Marshall County
Musings on Tamarack Road
At Tuesday night’s Culver Town Council Meeting, Town Manager, Ginny Munroe reported on the annexation progress for the “Tamarack Road project”. This is the storage facility project proposed by Beachview Properties LLC at 18710 Tamarack Road.
I get why it is referred to by the Tamarack Road moniker since that is the property address, but it has me thinking about the future. While this is truly none of my business, I would anticipate the future business on that site will want a West Shore Drive address. That would be more recognizable than Tamarack. But will it or should it remain Tamarack Road after the annexation?
Currently South Main Street becomes Tamarack Road at the town limits. I’d need to consult our local historians, Jeff Kinney or Kurt Garner, but I assume South Main Street was Tamarack Road until some point in the past. This seems likely since on the north side of Culver, School Street becomes Tamarack Road again at the town limits.
I assume the street/road will need to be addressed by the Town and County as part of the annexation processes. Situations like this, where one side of the road is annexed, but not the other side aren’t particularly clean. The County is generally more than happy to transfer the road and it’s associated maintenance to the Town. The Town generally wants to negotiate some kind of split where costs are shared until such time as the other side is annexed. This leads to fun questions like does each entity only plow their half during snow events?
Assuming the Town and County work out some amicable agreement, what happens to the name? Does it remain Tamarack Road or does it become the next section of South Main Street? Circling back to the address question, would the future business see more benefit to addressing themselves as being on Main Street?
In all reality, is South Main Street really the appropriate name for even the existing portion of this street? Generally “Main Street” designates the main business district of a community. (Often communities move on and Main Street becomes relegated to a side street.) In my limited knowledge, there were only one business on that section of street in the past. There was a florist shop on the east side of the street just north of the Masonic Cemetery. That business has been gone for decades. Currently South Main Street is solely residential and assuming the Comp Plan is followed, not to mention the current plans for The Dunes, this area will be totally residential for the foreseeable future. Given that and the fact that it doesn’t even line up with Main Street proper, makes the naming question more interesting.
I don’t really have strong feelings on any of this. Just musing about the possible future and it’s ties to the past…
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After writing Tamarack multiple times in this post, I took a drive down this road and didn’t spot a single Tamarack tree, thus I’m assuming the name is due to Marshall County’s peculiar choice to name north-south roads after trees in a mostly alphabetical order.
Reflecting on today’s Pilot News
Did it seem to anyone else that the Michael Hicks commentary in today’s Pilot News was directed at Marshall County? It highlighted the successes of the Regional Cities Initiative and the Stellar Communities Initiatives and how those should reflect success in the READI applications.
Marshall County’s collaboration with St Joseph County and Elkhart County created a successful Regional Cities Initiative bid. While the other two counties took the Lion’s Share of the money due to the differences in population, Marshall County still benefited from this group effort. Some of the Regional Cities money came to Culver and helped Culver’s Stellar Initiative.
Marshall County had great success in the Stellar program. The County came together to support Culver in their Stellar application which resulted in Culver being designated a Stellar Community. This success was rolled into Marshall County’s Stellar application, which resulted in Marshall County being designated a Stellar Region. Building on the successes, Marshall County again collaborated with St Joseph County and Elkhart County to make a READI application. The region’s past success working together help them achieve the maximum READI award ($50MM) for our region.
Mr. Hicks reflex on the holistic approach of these initiatives and how the community collaboration and community planning creates additional opportunities… much more so than just spending money on basic infrastructure such as roads. Particularly in the case of READI, these initiatives create the opportunity to multiply the effect of scarce public dollars by combining them with private funds.
For better or worse, the incoming County Council has telegraphed that they will have a laser focus on cost control and infrastructure (roads) projects. While I cannot find fault in their intent or honesty in stating their position, I have concerns regarding their plan to ignore other opportunities. They seem to feel the READI projects are outside the scope of county government, despite the fact that the State has made local government partition a requirement. They will be missing an opportunity to multiply the return on County tax dollars if they don’t participate.
I will confess that I do not know all the intricacies of County government. If the County Council members are doing their job, they should know those things much better than I do. My view is from the outside and I have to say I am concerned…
The Roger Umbaugh Impact Investing Fund
A little history…
I’ve talked about my friend, Roger Umbaugh, a couple of times here. Roger was a past board member of on the Marshall County Community Foundation (MCCF). While on that board, he was also on the MCCF Investment Committee. When I joined the MCCF board, I also joined the MCCF Investment Committee.
