This letter concerns the intended Ann Arbor Railroad project that Milan Township is
faced with accepting or rejecting. This operation will vastly affect all of our lives, and
those of the surrounding communities, as we know it today.
The proposed project has been characterized as having 400 plus acres of asphalt,
multitudinous railroad tracks, about 100,000 square feet of buildings, approximately 50
trucks per hour entering the property at Cone Road exit, and 24-hour per day operation.
The way I understand it, the new vehicles will come by semi-trucks from the
northern direction down U.S. 23, enter the property, be unloaded and stored on the asphalt
area, checked over and prepped to be loaded onto rail cars and shipped south to various
destinations.
I have a few questions. Do we want to lose 800 acres of farmland to industrial
zoning? If the land is rezoned to industrial and this project does not come to
fruition, what else is going to jump at the opportunity to occupy that space? If the
distribution operation were to go bankrupt down the line somewhere, what do we do with 400
acres of asphalt where crops used to grow? Do we want hundreds of acres lit up like
a football stadium at night? Do we want to fight 50 extra semi-trucks per hour on
US-23? Do we want to smell the exhausts of several railroad engines, hundreds of
diesel trucks a day and hundreds of cars being loaded onto trains? Do we want to
hear the toot-toot of the train, truck and car horns as they are being moved around the
property? Do we want the water runoff, mixed with diesel, oil, gas, asphalt
shavings, salt or other chemicals from deicing, to be sent down into our aquifer or down
our county drains and ditches to the rivers and streams? If they use London Sand and
Aggregates as their supplier for stone for the construction, do we want that many more
trucks passing through London Township? Do we want the weight of the reality of the
project to be upon the shoulders of the Milan Township Board or do we want the voters to
accept or deny its existence?
These are just a few of the concerns each of us should be having because this is coming
into our neighborhood.
A concerned area resident
Aretta Schils