Your local municipality will have building ordinance that any landowner planning to develop should become familiar with, if for no other reason than to facilitate communication with your team (attorney, civil engineer, and architect). Part of our process of securing building permits has been getting to know Jeff Wallace, Village Manager. We’ve been fortunate with Jeff, as he has been fantastic to work with, and sharing your intentions with the municipal leadership can offer the landowner a sense of acceptance or rejection of the development intentions.
While informally discussing our development with the Village Manager it became clear a Planned Unit Development (PUD) would be appropriate for our site, which allows for multiple living quarters on the property as a single residence. Our intention is to design and build our primary home on the westside of the gardens with a view of the river, which we refer to as River House, and a guest home on the eastside the property, near the front gate we call the Carriage House.
The first formal step in the process of securing a building permit with the Village of Manchester under a PUD process is your Preapplication Conference. This meeting is attended by the Village Manager, and the Village Planner, which for Manchester is a contracted position filled by John Enos of Carlisle Wortman Associates, Inc. a consulting firm in Ann Arbor. There is a prescribed format outlined in the ordinance to support a Preapplication Conference, largely a narrative describing the project, and drawings of the proposed building site.
Our Preapplication Conference was Friday February 15, 2018 at the Village Planner’s office in Ann Arbor with the Village Manager, my architect, and I in attendance. Both Jeff Wallace and John Enos provided insighful feedback, where the guidance for River Bend Gardens was extremely encouraging and positioned us as comfortable enough for closing with Jim Mann and his family.
The primary concerns from the Village’s perspective for any development is certainly ensuring building codes are met, but more importantly is gaining an understanding of how the project will impact the community? Do the plans maintain the 19th century character of the Village? Does the development safeguard the environmental attributes of the community? Does the project add to the community?
With the Preapplication Conference milestone behind us, the only open due diligence task is securing the necessary environemental permit to actually access the property across the USFW wetlands west of the easement?
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