Bear Lake Village Council to discuss new blight ordinance Thursday

BEAR LAKE — The Bear Lake Village Council has put the battle with blight toward the top of its priority list and will likely take another step in that fight this week.

A special meeting will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday to discuss and potentially enact a stronger ordinance against blight, which has become an increasing problem in the village's downtown area.

"There's three properties downtown, one of them that is obviously very dangerous," said Village of Bear Lake president Jeff Bair, citing the Village Variety Store on 7718 Lake St. He said two other properties downtown are also owned by the deceased and are getting close to being dangerous.

"We've hired an attorney that specializes in this; he drafted the ordinance ... that we can hopefully adopt on Thursday," Bair said. "It's got more teeth and gives us more leverage against blighted properties and property owners.

"Once we adopt this, the attorney will be more able to vigorously handle the situation."

In this effort, the village has been aided by the Alliance for Economic Success, which provided funds for the legal work being used to draft the new ordinance.

"There's a couple things that AES does, and it's all dependent upon communities being ready and really wanting to move forward," said Tim Ervin, resource development director at the Manistee AES.

"We agree to support those communities however we can in developing a master plan, strategy, whatever it may be, and the Village (of Bear Lake) had the foresight as well as the leadership to want to do this," he said. "Then we circle back around and do whatever we can to help with the implementation of that plan.

"Our support has been providing money to enable the community to get some legal support and then following up on that."

Recently, council members decided to close Lynn Street from Lake Street to the Huntington Bank ATM so that people won’t walk or drive on that side of the neglected variety store, which is essentially crumbling. With ownership in question, the village has had its hands tied moving forward.

"Dealing with blight is very complicated," Ervin said. "Ownership takes on a different form in certain instances, so it's important that you have a strong ordinance that you can work with and that's one of the things the village will end up with through the legal support.

"It'll be a great thing for the village to have those processes in place and hopefully as soon as possible we'll be able to see the actual physical change."

Since adopting a master plan update in 2014 that established blight elimination as a high priority, the village council created the Community and Business Alliance (CABA) to help with the effort and recently resolved to enter into an agreement with the Manistee County Community Foundation to create a Bear Lake Village Blight Elimination Fund, according to a press release from AES.

"Public safety (is the number one concern)," Bair said, "and then, aesthetically, to eliminate blight and accentuate our downtown and our access to one of the most beautiful lakes in the state of Michigan."