Peaine Township Planning Commission

Organization

Coordinates

45.7295° N, 85.5268° WGoogle Maps: Peaine Township Planning CommissionDownload KML

Eras

Modern era

Concepts

governance

Within

Township of Peaine

Summary

The Peaine Township Planning Commission is the Township planning body identified in the held 2023 Master Plan resolution and 2026 approved minutes. Its documented actions include adoption of the Master Plan and consideration of proposed zoning changes.

Composition and terms

The Commission is the planning body of Peaine Township, the island’s other planning authority alongside the St. James commission. It meets at the township hall on King’s Highway.

Its minutes do something the St. James series does not: they print each member’s term-expiry date beside the name. The regular meeting of 3 January 2025 records “Members Present: Pam Grassmick (2/28/26), Vicki Smith (2/28/27), David VanDeventer” — so a reader can tell not only who sat but how long their appointment had left to run. By the work session of 21 January 2026 the roll call is Grassmick, Franz, Doughman, Smith and Howie, five members, with the recording secretary listed separately and explicitly not among them.

One name recurs across the island’s bodies: Vicki Smith sits here, serves as Peaine’s township treasurer, and is the township’s representative on the Emergency Services Authority. On an island of a few hundred year-round residents the same people staff several boards, and an account that treats each body’s membership as independent will overstate how many people are involved.

Notice, hearing, and the limits of a recommendation

The held series shows the statutory machinery around a zoning amendment as well as the decisions. Before considering an application to amend the zoning ordinance the Commission publishes a notice naming the date, hour and place of a public hearing and the case number; the file for 3 January 2025 includes both such a notice and a cancellation of that hearing, which is itself worth knowing — a noticed hearing in this series is not evidence that a hearing occurred.

As with the St. James commission, what this body produces is a recommendation. It adopts and amends the master plan and it recommends on rezoning; the township board legislates. Nothing in these minutes establishes that a recommendation became an ordinance, and this archive does not read a planning minute as evidence of a land-use permission. Applicants and property owners named in hearing notices are deliberately not reproduced here.

Why two planning commissions

The island has two, one per township, and they are not interchangeable. Each adopts its own master plan and administers its own zoning ordinance over its own ground, so a rezoning in Peaine says nothing about the rule in St. James and vice versa. The 2023 Beaver Island Master Plan is the exception that shows the rule: it was prepared jointly and then adopted separately by each commission — see Peaine Planning Commission Master Plan adoption, 2023 and Beaver Island Master Plan, 2023 — because a joint document still needs two adoptions to bind two townships.

For a reader that has a practical consequence. A question of the form “what is the rule on Beaver Island” usually has two answers, and a source that gives one answer has probably looked at one township. The same holds for the boards, the appointments and the budgets described in Island civic governance and public institutions.

Evidence and limits

The held series runs to 110 documents — agendas, notices, draft minutes and approved minutes. They establish the Commission’s role in the dated actions above and its membership at two dates. They do not establish its formation date, a complete membership history, its charter, its budget, or that any recommendation became a township board ordinance or a current zoning rule.

A discrepancy in the township’s own paper. Two agendas in this series give the hall’s address as 26184 King’s Highway; every other Peaine document — 212 of them across the planning and board series — gives 36825 King’s Highway. The weight of the record is decisively behind 36825, and the two outliers are read here as a typographical error rather than a second building.

Added 2 August 2026. Recent changes