure out where it is. But this site, if you walked by it, you would not know what's going on here. Even if they have a generator outside, I suspect if that generator was running, you would not know that there was a generator running. They have done an excellent job of how they set this up so it does not impact the neighborhood around it. As I said, these have individual chillers. You can see the one right in the foreground of the picture there is one of the air conditioning units. What I'm standing in there when I took this picture is very cold. But inside that plenum in the middle, that glass door at the end there, that's quite warm. All that heat is going into that space as the equipment is drawing the cold air in from the outer area and then pumping through and circulating it back. And even that amount of equipment generated quite a bit of heat. I was impressed with the difference in temperature. So we'll go back down to our hyperscale. This is a site, it's in Loudoun County, Virginia. Loudoun County is a hotbed of data centers, many of which are federal government related, but not all. And this is, we've talked about the stuff on the top, there's, though you see it's right there with multi-family housing and other activity around it. This site is going to make a lot of noise. There's a lot of industrial generators, a lot of rooftop vents. all those chillers on the side, all of that's going to make noise. And it really is going to make two very different kinds of noise. It's going to make a very loud, high-pitched noise, which carries, and then it generates a very low frequency, almost vibration or low-frequency sound that carries through the ground in a different way, but both have a significant impact. So we'll talk about those a little bit more. But one of the things I want to show you here, if you look to the right and to the left, you'll see parking lots. But what you'll see are very small parking lots. This is somewhere around a half a million, 400 to 700,000 square feet. And I think that's a conservative number. It might even be bigger. But those two parking lots are all that serve that site.

And I don't know when this picture was taken. It could have been on a Sunday afternoon.

