| The Kalamazoo Planning Commission has made decisions about land use, zoning, and development since 1954. But until now, those records lived across scattered files, scanned documents, and institutional memory. A new database, built by a Western Michigan University geography intern working with city planning staff, consolidates more than 1,100 individual planning commission actions into a single searchable and filterable system. Staff are already using it; whether the public will have direct access is still an open question, though the records are public and available through FOIA request. |
| Plus: The database presentation included a brief history of Kalamazoo planning going back to 1918 including a planning commission that resigned in frustration, a gap of more than a decade with no commission at all, and a 1929 city plan that proposed a seaplane basin on the Kalamazoo River. |
