Northville Township Leaders: Prison Should Be Sold for Commercial Use

The Robert Scott Correctional Facility property should be sold for private enterprise, either for retail stores or light industrial use, leaders agreed Thursday night.

The township Board of Trustees approved a resolution at its Thursday night meeting to ask the state to sell the closed prison as soon as possible. Township leaders said they are acting in response to a plan by other communities to have the state turn the prison into a regional jail/public safety facility.

Township Manager Chip Snider and state Rep. Kurt Heise (R-20th District), who represents Northville, say they have been told that there are a few leaders from neighboring communities who are talking with Gov. Rick Snyder about turning the prison into a regional public safety facility. The regional plan could also include using the facility as a regional jail, Heise said he was told.

“I’m concerned that the state may get the wrong message,” Heise said. “A regional public safety facility is not the desire of Northville Township, nor is it my desire.”

Snider expressed his own concerns. “The township has been a public project dumping ground for 50 years, with the former Maybury Sanatorium, the Northville Psychiatric Hospital and the prison,” he said.

“At one time, about 33 percent of our township property was non-taxed due to institutional use. The residents need the prison property sold for the highest commercial use, to help with the tax base," Snider said. "Plus, they’re getting tired of staring at the concertina wire.”

The facility, which had been a women's prison since 1991, was closed in 2009 as a measure to save the annual $36 million operating costs. The state Department of Corrections turned the property over to the Department of Management and Budget in 2010, in preparation for a sale of the site.

Snider and Heise said the prison property, at Five Mile and Beck roads about a mile north of M-14, is the perfect place for a gateway development for the township.

“We need that barbed wire and guard towers to be taken down," Heise said. "It’s an eyesore to the community.”

Heise said he has not been approached officially about a public safety plan. Township trustees shared at the meeting Thursday night that they were upset about not being consulted about the use of the facility in their township.

A few township leaders said the plan came up through Public Safety Director John Werth’s discussions with his counterparts in neighboring communities. The leaders of these communities, and public officials named as leading the plan discussion, could not be reached for comment due to the Good Friday holiday.

The governor has been pushing for collaboration between neighbors, and Northville Township Trustee Chris Roosen has been an advocate of merging capabilities. Roosen, a consultant to the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, writes a blog that praises other communities’ efforts at collaboration.

However, Roosen said Friday that he will fight any effort to remove the township’s rights over the prison’s fate.

“We don’t really know the details of the plan, and we love our neighbors, but what would this cost us? Would this create a new layer of government?” Roosen said.

Heise said he will now take the township’s resolution to the Legislature and, in conjunction with state Sen. Patrick Colbeck (R-7th District), will push to have the state agree to put the property out to auction to developers. The measure will be similar to how the psychiatric hospital site on Seven Mile was purchased by REI a few years ago, Heise said.

Whereas developers have said the retail market is not ready for development on the hospital site, township officials believe the Five Mile and Beck location, across from a large, Home Depot-anchored retail intersection already, will attract buyers that can bring about the prison’s removal.

“We finally have the chance to get this property on the tax rolls, we don’t want the rug pulled out from under us,” Roosen said.