Almer Township is going resurrect some monuments.
The township board voted June 8 to pay the Tuscola County
Road Commission about $16,000 to find and fix some survey monuments around
Almer Township. Supervisor Jim Mantey said some of the monuments have been lost
over the years. He said there are about 20 survey monuments that need to be
found or replaced.
The monuments don’t really affect the roads, he said, but
every time a resident wants to build or is buying or selling property,
surveyors need to be able to verify the boundaries of the parcel and that
requires a starting point – the surveyor’s monument.
“We owe it to our township residents to make sure they can
do that in a somewhat expedient fashion,” Mantey said.
The road commission, he said, will do the work over the
coming four years.
“For the most part, the county road commission is really
good at keeping a monument box around those witnesses to protect them,” he
said, “but over the decades we have some of them go wayward on us in some way
or another.”
The road commission will replace the monuments that are
missing.
The board also:
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Learned workers are finishing up a lighting project at Darbee Farm Park. The
lights will work in concert with security cameras to help township officials
fight vandalism at the park. The vandalism has included damage to parts of the
playscape, paint on signs and damage to the diamond by an ATV
“We decided it might be a little disconcerting for the
neighbors to have motion-detector lights,” Mantey said. “So we are doing LED
(light-emitting diode) dusk-to-dawn lights that are shielded so it won’t be
intrusive on any of our neighbors.”
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about a month away from ironing out an ordinance to govern solar development in
the township. “We’ve made a pretty significant
effort to look at it from both sides,” Mantey said.
“We are not making an effort to keep them out. We’re just
making an effort so if they do meet all of the criteria that we set forth, it
is fair to those who are developing the solar energy and it is fair to all of
the rest of our neighbors in Almer Township.”
