2007 Community Recreation Plan
View or Download the Current Draft
Every five years, the Parks & Recreation Commission updates a Community Recreation Plan for the Village of Elk Rapids. The previous Plan was issued in 2000. The purpose of this Plan is twofold:
- to provide the Village Council with a 5-year Plan to meet the ongoing recreational needs of the residents of the Village and its environs;
- to establish eligibility for recreational and land acquisition grants from the Michigan Dept of Natural Resources (DNR) and other agencies.
The Village Planning Commission intends to incorporate the Community Recreation Plan into the Village Master Plan Update, which is also underway.
The Parks & Recreation Commission used the results of the 2005 Master Plan Opinion Survey (see top of this web page), data from a grade school survey, a high school focus group, and a June 14, 2006 Parks & Rec public input session in preparing this document. The Commission completed this document in late 2006, and further public input was solicited and gathered during a 30-day public review and comment period in December 2006. In January 2007, the Commission incorporated the comments to form a final draft of the Recreation Plan for submission to the Village Council for adoption. The Village Council held an advertised public meeting at its February 20, 2007 meeting, and passed a resolution adopting the revised document later at that meeting.
The plan document was submitted to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) for their approval in early March 2007. Once approval is granted, the Village becomes eligible to apply for a number of DNR-related grants for outdoor recreation, the most important of which is the the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund (MNRTF). MNRTF grants can fund outdoor recreation development projects, including land acquisition.
Many Antrim County recreational areas have benefited from the MNRTF land acquisition grants. The Antrim Creek Natural Area, the Grass River Natural Area, and the Cedar River Natural Area have all used MNRTF grant funds to acquire all or part of the land in their respective areas. Numerous townships and villages in Antrim County have also benefited from MNRTF recreation development grants. Barnes Park in Eastport is an example of a recipient of several such grants.
The Recreation Plan also provides the Parks & Recreation Commission (and, to a partial extent, the Harbor Commission) with a road map of projects to initiate, fund, and implement over the coming five years. The Plan can be updated at any time over the subsequent five years, if the Plan elements undergo a sufficiently drastic change. Otherwise, the next major update of the plan will be in the year 2011.
The Community Recreation Plan is available for viewing at the Village Office. They can also be viewed and/or downloaded (for viewing and printing) using the links below.
Click on the links below to view or download the various sections of the Community Recreation Plan.
To READ the sections on your browser, click VIEW below, and a separate browser window will open. This browser version is not suitable for printing.
To prepare a printable version, download the document onto your PC by clicking the DOWNLOAD button. The number, in Kilobytes (KB) or Megabytes (MB), after the title shows the size of the file. The larger the number, the longer it will take to download. The files are in Adobe PDF format. To read and print the documents from the PDF files, you must have Adobe Reader® installed. If you do not have it on your computer, you can download Adobe Reader® from the Adobe website.
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