WEST OLIVE, MI (WHTC-AM/FM) – The Ottawa County Board of Commissioners approved several items during yesterday’s business meeting.
One was a 2.4 million-dollar plan to refurbish the Parkside Marina in the county’s Historic Ottawa Beach Park site. The 1.5-acre property would have additional shoreline stabilization, a waterfront walkway promenade, an accessible kayak and canoe launch with limited public parking, a public restroom and marina services building, parking and additional greenspace, and a reduction from the current 80-slip marina with winter storage to only 41 slips, with 15 seasonal and 26 transient slips. Bonds and grants will pay for nearly 80 percent of the project. The plan now must be approved by the Park Township board and the Army Corps of Engineers before it can become reality.
Another issue was a resolution approving a 32-year-long land/lease agreement with Holland Township that would allow that municipality to build a public safety services building on the county’s James Street Campus just east of US-31 on Holland’s North Side. The structure would house a township fire station and a substation for the Holland/Park Township community policing unit of the sheriff’s department. The county will receive over 310 thousand dollars from the township to cover the cost of purchasing land last year for this project. No timetable for when this building would be built was mentioned in meeting agenda documents.
Finally, the commissioners approved a resolution for the state Department of Transportation to look into the next phase of the M-231 project, along with establishing a M-231 Corridor Preservation Committee. A planning draft of a proposed alternate north-south route to US-31 would have the highway continue south from Lake Michigan Drive, parallel to 120th Avenue, to just north of New Holland Street, where an extension would go west to US-31 while the highway continues east and south around Zeeland to a junction with I-196 about a mile east of the current Byron Road exit. There is no current timetable for this proposed project.