It’s not always easy to write a government ordinance.

There are many things to consider and many people to satisfy. And as is the case with most, if not all, things in small, medium or large municipal governments, you can’t please everyone.

However, officials can make things simpler for people to understand and officials to apply.

For instance, Chocolay Township is working on streamlining the areas of nuisance, noise and vehicles into a single ordinance. Township Manager Bill De Groot said officials have been focusing on a revision of Ordinance 37A, Regulation of Nuisance; Ordinance 55, Vehicle and Trailer Parking and Storage; and Ordinance 66, Noise, to review the language and combine the three similar ordinances into one overall ordinance.

“Our current board has started reviewing all ordinances under three lenses: health, safety and welfare, and so in doing so, we have the township zoning ordinance itself and then we have a bunch of standalone ones,” De Groot told The Mining Journal in a recent interview. “We’re systematically going through our standalone ordinances to try to respond to both the three pillars of healthy, safety and welfare, but also trying to clarify any either vague language or any repetitive issues that we have in the community, and also language that may be used as loopholes or different things like this.”

What might be OK in one area of the township might not be OK in another area, so the proposed nuisance ordinance would put these issues under one umbrella.

The Sawyer Operations Authority in August already tackled such an issue, unanimously voting to use the language of Forsyth Township’s burning ordinance for K.I. Sawyer, which includes Forsyth and West Branch townships, to prohibit open burning unless the ordinance specifically permits it.

SOA Chairman Bill Nordeen said at the time that the authority believed it could be helpful in passing this ordinance by providing consistency.

“You’d have ordinances on one side of the street, and then the other side of the streets you wouldn’t have them, and people didn’t understand that either,” Nordeen said after the Aug. 12 meeting. “So, the one thing we wanted to tackle was a common ordinance throughout Sawyer.”

In 2019, the SOA adopted two ordinances that addressed parking and curfews, again toward the move toward K.I. Sawyer uniformity.

Many people find municipal laws and issues complicated, so clarifying ordinances, which comprise a big part of government, is a good way to help residents understand what can be a labyrinth of laws.

— The Mining Journal, Marquette