Check Your Lawn, Because They're Coming For Those "Country Curbs"

At first, Todd Seguin thought someone lost control on the busy highway and drove up onto his lawn.

It was a few weeks ago when Seguin, who lives on M-22 just north of Pathfinder School, found a ripped off sprinkler head and other signs that a vehicle was on his grass.

But upon closer inspection – namely, looking up and down the road – he could see that it wasn’t just his lawn. This was part of something bigger and systematic.

“I got to looking at the neighbors, and I could see where somebody had gone through, cut up into the yards around mailboxes and roadside reflectors,” he tells The Ticker.

It turns out it was the Leelanau County Road Commission, which every so often goes through to scrape off the so-called “country curbs” that build up along the roadside. These curbs come from the accumulation of sod, mud, grass and other organic materials from lawns or the roadway, and their presence can interfere with proper road drainage.

Seguin is one of several people who complained to the road commission about this work, which he feels should have been more selective.

“Some areas have a country curb and some do not, but they went through everybody’s yard indiscriminately,” he says. “They went everywhere, whether they needed to or not.”

He’s also upset that he as a property owner wasn’t notified that the work would be happening.

Brendan Mullane is manager of the county road commission. He tells The Ticker that country curbs are something his organization is always trying to keep in check.

“Basically, they build up and keep the water from running off the road like it should,” he says. “So the water will then either pond up or ice over, or run down the road if it’s on a hill and finally wash out somewhere and cause a lot more damage.”

The road commission did work along M-22 earlier this month as part of its contract with the Michigan Department of Transportation for maintenance on state highways, Mullane says. More work is planned for later this year, with at least some of the focus on the subdivisions in the southeast corner of the county.

“One of the biggest areas (in need of this work) is what we call the Greilickville streets, the neighborhoods and roads back there behind Cherry Bend and the south end of Elmwood Township,” he says. “There’s a lot of drainage problems there.”

As for damage to residents’ property, Mullane points to a legally defined right of way that road crews have to work, which unless otherwise specified is 33 feet from the midpoint of the road. County residents should take time to check to see if sprinkler heads or other items that could be damaged are within that right of way.

“We understand the frustration…but sprinklers aren’t supposed to be in the right of way. That’s often where they end up getting put out of convenience for the installers or whoever, but the reality is they’re not supposed to be there,” he says. “We don’t go around…and tell people they have to move them, but they’re there at the owners’ risk.”

Mullane says it’s not practical to only operate their equipment in areas where country curbs are visibly evident. The equipment blades are set to a predetermined height (meaning, in theory, that there should be minimal impact to properties that don't need the curb removed) and the crews just work down the line. 

“The reality is we've got multiple trucks, crews, traffic control, and it's quite a bit of effort to do work anywhere,” he says. “It's just substantially more efficient and cost-effective to hit an (entire) area.”

He also says it's not practical to notify every home owner every time work is done.

"We do post notice in the paper every year about what is allowed in the right of way, and then we try to use our website and Facebook to post where and when we are doing some of these larger operations," he says. 

Mullane reiterates that homeowners should check to see what on their lawn is in the right of way, because this work will only continue, and perhaps at a more frequent pace than ever before.

“We've got roads all over the county that can use it,” Mullane says. “We bought a new piece of equipment three years ago that vastly improves the speed and efficiency of the work, and we've been talking about this for years, how we really need to ramp up how much of this that we do."