A small boat launch on Old Mission Peninsula is causing big drama.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) owns and maintains OMP’s East Bay boat launch, which is located at the corner of East Shore Road and Center Road. In recent years, that launch has been plagued with potholes and issues of general disrepair. The DNR is planning a redesign of the launch, both to resolve those maintenance shortfalls and to bring the park up to the standard of other boat launches that have access to Lake Michigan waters. But the proposed redesign, which would add a new exit onto East Shore Road, has drawn considerable backlash from local officials and residents alike.

“We’re not super happy with them right now,” Peninsula Township Supervisor Maura Sanders says of the DNR. As currently designed the boat launch has a single ingress/egress point, located along Center Road. “The point of contention [with the redesign] is the right-turn-only exit the DNR is planning to have onto East Shore Road, instead of having boaters circle around and exit back onto Center,” Sanders explains. “There is definitely concern amongst the residents in that corner, especially along East Shore, because it would increase boat traffic significantly on an already limited roadway.”

Those concerns were front and center at a December 16 Peninsula Township board meeting, which several DNR representatives and other project players attended virtually to present their preliminary designs. Kasey Cline, Cadillac district supervisor for the parks and recreation division of the DNR, led the presentation, but Stephanie Rosinski (the DNR’s supervisor for the Traverse City and Leelanau state parks) and Annamarie Bauer (DNR’s outgoing district planner) were also on the call, as were Garth Bogart and Brian Sousa from Wade Trim (engineers for the boat launch redesign).

“The main priorities include increasing the number of parking spaces available on site, driven by the consistent amount of time this site is at capacity or over capacity,” said Bogart, who drafted the proposed redesign. “Another top priority – and these are not in order of importance – is improving safety and traffic flow. The DNR has design standards for its boating access sites. Meeting them helps us ensure that both safety and traffic flow are optimized.”

Per Bogart, the existing parking spaces at the Center Road boat launch are 40-45 feet in length for trucks with boat trailers, compared to the DNR’s current standards of 50 feet long and 10 feet wide. Because of necessary tweaks – each space will need to gain “a foot in width and 5-10 feet in length” – the DNR’s new design would result in a net gain of just one parking space. Additionally, Bogart said that “meeting current design standards required we increase the turning radius of both the entrance area and the area down by the launch.”

“It became clear that if we reconfigured the site minimally in order to increase parking length and add that parking space, we were inhibiting the ability to exit the site at the current entrance and exit,” Bogart said. “You can see that the turning radius to leave the site is very tight, both proposed and currently. If a truck and trailer left the site at the same time another truck and trailer were attempting to enter, you could have a potential conflict.”

Those concerns led to the most controversial aspect of the DNR’s new boat launch design: changing the existing Center Road entrance and exit into an entrance-only driveway and installing a second driveway onto East Shore to serve as the park’s lone exit. Drivers departing the boat launch would only be allowed to turn right onto East Shore, toward Center Road.

“Our intent is not to increase traffic flow going south on East Shore Road but rather to improve the efficiency of getting boats and trailers back onto M-37 safely,” Bogart said. “Doing a right-turn-only exit out of the south side of the site allows a boat and truck to pull off the ramp, utilize the tie down area, and pull straight out of the site without any additional turning movements within the site.”

Despite the DNR’s insistence that the new design will improve traffic flows and reduce accidents at the boat launch, local residents have expressed a laundry list of worries about the change. Concerns include increased traffic at the East Shore/Center Road intersection, conflicts between vehicles exiting the boat launch and pedestrians or cyclists that utilize East Shore Road on a regular basis, increased collision rates due to limited sight lines on East Shore, and boaters ignoring the right-turn-only rule. Grant Parsons, a Peninsula Township resident and attorney, even accused the DNR of focusing “on one community of big boat users to the exclusion of the surrounding community that is affected by this ramp.”

Cline said that a design of this nature – which she classified as a “repaving of what is there” rather than a totally new development – would not typically prompt a formal public meeting, based on DNR procedure. However, the DNR agreed to December’s meeting due to significant public concerns around the redesign. Cline said at the conclusion of that meeting that the DNR would “wait and allow some public comment through the first of February” before deciding if, how, and when to move forward. Because the DNR owns the boat launch site, it doesn’t require approval from Peninsula Township to proceed, though it will need a permit from the Grand Traverse County Road Commission to build the proposed egress onto East Shore Road.

Locally, a “citizen discussion” about the DNR’s plans has been scheduled for 3pm next Monday, January 13 at Peninsula Township Hall. Protect the Peninsula (PTP), a citizen group dedicated to preserving OMP “for future generations and the common good of everyone,” has urged community members to attend the meeting and mobilize against the DNR.

“East Shore Road is a quiet, residential street, widely used by cyclists, joggers, sports teams training from nearby Central High School, and walkers,” PTP wrote this week in an email to subscribers. “If the DNR implements their proposed changes, East Shore will see a marked increase in traffic. Residents as well as recreational users will be endangered.”