Garrett Neese/Daily Mining Gazette Houghton City Manager Eric Waara discusses the city’s work on updating its branding during Tuesday’s Planning Commission meeting.

HOUGHTON — The Houghton Planning Commission heard updates on the city’s push to upgrade its neighborhood parks, as well as the work of its zoning and branding committees, at its meeting Tuesday.

The city held an open house this summer to get input on how to spend the remaining $120,000 of American Rescue Plan Act money the council had earmarked for the three neighborhood parks.

City Manager Eric Waara said he is about halfway through preparing recommendations based on the comments.

One recommendation will be creating a path to West Houghton Park to make it more accessible. The park can be difficult to reach for someone with a stroller or mobility issues, Waara said.

“There’s no sidewalk in the park,” he said. “We were planning to put one in there in 2017 or 2018, but the bids came for that project so far over it was already just too expensive, but we could probably do a lot of the work ourselves to pour a ramp into the park,” he said.

The council is required to have the funds committed by the end of the year, which will then be spent on construction next summer.

Vice Chair Bill Leder also provided a status report on the city’s zoning committee. It met in August and determined priorities: stormwater management and site plan review, which would be simplified and for smaller projects, handled administratively rather than at the planning commission level. At the request of the city council, the committee is also tackling potential changes to the city’s sign ordinance.

Their follow-up meeting included a review of markups on stormwater management and site plan review, and an initial discussion on signs. The goals there included making the wording as simple as possible; making the language as clear as possible, to aid in enforcement; and resolving contradictory language between federal law and the Michigan Department of Transportation advisory on temporary signs. A 2015 Supreme Court decision requires content-neutral policies, where political signs must be treated the same as other signs, Leder said. That conflicted with the MDOT website, which had a separate section for guidance on political signs, Vice Chair Bill Leder said.

“This was discussed in the context of signs, but it really pertains to all of the zoning ordinance provisions that we work on changing,” he said. “We have to be really careful about unintended negative consequences as we think through changes.”

They expect to have first drafts of the stormwater management and site plan improvements to review at their October meeting, where they will also do markups on the sign ordinance.

Leder said it might be possible to craft exceptions in certain parts of the city where event-related signs, rather than having to be 30 feet back from the center of the street, could be measured in distance from the curb.

“Not every street necessarily has the same right-of-way width, and it would be much easier to enforce, and that could be an exception with regard to public property,” he said.

A committee has also been meeting on the city’s branding. One of the first steps is developing a survey, which the city is doing in consultation with Karyn Olsson from The Marketing Department.

Initial questions will include the person’s opinion of Houghton, ranked on a scale from 1 to 10. If their answer is lower than 10, they will also be asked what the city could do to raise the score.

Other questions will deal with Houghton’s greatest assets, what makes Houghton unique, or how people would hope to describe Houghton five years from now.

“Part of branding is knowing who you might want to be if you’re not that already,” she said.

The survey will go out through the city’s email list, as well as Visit Keweenaw and the Keweenaw Chamber of Commerce’s contacts.

The hope is to get the survey out in October and receive results back by the end of the year, Waara said.