Livengood: These Michigan communities are done waiting for Lansing to fix their damn roads
Canton Township — Ann McGowan still feels embarrassed by the condition of her suburban street when she hosted her son and daughter's high school graduation parties a few years ago.
To navigate their pockmarked road built in the late 1980s, McGowan and her neighbors in Canton Township's sprawling 1,700-home Sunflower subdivision had gotten into the habit of sweeping up the gravel flaking off from Swanmere Drive, a task they dubbed "the Swanmere game."
The road conditions were so bad that rollerblading became hazardous for neighborhood kids. Cars had to creep along at a snail's pace or risk getting a tire chewed up. And a snowplow driver bent his truck frame after the plow scraped up a heavy chunk of concrete that had busted loose from the street bed, neighbors said.
"You couldn't even straddle the potholes anymore because the potholes had potholes," McGowan said. "... And instead of enjoying the graduation party ... everybody's talking about our roads. It was embarrassing."
Swanmere Drive is typical of any subdivision road in a populous community across Metro Detroit — a street built by a real estate developer a generation or two ago with almost no plan for how to someday replace it.
"It would have been nicer to go back to gravel because you can grade that," McGowan said.
But instead of going back to gravel, Swanmere Drive got ripped out and rebuilt last summer — a brand new street paid for, in part, by a township millage dedicated to infrastructure.
Communities like Canton Township in recent years have taken Michigan's road funding crisis into their own hands. They've stopped waiting around for an elusive solution from Lansing to fix some "damned roads" and just went ahead and voted to raise their own taxes.
"If you want your roads fixed, you gotta pay for it," said Khalil Kandah, a Sunflower resident who, like McGowan, serves on the neighborhood homeowners association board.
Because of Michigan's arcane road-funding formula, charter townships like Canton Township — population 98,000 — don't get direct state funding for roads, unlike a similar size city such as Livonia — population 92,000 — or even a small city like Rockwood, which has about 3,200 inhabitants.
This is a public policy that goes back to the Truman administration that predates the construction of freeways in this state. Residents in Canton Township, after years of complaining about their disintegrating roads, understand this as well as anyone in Metro Detroit.
"Public Act 51 (of 1951) is antiquated, it doesn't serve our needs, and it benefits those in rural communities over people where we have suburban and urban traffic, and it really should be updated — and we couldn't wait for that to happen," said Sommer Foster, a Canton Township trustee and planning commissioner.
Taxes pack road fixing punch
Roads in unincorporated areas that aren't state-owned (any road with an I, U.S. or M name and number) or within the boundaries of a city or village are the responsibility of the county road agency.
Statewide, about 33% of all Michigan roads were rated in poor condition in 2023, the most recent year data is available from the state's Transportation Asset Management Council.
But in southeast Michigan, the percentage of county-maintained roads in poor condition increases precipitously, particularly in areas with country subdivisions that have been allowed to add density to roads that weren't really designed for more urban-like traffic.
In Wayne County, 40% of these roads are rated in poor condition. About 43% of Macomb County's pavement in townships are in poor shape. And to the north, 56% of roads in St. Clair County outside of the city limits of Port Huron are rated as poor, state data shows.
Oakland County, which has one of the largest networks of gravel roads in the state, has generally better overall pavement conditions than its neighbors, with about 24% rated in poor condition. But Oakland has a higher percentage of roads in fair condition (51%), and fair roads have a habit of becoming poor roads over time.
The county in southeast Michigan with the best local roads is Washtenaw, which, like neighboring Canton Township, has a dedicated millage for fixing roads. In 2016, Washtenaw County voters approved the 0.5-mill property tax for four years and then renewed it in 2020 and 2024.
Washtenaw County's millage generates about $11 million annually, which gets distributed proportionally between Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and other cities and townships, and has led to the improvement of 415 miles of roads in nine years, according to the county road commission.
"It's made a huge difference in our primary roads in Washtenaw County," said Matt MacDonell, managing director of the Washtenaw County Road Commission.
The millage has helped the road commission put more money into preventive maintenance of roads in townships, MacDonell said, which helps to extend the life of the blacktop.
"It's a piece of the puzzle, and it's a very important piece, so that you can continue to improve and maintain a road network that you know is in good and fair condition," he said.
Across the state, 34 of Michigan's 83 counties (41%) and 580 of the state's 1,240 townships (47%) have millages for maintaining and repairing local roads, according to the County Road Association of Michigan.
But not every county or township has leaders willing to take the political heat from putting a millage on the ballot.
Macomb County, with its city-sized townships of Clinton, Shelby, Macomb, Harrison, Chesterfield and Washington, has struggled for years to keep up with urban sprawl pressures.
As more subdivisions were built north of Hall Road, the county's roads budget got stretched thinner, and the older 1960s, '70s and '80s subdivisions south of Hall Road rapidly deteriorated.
There's been no political will by the Macomb County Commission to put a millage for roads on the ballot.
“They had a hard time putting the millage on the ballot for 911,” Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel said of the Republican-controlled county commission.
Hackel, a fairly conservative Democrat by today's standards, said he thinks a local roads millage would pass if voters knew all of the money would go into the county's roads — and not get siphoned through the state's formula, which treats a two-lane country road the same as a five-lane suburban roadway.
