At the recent March 26, 2024 Oakland Township Board of Trustees Meeting about a dozen residents who live in close proximity to the proposed 195 Verizon foot cell-phone tower spoke strongly against it, citing its appearance and negative effect on property values in this rural residential area. The site is a 20 acre property owned by Lake Orion schools and immediately adjacent to Marshview Park. They will receive about $1900 per month from Verizon.

Apparently the residents were informed that the Board will consider this issue at their April 9 meeting. If you have a view, you should attend that meeting and comment. The Planning Commission who reviews such matters voted narrowly 3/2 at their February 6, 2024 meeting to recommend that the Board approve it. Two members of the Planning Commission were absent from the meeting. The minutes of that meeting give more detail here: https://ecode360.com/OA3183/document/753018965.pdf

The detailed blueprints should be available for inspection by anyone at the Building Dept. window at Township Hall. See a site schematic drawing and the letters from Township consultants here in gthe February 6 meeting packet: https://ecode360.com/OA3183/document/753014259.pdf

Click to access 753030610.pdf

See the agenda at the link above which takes you to the 53 page meeting packet. Also read the much improved minutes of 3/7 and 3/12 meetings on pages 25-29 of packet. (Each motion is explained.)

See every check written recently for approval by Board and background materials for each agenda item on the page shown to the right of each item.

I suppose the big item is choosing the new Township Manager.

HDC Agenda for Wednesday March 20, 2024, 7 PM

Information in the meeting packet https://ecode360.com/OA3183/document/753028198.pdf is listed below.  I’ve picked three items I think are of most interest to preservation enthusiasts

• Minutes of February 21. 2024 meeting, pages 2-6
• Trouble with Road Commission in moving historic barn, pages 7-16
• Saving historic Rochester High School building, pages 51-57

and one of interest to budget hawks.

• ($699,014 fund balance), page 73

Contents:                                                                                     Page

See the agenda for tonight’s meeting and the draft minutes from last month’s meeting at the link below at the end of comments. (These are excellent minutes prepared by contractor Ingrid Kliffel. She also does Parks minutes and used to do our Board minutes until early 2013 when the 2013-2016 Board decided to include only the legally required minimum information in Oakland Township Board minutes.)

There is a lot of good information in this packet. I won’t try to summarize it all. Several issues directly effecting Oakland Township are:

A resident at 4763 forest Ridge Court whose yard backs up to the trail just south of Gallagher Road seeks permission to continue the encroachment of her steps that were there when she bought the house recently and were actually advertised by the realtor as an advantage. She just replaced the rotting wood and added a handrail which suddenly made the steps visible. I think her request is reasonable, especially since she allows all her neighbors access.

Minutes say that Supervisor Robin Buxar will have a porta-potty installed outside near Paint Creek Cider Mill. (Too bad the 2013-2016 Oakland Township Board of trustees “shot down” Parks Director Mindy Milos-Dale plan including a grant application, that included very nice outdoor restrooms in that area among other things.)

The Commission will undertake revision of their master plan with public input scheduled for June-July 2024

A resident raised several trail maintenance issues – enlarged chipmunk holes that have been a hazard to kid’s bikes, poor slope that cause bad drainage and ruts after heavy rains caused by improper slopes, and the need for periodic grading to knock down bumps.

I raised the issue of the high levels of dust in an email to the Trail Manager. The Trail Manager made the Paint Creek Trailways Commissioners aware of my concern in his monthly memo. (I’d like to see our future Township Manager do the same for issues we residents raise with him/her.)

Of our two Commissioners and one alternate only Commissioner Brian Blust attended the February meeting.

https://paintcreektrail.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/March-19-2024-Meeting-Packet.pdf

March 16, 2024

To: Board of Trustees, Oakland Township

From: Bob Yager

I would like to see my suggestion below on the Board of Trustees agenda for discussion and acceptance, denial, or modification

Safety Path and Trails construction plans must be first approved by our Planning Commission and then recommended to the Board of Trustees for approval. This will ensure that all requirements of Zoning Ordinance No. 16, passed January 23, 2018, are met.

In particular, I am concerned about paths that have been approved by our Board of Trustees without review by the Planning Commission that contain paths narrower than the 10-foot width required by this ordinance. In my view this creates an unacceptable risk level of bicycle / bicycle or bicycle/pedestrian collisions.

From February 23, 2021, Board of Trustees Minutes

“4. Gallagher Path Bid Approval

The Board heard an overview of the project from Trustee Zale. MOTION by Buxar, supported by Zale to approve payment not to exceed $565,000 to All Star Power Excavating, LLC and PEA Group for the construction and engineering services for the Silverbell/Gallagher/PCT Path.

