What “Lake Access” Buys You at a Public Road End Up North
The Glen Lake Association watches seventeen road ends between Big and Little Glen. Seventeen, on one lake system. Empire Township has a road end ordinance, Glen Arbor Township adopted one back in November 2008, and the person you call about either is the township zoning administrator, not the sheriff.
The docks are coming out right now. Late September into October is when the flatbeds come back around, and for a few weeks you get to see our lakes the way Michigan law sees them, which is mostly empty.
A public road end is a way to get to the water. It is not a place to keep a boat, and it hasn't been one since March 2012. That surprises people who are about to pay a premium for a back lot because the plat shows a strip of road running down to the water.
The 2012 law
Public Act 56 of 2012 added MCL 324.30111b to Part 301 of Michigan's environmental act, and the legislature amended it again in June 2014. The list of what you can't do at a public road end is short and it isn't subtle: no boat hoists, no boat anchorage devices, no mooring or docking a vessel between midnight and sunrise, and nothing that obstructs anybody else's way into or out of the water.
Docks get their own sentence. A public road end can hold one seasonal public dock, authorized by the township or village, permitted if Part 301 requires a permit. That is the entire allowance. Not one dock per back lot, and not the dock somebody has been sliding in every June since 1974 because his dad did it first.
Violating it is a misdemeanor carrying a fine up to $500, and every 24-hour period the violation sits there counts as a separate one. A peace officer can write an appearance ticket for it. The statute also says nothing in it stops a person or agency from filing a civil suit, so the riparian owner on either side can come after you whether or not anybody ever gets cited.
The exception that decides most of these
Every prohibition in that statute carries the same qualifier: unless a recorded deed, recorded easement, or other recorded dedication expressly provides otherwise.
Which is why "there's a road end down the street" isn't an answer to anything. Some plats up here dedicated the strip to the lot owners in that subdivision in language broad enough to cover a hoist. Some dedicated it to the public generally, and under this statute that buys you a walk down to the water and a spot to slide a kayak in. Plenty of the access strips on our inland lakes aren't public road ends in the first place. They're private easements held by an association, the statute doesn't reach them, and the association's own document controls. Different piece of paper, totally different answer, same gravel two track.
Your township can't fix it for you either. A local unit of government can prohibit a use that violates the section. It cannot enlarge what a road end is good for by passing an ordinance saying so, and Michigan courts have been through that one more than once.
Inland lakes and streams only
Part 301 covers inland lakes and streams. Great Lakes frontage plays by a different set of rules, and road end fights out there usually start somewhere more basic, with the question of whether the strip is a road at all.
Leland has been arguing about sixty feet of sand since 2019. The Abigail M. Janko Share Trust and the Preston P. Joyes Jr. Trust sued Leland Township and the Leelanau County Road Commission on July 5 of that year over the Reynolds Street road end, the one locals call South Beach or Christmas Tree Beach. Their argument wasn't about docks. It was that the road was never properly dedicated down to the water, that the land west of the old Water Street intersection is private, and that treating it as public road was a taking. The complaint put the value at $600,000.
There was a settlement on the table in 2021 that would have kept the beach public under a permanent prescriptive easement while adding a pile of restrictions: no fires, no fireworks, no overnight camping, leashed pets, no trash cans or toilets, use limited to between sunrise and an hour after sunset. Leland's board authorized the supervisor to sign it in April. In June the board voted 3-2 to rescind that authorization after a lot of angry public comment.
I don't know where that case stands today. I haven't pulled the docket and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What stuck with me was something the road commission's managing director, Brendan Mullane, said to the Leelanau Ticker about the risk of winning the wrong way: if they fight and prove the strip is a road, then it's a road, and a highway easement has no room in it for recreation. Walking down to the water, and that's it.
Leland Township supervisor Susan Och put the real estate side of it plainly a few years back, talking to the Glen Arbor Sun. People who buy near a road end, she said, count that access as part of what their property is worth. She's right, and that's exactly the problem. The value is real and the legal basis for it is thinner than the price suggests.
What I look at
Start with the recorded plat at the county register of deeds, not with the listing and not with the township's parcel viewer. The dedication language on the plat is the document the whole thing turns on, and on the older Leelanau and Antrim plats it's a couple of sentences in cursive.
Then find out whether the road is a public road at all. County road commissions certify their mileage, and a strip that everybody has been driving on for fifty years isn't automatically on that list.
Pull the township's road end ordinance by number if it has one. Glen Arbor's is Ordinance #1-2008, Public Road Endings, adopted 11/18/08. Empire's is in the ordinance list on the county site. Call the zoning administrator who handles both, because in a lot of these townships enforcement is one part-time person with a phone.
And check the assessment roll for the strip itself. In the Leland fight, the township assessor pointed out that neither of the adjoining owners had ever been assessed for that sixty feet. That's not conclusive, but when nobody has been paying tax on a piece of ground for decades it tells you something about who everyone involved thought owned it.
Two opinions, stated flatly
I would not pay a back-lot premium for road end access unless I'd read the dedication language myself. Not the agent's summary of it, not the seller's memory of what the neighbors have always done. A dock that's been going in for thirty years is evidence that nobody complained, which is a different thing from having the right, and a $500-a-day statute exists precisely to end that kind of arrangement.
The other direction is worth saying too. Buying the house next to a public road end is buying a permanent social situation. Some of them are a quiet path and a kayak rack. Some of them are a parking argument every Saturday in July. Janel has watched a few of these go sideways over twenty-five years up here and the pattern is pretty consistent. The trouble tracks how easy the road end is to park at, not how many people have a right to use it. Go stand at it on a hot weekend afternoon before you write the offer. Not on a Tuesday in October when it's empty and charming.
None of this makes road end access bad. Seventeen of them on the Glen Lakes is one of the nicer things about living around Glen Arbor, and a back lot two streets off the water with a real, recorded right to get to it is one of the better values left on our inland lakes. It just needs to be the recorded kind, and somebody has to go read the record.
If you're looking at an inland lake property this fall, whether it's the frontage or the lot behind it, this is the sort of thing worth sorting out before the inspection rather than after. Same goes for who owns the dock on a place that does have frontage. Happy to walk through a specific parcel with you, or you can just browse what's on the market and send me the one you're stuck on.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
Taylor@taylorbrownrealtor.com
(231) 360-1510