I don't know. But these units, this equipment runs 24-7. And you see about a half dozen cars in the parking lot. And you see only room for about a dozen total. There's only about a dozen parking spaces for a half a million square foot at least facility. What that means is these larger facilities, they're not employment centers. The folks that work there probably make a decent living, but there are very few of them employed. We had a project that came here to Union Township a couple of years ago, just kicking the tires. And we'll talk a little bit more about it, I think, probably, too. But I asked them. It was a 200,000 square foot data center proposal. They never got beyond kicking the tires. No formal nothing. It's just asking a few questions. But I asked them, what's the employment? And they said, oh, it would probably operate with about 12 people. 200,000. This one looks like it operates with about 12 people, too. about a dozen cars and paces for cars. So it's just not a deployment center, which is problematic as an economic development tactic. Because typically for economic development, we want to have increased deployment and a variety of increased deployment. Back to our challenges for a moment. Let's talk about some of these issues. I just mentioned noise and vibration. These units generate a lot of noise, and there are some opportunities to mitigate that, but in some of these cases, the folks that put these facilities in just didn't care about mitigating, and they weren't required to. So one of the elements in any regulation, we're going to be looking at some of these impacts and how we make sure that the issues are mitigated to the maximum extent we can. Noise is interesting. There's been some projects that have gone in. There's one in West Michigan. that there has been noise levels, it was not put in with a lot of oversight, and there's a residential neighborhood not very far away, and within that neighborhood, there have been noise measurements taken in the 70 to 90 decibel range, ambient, outside of the grounds of the facility, 70 to 90 decibels. No conversation can take place at that noise level. That's safe, that's not technically going to damage your hearing, Like if it gets well above 100, you can have ear damage. But 70 to 90, you can't have a conversation. It's like standing next to a busy freeway. Even at 70 to 90 decibels, the problem is really not even that level. The problem is the constant nature of it. If you know anybody that has worked in a manufacturing plant for many years, they often have hearing problems. And at certain frequencies, associated with the noise from the equipment that essentially they've lost the hearing at those frequencies because it was just constant noise at that level. That's why today, the companies, the industrial manufacturing companies are far more careful about making sure folks have ear protection. But back in the day, that was not the case. My dad worked for Ford Martin Company 30 years at Michigan Truck Plant down in Blaine. He had his hearing until his last day. There were certain frequencies he couldn't hear well. And it happened that at least one of those frequencies or ranges matched very well with my two daughters when they were little. He could hear my son. He could hear me. He could hear his wife. But their voice when they were little was right in that space that he had a hard time. And he always had to be very careful to focus on what they were saying. Just because over many years, it had been damaged. It's a 24-7 characteristic that's so troublesome for the noise. One of the things that can be done, though, especially on the vibration side, and even on the noise side, is looking at isolation, both isolating the equipment from the base, from the foundation, to avoid vibration getting into the ground, but also creating air gaps. around equipment so that the sound essentially is kept within that air gap and doesn't travel outside. If there's stuff on the roof, you can't solve that. But certainly equipment inside the building, you can have some good gain elements. The other item on this list was electromagnetic interference. This is not something we can do much locally. This is basically a federal issue, federal regulation. of the airwaves. It's the same issue we have with cell towers. We can't really ask the cell tower companies how much EMF, electromagnetic radiation, they're giving off because that's what federal rules. But it is an issue here. If you've ever been listening to your AM radio and driven by, especially an older electric vehicle, now all of a sudden your AM radio just fuzzes completely out, goes to static, that's electromagnetic interference. So just kind of imagine the millions older electric vehicles, and that's what the data center is going to be, if there's not the proper dampening to try to mitigate that. Again, it's possible, it's just they have to take those steps to do that. Just a momentary break on this to talk a little bit about scaling up versus scaling out. This again gets to the different operational characteristics. The enterprise and co-location data centers scale up. For example, when the township moved our servers to the CMS facility, we also updated them. We replaced the ones we had and so it was new ones that went into that facility. And the reason we did that is our servers were getting near to the end of their operational life. There was simply a need to update. And that's typical of the co-location enterprise centers. The equipment cycles fairly regularly. But in the hyperscale data centers, They scale out. They simply add more equipment. And they can operate older equipment longer because it's all networked together. Many