 Roll Call Vote: Ayes: Abbate, Buxar, Elder, Giannangeli, Mabry, Mangiapane, Zale

Nays: None Absent: None

Motion carried 7/0.”

I find no record of review by Planning Commission.

Visit the Gallagher Road path to see this in person. That is why AASHTO recommends ten feet. (See section 16-338 of our ordinance)

Enforcing a 10-foot width requirement may require you to revisit your unspoken “ban” on using your powers of eminent domain to construct paths with a safe width.

This is a timely issue as SPTC is in the planning stages for a narrow six-foot-wide path down Snell Rd. from Rochester to Stony Creek Metropark.

Oakland Township Parks and Recreation Director Mindy Milos-Dale will Retire May 31, 2024. After being honored the night before at Board of Trustees Meeting for her 25 years of distinguished service including over $10,000,000 in MNRTF grant awards that added over 1500 acres to our parks system, Ms. Milos-Dale read tearfully her letter of resignation at the Parks and Recreation Meeting last night. She expressed appreciation for the opportunity and gratitude for how well she was treated by Parks Commissioners.

It is of utmost importance to find someone to competently fill her role. None of us truly know how much of what we have in our Parks we would not have without Ms. Milos-Dale’s leadership and management skills. The Commissioners began planning her replacement with legal advice on the process in closed session last night. I have a feeling that any community she retires to will suddenly start receiving MNTRF parks grants. I wish her and her husband a happy retirement.

At last night’s March 12,2024 Board of Trustees Meeting the seven members voted unanimously to approved Trustee Langlois’ motion to postpone the selection process that had been on the agenda in order to “get more input from residents and employees”. There was no discussion on the motion before the vote. My theory is that they polled themselves in the 6 PM closed session and found that none of the three candidates had the necessary four vote majority.

I just read an editorial in the Monday, February 7th, 2022 Oakland Press by Henry Olsen of the “Ethics and Public Policy Center” on page 5 that encourages the Republican Party to get behind a bill proposed by Marco Rubio. Mr. Olsen states :

“The proposal — called the Teamwork for Employees and Managers Act, or Team Act —aims to address one of the major problems with the modern U.S. economy: the lack of employee voice within a business”

Mr. Olsen sees this as an alternative to unions and predicts unions will be against it.

Maybe.

I have some direct experience in this area at the unionized Toledo Plant of Dupont where I worked from 1974 to 1992. I was at first a coatings chemist, then Quality Control and Assurance Laboratory Supervisor and then assigned to the Plant Manager on an assignment helping with employee involvement, planning and communications projects. This last assignment came after all of us in management went through a very non-traditional 3-week Management Training Program sponsored by and mandated by some enlightened top management of our division.

One outcome at Toledo Plant, was that we developed methods for our employees (International Chemical Workers Union) to have a voice in how work was done. The results were many cost savings and productivity improvements. It never crossed out minds that we needed a federal law to allow this. We got no objections from our union. Of course we were small, about 500 employees. And a key human resource person was well-trusted and had been, when an hourly employee, one of the organizers of taking the old “company union” to a national union in 1968.

One example. Every year there was competition between departments on the plant site to be awarded capital money. The awarding of capital money had become a secretive political-influence process, not an open, logic process. Most went to advanced engineering automation and computer control systems in the polymer manufacturing area. The less glamorous and less high-tech areas got little to no capital money. Much of paint-making is a relatively unglamorous process of dumping materials from 55 gallon drums or 50 pound bags into tanks ranging from 150 to 5,000 gallons and mixing them up. We had a least 700 different raw materials stored in several areas of the plant, including outdoors, as seen in the aerial photo above. Waiting for materials to be delivered often held- up production, but we in management did not realize how serious this problem was. We had no real data to highlight this issue.

In the first year that a system of “Area Improvement Teams” was established to start the process at the the bottom of the org chart to identify capital neeeds, hourly workers identified a single unrealiable fork-truck and freight elevator as the major bottlenecks in moving paint formula ingredients in 55 gallons drums from outdoor storage to areas on the circ 1919 three story brick plant where they were needed. A new forktruck and rebuilt elevator did wonders to speed paint batch production.

This effort was not simple. We had to learn to run a meeting of a large number of people that stayed on the subject and was organized. We had to steel ourselves for the initial negative comments from each group to the effect that ” This was a B.S. effort for show and we would ultimately not listen to them”, and a long recap of past examples of not listening. Once they were allowed to purge all of this we could get to work gathering their ideas and have an engineer help them to prioritize and assign estimated costs and benefits. Then mangement worked on these lists in meetings whose outcomes were communicated widely to reduce the list to conform to maximum allowed capital budget for the year. Many impediments to smooth, efficents production were identified and corrected.