St. James Township Planning Commission

Organization

Coordinates

45.7427° N, 85.5096° WGoogle Maps: St. James Township Planning CommissionDownload KML

Eras

Modern era

Concepts

governance

Within

Township of Saint James

Summary

The St. James Township Planning Commission is the planning body of St. James Township, constituted under Michigan’s Planning Enabling Act, Act 33 of 2008. It meets in the conference room of the Print Shop Museum — the Historical Society building — usually at 6:00 pm.

Constitution and officers

The township’s own document series holds the enabling statute alongside the minutes, which is unusually convenient: the rule and its application sit in one place. Section 17(1) of the Act, MCL 125.3817, provides that

A planning commission shall elect a chairperson and secretary from its members and create and fill other offices as it considers advisable. An ex officio member of the planning commission is not eligible to serve as chairperson. The term of each officer shall be 1 year, with opportunity for reelection as specified in bylaws adopted under section 19.

The minutes show that machinery working. At a special meeting on 10 December 2024 the Commission elected officers, Engelsman being nominated for Chair by Pryor and Taylor-Blitz for Vice-Chair. The change is visible in the record without being announced: through 2024 the minutes read “Meeting called to order by Taylor-Blitz”, and from April 2025 they read “by Engelsman”.

The five commissioners named in the April 2025 minutes are Lori Taylor-Blitz, Mark Engelsman, Cynthia Pryor, Paul Cole and Vic VanDeventer, with the township’s zoning administrator attending in an officer capacity rather than as a member. Attendance is minuted by name, and absences are recorded as excused or unexcused.

The 2023 Master Plan

The Commission’s most consequential action in the held record is its approval of the Beaver Island Master Plan and Future Land Use Map as a guide, and its referral of the draft to the St. James Township Board — see St. James Planning Commission Master Plan approval and referral, 2023 and Beaver Island Master Plan, 2023. A planning commission’s adoption of a master plan is a recommendation and a guide; it is not a zoning ordinance, and it does not by itself change what may be built anywhere.

What a planning commission is for, here

The distinction that matters most for reading this series is between planning and zoning, and the Act keeps them apart. The Commission prepares and adopts a master plan and recommends; the township board legislates; the zoning administrator applies the ordinance to particular parcels. All three appear in the same minutes — the zoning administrator sits at the table and reports — and it is easy to read a discussion of a parcel as though the Commission had decided something about it.

It had not. What the Commission decides is what the plan should say. Anything in these minutes touching an individual property is a discussion, a referral, or a recommendation unless a separate zoning record says otherwise, and this archive does not treat a planning minute as evidence of land-use permission.

Evidence and limits

The held series runs to 254 documents, with dated material from 2017 to 2026 plus the 2008 statute — agendas, notices, draft minutes and approved minutes together. Three limits follow.

Approved and draft minutes are both present, and only the approved version is the record. Officer terms under the Act are one year, so any chair or vice-chair named here is current only to the date of the document naming them. And nothing in this series establishes what the Township Board did with a referral, what the zoning ordinance says, or whether a plan recommendation was carried out — those are separate records. See Island civic governance and public institutions.

Read the document

2 pages, rendered from the held scan.

All 2 pages

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Added 2 August 2026. Recent changes