years ago, there were examples shown of personal computers being networked together that could do the work of a very powerful mainframe computer. I can't remember the names now of the big computers of the day. But they showed that if you networked enough old computers together, you could actually get a pretty powerful operation out of it. It's similar to these hyperscale ones. They can keep the older equipment longer and simply add more as it goes along. So that's the scaling out of it. The benefit, of course, to the hyperscale is that means they can grow faster and that they ultimately can do more with what they're doing. Back to our challenges. Farmland usage is a big one. I mentioned the Slade Township site as farmland. Farmland is very attractive. It's flat open and already cleared of vegetation. It's already usually draining properly. And so it often is crossed by the big power lines. It makes a very attractive site. The more prime farmland we lose to these types of facilities, any kind of non-farm development, have agriculture as a viable operation, a viable part of our economy. We already in Michigan have lost a lot of the agriculture support services because we've lost a lot of the farmland that used to support those services as development was taking place. So it's an issue that we need to be very careful in terms of how we look at where these very large facilities might go and where they should not go. We've had this conversation, Peter and I have, regularly with folks wanting to do utility-scale solar development, for example. Of course, we have projects in the north of us or around the rest of the county. And there's been some fishing and interest in kicking the tires for doing similar projects in Union Township. What we've said is we don't have a lot of agriculture here, but it's important to us. We have an agricultural community, and the agriculture of the rural part of our community is very important to the township. And so if it's converted to the utility scale solar, we lose the agriculture. It's gone. And even if, as I claim, it might come back 50 years from now, when for some reason, magically, we no longer need the solar. it still is really gone. And so we have encouraged them to simply go elsewhere. The county is happy to have them elsewhere in the county. We're happy to encourage them to be there. But it's a similar thing. If we're going to support agriculture, we have to be very leery of non-farm activities that are going to encourage them to what we have. The energy consumption side is a big one in Michigan. We, Consumers Energy and DTE, have closed all but one of the coal plants in Michigan. The one is only open because the Trump administration insisted on it, and apparently it's now likely to close because I think that court case has said otherwise. Coal plants are messy, they're polluting, but they also have been our base load for energy production. They generate a whole lot more energy per year unit of fuel used. I don't remember the actual word for that, but they have much more energy capacity, general capacity than natural gas or solar or wind or other elements. They have long been our baseload as a result. With closure of all those, and those haven't been replaced. We have some solar, we have some wind, not anywhere near the scale that's needed. Consumers Energy said they needed 80,000 acres to replace the coal plants that they were closing in Michigan. That's 80,000 acres of solar, and they have hundreds of acres of solar, maybe a couple thousand, not 80,000. So we have less energy generating capacity, but we have a much higher need with these data centers. The utility companies say they can do it. I'm pretty sure that magic is involved. I've seen the presentations that are made on this topic, and I don't understand. And I've asked, and they can't really explain the gap that seems to be there. So I think they really are thinking that magic is involved. But it's something for us we need to be aware of. As I've mentioned, the Union Township site project proposal They went to Consumers Energy, and what they found was that our existing capacity for high voltage service coming into Mount Pleasant was insufficient to allow them to do what they wanted. The pipeline just is not big coming into the community right now. And that's actually a benefit for us, and we'll talk about that towards the end, because it means that they really can't build that 200,000 square feet unit. That's a small data center at that hyperscale. They can't build that one right now because it can't get power right now. That doesn't mean they won't be able to get power in the future. We'll talk about that in a moment. But for right now, this is a reason why here, I will tell you, we don't need to act in haste. Because right now, this is not something that the power will allow them to build. That will eventually change. At least for right now, we have the ability to act with deliberation in whatever we choose to do. So this is new. This was not part of what I gave to the Board of Trustees, my presentation. And it is new news. It is that we're getting the power. You see a map there. We'll see a more detailed version in a minute. On the left is Levington. Right under that long line, it says Topperton and Levington. Copperton, Salt River, that's actually Coleman. That's a substation south of Coleman. And then over to the right, that's Tittabawassee, that's over towards Saginaw, the Bay City area. That's another substation. And then the Nelson one, or Nelson Road, that one down below, that's, I believe, a Gratiot County substation. So this is a project to further connect the ITC electrical transmission lines through the community.

