The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore proposes to develop a hiking and paddling trail that follows the Lake Michigan shoreline in the park from Platte Bay to Good Harbor Bay. To do so, the National Lakeshore will prepare an Environmental Assessment (EA), which will describe and analyze alternatives for this trail.
Affordable housing in Leelanau County is in short supply. That isn’t actually burning news. It wasn’t even news in 1995, when I became an Americorps worker whose mission was to help start a five-county housing nonprofit organization called HomeStretch. What makes it relevant, even urgent, today is that housing in the county—for workers with college degrees, skills and good jobs, families, people with low incomes, seniors, young adults—is evaporating more quickly than the water levels on Lake Michigan. When the basic needs of a community aren’t met—whether through a confluence of circumstances, lack of initiative, an adverse business climate, or refusal by its members to take action—then the whole community suffers.
Here’s a quick timeline of events surrounding Sugar Loaf since the resort reemerged in the headlines last September. Below that you’ll also find a list of major questions that remain about Sugar Loaf and its ownership.
Andy Gale of Cedar is one such seeker who has made “waste not, want not” his personal and professional mission. The founder of Bay Area Recycling for Charities (BARC) discusses his visionary goals and the extraordinary growth of his six-year-old venture. BARC collects a wide variety of recyclable materials from both residential and commercial customers, offering both convenience and a cost-effective way to make their detritus “disappear.”
This spring in Empire, a heated debate has ignited over whether visitors from outside the Township ought to begin paying $1 per hour to park their automobile at one of 87 spots at the popular Lake Michigan public beach. The payment would be made at one, centrally located machine that accepts credit cards. Nearly empty during the cold months, the beach fills up fast in July and August.
Mark Evans, who had hoped to build a forest canopy walk this summer in Leelanau’s Kasson Township, confirmed to the Glen Arbor Sun that the prominence of Ash trees on the property (many infected with Emerald Ash Borer), and not the outcry from citizens opposed to the project, was what stopped him from moving forward.
Eco-tourism guide Mark Evans will likely not pursue a forest canopy walk with views of the Glen Lakes in Leelanau County’s Kasson Township, the Glen Arbor Sun has learned. A site study conducted late this winter revealed that many of the ash trees on John and Wendy Martin’s 83 acres — perhaps as many as 60 percent — were infected with, or at least affected by, the emerald ash borer invasive species, which has decimated hardwood forests across the eastern United States. Only 40 percent of the trees affected were deemed treatable.
Eneliko “Liko” Smith, the enigmatic Samoan-born boxer turned hotelier who has made two ill-fated bouts for Sugar Loaf, has shifted gears and will instead acquire the Glen Arbor Art Association’s Manitou Music Festival — the popular classical and folk music concert series that takes place in the summertime at area churches, at the backyard studio stage at Lake Street Studios, and at the Sleeping Bear Dune Climb. Ann Arbor teacher and performer Harry Fried had run the Festival until stepping down last year. The Manitou Music Festival was founded about 20 years ago by world-renowned cellist Crispin Campbell, who has since gone on to found symphony orchestras in the Columbian jungle in land formerly occupied by leftist FARC-rebels.
At the moment these words were put to paper, somewhere around 280,000 people in Michigan were barred from marriage. About 44,000 of these people have created a life together anyway. Some of them share in the task of raising children. We’re talking, of course, about gay people. At the time this article was printed, Michigan’s same-sex marriage ban, passed by voters in 2004, was still in effect. But will the law change as the ink dries? Earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Bernard A. Friedman heard arguments in the case of DeBoer v. Snyder, and in the coming weeks, he’ll announce his ruling on whether the state’s ban is legal under the U.S. Constitution.
Ten local, state and national organizations have joined together in endorsing a statement calling on The Homestead Resort and the Michigan Department of Enviromental Quality to work together to correct the problem of partially-treated wastewater spray blowing into a portion of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, rendering it unavailable for public use.