We expect Independence Township officials to protect residents next to the Beaumont property on M-15.
This property is not suitable for what they have planned.
Beaumont does great work at its Troy and Royal Oak hospitals, but a new medical center in a boxed-in, bar-graph shaped piece of land on M-15 near I-75?
What are they thinking?
Neighbors are understandably up in arms. Into what they expected would be a quiet neighborhood could come a busy hospital.
About half of the 62.5 acre site, 32.2 acres, is zoned residential in the township Master Plan. Beaumont wants the township to rezone it as a Planned Unit Development, which would allow the mixed-use project.
The plan places a nursing home and assisted/independent living apartments in the residential areas, so it may meet the PUD legal definition, but not its spirit.
The idea behind a PUD is to create more of an old-fashioned neighborhood. Houses are mixed together with small businesses. People live, work, and shop in an open area with lots of trees and grass.
This site is too small for that.
Beaumont would have 2,554 parking spaces sprawled on surface lots and a four-tier parking garage. It would have more than 300,000 square feet of four-story hospital and office buildings.
The state Department of Community Health lists a surplus of more than 1,000 hospital beds in Macomb and Oakland counties.
This doesn’t mean Beaumont would be denied a Certificate of Need for its proposed 192-bed hospital, even with McLaren seeking 200-300 beds a mile away on Sashabaw.
Denial by the township could be only a first step. The ongoing Orco situation has shown developers don’t have to take ‘no? for an answer.
Be prepared for that.
Appeal to the state against changing the CON law or making exceptions.
Stick to the Master Plan, which calls for this area to be residential and research offices.
A well-equipped research facility could provide employment to highly-educated researchers, tax revenue for the township, new medicines to benefit society as well as Beaumont, and a quiet neighbor to local residents.
Don’t let us down.
PMC