They're also reconductoring the lines. They're taking them and changing them from the old lines into the new lines so they can channel more power per power line. Exactly.

So ITC is the company that basically transmits power between the generators, the power plants, and the utility companies. They are the high voltage lines you see running through the region across the state in various places. Those are almost always ITC lines. And they've been here for many, many years doing great work. And what they're essentially trying to do here in Michigan is to extend their network and extend the capacity of the power availability and also to give somewhat of a loop to their network so that in the event of part of their network's damaged, there'll be more opportunities to use supply power from a different route. And this is their, by the way, this is very early This is right at the beginning of project planning. You might say this is a napkin sketch. So that website up at the top is the website where you can find all of this. It's just mifuturegrid.com. In fact, you can just type that in, mifuturegrid.com. You'll be able to quickly get to this Copperton Project site, which is the name that they've given the site. If you simply Google ITC Michigan and Copperton, it will get it that way too. So it's easy to get at. The data they do, a great site, provide some great information. But like I said, think of this as a napkin sketch. The gold or yellow lines, for this new high-voltage transmission. They're not going to use all those. They're going to probably use one or some combination, but it's one line, one route ultimately. But these are all the possible ways that they might be able to go. And that's based on topography, sensitive lands, all those kinds of factors. In some cases, where the existing lines are that they can use the same right-of-way. And so what you see, essentially, you see Mount Pleasant there in the center right-hand side. And you see that the routes at this point are either going up north of Clare, which is up towards the top of that map, or they're going south of Mount Pleasant. And it's also south of Union Township. At this point, they're not proposing anything going through Union Township. I attended the earliest of their public meetings where they were trying to get information on various local communities, and so they invited local government leaders to come. And one of the things I said to them, because they were actually talking about coming through Union Township, I explained about, we don't have a lot of ag land, it's very important to us, we'd rather this go elsewhere. We'd rather you not impact ag land, because when they come 200-foot wide easements. They're coming across and basically clearing those 200-foot wide easements. So forest lands, all that stuff gets cleared. And so it's a very big impact on the area that they travel through. So I think maybe I had an impact because they proposed to go south of us and also well north of us. But this is where they are right now. I will tell you that they are having a series of kind of open house style public meetings in October. You'll find the information on the website. find a chart looks like this one on there in a space where you can sign up these I said open house we just come in any time during the six hours or whatever that they've set aside and just talk to the folks there talk to the people that are playing you're doing this planning work and give them your thoughts and feedback whatever it might be may know something about other areas right now they're just gathering information trying to figure out how can we make this work

