Listen to a conversation about the school forest property between IPR's Tyler Thompson and Claire Keenan-Kurgan in the audio player above.
The Glen Lake School Board was expected to discuss a proposal for attainable housing on their school forest property on Monday, but decided to hold off on the discussion and let board members do more research.
“Those (items) were taken off the agenda prior to it being published," Superintendent Jason Misner said in a statement at the meeting. "This is simply due to not having a defined process and procedure for changing the usage of this property.”
He says the board will take more time to “learn about how to best utilize the property within the currently written provisions associated with this land,” he continued. “I’m sure we will be speaking at future board meetings about next steps.”
Many school districts have forest properties — they come from the Municipal Forest Act of 1931. The properties are deeded to school districts from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, in an effort to encourage local land stewardship and provide the districts with money from forestry and other uses.
But housing is not one of those uses, under current law.
The housing proposal
The idea came from the Sleeping Bear Gateway Council, a local organization that has focused on workforce housing in recent years.
Mike Rivard, who sits on the board of the Sleeping Bear Gateway Council, told IPR that they had worked on a drafted amendment to the state's municipal forest legislation to allow “attainable housing on a nonprofit model” on school forest properties.
But they were told Michigan's Department of Natural Resources had “no interest” in changing the rules that limit school forest properties to forestry or recreational use.
Instead, the DNR proposed a case-by-case process to free Glen Lake’s property from the school forest restrictions, in which Glen Lake Community Schools could deed the property back to the DNR, and the DNR would grant a public use deed that allows for housing.
An anonymous Facebook post in a popular Leelanau County group suggested Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources agreed to this administrative deal in Glen Lake in order to stop local legislators from introducing that legislation.
Rivard said if the Glen Lake project had anything to do with halting legislative change, as the post implies, that’s not something he was aware of.
The school forest property
Ellie Johnson is district forester with the Leelanau, Grand Traverse, and Benzie Conservation Districts, and is familiar with this land.
“It's got some pine plantation, some Aspen pockets, and then mixed northern hardwoods, especially in the northern half,” said Johnson. “It's also got a lot of steep ridges and wetland spots in the northern part.”
She described it as a “stepping stone in a larger continuum of natural spaces” between Manistee National Forest and Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore.
The land has been logged in the past, most recently about ten years ago.
“A harvest, if it's done correctly and if the market's right, should create revenue for the landowner,” said Johnson. “But it's also done in part for enhancing the forest, either for setting up future timber sale, or for meeting wildlife habitat goals or different ecological initiatives.”
She was slated to speak about school forest properties at Monday’s meeting before they removed the item from the agenda.
Since this type of deeded land historically can only be used for forestry or recreation, Johnson said she has some concerns about wider forest loss if municipalities have a pathway to develop the public land they control, beyond those two purposes.
It's likely the issue will come back up for discussion at a future meeting.
