Leland Township To Host Streetscape Master Plan Workshop This Week

A process aimed at improving the streets of Leland will start in earnest this week, with a three-day “stakeholder workshop” running from Monday through Wednesday.

“What we're looking at is primarily the area between Reynolds Street and Hill Street, and between Lake Michigan and M-22,” says Leland Township Supervisor Clint Mitchell. “What we have there are streets – North Street, Lake Street, and then the east-west streets that connect M-22 to Lake Street – and they're generally in very poor condition. In some cases, they're crumbling. And the issue is that most of them are not up to code, width wise”

In most cases, Mitchell explains, the township receives Pavement Surface Evaluation and Rating (PASER) assessments of its roads from the Leelanau County Road Commission (LCRC). Those ratings, which range from 1 to 10, are the township’s primary means for deciding when and where to allocate resources for township road maintenance.

“But [that system] is based on roads being up to code,” Mitchell says. “Some of our streets are only 11-12 feet wide, and code now is 18. And some of the right-of-ways are also pretty narrow. So, we don’t get PASER ratings for those roads.”

With PASER, Mitchell says Leland Township has “a pretty good handle” on most of its local roads. Under that rating system, roads rated 8-10 are considered to be in “good” condition, 5-7 are “fair,” and 1-4 are “poor.” Working alongside with LCRC, Leland Township “generally keeps up with the ones that are in the fair category” for maintenance, “because it's a lot cheaper to keep something in fair condition than repair it once it gets to poor,” Mitchell explains. A lack of PASER data for the township’s below-code roads, though, means that deferred maintenance is far more commonplace on those streets.

Now, the township is taking steps to address the growing issues with those out-of-code Leland roads. The newly-launched streetscape master planning process will kick off this week by “having an architect and urban planner and civil engineers take a look at those streets, and let us know what it would require to bring them up to code,” Mitchell says. “And then we’ll also take into account parking and pedestrian traffic, and how that works with traffic flow and drainage.”

The ultimate “master plan” will be a map of Leland streets, showing which roads need to be redesigned or rebuilt to bring them up to code, what that process would look like, and what it would cost.

“We don’t have a ton of them,” Mitchell says of out-of-code roads in need of maintenance. “But we do have enough that it will likely be extremely costly. I would expect into the millions. So, once we have that estimate number, we can put together a priority list and what that looks like in terms of timeline – whether it’s getting these projects done over the next five years, or over the next 10 years.”

“We’ll also have to determine if the public is willing to pay for it, because this isn’t money that we have,” Mitchell continues. “It's likely that it would be some sort of private-public partnership – the combination of a millage, possibly special assessment districts, or maybe even fundraising that goes along with it.”

This week’s three-day workshop marks the formal kickoff of the streetscape project, and will give opportunities for various local stakeholders to offer input on the master plan. That list of players includes the Leland Township Board, the Fishtown Preservation Society, the Leland Chamber of Commerce, members of Leland’s new cultural overlay district (the Old Art Building, the Leelanau Historical Society, and the Leland Public Library), and several local business and property owners, including Skip Telgard of the Bluebird, Ben and Caroline Maier of Benjamin Maier Ceramics, and George Cochran of The Riverside Inn.

The workshop schedule also offers time for public attendance, observation, and input, Mitchell notes. First up is a 2-3pm public input session at the Old Art Building on Monday afternoon, where the project design team and steering committee will share background and introduction information about the project and offer Q&A/public comment time. That session will be followed by a 3-4:30pm walking tour of the project territory.

Other open-to-the-public opportunities will follow on Tuesday (Mitchell points to noon-12:45pm and 2-3pm “public walk-in times at the library conference room, for one-on-one with project coordinators”) and Wednesday (an 11:30am-1pm presentation and discussion at the Leland Library’s Munnecke Room, which will share key takeaways from the workshop).

Ideally, Mitchell says the design team and steering committee will end the workshop with a clear vision for the streetscape master plan and its next steps. The public would then get a look at the more complete plan later this summer.

“The final adoption [of the master plan] probably wouldn't be until August; we're expecting that to happen at our regular board meeting that month, once the team has had a chance to go through this process, have a little back and forth, and figure out a design,” Mitchell says. “I believe what we're going to see at that meeting are a couple of different plans. One will show us what this could look like if money were no object and all sort of grand ideas were in play. But we’ll also see a plan that's a little more practical, outlining, 'OK, here's what you need to do to bring your roads to code, to fix them, and also to provide a reasonable amount of parking within the downtown area.'”