ROTHBURY — With the Electric Forest music festival getting rolling this week, the Rothbury village council received an update on this year's event from AEG Presents vice president of business strategy, Chad Cheek, at its regular meeting Tuesday.
Cheek shared his thanks to the council again for its help with the 10-year mass gathering permit extension that was granted to the festival early in 2024. Through the stability that came with that permit, Cheek said, his company was able to work to secure a similar camping permit with Grant Township and pay to get needed road work done on 80th Avenue and Wilke Road.
Cheek added that after a thunderstorm in the area disrupted the final night of last year's festival, he hopes this one goes undisturbed. In the event such a thing does occur, the council agreed Cheek can contact village president Vern Talmadge, which he did last year.
The festival has close to 2,000 vendors and 130 musical acts scheduled for this week, and Cheek shared that the work done to put the event together is "an amazing feat of logistics I'm inspired by every time we come." He also happily shared stories of event personnel being delivered food and water by residents a year ago.
In regular village business, the council approved a bid for road work to be done in the village as well as a bid for repaving and widening of the paved path from the village hall to the Hart-Montague Bike Trail. Both votes were 6-0 (Denise Kurdziel was absent).
The road work will be done on a 1,240-foot stretch of Wilke Road to where it connects with Michigan Avenue. The council approved a bid for $51,800 from Asphalt Paving Inc. in Muskegon, which was the lower of the two bids presented.
The paved path will be repaved and widened from its current eight feet to 10 feet in width. The council approved a $49,964 bid from White Lake Excavating. That bid was some $700 higher than the other bid presented, but the council agreed staying with a local business was worth the small increase in price.
No final timetable is set for either project. Department of Public Works director Scott Beishuizen said the contract allows for a 21-day window for work to be completed once begun and said he could ask the company to ensure the path remains usable while the project is in progress.
The council considered a request from Montague Area Public Schools to park its new refrigerated truck in the village hall parking lot through the summer and plug it in to the village hall to streamline transportation of food to the food pickup for local schoolchildren on Tuesdays. It was noted the district has offered to help pay for the added electricity this would generate, and treasurer Deb Murphy said her concern was the truck taking up parking spaces. Beishuizen said he could find a spot for the truck to minimize disruption.
Zoning administrator Mike Harris shared an update regarding the planning commission's issues with the Greenlawn mobile home park. He said there have been some improvements regarding the zoning violations the commission believes have occurred, but the dumpster Harris said owner Kurt Hofstra promised to place on site has not yet been placed. The council suggested applying a hard deadline for the dumpster to be placed.
Vaughn White of Valley City Metal, who is overseeing work being done to the old foundry in hopes of turning it into a community center, shared that his team is now four weeks into the demolition of a portion of the building. He wryly added that may account for some of the loud noises nearby residents have occasionally heard. The plan is for the south end of the building to include the community center, while the north would have industrial space.
Early steps have been taken to get a new roof, siding and a dividing wall to the property. White is also applying for easement permits with the state Department of Natural Resources, saying some sort of access point from the bike trail may be necessary to allow sufficient space for emergency vehicles to come to the building if needed. If those are approved, White said he will approach the council again to consider some form of cooperation on the matter.
