Development and Planning

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The City has now made available four draft alternatives for an amendment to the City Charter to change how decisions are made about the sale of City-owned lands. Some Council members expressed an interest in changing this provision in East Lansing’s Charter to be more in line with Lansing’s, but the decision parameters being suggested for East Lansing are different from Lansing’s in an important respect.

Image: PDIG represenatives Tom Eckhart and Todd Arend at City Council last night

Last night at City Council, PDIG ran into multiple disappointments as the developer’s representatives tried to push forward their plan to construct a project known as “Building A” at the corner of Grand River Avenue and Abbot Road.

A citizen-run protest on the theme of ‘Save Our City” will occur this Tuesday from 6-7 pm at City Hall, just in advance of Council’s next scheduled meeting.

The protest is being organized by the PAC Neighborhoods 1^st and advertised by the group East Lansing Citizens Concerned. Neighborhoods 1^st says the protest is directed at three issues:

Since Tuesday’s 3-2 vote at Council to close the Bailey daycare and community center, ELi’s Managing Editor Ann Nichols and I have been soliciting citizen reactions.

Image: The previous plan for Building A, which was to include a hotel and to be 10 stories

Plans to put an upscale boutique hotel in “Building A”—the building PDIG is proposing to erect at the corner of Abbot Road and Grand River Avenue—have fallen through. PDIG has informed the Downtown Development Authority there will be no hotel after all—and the building will be eight stories rather than ten.

East Lansing’s public parking system is consistently a money-loser; the City’s large unfunded retiree liabilities are about to become more visible; and property taxes are going up. These were three of the major issues covered last night at City Council during discussion of a report on the City’s finances.

In a long and contentious Council meeting tonight, Mayor Nathan Triplett, Mayor Pro Tem Diane Goddeeris, and Council member Susan Woods effectively voted to close the Bailey daycare and also the Bailey Community Center in June of this year.

Left: Mayor Pro Tem Diane Goddeeris. Right: Site of the proposed PDIG development

Image: Bailey daycare parents' Working Group member Charles Hoogstraten speaks to Council late last year

Former East Lansing mayor Douglas Jester is urging City Council to vote tomorrow night to save the Bailey daycare. In a letter to Council that he has shared with ELi, Jester asks Council “to assist the parents who are attempting to establish a non-profit corporation to operate the program, and to undertake a community process to decide the future of the Bailey Community Center.”

Councilmember Ruth Beier is set tomorrow to make the following motion at Council:

Image: City Manager George Lahanas, courtesy City of East Lansing

City staff are moving to get a East Lansing City Charter amendment on the ballot for May 5 that would change how some public land sales happen—taking the power from the ballot box and giving it to a simple majority of City Council.

At City Council this week, City Manager George Lahanas told Council the current Charter provision is outdated and restrictive.