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MACOMB TOWNSHIP — Meeting for about an hour on May 6, the Macomb Township Planning Commission advanced all of the items on its agenda for final approval.
First to be discussed and given recommendation for approval was the final site plan for the Rockwood Park site condominium development, located next to Waldenburg Park along 21 Mile Road. The development will feature 21 condominium units and a detention basin between the properties and the Middle Branch Clinton River.
Given the development’s proximity to the river, commissioners and residents alike had concerns about flooding. Commissioner Aaron Tuckfield brought his flooding concerns to Land Development Director James Van Tiflin, who spoke about the engineering behind the site.
“It meets all of the requirements as far as the flood plain goes,” Van Tiflin said. “Essentially what they’re doing is they’re filling the property where the road is going to go and to where some of the lots are towards the north end, and they’re mitigating that flood plain in the detention basin. This detention, from the normal water elevation to the flood plain, is about 6 feet deep. A foot of it is for detention, the rest of it is all for flood plain mitigation, so they are taking that volume that they are filling and putting into the detention basin that they’re digging out.”
The detention basin’s effects are expected to be limited to the development itself.
Commissioners then advanced a proposed rezoning of the former CVS Pharmacy at the southeast corner of the 23 Mile Road and North Avenue intersection from C-3 commercial (shopping center) district to C-2 general commercial district. Brought to the board by the township itself, Planning Director Josh Bocks described the request as bringing a nonconforming site into line with the township’s master plan.
“It came to our attention that there used to be three separate parcels there, and they were zoned C-3,” Bocks said. “I’m not quite sure how they were zoned C-3 … and there was a contract rezoning agreement put in place to rezone them from C-3 to C-2. That agreement also stipulated that a drug store is the only use allowed at that location and … if that drug store is no longer operating, the parcels should revert back to the C-3 zoning. The issue with the C-3 zoning is that it requires a minimum of 5 acres, and this parcel is only just over 3 acres, therefore by reverting back to C-3 we’re creating a nonconforming parcel, and we typically try to avoid those.”
Bringing the parcel back to C-2 changes little about how the site could be used with the township’s zoning code describing C-2 as encompassing “business and commercial activities, conducted within an enclosed building only, of a general character of large service activity and normally depending for support on more than a small neighborhood area.” The biggest difference between C-3 and C-2 is that C-3 allows shopping centers such as a grocery store, though the size of the parcel would prevent such a business from being built there.
The Macomb Township Board of Trustees will exercise its approval authority over both locations at its Wednesday, May 14 meeting.
