ONTWA TOWNSHIP — After a board of trustees vote Monday, the Ferndale Park Homeowners Association has been left without a park.

The Ontwa Township Board of Trustees passed a resolution at its Jan. 8 meeting to terminate a more than 20-year-old license agreement with the Ferndale Park Homeowners Association over Ferndale Park.

The license was written and approved in 1994, and the Ferndale Park Homeowners’ Association has been maintaining the property ever since, but now that has changed.

“I’m incredibly disappointed,” said president of the homeowners association Karen Crilling of the decision. “I knew this would happen. I knew [the board of trustees] would come after us again.”

This was not the first time the board of trustees has attempted to terminate the license agreement. The first time was at the trustees’ October meeting, when the board drafted a resolution to terminate the license agreement in response to the association filing an affidavit of interest in the park property, which was a violation of the license agreement.

At the time, the board also said that under the care of Ferndale Park Homeowners Association, the park had become thick, overgrown and unkempt. The resolution in October did not pass due to a tie vote.

Though the outcome of the vote was different at Monday’s meeting, many board of trustee members retained the same opinions with Trustees Dan Stutsman and Jeff Koziniski opposing terminating the license agreement and Supervisor Jerry Marchetti and Trustee Jerry Duck in favor.

Duck even repeated nearly his exact words from the October meeting.

“It comes down to that it’s unfair for one group to have primary access and control of a township park,” he said.

Prior to the vote to terminate the license agreement, members of the public asked the board to reconsider terminating the long standing agreement.

Vicki Anders, who lives around the corner of the park, has been using the park as a way to get to the lake for 15 years.

“I would still like to use the lake with my boys the way I was told I would be able to,” she said to the board Monday evening.

Crilling added that the homeowners association has not had an issue like this in the more than 20 years it has been caring for the park.

“We’ve taken care of [Ferndale Park] to the best of our ability,” she said. “If the township is going to terminate the lease, it would be nice if they could offer some reasonable reasons for doing so. … We hope you will keep the lease.”

Despite testimony, the majority of the board voted to terminate the license agreement, as the township lawyer has gone on record advising the board to break the lease.

“There are laws that are put into place that down the road you find that it wasn’t quite the right law or there should be a revision of that law,” Duck said. “How many state laws that down the road, maybe two or three or four years, you find there’s got to be a change in that law, because there are unintended consequences that you didn’t foresee when the law was made?”

With the license terminated, Marchetti announced plans to seek grants to restore the park, which is in need of major renovations, and recommendations on how to do so in order to make the park a space that the people of Ontwa Township will want to use.

“Let’s take the park back, see what we can do with it and see what we can do to make it workable for the entire community, not just the few people [of the Ferndale Park Homeowners Association],” Marchetti said. “The association can still use it. It is a public park, but maybe we can make it more usable for everyone. … Maybe we can expand it, clean it up a little bit.”

Though Crilling was disappointed with the outcome of the meeting, she said she does not know if the Ferndale Park Homeowners Park Association would do anything further on the subject of the license agreement or what the association could even do.

“I guess we will see what [the board] does with [the park],” Crilling said. “There is no parking. It’s a wetland. I don’t see how they can do the things they are talking about. … It’s not what they think it is.”