State Representative Brad Paquette has been meeting with the Michigan Department of Transportation to address complaints from businesses being harmed by a road reconstruction project in Niles.
Businesses near US-12 and M-51 have complained about reduced customers since a detour went into effect as part of the US-12 and M-51 interchange reconstruction project. Paquette says he lives right there and knows it’s a major headache.
“Businesses are down 15 to 20% with two lanes being open,” Paquette said. “But now with the one lane, it’s really hitting them hard. So we’re doing a full court press on trying to figure out how to get it back up to two lanes here because people are just avoiding the area to the detriment of all of our local businesses.”
Paquette says he met with MDOT on Thursday to ask why the public wasn’t better informed about what was coming.
“They stressed the transportation management plan and they talked about how there was a meeting in September of 2023 where this was depicted, but a lot of the locals, and myself included, weren’t invited to that meeting. So we weren’t able to scrutinize it or ask questions.”
Paquette says MDOT needs to come up with a better way of engaging residents when major work is about to affect their daily lives. Also, he says MDOT should consider the economic impact of certain projects before making the final engineering decisions.
The detour in effect right now has M-51 reduced to one northbound lane with southbound traffic being totally detoured. It’s only a couple of weeks in with two more to go, and some merchants are concerned they could lose their businesses.
Paquette says MDOT has a complicated job, but lessons should be learned from the current difficulties.