One of Roger’s goals was to get MCCF into a better home. While the generosity of Key Bank was always appreciated, it was not always the best solution. On top of that, the Community Foundation had grown and needed more space than was available at Key Bank. When financing for the community pool project was under discussion, Roger found a way to finance it using New Market Tax Credits and to put MCCF in a position to facilitate this while also getting a new home as part of the deal.
Another of Roger’s goals was to see some of MCCF’s investment funds invested back into the community. He always thought it would serve two purposes… providing some income and doing good in the community. At the start, he didn’t know that there was a name for this: Impact Investing.
When the New Market Tax Credit project needed additional funding, Roger broached the subject of MCCF providing the funding gap as a loan. This resulted in $500k of Community Foundation funds be loaned to the project. This was a win-win for MCCF and project.
After Roger’s passing, I wanted to carry this forward for him. In his name, I championed designating the $500k as the start of an Impact Investing Fund. I also suggested that the fund be named the Roger Umbaugh Impact Investing Fund. The board voted to approve both measures. I have the feeling that this will be a draw to a different kind of donor for the Community Foundation. Another win-win.
This is still new. I have sat in on a seminar on Impact Investing. I have done a little research. There appears to be a lot of different ways we could approach this. At the last MCCF board meeting, I suggested that we should start this process by setting some goals which we’ll be doing in a future meeting. This seems to range from self-run scenarios to hands-off options where 95% of the heavy lifting is done using outside financial institutions.
So… I’m throwing this out here to see if there is any input from followers. This is your chance to add suggestions on how this new venture should be structured. Any ideas? Contact me by email (mail@easterdayconstruction.com) or feel free to use the comments.
More Stellar Signs
As I said in my previous post, I have been disappointed in the lost potential of the Stellar signs. At the time of that post, I hadn’t had the chance to see the signs in Bremen and Bourbon. I had the opportunity to see those signs the other day. While both of these seemed to be making better use of the opportunities and goals set for these signs, they are still under used.
Bremen is doing the best with use of it for town events. It had quite a few different local events listed, but there was still the ubiquitous Time & Date filler and “Welcome to Bremen”. Nothing was shown regarding the events outside of Bremen when I was there.
Bourbon wasn’t being used as much with the Time & Date filler prominent. Bourbon did make the move of including other local connections. They included screens with their town website address which I thought was an improvement and something the others should consider. (The sign was legible up close, but obviously not enough so for a picture.)
As I stated in the previous post, I realize there are limitations to the time municipal employees have to keep up with these things. Just this past week, I was please to see that Culver’s sign had shown some improvement, including advertising the “Paint Out” that was scheduled here this weekend. But events like the Paint Out should be showing up on all of these signs. The opportunity for cross-county tourism is a real one, plus the event would have been seen by travelers passing through those communities too. I’ll keep an eye on all of them for improvements. Time will tell. The opportunity is still there.
Extraterritorial Boundaries
January 23, 2023
Kevin Berger
Commentary, Culver, Marshall County, Politics
Community, Comprehensive Plan, Culver, government, Marshall County, Plan Commission, Plymouth, Zoning Ordinance
I’m currently sitting on committees forming new comprehensive plans for Plymouth and Culver. I’ve been pushing Culver to do a new Comp Plan since 2020. (See post here) Wouldn’t ‘2020 Vision for Culver’ been a good name!?! But I think they had some Stellar fatigue followed by pandemic malaise…
This will be the third time I’ve done this for Culver and the second time for Plymouth. MACOG has started offering this as a (paid) service and is leading these meetings for both communities. Ratio Architects did the previous one for Plymouth and an earlier one for Culver. The last one for Culver was completed by Houseal Lavigne.
What have I learned from these experiences? You’re buying a template. They all have strived to “personalize” the product, but lined up on a table without the credits, it would be pretty easy to group them by consultant. The format would give it a way.
But to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant… But that’s not what I came to tell you about. I came to talk about… Extraterritorial Boundaries.