Need to make sure they're talking to the pipeline guys around here, too, because that can cause a really big problem for pipelines. Because the increased transmission load on the line can introduce issues into the rectifiers on the pipelines and cause corrosion and destroy the pipeline.

And it may to some extent be the reason why we're not seeing anything, especially to the north of us, because we have the consumer's energy, natural gas pipeline run through that space. So as I said, it's at mifuturegrid.com. There are three open houses that are on this list. They're local on October 6th. They'll be in Midland. On October 8th, they'll be here in Mount Pleasant. And on October 12th, they'll be in McLaren. And all the information's on their website and you can sign up and let them know when you come and kind of go through that. So I encourage you to take a look. This is long term. This is how we wind up with high voltage power in the county that could support a large data center project. But this is also years away. This is not anything that's going to be coming in our immediate lifetime or even in the next years. So a few more challenges. Heat impacts. We talked about those chillers. Heat is a huge issue. Even that 450 square feet of computer equipment was generating a tremendous amount of heat in that little space. Heat impacts are problematic at the hyperscale level. They come up at both ground temperature and air temperature. referred to large cities as heat islands. That's because of all the concrete, all the rooftops that absorb heat and radiate it off as infrared. And so it raises the temperature in large cities. If it's 50 degrees in the countryside, it's 60 degrees in the city. And similarly, these data centers do the same thing. All those vents in the roof, all those generators generating heat, all those air conditioning units giving off the excess heat, that's all going into the air. And so each of these data centers essentially becomes its own heat island, raising air temperature around it and for a significant distance around the facility. But interestingly, they can also raise ground temperature. Most of these facilities are water-cooled. And even if they're using a closed-loop system where the water circulates, like the fluid in your car radiator, and it circulates and reuses, it's pumped into the ground to cool it off and brought back up to then cool off the equipment and hot water is pumped back into the ground. And what that does is it raises the ground temperature. And here again, measurements have been taken that have found the ambient ground temperature, as much as 300, 500 feet away from the data center, can be elevated by several degrees, three or four degrees higher than the area beyond it. And that's, I mean, a quarter of a degree difference would be significant. Raising three or four degrees, that has great potential of impact on wildlife, on crops, other vegetation, even on soil quality, potentially, as it drives out soil. So heat impacts are a big one. Water uses is the other one. they can still potentially use certainly thousands and thousands of gallons of water today, maybe even millions, because even the closed loop has to release some of that water and exchange some of it at various times. So these are big impacts from these types of facilities. A few more. We're almost done. These last three are really the same as almost any industrial use. Almost the same. materials pollution, absolutely, there's impacts from that. Just read today about a data center that had a very large diesel tank for those generators that had a computer glitch and the diesel tank dumped 5,000 gallons into the creek nearby. They caught it, they caught it quick, they did all the right things to mitigate it, but it still has an impact. It's 5,000 gallons of diesel that went into the water system. Who knows what might happen next time. It's not that quick. Beyond that, there's other pollution issues as well that can come up. The big one is emergency response. Lively status centers are going to very rural communities with volunteer fire departments. They have no capacity to deal with an emergency situation at this type of facility. And so it requires tremendous expense in training, upgrading equipment, potentially moving from volunteer to a professional fire department, all to support this new use that comes into the area. Even our community, would likely require substantial upgrades to equipment and training in order to be able to support this kind of industrial use. And then the big one, I would say, the last one is decommissioning. These are very specialized buildings, very specialized facilities. Very large industrial building. If that 200,000 square foot building was built here in Union Township, we probably could find a different industrial use for it. But 20,000 In Utah, what do you do with a 20,000 acre industrial building? How do you fill that with something else? This world is very quickly changing. And while right now the cloud has a physical location, who knows? There might be a time when the cloud really will be in dispersed storage. We won't need these types of facilities, do we? don't know what's coming in the future. And if Elon Musk has his way, maybe all this will be orbiting over our heads. And we won't need these facilities on the planet. So things can change very rapidly. And these facilities can go from being absolutely necessary to being obsolete and useless very, very fast. And what happens when that happens? How do you deal with it? How do you decommission it? What's the future use? These are all things that we need to be dealt with as part of any development project. So I bet I've got you worried at this point, and so at this point I thought it'd be best to bring in the pirates. Cryptocurrency is the pirates of the internet, and they are a bonus challenge. I'll ask you, do you know what cryptocurrency is? Well, this is at the data center, and cryptocurrency mining is just, this is kind of a type of operation, operational classifications, enterprise collocation, cryptocurrency mining. The problem is that these folks also sometimes behave badly, like pirates. There's a couple of these cryptocurrency data centers in the U.P. A friend up in the U.P. told me that one of them, one of them is not running pretty well, but the other one is sitting with very, very little oversight, and it's creating all sorts of problems for its neighbors, all sorts of impacts, noise, all the things we've been talking about. And it's largely because all the other data centers, provide a service. They have a product or service. They do something for other people. For other companies, they're outwardly focused. There's some benefit that comes from having them. That benefit may not be to the immediate neighbor, but there's some benefit that comes, outward benefit that comes from the data center. In addition, of course, being a profit center for whoever owns it. These cryptocurrencies have no outward service. They are serving one person or one company, one owner that's trying to mine more Bitcoin Ethereum or whatever the other types of cryptocurrencies they're trying to mine and create through these data processing elements. So there's no thought about the outside, because they're not serving the outside, they're only serving themselves. So all the impacts go out and all the benefits go in. And that's the reason why they call these the pirates of the internet, is that they really are completely focused inward. At least in that one case in the UP, it created lots of havoc for the folks around me. So that brings us to the end. What's next? What do we do next? As I said before, we don't need to rush. Our power limitations are a blessing. It means we do not need to immediately jump in and do something. There's been a lot, especially if you look downstate in some of the areas that are hot for this right now, There's been a great rush to adopt zoning ordinance amendments, to adopt standards of various sorts. All very good. See a lot of these different ordinances, lots of very good stuff. But it's been hastily done. There we go. It's been hastily done. And when you do that, first of all, there's always the unintended consequences. But also, you may not really get to the what you really need to get done, but what really needs to happen. And you might still end up with impacts you don't want. For us, we can do this with deliberation. We should. They noted their number one checkbox is to keep an eye on what ITC and Energy are doing. Be aware of the power, future power possibilities and look at where that's coming. Be aware of the economy here for this and the other operations in the state, which we're doing at the staff level. But the second item is to actually look at adopting an ordinance amendment. that allows those co-location and enterprise data centers, the smaller scale ones, as an allowable land use. It's a completely appropriate use. As I said, in most cases, they have almost no impact on their neighbors. And so right now, they're not specifically in the ordinance. I kind of suspect that if we had one come in, that we could interpret some provisions of our ordinance to say that's similar to that and we can allow it in a commercial district or an industrial district. But I'd rather have them in there. And the reason is because there's a concept in zoning that the local government should never completely exclude in a lawful land use. This is a lawful land use. Like I said, we have it here in Mount Pleasant. There's 77 others at least around the state. And so we don't want to even appear like we're excluding a lawful land use. And one of the best ways to do that with this is to allow the smaller facilities, the smaller data centers, and say, yeah, come on in. Here you go. Here's whatever little rules we need with site plan approval. Absolutely. This kind of facility can come in and be welcomed. And then look more at it in a more deliberate manner at the hyperscale side, that ludicrous view side, and decide what do we want to do with those? Do we want to consider it? bigger facility or do we want or we would say that just it's not a good fit here there's various ways we can do that we don't simply have to just add them to our ordinance and make them a special use and put a bunch of standards on it we can look at this from a few different perspectives Not in haste, but through deliberation and care. I think that's key to this. And so with that, that brings me to the end of my presentation. I am happy to answer questions. So the original presentation is on the website. I haven't put the updated slides on there, but you can go to that MITuturegrid.com and see the ITC stuff right there.

