Roads -Who Pays? (and why)

Why do we have to pay to fix our own roads?

Shouldn’t the entity that owns the roads pay to fix them?  One would think so, but….. 

First, some background:

Who owns neighborhood roads in the state of Michigan depends on how the local government is structured.  Cities and villages in Michigan own their roads.  On the other hand, throughout the state, township roads are owned by the county road commission.  As such, the Road Commission of Oakland County owns the roads in Bloomfield Township, including neighborhood roads like ours.  The Road Commission’s funding comes from gas taxes assessed at the pump, which are collected by the State of Michigan and allocated down to the various entities with jurisdiction over the roads. 

Quite simply, there is not enough funding throughout the state of Michigan to improve our roads.  This is not a surprise to anyone who drives throughout the state.  Locally, funding to the Road Commission is not sufficient to maintain and improve all the roads under their jurisdiction.  The Road Commission directs its improvement efforts to the “main” roads – Quarton, Maple, Lahser, for example – and that’s as far as their improvement dollars will go.  The Road Commission thus will maintain neighborhood roads – plowing, filling potholes, filling cracks, etc. – but will not improve the roads, even when they get to the sorry state in which we find our Village roads. 

Bloomfield Township doesn’t own the roads within its borders, and thus cannot collect a millage from Township taxpayers to establish a road improvement fund, and pay for road improvements.  This means that the property taxes we pay to Bloomfield Township do not include (and never have included) taxes to pay for road improvements.  This is different from, for example, the City of Birmingham – they can (and do) assess a road millage across all taxpayers, establishing a road fund and funding road improvements.  (Even with the road millage, in some cases, residents in Birmingham do pay special assessments for road improvement on their streets.)

What that means for Village residents:

So, the Road Commission owns our Village roads, but they don’t pay for neighborhood road improvements.  The Township doesn’t collect taxes to pay for road improvements, so the money for our roads can’t come from them.  Thus, it is up to us to pay for our roads.  To some degree, that makes sense – residents in neighboring jurisdictions have paid for their roads with a millage collected over the years by the city in which they live.  We (residents of the Village) haven’t paid a millage for our roads since the 1960s, when Village roads were originally paved through an SAD.  If we want to fix our roads now, we have to (again) pay for it.

To fund a project of the size of ours, state law allows residents to authorize formation of a special assessment district, through which we ask Bloomfield Township to collect an assessment from us over 15 years, and use that money to pay for it.  (We could also form our SADs with the Road Commission, under a different state statute.)  The current petition efforts for the Pink and Blue sections, and later for Gold, Yellow and Green, are the means by which we ask the Township to form the SADs to fund fixing our roads.