If you follow that link, you’ll see that the Indiana legislators are constantly messing with the definition and powers granted to municipalities for their extraterritorial jurisdiction. The core premise is that municipalities are allowed to extend their zoning boundaries to cover areas of potential future municipal expansion. This is done with the consent of the County. It has generally been a 2 mile zone. The distance is increased when there is a lake involved, i.e. in the case of Culver, the south end of Lake Maxinkuckee is more than 2 miles from town, but is included in Culver’s Zoning Jurisdiction. This is not annexation. It doesn’t change tax rates. It doesn’t include water, sewer or road extensions. It just brings those areas under the municipality’s land planning jurisdiction and provides some control over how it is developed. In most cases, any development of significance would need municipal connections and most other developments will feel minimum impact. It’s a good way for the municipality to keep track of what’s happening around them and how it will affect them.
The pink area shows the current extended authority. The loop outside that shows the approximate limits if the Two Mile area was granted.
I have pushed several times for Culver to expand their Extraterritorial Jurisdiction to the limits allowed by the State. This is just good planning practice. I have an extended post about it from February 14, 2013 here. The drawing to the right is from that post. It shows where Culver’s Extraterritorial jurisdiction should have been then. That was before the annexation of The Paddocks PUD on the west side of town, the Beste annexation on the west and north side of town and the upcoming annexation on the south side of the Masonic Cemetery. All of those would extend the potential jurisdiction to the south, west and north. (The main effect would be on the north side since in the drawing we’re already running into to edge of county boundaries and the chances of Starke or Pulaski counties granting Culver jurisdiction are slim.)
The other change from the map above is that the current boundary became much more jagged after that. Sometime around 8 years ago, Culver chose to partner with the County on permitting, using their system. Unfortunately their system is quite crude and couldn’t handle parcels that had split zoning. This ended up in some negotiations which moved split parcels in and out of Culver’s jurisdiction based on the percentage that was in Culver’s jurisdiction at the time. At that time I argued strenuously that all the partial parcels should be brought under Culver’s jurisdiction since they were all fully within the allowable extraterritorial jurisdiction, but the Marshall County Plan Director and Marshall County Building Inspector pushed back on this, not wanting to give up County control. This was a huge missed opportunity, but it’s water under the bridge now.
I have been told that Plymouth’s Extraterritorial Boundary does take in all of the allowed jurisdiction. Looking at the drawing to the right, this is mostly correct, but not 100%. This is most obviously an issue in the industrial area on the NW side of Plymouth.
The Comprehensive Planning process will not change this, but I would suggest that the new Comp Plans include strong recommendations to expand the boundaries. That is a first step. This is not so much a power grab. It’s not about control. It’s more about knowledge and PLANNING. Both communities should look at Bremen and their struggles, where they’ve allowed their industrial area to become landlocked. This is an easy, local example of why planning outside the immediate boundaries of the community are important.
Currently, there are new things going on which should be part of this extraterritorial planning. One of these, which is of huge significance, is the County’s pursuit of expanded sewer districts. In Culver, it is likely that the town would be asked to take in sewer for Burr Oak and Hibbard. The push for inclusion of lakes means it is likely that Plymouth may be asked to take in all of the chain of lakes all the way to Lake Latonka. If these areas start to become municipal “customers”, then their future development becomes the concern of those municipalities. Look at the trend towards bigger and bigger houses around Lake Maxinkuckee and Pretty Lake. Sewer access will make this likely with the other lakes as well Many of them have lots that are currently unbuildable, but with sewer, that will change.
There is also a concern with allocation of resources. The County is struggling to hire and struggling to provide coverage. In the Culver area, a potential solution for both entities would be to expand Culver’s zoning jurisdiction to the County lines to the south and west of Culver. This would eliminate the small fringe area of county zoning around Culver and it would help Culver with planning control.
While Burr Oak and Hibbard aren’t exactly booming communities, sewer access could change this. Again, bringing this under Culver’s zoning control would help the town anticipate and plan for any growth. Sewer access could well spawn growth in Burr Oak. As mentioned in my article, the proximity to major electric service from the Burr Oak substation and access to an significant railroad line could be the catalyst for growth if sewer were available.
I don’t see much in the way of downside to this expansion. I know some in the AG area don’t want this oversight, but in reality, the municipal zoning has been changed so that the AG designation for the municipalities reasonably mimics the AG designation in the County. The municipal plan commissions have a county appointed member so there is representation. This is not to say that the municipalities don’t occasionally over step, as they did with the WECS rules, but even with those, the county eventually came pretty much in line with the same rules.
I will continue to advocate for expanding the Extraterritorial Jurisdiction of Plymouth and Culver as I serve on these committees. I think this is appropriate and necessary planning. It should be positive for all involved.
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