Any questions?

Rodney, I got a question. Kind of peeing on that last point there of looking at future regulations and different regulations of different data size and stuff like that. I've been seeing a lot of stories in the news recently of townships that are putting in different regulations, putting in different plans, but somehow data centers are still going to be built, you know? Whether that be through cost of litigation for the township or... In some ways, I'm worried, like, how effectively can we stop a large hyperscale from coming in here and kind of steamrolling, like you said, in that process, regardless of maybe what the planning board, the trustee board wants to do, that they're like, you know, we're going to get our way to hell or high water. And I see that happen again and again in different places, like you brought up.

factors that are in our favor. We have a public water system. They need water, they're going to get it from our utility. If they're going to get it from our utility, they need to play nice. Because we're not going to play with them if they're steam rolling us. Why should we bother? So we have some leverage in that way. We have leverage related to the power issue right now. So if somebody came in right now, essentially the only way they could come in is if they were building their own power plant, which As I said, I think we definitely want to look at, ultimately look at, amend your ordinance. I think the best thing we can do is say we allow the smaller ones. Because that's mostly the argument has been exclusionary zoning. They said you don't allow it in your ordinance, therefore you're exclusionary, therefore your ordinance is unconstitutional, and that's the steamroller part. So if we make clear I think right now, even our ordinance right now would allow these facilities at the smaller scale in the business and industrial districts. But it's better to be explicit. And by being explicit, it'll say these things are allowed. And they're allowed pretty easy. Site plan approval. Come on in. That eliminates that argument entirely. We're not excluding. We're only looking at here's the size that works for our community. We don't have existing industrial zoning at hundred and thousand acre sizes. So right now, that's That's just not a possibility. It could be a possibility in the future. There's land that could potentially be in that space, at least 100 acre size. But it's not there right now. The key, ultimately, is to choose to fight. In Saline Township, I'll go back to that one because it's a poster child for how not to do this. They did not even defend their master plan. And the question was really, they have an area that's not industrial. They had an area in the master plan that said if we're going to have industrial, it's going to be here. They didn't have an existing industrial. They were next to the city of Saline. And so they said, basically, next to the city of Saline, if we need industrial, we're going to have it there. But it was very vague in the master plan. So this property was several miles to the west of that, out of the country. So they could have defended their master plan. They could have said no, this is not consistent with their master plan. They did in fact deny the rezoning. They asked for rezoning. And initially it was denied by the planning commission and went to the attention board. And I don't know the quote now, but I think there was denial action there. I know they were leaning that way. But essentially, the community filed suit even before that process was finished. And it truly was a bully move. And all the things about exclusionary and all that stuff was said. And ultimately, the court fight would have been about whether that master plan was valid that said industrial should be over here, not over here. That's a pretty simple fight, actually. But they chose not to fight it. They chose to literally abandoned their own plans, abandoned their own ordinance, abandoned the Planning Commission that had recommended not to rezone the property, and the Board of Trustees threw up their hands and said, we'll sign whatever you want us to sign. And they had, there was a consent agreement, relatively simple, there was no site plan approval process, there was no nothing associated with this project. Frankly, they started constructing without building permits, as I understand it. They started construction without any of the state permits they needed to be dealing with wetlands and other things. They just jumped in, and the state had to come in and slow it down. But that was a case of the community didn't fight. It gave up. We have to choose to defend our master plan if we're in that circumstance. And this community, our board of trustees, has made clear that... defend what we're doing. This is what we want. We're going to defend it. And that's the key, I think, is to choose to do that. Awesome. Thank you, Ronnie.

