Politics & Government
Northville Township Board of Trustees To Decide on Planner for Seven Mile Park Thursday
If approved, the Board will pay Stantec $100,000 to help gather public input and create a master recreation plan for the former psychiatric hospital property.
The Board of Trustees is expected to vote Thursday night on a planner to transform the 334-acre Seven Mile property from the leftovers of a psychiatric hospital to a possible park.
The board wants to hire a company, a design and planning firm called Stantec, to gather public input on what to do with the property and to help create a master plan for the site. Plans will likely include some type of park or open recreational use, though some parts of the property are considered polluted and will need cleanup. The $100,000 cost for a plan is being paid from dollars made from salvaging material from the property.
Resident ideas are crucial to future uses, said Township Trustee Marjorie Banner.
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“We want to get the community’s vision for the property,” she said.
The property, along Seven Mile between Northville and Haggerty roads, is too large for the township staff to handle alone, so a board selection committee was created to hire a company for assistance, Banner said. She chaired the selection committee that reviewed proposals from eight companies that vied to create the master plan process. The companies included Stantec, McKenna Associates of Ann Arbor and LSL Planning from Royal Oak.
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She said the companies did not submit costs or master plan layouts. Instead, the firms detailed how they would go about gathering public input and working with the board to create the master plan.
The selection committee picked Stantec, which is also the township’s contracted engineering firm, as its recommendation to the board of trustees. Banner said Stantec promised to bring its leaders, instead of underlings, to work on the process. The company also had the most comprehensive plan to include residents in the process, she said.
The board and the committee met jointly on Feb. 3 to examine the Stantec selection. At the meeting, there was some concerns raised as to why Stantec was the only company that was asked to provide a cost estimate. At least one board member asked why the township isn’t trying to find the lowest bidder for the process.
Township manager Chip Snider said the township's bid policy doesn’t require officials to gather cost estimates if a company fits desired criteria.
“We don’t have to do the low-bid process, as long as we justify and articulate that the selected company has met our needs,” Snider said.
Snider said if Stantec is approved at the board meeting, there could be some public hearings about the property ideas by April or May.
The University of Michigan’s graduate planning students took on the property as their project last year, and created a planning presentation for the township at no cost. It is not clear if this input will be included in the Stantec process.
A joint venture of developers Real Estate Interests Group and Schostak Bros. owns another 80 acres of the closed hospital property, but the economy has shut down any potential users for the site for now, according to the companies. A brownfield reuse process, which will clean up pollution on the site, is tied to the companies bringing a new development to the property.