The Leelanau County Board of Commissioners will decide this week whether to allocate more than $40,000 in county money to help alleviate issues with one particular drainage district.

Two Leelanau County leaders had previously promised members of the Lake Bluffs drain district that the county would help with their failing drain and the unexpected costs it has incurred. Months later, both those county leaders are gone, and the drain district has yet to be reimbursed for the issues.

The Lake Bluffs Drain is located in Solon Township and serves a neighborhood in Cedar near the southern end of Lake Leelanau. That drain was completed in 2023 by GEI Consultants, a major engineering firm with 64 offices across the United States and Canada. Residents of the Lake Bluffs neighborhood say they’ve had consistent issues with the drain since it was built, including erosion compromising the stability of their road.

Speaking to commissioners at last week’s executive board meeting, County Drain Commissioner Chet Janik said members of the Lake Bluffs drainage district received a tax bill last December, assessing thousands of dollars in maintenance fees for the drain. Residents weren’t notified about the costs ahead of time, Janik said.

Frustrations with the drain led to a public meeting on March 4, where former Drain Commissioner Timothy O’Non said “he was going to transfer $15,000 from other drain districts into the Lake Bluffs district to cover some of their issues,” Janik told commissioners. At the same meeting, former County Administrator Jim Dyer “made a commitment that he would approach the board and request $8,000” to refund residents for December’s surprise tax bill.

Fast-forward six months and neither O’Non nor Dyer are still in their positions. O’Non resigned shortly after the March 4 meeting, while Dyer separated from the county in late July.

Those high-profile exits have left Lake Bluffs residents with questions about the verbal commitments O’Non and Dyer made in March, neither of which were ever fulfilled. Now, the Board of Commissioners will have to decide whether to spend county money to satisfy those promises.

Speaking to the board last week, Janik acknowledged “there are legitimate concerns with the quality of the work done” on the Lake Bluffs Drain, and expressed “great sympathy” for the residents. However, he said the board cannot legally follow through on O’Non’s promise to reallocate $15,000 from other drainage districts to the Lake Bluffs drain.

“The commitment made in March 2026 was two and a half years after the drain district was completed,” Janik explained. “Those books were closed, that money was allocated. You can only transfer money from one district to the other district if the work is occurring at the same time and there are mutual costs. That was not the case.” He added that any transfer “would not be fair to the other districts,” which would end up paying to rebuild a drain in a different district.

Instead, commissioners are considering a new proposal – one that would transfer up to $43,500 from the county’s special projects fund into the Lake Bluffs Drain Revolving Fund. That amount includes $8,500 to reimburse property owners for December’s tax bill, as well as $35,000 “for the remediation and repair of the Lake Bluffs Drain.”

Janik told commissioners they are not legally obligated to allocate any of that money. In Michigan, county boards set the salaries for drain commissioners but otherwise have no authority over drainage districts or drainage assessments. Those responsibilities fall solely with the drain commissioner.

But residents insist the county should be on the hook. In a letter to commissioners, Lake Bluffs property owners noted that the $8,500 they paid last December stemmed from cost overages the county paid to GEI Consultants the previous month. They question why they were billed for project overages “2.25 years after competition of the project with no notice to property owners.”

“This is potentially a violation of the MI Drain Code of 1956 and therefore owners should not be responsible for these overages,” residents wrote of the delayed overage bill.

Additionally, Lake Bluffs property owners say the county didn't follow proper surveying and permitting processes for the drain.

“We think this project wasn’t done right to begin with, and I guess we’re asking for some kind of support...to make this right,” said Kristy Burns, one of the Lake Bluffs residents leading the charge on this matter.

While commissioners were sympathetic, they also expressed apprehensions about spending county money to alleviate issues in a single drainage district. Commissioner Alan Campbell stressed the legal “separation” between the authority of the county board and the business of the drain commissioner, and Board Chair Steve Yoder fretted about setting a precedent that could bring other drainage districts before the board in search of similar reimbursements.

Commissioners ultimately decided to move the matter forward to this week’s regular board meeting, and to seek an opinion from legal counsel in the meantime. The meeting is scheduled for 6:30pm tomorrow (Tuesday).