I appreciate it.

Yeah.

And if you were to add it to the ordinance and put a cap, say we can only have 200,000 square foot units, is that okay? Like, we can defend, like, we can't afford anything bigger than that in this township?

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm not sure that I would want to put a size limit on it if we're allowing the hyperscale because it's kind of arbitrary. If we were going that way, classify by size, it might be we say with this range, maybe this range is administrative approval. This range is site plan approval. And this range up to some number is specialty permit approval. But if you're over that, then there's these other shadows that come into play. We sort of do that. You kind of have a menu approach. But I'm a little leery of having an arbitrary top number. I'm not sure that we need to, because we can get at it through those impacts and requiring mitigations for those impacts. If you get more impacts, can you mitigate them? Show us how. And if they can't, then you can't build it. Rather than trying to defend an arbitrary number.

You could limit them to the size of a pole barn.

Well, that's the smaller size, yeah. These smaller facilities, the 500 or 5,000 or whatever. They don't do agricultural data centers, right? They're out the window. Store data in trees. There is one more category. I didn't talk about it in this. But there's what I would call an accessory use data center. And that would be that server that's in the closet of the church. Or that server that is in the closet of the home occupation facility. for the attorney that has his home office. My home lab in the basement? There you go. I don't know. My home lab in the basement. That's a data center. Data operation. And it's a necessary use to something that's allowed in that data center. And that's, by the way, that's something, although we can talk about it, it's something we build in the ordinance too. Because we need to recognize those types of things happen in our community. And it's completely appropriate to have a couple servers in your closet because you were doing whatever you need to do business-wise, it runs that. You can have an internet business as a home occupation. In fact, it's almost encouraged because it has no impact on the neighbors. It's all just GPS coming and going occasionally. That is definitely part of the consideration.

Very good. Anything else? Okay, thanks so much. We feel better informed. Two more things. So every meeting we have an extended public comment towards the end of the meeting that is not restricted to items on the agenda. It's unrestricted. So we'll open the extended public comment. If there's anybody who would like to address the Planning Commission on any item that was on tonight's agenda or not, do so at this time. Extended public comments open at 8.48. I assume we still don't have anybody in our room. and there's nobody here, so we'll go ahead and close that back up until October. And then, next is final board comments, so I'll open it to any comments from board members, but I'll also extend another welcome to Eric, thanks for uh your participation and also i assume that you guys will make sure he's fully informed of upcoming training opportunities i think we've kind of missed the we missed the august there's a cluster of them in august and they come up at periodic times throughout the year but um they're mostly things that are in well they're around the state occasionally they're in mount pleasant but they're usually you know two three four hour sorts of things that are very i think very useful yeah we met yesterday and uh that was very that was very helpful so appreciate the both of you and appreciate the welcome from all of you thank you Okay, thank you. Any other comments from board members at this time? Commissioners at this time?

I got a quick comment, a question for Rodney, I guess, or for talking more about standards. So it came to my attention recently that there have been some automatic license plate readers that have been installed in CMU campus that are currently, like everyone that goes down Bloomfield is grabbing every license plate. Do we have any standards, procedures, anything like that for when it comes to that type of... It's in Union Township. Is that something we would even put on the books? I guess I'm just wondering for that because it's not currently in our township. It's in Mount Pleasant. It's right before...

the turn off there but I just wondered if something like that came up where someone was coming for license plate readers flock cameras something like that is there anything that we have on our books in relation to that type of development no it the kinds of improvements would be in the road right of way essentially are under the responsibility of either MDOT or Road Commission we don't really have any say over what they put there It's interesting with those flock cameras. I was reading about some of those, the ways they came in, and they're kind of coming in under the radar. They're coming in basically a budget approval to say whatever unit is one of these things, they approve a budget to buy them, and they approve the contract to buy them and have them operated by this company. And all that's done just in a regular meeting. There's no public hearing, there's no public input process, none required typically. There's a hearing required for the budget, but that's the whole budget, not this one either. And so they are coming in under the radar. Certainly, CMU has the ability to do lots of things under the radar. They're very closed in terms of their activities. But it ultimately would have to have approval from the road commission or M-DOT, depending on who owns it right away.

