How many detours can motorists expect to see around Leelanau County this summer? While the absence of last year’s M-72/M-22 rebuild will make the coming season feel comparatively light from a road closure standpoint, Leelanau County Road Commission (LCRC) Director Brendan Mullane tells The Ticker there are still a few construction projects drivers should plan ahead for as the summer begins.

The biggest detours of the summer, Mullane says, will concern a pair of culvert removal projects initially slated to go ahead during the summer of 2025.

As the Leelanau Ticker reported last year, federal funding freezes implemented in the early days of the Trump presidency affected United States Department of Agriculture dollars that would have allowed LCRC and a pair of partners – the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and the Conservation Resource Alliance – to replace Crystal River culverts on White and Alpine roads with new timber bridges. The three partners have been working for the past several years to restore the Crystal River to its natural flow, touting benefits for both wildlife and infrastructure.

“Those projects are paid for by federal funds, and that all hit a bit of a hiccup last year, but they’re back on track again now,” Mullane says. The company that came through with the low bid for the culvert replacements a year and a half ago – the Honor-based AJ’s Excavating – will be doing the work. “They’re basically waiting for the bridges to be built, so we’re looking at anywhere from mid-July to mid-August as a start date.”

Because those projects involve the removal of river crossings, they will necessitate total road closures and detours during construction on Alpine and White. “Once the work starts, [AJ’s] has 60 days to do both crossings, and they have to do them in series, because each crossing will be the detour for the other,” Mullane explains. “So, while Alpine is going, White will be the detour, and then they’ll jump over to White and Alpine will be the detour.”

Also on the schedule for the summer are a trio of culverts on County Road 641/South Lake Leelanau Drive, near Maple Valley Road. “Those will all be done in the next couple weeks, and that’ll be a pretty major disruption on 641,” Mullane says. While LCRC plans to avoid total road closures for those culverts – “We’re going to have flaggers keeping one lane of traffic open, because the detour would be so bad if we closed the road,” Mullane notes – he cautions “there will certainly be backups while we're doing that work.”

Other projects coming in June include minor asphalt patching work on Dunns Farm Road and South Lake Leelanau Drive and some asphalt overlay on Crystal View Road, to finish up last summer’s Crystal River culvert replacements.

Beyond those projects, Mullane says most of LCRC’s work this summer will be in the “chip seal” category. As Mullane explained to the Leelanau Ticker last summer, chip seal work happens on a rolling basis throughout the summer, and involves brief traffic disruptions on affected roads. “We typically put down the emulsion first, then the stone, and hit everything that way, usually in June or July; then we come back later and fog seal everything – which is just spraying a top layer – and that goes a lot faster, usually in August,” Mullane said of the process. “Both operations, we’ll keep one lane open and have flaggers to maintain traffic.”

On the schedule for chip sealing this summer are 35 different roads throughout Leelanau County. That list includes County Road 629/North Lighthouse Point Road, County Road 640/North Mill Street, County Road 631/North Overlook Road, County Road 626/East Omena Road, County Road 626/Jacobson Road, Roubal, Nanagosa, Shaker, Montmorency, Blossom Lane, Ridgeview, Spinnaker, Walden Court, Kilcherman, Christmas Cove, Cathead Point, Elnora, Scott, Peterson Park, Foxview, Garthe, Nelson, Melkild, Clausen, Johnson, Carlson, Casperson, Camp Haven, Indian Beach, Dawn Haven, Lee Mann, David, Kolarik, Novotney, and Grand Avenue.

“We’re street sweeping right now and doing prep work for our chip seal projects, and mid-June is when we start those,” Mullan says. “And those will run pretty much from mid-June to mid or late August, depending on weather.”

A few of LCRC’s major projects this year won’t happen until the fall. The biggest of those is a reconstruction of County Road 667/616 in downtown Maple City. That $325,000 project is funded in part by the federal Rural Transportation Fund, and will involve collaboration with Kasson Township.

“The township is paying for the sidewalks and a parking redesign, and the road commission is covering the cost of terrain, the road itself, and a few culverts,” Mullane says of the Maple City project. “We’re going to do all of that at once. We don't have hard dates yet, but that’ll be a fall project. It will be mostly just a lane closure, except for there may be a detour for some of the culvert work. But more details to come on that later.”

Omena Point Road and Traverse Lake Road are also on the docket for reconstruction work this fall.