Leland's Streets Run on Road Shoulders. The Township's Streetscape Plan Has to Decide How Much That Should Change.

"In simple terms, there is an element of 'having your cake and eating it too' in expecting the street to perform differently without allowing it to change."

That sentence comes from the preface of the draft Leland streetscape report, dated October 6, 2026, and prepared for Leland Township by Influence Design Forum of Traverse City and Farr Associates of Chicago. The report says plainly what many of the streets between Reynolds and Hill already show. Leland's informal, loosely organized streets are part of the village's charm, and the draft's preface says that same informality underlies the safety, drainage, and parking problems people want solved.

The process began as a master plan with a clear goal. Over the past year it has turned into something more careful, and the parking inventory explains much of the reason.

Most of the Parking Is a Shoulder

The draft report includes a planning-level parking inventory for the area around M-22. As of the October 2026 draft, the counts are:

Road shoulders hold about 426 of the roughly 622 public spaces counted, more than two out of every three. The unimproved shoulders alone, meaning gravel and grass edges with no marked spaces, hold more cars than all the improved public lots combined. The report says the shoulder counts are approximate, because how many cars fit depends on how drivers happen to line up. It does not count private lots or school parking.

This shapes everything that follows. Most proposals to add sidewalks, organize parking, or manage stormwater need that same strip of land at the edge of the road. In Leland, that strip is mainly where the parking is.

Why These Streets Kept Slipping Down the List

The township started the project because of the roads underneath the parking. When The Ticker previewed the June kickoff on June 8, 2026, Supervisor Clint Mitchell described the streets between Reynolds and Hill, west of M-22, as "generally in very poor condition. In some cases, they're crumbling."

He said width is the bigger problem. "Some of our streets are only 11-12 feet wide, and code now is 18," Mitchell told The Ticker. The Leelanau County Road Commission rates township roads with a 1-to-10 system called PASER, and the township uses those ratings to decide where maintenance money goes. Streets below the width standard don't get rated. In that same Ticker report, Mitchell explained that without ratings, maintenance on those streets tends to get put off.

The narrowest, most informal streets in the village core fall outside the rating system the township relies on to schedule repairs. Bringing them up to standard means taking space from somewhere, and the shoulders are where most of the cars sit.

What the September Concepts Put on South Lake Street

Nate Elkins of Influence Design Forum presented the concepts to the Township Board on September 14, 2026. The concept presentation splits the village into districts: the commercial core, Historic Fishtown, the North Village and South Village neighborhoods, the Riverside neighborhood, and a cultural district around the Old Art Building, the Village Green, and the library.

South Lake Street got the most detailed treatment, block by block. The recurring cross-section has these parts:

• a one-way street, northbound in the cross-section shown
• parallel parking organized along one side
• a new sidewalk
• a bioinfiltration swale to absorb stormwater
• a tree lawn, with stop signs at several intersections

The South Village neighborhood got two alternatives, labeled Option A and Option B. The Riverside neighborhood sheet takes on the parking question directly. It suggests negotiating a lease with the church for public parking and considering buying an adjacent vacant property for public or employee parking.

Those two notes show how the concepts deal with the shoulder problem. Organizing a street into a travel lane, a parking lane, and a sidewalk removes the loose edge parking. The concepts list two possible ways to replace those spaces, a lot the township doesn't control or land it would have to buy, and both were offered as ideas to consider rather than settled sources of parking.

The Questions in the Room

The September 14 board minutes record the board's and the audience's reaction, and parking was among the first questions. Asked whether the plan would add spaces, the minutes record that neither the current spaces nor the spaces in the concepts had been counted, and that there cannot be any parking at the church. That rules out, at least for now, the church lease floated on the Riverside sheet.

According to the minutes, other questions covered car and pedestrian safety, what the plan is meant to solve, and how it would be paid for. One speaker suggested that a one-way sign might be enough. Another pointed out that the township had not been able to afford a $200,000 project on Oxford Drive. Another said parking and pedestrian safety were the top concerns. Trustee Steve Scales said he appreciated the creativity of the vision. Trustee Greg Kuntz suggested holding meetings neighborhood by neighborhood.

The minutes also record that Leland is not an incorporated village, which the presenter called a challenge. Asked for a comparable Michigan town, he named Mio. Responsibility for the streets is split, too. The draft report notes that M-22, which is Main Street, is under the jurisdiction of the Michigan Department of Transportation, while the local streets around it fall under the jurisdiction and maintenance responsibility of the Leelanau County Road Commission.

Then there is the gap between the two prices. The township's December 8, 2025 minutes record the planning contract going to Influence Design Forum, paid from the 2026 township budget. The same minutes note that road construction in the area would require a millage. The firm's proposal caps its professional fee at $33,660. In June, Mitchell told The Ticker that the construction itself would likely run "into the millions." He listed a millage, special assessment districts, and fundraising as possible ways to pay, and said the township would have to "determine if the public is willing to pay for it." No specific funding proposal has been put forward.

From Master Plan to Conceptual Design

These questions changed the document. In June, Mitchell expected the board to see two plans: one "if money were no object" and a more practical one showing what it would take to bring the roads to code with reasonable parking. He expected adoption in August. The township's October 2025 minutes had targeted May 2026 for a final plan.

The October draft has a different title and a different purpose. It calls itself a "Conceptual Streetscape Design." It says several important decisions "would benefit from additional study, community dialogue, and design development before preferred solutions are established," and that it "should be understood not as a final prescription for the future of Leland's streets, but as a framework for the next phase of work." The draft still names a priority area, and it is the shoulder-parking area: North Lake Street, South Lake Street, and the east-west side streets connecting them to M-22.

The preface describes the goal as determining "where carefully considered change is necessary" and where informality should remain. For South Lake Street, that means the one-way, swale, and sidewalk drawings from September are still ideas on paper. They are not a construction schedule.

Where It Stands This Week

The process so far, by date:

1. October 13, 2025: the board approves a request for proposals for a Leland road master plan.
2. December 8, 2025: Influence Design Forum is hired.
3. June 8 to 10, 2026: stakeholder workshops with the Fishtown Preservation Society, the Leland Chamber of Commerce, the Old Art Building, the Leelanau Historical Society, the Leland Library, and business owners including the Bluebird, Benjamin Maier Ceramics, and the Riverside Inn.
4. September 14, 2026: the concepts are presented to the board, with public comment open through the end of September.
5. October 12, 2026: the board agenda lists adoption of the Road and Streetscape Master Plan for the area west of M-22 between Hill and Reynolds, plus acceptance of the firm's parking recommendations and options.
6. November 1, 2026: the draft's timeline marks this as the final-report milestone.

The board's decision on the October 12 items will appear in that meeting's minutes once they are posted on the Leland Township page at leelanau.gov, which also links the draft and the September presentation. According to the September presentation, the remaining steps are reviewing the comments, making final revisions, producing a rough cost estimate for each street, and recommending priorities and phasing. All submitted comments are to be included in the final report.

Whatever the final document says, its street-by-street cost estimates will be the first real figures for what it would take to reorganize streets where roughly 426 parking spaces now sit on road shoulders.

At The Mitten Group, we follow how decisions like this one shape the streets our neighbors walk every day in Leland. If you have questions about how the streetscape conversation could affect a property you own or are considering on North Lake, South Lake, or the side streets between them, we're glad to talk it through. Contact Us.