"If people understand what their money is going for, and it's staying local, and 100% of it is going toward those projects, I think you'll get a majority of the support for that," Hackel said.
Hackel noted there are vastly different pavement conditions in St. Clair Shores and Sterling Heights — two cities with local road millages — and Harrison Township, which leans on the county to fix its pothole-ridden streets.
A long and winding road
To understand the predicament municipalities face in fixing jagged local roads, taxpayers need to know how the taxes they've already been paying are spent.
For much of this century, Michigan's been treading water on infrastructure. Until 2022, fuel taxes did not rise with inflation.
The current debate in Lansing revolves around closing a $3.9 billion annual shortfall in funding to make 80% of all Michigan roads be rated in fair or good condition — a public policy goal that at least the last four governors have tried to achieve without much success.
Under Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who famously ran for governor on a "fix the damn roads" platform, about 63% of Michigan's roads are rated in good or fair condition.
Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, who secured a modest $600 million tax increase from the Legislature for roads, left office at the end of 2018 with 59% of roads in good or fair condition, down from about 66% in 2010, Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm's last year in office, according to state data.
If Michigan lawmakers could come up with another $3.9 billion annually for fixing roads and bridges, it would double what the state already collects in taxes ($3.7 billion) that are dedicated to repairing the state's infrastructure.
About 41% of current revenues come from motor fuel taxes, 41% from vehicle registration fees (the so-called birthday tax) and 16% or $600 million is earmarked from the state's income tax, according to the nonpartisan Michigan House Fiscal Agency.
Snyder's $600 million tax hike was a 7 cent per gallon increase in the gas tax and a 20% increase in vehicle registration fees in 2017, coupled with the $600 million annual earmark, generating $1.2 billion more annually for roads. At the time, transportation experts repeatedly warned policymakers they needed to spend double that amount to keep the roads from going to pot.
Lawmakers didn't listen.
But for the average motorist, they might think the state has been on a road-building bonanza in recent years.
For the past three summers, Michigan's freeways have been lined with orange barrels. Those major construction projects — I-96, I-696 and I-75 in Oakland County, I-275 in western Wayne County, U.S. 23 in Livingston County — have been largely funded by $3.5 billion in bonds (debt) issued by Whitmer's administration in 2020 after the 45 cents per gallon gas tax increase she proposed in 2019 was dead on arrival in a GOP-controlled Legislature.
But that bond debt (which comes with a 25-year payoff schedule and $2.5 billion in interest payments) can only be used to finance improvements to highways and state trunkline roads (think Gratiot, Woodward, Grand River and Michigan avenues).
Municipalities have been left to fend for themselves from a stagnant state funding system, with very little money from the state's recent multibillion-dollar tax surpluses being poured into concrete and asphalt projects.
“We waited too long. Look at how long we’ve been waiting,” Hackel lamented last week. “And we’re still talking about the same thing — and it’s getting far worse. That’s the problem.”
'Our roads were a mess'
In 2018, 57% of Canton Township's local roads were rated in poor condition; just 7% were deemed good.
"Our roads were a mess," Foster said. "Depending on the county wasn't a good solution for us back then."
At the ballot box in the August 2018 primary election, 56% of Canton Township voters approved a 1.47-mill, 20-year property tax that raises about $5.6 million annually for roads, Foster said.
The township divvies up the tax dollars by putting 55% into projects that maintain or repave its major roads, 30% for local subdivision roads and 15% to contribute to mostly state-funded projects on trunkline roads, such as Ford Road and Michigan Avenue, Foster said.
Since Canton Township approved the millage, the township has seen a dramatic improvement in its roads.
In 2024, 26% of Canton Township's roads were rated in poor condition, a 31-point swing downward from 57% five years earlier, according to data from the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments.
SEMCOG data shows the percentage of roads rated in good condition rose sharply from 7% in 2018 — the year the millage passed — to 35% last year, when the crumbling concrete on Swanmere Drive was replaced.
In the Sunflower neighborhood, the homeowners applied for two years' worth of township road funds and combined it with a $1.9 million legislative earmark secured by Rep. Ranjeev Puri, D-Canton Township, for the replacement of Swanmere Drive and Lambeth Way. Both streets had an alkali-silica reaction or ASR, the so-called concrete cancer that has infected scores of suburban streets in Metro Detroit, according to the homeowners association.
Canton Township's millage program requires a contribution from homeowners associations for subdivision road projects. For Sunflower, it was about 1% of the project's $2.3 million cost.
"We don't make the HOAs pay very much, but it allows everyone to have some skin in the game," Foster said.
Canton Township's millage shows local communities really can turn the tide on decades of disinvestment in infrastructure, she said.
"But we really need to fix the state funding formula," Foster said, "because it is inequitable."
clivengood@detroitnews.com
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This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Livengood: These Michigan communities are done waiting for Lansing to fix their damn roads
Canton Township — Ann McGowan still feels embarrassed by the condition of her suburban street when she hosted her son and daughter's high school graduation parties a few years ago.
To navigate their pockmarked road built in the late 1980s, McGowan and her… #Michigan #CantonTownship #RoadRepair
