I felt that a recent discussion of roads at the 11/9/21 Board meeting may have incorrectly left residents with the idea that our Township Board has major responsiblity for roads in Oakland Township.

All the roads, except private ones in certain housing developments are totally the responsiblity of Road Commission for Oakland County.

https://www.rcocweb.org/275/RCOC-Officials

Their work is paid for from state gasoline taxes and some grants and whatever they can extract from townships. They constantly say that they have insufficient funds.

What causes confusion is that they will only grade a gravel road. If you want any gravel added to the road or any dust control chemicals added the township must pay for that. You see money for those two items in the township budget every year, although not always well identitified

If you want a road repaved, such as our Bear Creek Court was about nine years ago after about 35 years of service, the homeowners along the road must pay by creating by a special assessment district (S.A.D.). Ours was S.A.D. 14021, A YES vote of 51% of our 20 homeowners was required. Cost was $166,530 for resurfacing with a layer of apshalt our quarter mile long cul-de-sac. Each home paid from $7782 to $8327 depending on lot frontage on Bear Creek Ct. We we allowed to pay over ten years.

Hills of Oakland at Adams and Dutton went through this process a few years ago and I understand it was more like $20,000 per home.

The township kicked in $25,000 for each project.

In some “developments” called Site Condomimiums (a land concept, not an apartment-like condo as you may be thinking of ) in our township the roads are totally the responsiblity of the homeowners and not the county or township.

I have no idea how, if ever, the badly deteriorated portion of Gunn from Rochester Road and east will every be repaved. But I fear it will never be unless the Township agrees to pay the Road commission a huge sum of money or it is done by an S.A.D. as our road was.

Road Commission for Oakland County is totally independent of the Board of County Commissioners, except that the County Commissioners appoint the three Road Commissioners.

https://www.oakgov.com/boc/Commissioners/Pages/default.aspx

The RCOC three commissioners can make their decisions without any approval of the Board County Commissioners. Other counties, like MacComb for example, make their Road Commission accountable to the Board of County Commissioners. If you read RCOC minutes, they never seem to every reject a suggestion put to them by their people.

RCOC asking what roads the township would like paved is somewhat odd as they should be monitoring road conditions and traffic levels to see if paving is needed.

The Road Commission has a system (link below) where you can make them aware of a problem. Some say this works others say it does not.

https://www.rcocweb.org/FormCenter/Contact-Us-4/Contact-Us-Form-43