WILLIAMSBURG — Years of disputes over whether a piece of land in Whitewater Township is buildable or not prompted the owners to sue the township for millions in federal court.
Baggs Partners is asking a federal judge to award $15 million in damages over claims that township officials arbitrarily and capriciously blocked a 20-home site condominium development, said Michael Herring, an attorney for the property owners. A previous township board had declared the property unbuildable in 2023 because its width ratio didn’t comply with township ordinance, then agreed the owners could ask the zoning board of appeals for a variance.
Those were just two parts of a long narrative laid out in the 27-page complaint. The owners of the 30-acre plot off Baggs Road north of M-72 accused former township officials of siding with a neighbor who objected to the condos project. They did so in spite of the fact that the neighbor’s objection to the land split came a few years later, instead of the 60 days allowed by law.
Some trustees were skeptical of the objection and the board’s decision to render the property unbuildable, according to emails the plaintiffs unearthed through an open records request.
“It’s really frustrating that my client’s had to go through this, it really is,” Herring said. “You’re talking about something you can see within all the documentation that we got: (Township officials) weren’t there to help, they weren’t there to be neutral. They were actively working against them.”
Baggs Partners is a limited liability corporation registered to Derek Van Solkema and a home address in Grand Rapids, state records show.
Ron Popp, a former township supervisor involved in the decisions in question, denied township trustees did anything wrong. Instead, they followed an ordinance that specified the steps to take for a split parcel that doesn’t follow township rules. He argued that Baggs Partners should address the issue with the parcel’s previous owner, or the land should revert to the parent parcel and its owner could seek a resolution.
“We followed our ordinance, we followed General Ordinance 26, good, bad or indifferent, right? It did provide a set of instructions, and we followed it even though it turned a piece of property into something that was non-buildable,” he said.
Popp is no longer in township government and couldn’t speak for Whitewater, but his name appears throughout the complaint, as do those of other former township officials.
Linda Slopsema, currently Whitewater Township’s supervisor, said the township’s attorneys have the complaint and didn’t comment further.
Christopher Patterson, who represented Whitewater in a previous legal dispute over the same parcel, said he wasn’t sure who would represent the township in the federal lawsuit — court records didn’t list an attorney for the township.
The former Whitewater officials declared the parcel unbuildable despite former township Zoning Administrator Robert Hall’s 2020 report backing his approval of the land split. Baggs Partners argued that Hall cited an exception in township ordinance to the four-to-one width ratio for a parcel’s front and side boundaries if land conditions would make that ratio difficult to meet.
Popp said Hall didn’t have the authority to grant that exception without having a public hearing first, a process that never happened. Popp also said Hall called the land split approval a mistake in a later planning commission hearing. Messages seeking comment from Hall were not returned Friday.
After the township’s board of zoning appeals granted Baggs Partners a variance, a group called Keep Whitewater Township Rural asked 13th Circuit Court Judge Charles Hamlyn to overturn it in September 2023, court records show.
Hamlyn upheld the zoning appeals board’s decision in June 2024, but a year later, the state Court of Appeals remanded the case to the zoning appeals board. In their opinion, judges Christopher Yates, Adrienne Young and Randy Wallace said the board’s findings were too sparse to support the decision; much of it consisted of a few words indicating whether the board thought a standard had been met.
“None of those pronouncements of the ZBA offers any factual findings underlying its determination that the requirements of the ordinance were satisfied,” the judges wrote. “Instead, the ZBA merely repeated the conclusory language of the zoning ordinance.”
Patterson said he couldn’t comment on the earlier legal battle without authorization from the township board. He didn’t respond to subsequent inquiries about getting that permission.
Instead of going through the variance process all over again, Baggs Partners opted to withdraw its request after the appeals court order, Herring said.
Not only would that have set back the development even further, but it shouldn’t be necessary in the first place.
The question isn’t whether the property qualifies for a variance, but why the township board of trustees “broke” the property to begin with.
“You have to remember, that parcel was split in 2020, so everything’s fine on that parcel up until the board’s decision,” he said. “Then it’s noncompliant, but the only reason it’s noncompliant in that time is because of the board’s decision.”
While the complaint accused the former township board of failing to give proper notice ahead of some of its meetings, Popp denied this and said Whitewater officials followed the relevant laws.
The five-count complaint before U.S. District Court Judge Jane Beckering accuses the township of violating the property owners’ constitutional rights under the Fifth and 14th amendments, including procedural and substantive due process violations.
Baggs Partners want Beckering to declare the township’s land split ordinance unconstitutional, both on its face and as applied, and to award the owners damages for the blocked development and recoup their attorney fees.
No future court dates are noted on the docket after the initial May 1 filings.