This is actually CMU, and it's contracted out by the parking company that they have running their parking that it's running under right now. But I was just wondering if there's something like that where it steps out from, you know, looking at CMU land into public roadways, but you're saying any of that would be under the jurisdiction of the road commission. It would be.

Thank you, I appreciate it.

Anything else?

I have one. Brendan, you said earlier Dogtown. Where is that? Oh, thank you, Ryan. I meant to go back to that.

I'm sorry. I apologize. It was a colloquial term.

River Road all the way to the end.

Yep, exactly. River Mission. Basically the modern intersection of Dogtown. It's actually not the original. The road network there has changed greatly. Dogtown is actually the... really the original settlement in Isabella County. It's older than Mount Pleasant. It is the area where the Indians and the white traders met. I think there's a plat there, was it a village of Isabella? It was a village platted there, so there's some platted lots. My ownership's tough there because the Village Platte doesn't match necessarily the way things are now because they literally changed the road network at some point. They put Mission Road through and then partly messed things up. But anyway, it's actually the oldest community in our county.

And that encompasses what part? Like you said, River Road and Mission? The intersection of River and Mission, that's sort of the center of... Both sides of River, or just one side? Both sides, yeah.

You put a pit in that, put a big circle around it, about a quarter mile to the north and south, east and west, that's... Dogtown. The country club, you might say, is on the west side of Dogtown. The river is kind of the south side of Dogtown. This is amorphous. These are not exact. If you talk to a historian, you probably get a little bit clearer number of that. As I said, it was an area that was intended for Indian settlement. It was an area where the Indians came to trade. and to meet and all the community things they did. Jog time is actually kind of a derogatory term, but that's the term that's typically used for that area. It's been for many, many years. And anyway, it's the oldest area of settlement in Hezbollah County.

Do I remember correctly that when we did the Four Hacks project or one of the, something in that vicinity, there were maps that had the old plats on them?

Yeah. Yeah, in fact, for that Four Hacks project, Four Hacks was a kind of minimum development. It was only partially built. Essentially, the owner built the units they wanted and never did anything else. But that's on the north side of River Road, just a little bit west of It's sort of that sort of Northwest corner you might say in downtown. But they actually had to vacate the plat underneath that. They had to go through a court action. The only way to vacate a plat, subdivision plat, is to go to circuit court and get a circuit court order to vacate the plat. There's no functional way in the state law to get rid of a plat that no longer works. Essentially, you have to have a friendly lawsuit with the local government. You go to court and have an agreement. The court agrees to order the plant vacated. And that's what happens to allow the kind of development to be built instead.

Yeah, yeah. I think, I don't know, I remember that the maps, you could tell they were old maps because I think they were like handwritten or something like that. Any other?

Where do you find the new maps? The new plant maps? Are they online somewhere?

Well, you can see the lot configuration. If you go on the Isabella County GIS site, that's computer mapping. It shows aerial photos as an overlay of the parcel boundaries. Understand the parcel boundaries are not exact. And in fact, in that area, are significantly off on that map. But it'll give you at least an idea of the layout of things. Beyond that, there's a couple of places you can find the old flat maps, the older maps. One is the Clark Historical Library in the CB campus. They have a lot of those older flat maps. And then the state of Michigan actually has digital versions of all the final plats that were recorded with the state, because under the Plat Act you have to record the plat with the state of Michigan at the end of the process. And so they have those, and I think the vast majority of those are digitized. And you can search by county and by project name, usually, to find the Estrogo maps. I don't know if they would have that area or not. They'd probably have that Village of Isabella map. But the Clark Estrogo Library does as well, I believe. Anything else?

Okay, thank you for your comments. So we've completed our agenda before nine o'clock and we stand adjourned until October.