By Mark Haney | Reporter
mark@tcadvertiser.com
The dispute between South Central Michigan Construction Code Inspections and Putman Development remains unsettled, but the attitude of the Tuscola County Board of Commissioners has shifted in the two weeks since William E. Putman II appeared at the commissioners’ meeting room in the H.H. Purdy Building in Caro.
At stake is the fate of a 42,000-square-foot, $7 million new medical center on five acres of land at 1800 W. Caro Road, just west of Caro.
While work on that building has been going on since November, SCMCCI has yet to issue the Putmans a building permit. Instead, the building codes office has filed two stop-work orders against the development.
The commissioners were sympathetic to the Putmans’ cause two weeks ago, but at Thursday’s meeting the five men seemed to find both parties at fault, at least in some manner or another.
That change may have come out of an hour-plus closed session with attorney Eric Morris of Braun, Kendrick, Finkbeiner of Saginaw. Two weeks earlier, the commissioners had tasked Morris with the job of mediating the dispute between SCMCCI, the Athens-based agency that serves as the county’s building codes office, and the Ellington Township-based Putman family over construction at the site on M-81 in Indianfields Township.
While Morris hasn’t been able to bring the two parties to an agreement, he seemed to have clarified the problem for commissioners.
District 3 Commissioner Kim Vaughan thinks the real issue is that the state building code allows for construction to be done in stages but SCMCCI isn’t.
“I honestly believe we are where we are today,” Vaughan said after the commissioners came out of the closed session, “because at the very beginning SCMCCI wouldn’t accept anything from the Putmans unless it was a completed project, which is the water, the sewer, everything. Even though the state will allow you to do projects in stages. And it has been the Putmans’ contention that they could not wait for water and sewer permits and all of that stuff because there were a lot of legalities going on.”
The Putmans previously said they had been able to get access to the city of Caro’s sewer system but were going to drill a well for water. Vaughan said the adjacent property is known to have arsenic in the well water, so that is a concern. He said the Putmans may need to connect to city water too.
They knew they’d need to work out those issues in order to get an occupancy permit, he said, but not to get a building permit.
“I’m not saying the Putmans did everything right or SCMCCI did everything right,” Vaughan said. “But I honestly believe that’s why we are in this dilemma that we are in today.”
District 5 Commissioner Dan Grimshaw continued to point the blame on SCMCCI and its failure to adequately communicate with the Putmans, but he also said the Putmans should not have done so much work without a building permit.
“Without a building permit they can’t proceed,” he said, “and they probably shouldn’t have proceeded as far as they have done already without a building permit.”
District 2 Commissioner Thomas Bardwell said the commissioners appreciate what each side is doing, “We are attempting to do our best to resolve this as quickly and amicably as we can, for both sides, without choosing right or wrong.”
Bardwell said Morris has been asked to get SCMCCI’s requirements for issuing a building permit. He said that will be crucial to solving the deadlock.
“That’s the main objective, to move forward,” he said. “I think that is what the parties are waiting for.”
“Included in that is us requiring SCMCCI to respond to communications,” Grimshaw said. “They are working for us.”
Bardwell said he isn’t sure the commissioners could compel SCMCCI to communicate better with the commissioners or others, especially after the commissioners voted to not renew the agency’s contract when it ends on Sept. 30. Instead the county is seeking firms to bid for the contract. So far, controller/administrator Clayette Zechmeister told the commissioners, several firms have shown interest in the work but none have yet to submit a bid.
“I think we are being backed into a corner that is a no-win situation any way you look at it,” Grimshaw said. “The question is, for us, where do we go from here? I think the best we can hope for is for our attorney to do some communication with the parties involved as a last-ditch effort to at least get some of it resolved.
“We’ve been backed into a corner by some of the stuff that is going on.”
Morris will continue to arbitrate the dispute, though the Putmans previously told the commissioners time is of the essence. The family has signed leases for the space in the building and any delay in its completion puts those leases in jeopardy. McLaren Caro Region, which will lease approximately 20,000 square feet of the building, plans to offer an array of medical services such as primary care, imaging and laboratory services. Other lessees will provide urology, a chiropractor clinic, a pharmacy, physical therapy and other specialty services.
The Putman family became famous as stars of the TLC reality television program “Meet the Putmans.” TLC featured the Putmans in a January 2017 pilot episode. The show received positive feedback, so the network signed the family for a six-episode season broadcast in fall 2017.
