Drive Eastways Road this week and you will hit a hard stop. The Road Commission for Oakland County closed it on August 17 to replace a culvert, and it will not reopen until sometime in September. A few miles away, in the Green Section of Bloomfield Village, homeowners are dealing with a different kind of disruption. Allied Construction started tearing out curbs on four streets there on July 23, blocking driveways for up to two weeks at a stretch, as part of a road rebuild the residents themselves voted to fund.
Both projects involve pavement, both involve orange barrels, and both are inconveniencing someone's Tuesday morning commute right now. But they are not the same kind of project, and understanding the difference explains something most people who live here never quite piece together: why the township can fix one road with county money and no strings attached, while the street one block over gets rebuilt only after a majority of homeowners agree to pay for it themselves.
Two Roads, Two Owners
Bloomfield Township does not own most of its own roads. It maintains 176 miles of subdivision streets and another 37 miles of gravel road, but the primary roads, the ones with real traffic and real names, belong to someone else. The Road Commission for Oakland County holds responsibility for about 50 miles of major roads and state trunk lines here, including Telegraph, Woodward, the Mile roads, Squirrel Road, Franklin, Inkster, Adams, part of Charing Cross, part of Cranbrook, and Fairfax Avenue.
That split is why Long Lake Road and Eastways Road are being fixed without a dime coming from adjacent homeowners. The RCOC scheduled two culvert replacements this summer, one under Long Lake Road that closed after July 4 and reopened around August 16, and one under Eastways Road that closed August 17 and stays shut into September. County road, county budget, county timeline. If you live along either of those corridors, you get detour signs and a finished road, and that is the extent of your involvement.
Subdivision roads work on the opposite model. If your street is not one of the named arteries above, the township only steps in to rebuild it once a majority of the people who live there ask for it and agree to pay.
What Bloomfield Village Just Voted For
The Green Section of Bloomfield Village, spanning parts of four Judson Bradway's Bloomfield Village subdivisions, is the newest neighborhood to go through that process. The petition passed with 51.28 percent of residents in favor, just past the threshold the township requires. After a February 9 public hearing where the Board of Trustees heard objections on both sides, the trustees voted unanimously to send the project out to bid. Construction started this summer on 15,944 linear feet, just over three miles, of road.
The scope is not cosmetic. Crews are pulverizing the existing pavement, removing and replacing curb and gutter across the entire section, installing new underdrains, and rebuilding ADA ramps at every sidewalk crossing. The curb work that started July 23 on four streets was the visible first phase, blocking driveways there in stages through early August, and it is only one slice of the three-mile scope the rest of this construction season still has to cover.
None of that gets paid for by the county or the township's general fund. Bloomfield Township uses an equal-cost-per-parcel formula for these special assessment districts, the same approach used for the Pink, Blue, Gold, and Yellow sections that came before Green. Every homeowner in the district pays the same amount, spread over years, regardless of how much curb frontage sits in front of their particular lot.
This Has Happened Before, Repeatedly
Green is not the first Bloomfield Township neighborhood to rebuild its own roads this way, and it will not be the last. Over the past decade, subdivisions across the township have gone through the identical petition-hearing-bid-build sequence:
- Still Meadow
- Pinewood Court
- Lauren Court
- Kirkwood
- Chestnut Run South and Chestnut Run North
- Hickory Heights
- Overbrook
- Wabeek 5 and 6
- Concord Green
- Dell Rose
- Thorncrest
- Kentmoor
- Hickory Grove
- Echo Park
- Sandalwood
- Carillon Hills
- Knob Hill
The Village's own roads effort is being broken into five sections precisely because the scale is too large for one construction season. The plan calls for two sections at a time, aiming to finish the whole Village in three years rather than five, provided each section keeps clearing its own 51 percent threshold.
The Detail Most People Miss
There is one wrinkle in how these assessments work that catches people off guard, and it is worth knowing even if your street isn't currently under a cone. Under the statute governing the current round of special assessment districts, an unpaid assessment balance stays attached to the property itself, not to whoever signed the original petition. That is a change from how things worked during the last major Village roads push in 2013. If you buy a home in a section that has an active or recently completed SAD, you may be taking on the remaining balance along with the house, regardless of who lived there when the petition was signed. It is the kind of detail that shows up in a title search, not in a listing description, and it is one more reason the subdivision-road system behaves so differently from the county-road system next door.
If you are not sure which category your own street falls into, the fix is a phone call, not a guess. The Department of Public Works handles subdivision road questions at 248-594-2800. Anything on Telegraph, Woodward, Franklin, or the other RCOC-maintained roads goes through the Road Commission's customer service line at 248-858-4804.
A Different Kind of Approval, A Few Blocks Away
Not every project moving through Township Hall this month involves a road at all. On August 10, the Board of Trustees held a public hearing on a request from Birmingham Country Club, at 1750 Saxon Drive, to add a kitchen, a snack bar, and a renovated terrace to its clubhouse. That project runs on a third model entirely. It is private capital, funded by the club rather than by taxpayers or assessed homeowners, but it still has to clear the same township approval process that governs zoning and site plans for anyone else. Three different projects, three different funding structures, all working their way through the same town hall in the same six weeks.
The Season Keeps Moving Anyway
None of this has slowed down the rest of the area's late-summer calendar. A few minutes over the line in Bloomfield Hills, Cranbrook's Japanese Garden hosted its MI Bon Summer Festival on August 8, six hours of free taiko drumming, Bon dancing, food trucks, and cultural displays that drew people from well outside the immediate neighborhood. Earlier in the month, the Cranbrook Tennis Classic brought an ATP Challenger 125 field through its final rounds, with top-seeded American pairs playing a quarterfinal match in late July. Detours and driveway closures in Bloomfield Township are real, but they are running alongside a regional calendar that has not paused for any of it.
Knowing which system is tearing up your particular street, and which one is quietly finishing without you noticing, is a small piece of local literacy. It also happens to be the kind of thing you only learn by living here long enough to watch a few of these projects play out.
If you are weighing what any of this means for a home you own or one you are watching in Bloomfield Township, Meredith Colburn has spent more than three decades tracking how these local details actually affect value and timing here. Reach out for a free home valuation and a straight answer about what's happening on your specific street.
