News Photo by Blace Carpenter The Montmorency County Board of Commissioners prepares for their meeting held on Thursday in Atlanta.

ATLANTA — The Montmorency County Board of Commissioners met on Thursday to provide updates on filling the county emergency manager position. They also discussed concerns over debris piling up at dropoff sites following March’s historic ice storm.

‘Like a tinderbox’

During the public comment section of the meeting, residents raised concerns about the overwhelming debris that is piling up from cleaning up downed and damaged trees from the storm.

Currently, the county has three designated spots that they oversee:

Two gravel pits that are run by the County Road Commission.

One private site off Briley Road.

These sites are currently closed due to woodchippers being in high demand and the gravel pits being needed by the road commission. The wait has been frustrating to some residents.

Nancy Zablocki, of Lewiston, owns around seven acres of wooded land. She said that she has had to clear around four or five acres of downed trees and branches on her property, adding that Lewiston is “like a tinderbox” due to the amount of dry debris.

Albert Township Supervisor Mike Szukhent compared his township to a tinderbox as well.

“It’s a tinderbox,” Szukhent said. “If we don’t come up with a plan … what happened in Los Angeles is going to look like a campfire.”

Montmorency County Controller Aprille Williamson said that maintaining these sites has been difficult due to people being “belligerent” with site monitors and dumping household waste like roofing and plywood.

This has limited how freely available the sites are for residents.

“We had people coming in with big trailers and then dumping garbage,” said Williamson. “Home waste products like roofing pieces and plywood … It was starting to get where people were no longer being kind to a person that’s trying to collect information.”

One suggestion made during the meeting was to get more private landowners to volunteer. However, If a landowner opened their property, the commissioners said the county couldn’t financially compensate them.

Williamson is hoping to get a chipper out to one of the sites and open it back up sometime next week.

The hunt for an emergency manager

Montmorency County will be holding public interviews on Monday for the county’s future emergency manager. Since October, the county has been looking into turning it into a full position and filling it.

“There’s been a lot of conversation about the emergency manager position and whether we wanted a full-time or part-time,” Williamson wrote in an email. “We didn’t think that it should be done by a part-time person anymore because we thought there was more work involved.”

In February, Montmorency and Alpena counties planned on sharing a full-time emergency manager, but Montmorency County has since decided to go on with its own.

“The work that’s been taking place until we get a new person hired has been done by both myself and our chair,” Williamson wrote in an email. “We changed courses and decided to hire our own full-time emergency manager after the storm. Many conversations with our emergency services people helped in getting this taken care of.”

The interviews will begin around 1 p.m. Monday at the Montmorency County Building and Courts in Atlanta.

Other news

Commissioners unanimously approved their audit for the 2024 fiscal year. Auditor Christy Schulze said that the audit went smoothly and that the county at the end of December of 2024 had roughly 53% (around six months) of its reserve left for 2025. Schulze said she had no complaints with the county.

Blace Carpenter can be reached at bcarpenter@thealpenanews.com. This story was produced by the Michigan News Group Internship Program, a collaboration between WCMU Public Media and local newspapers in central and northern Michigan. The program’s mission is to train the next generation of journalists and combat the rise of rural news deserts.