By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
Ortonville- At the Monday night meeting, the village council voted 4-3 to table the first reading of the drafted ordinance pertaining to the Ortonville Wildlife Preservation Park for the purpose of drafting additions to the ordinance. President Tonja Brice and council members Pat George and Larry Hayden voted against it.
At issue is about 47 acres of village owed wooded property and just how that parcel would be managed. The impasse for community members is should the trails be natural hiking trials or more developed trials.

“Tonight, I would like to recommend that we table this because I’d like to make some inclusions to the ordinance,” said president pro tempore Dan Eschmann. “Number one, first and foremost, as we commented many times at our last meeting, that property is open to the public, so as part of this ordinance, I want to include what is allowed, so I would like to add and I would like to propose for council to consider adding to this ordinance that it is open to the public for natural trail hiking. And I would also like to add, I would like to include in the ordinance that no trees be cut, and no structures be built of any kind on the property.”
President Tonja Brice brought up that there are currently ordinances for Parks and Recreation that prohibit motor vehicles, tree cutting, unauthorized construction, loitering, trash dumping and more in all village parks that they were not aware of when the original issues with the property came up last year.
“We already have an ordinance that voices all of these concerns,” said Brice. “So what we did not do properly was take those pictures to Lt. Glover, and we did not say ‘here, we are concerned, here is our ordinance,’ instead we drifted away and we’re trying to recreate the wheel with another ordinance, that we already have in place. So at any time we can look at this and say ‘hey, what needs to be tweaked’ versus creating something that duplicates what we already have.”
Village manager Dale Stuart stated at the meeting that repetition would not hurt the ordinance, and may help clarify the specifications to that park. But there was no motion on if developed trails would be allowed in that park.
The ordinance was tabled to the regular meeting of Nov. 25.