What's in your outbuildings?

When I bought my farm, built  in the 1880s and still owned by the descendants of the homesteaders, there was over 100 years of stuff in those outbuildings.  It was all laid out for every one to see at the auction.

The good stuff went fast.  There were horse-drawn sleighs; an anvil and blacksmith tools; a fainting couch. We were left with the stuff that no one wanted.  There was a chicken coop with its roof held up by twine-tied stacks of Farmer's Wife magazines.  The next coop was a museum to the history of vacuum cleaners.  A room in the barn was filled with bread bags stuffed in other bread bags and jars of straightened baggie twisters. The hayloft was a church with  lectern, two pianos, dozens of pews, and boxes of psalm books in Norwegian, plus lots of pigeon poo. The milking parlor archived hundreds of windows and extra panes of glass; straightened nails, tin ceiling panels, and doors from somewhere else entirely. You get the picture, and there were over a dozen buildings.

We eventually dealt with most of it, finding appropriate homes, renting dumpsters and trying to learn  how much could be amassed in a lifetime or two and keeping an eye on our stashes of yarn, washed ziplock bags, wine corks, canoes, bikes and yes, straightened baggie twisters.

Why does the Township get involved with what we have in our outbuildings?   Well, the short answer is, they don't if we are an agricultural property or if we are using them for personal storage.  What we keep, hoard or save for a rainy day is our business and our childrens' problem (or embarrassment at the auction).


But are all accessory-use structures used for personal property?  Even the really big (and getting bigger) ones?  Can we trust the current Board to enforce our ordinances and make sure that they remain for personal use?  What do they keep in their outbuildings?  What are we to think when a current Planning Commission member said that, as long as what's being done is under the radar, its okay."?  Or when a long-time Board member said,  "We don't want to know about that.  Don't tell us that.  That has been a 'problematic' property."   with regard to how to represent a well-known property to prospective buyers.  The real estate agent was present at the June Board meeting with two potential buyers when that statement was made.  Everyone knew that the place for sale had been operating commercially as a number of things over the years...most recently as a furniture and second-hand store with food for sale.    Even the County acknowledged it was a commercial interest and had been taxing it as such.  So why do we allow this to happen?  Why should we care?


The Township should care because it has ordinances that protect the health, safety and welfare of its residents.  Home occupations are allowed but are to be limited to the home.  Businesses are not to be run from accessory use structures. Even storing business equipment or materials there, as recently clarified at the June meeting by the Township Attorney, Chad Lemmons is not permitted. We do not have sewers, fire response, road infrastructure, or the setting to allow businesses to operate from accessory use structures.  We do not have a commercial zone that isolates and separates people's homes and backyards from back-up beeps, delivery trucks, motorized equipment, bus parking lots, waste piles....  There are simply things that should not go on, be stored, used, heard or dumped on the ground in a non-sewered, rural community.  We lay it all out in the ordinances and comprehensive plan.

It is also laid out for display at those auctions.  We can't pretend to not know what's going on.   If you have a complaint, use link to the form on the right side of the blog.  Your name will be protected and the complaint will have to be addressed by the Board.