Who plows a private road in Oakland County?

Nobody public. Orion, Independence and Waterford Townships all state that private-road snow plowing is the responsibility of the owners along the road, and Troy does not plow private roads either. Michigan townships hold no road jurisdiction at all.

For boards and road associations

Private Road Associations

Q: What can an association do if some owners will not pay?

Michigan's Act 139 of 1972 lets a township board provide for private-road maintenance by contract and recover the cost through a special assessment district on the benefiting owners, with petitions and a public hearing. It is the formal mechanism when an informal cost-sharing arrangement has broken down.

A private road association is buying something no public agency will supply at any price, from a market with no published rates. That combination is why the process matters more than the negotiation.

Call (248) 494-7362 Get a Quote

Work is carried out by an independent snow removal operator under their own company name and insurance. This site arranges the introduction and clears nothing itself.

The Baseline

Confirmed in Writing by Four Jurisdictions

Orion Township: owners bordering private roads are responsible for maintenance and snow plowing; the township does not handle private road upkeep — and townships in Michigan have no road jurisdiction at all. Independence Township: private roads are the responsibility of the homeowners along them, and the township publishes an interactive map identifying which roads are which. Waterford Township: owners bear full responsibility. City of Troy: private roads are not plowed by the city.

The Road Commission for Oakland County sets the outer boundary: roughly 5,600 miles of public road in the county — 310 miles of state highway, a 2,600-mile county system, about 2,700 miles of city and village street. Everything past that is private. No agency publishes how much that is, so no number is claimed here.

Procurement

Five Steps That Produce Comparable Proposals

Settle what is in scope before calling anyone. Road surface only, or individual driveways too? Guest parking? The mailbox cluster? A turnaround at the end? Every operator will assume something different if you do not say.
Fix a trigger depth and put it in the request. Two inches is the residential norm; associations commonly buy lower, and one to two inches is standard commercially. A road with any grade is a problem before two inches.
Say where the snow goes. A tree-lined private road with no shoulder is out of storage by February, and hauling is the single most expensive line in winter maintenance. If there is a field, a cul-de-sac bulb or a common area that can take a pile, name it.
Ask for the same structure from everyone. All-inclusive seasonal, or per push tiered by accumulation with de-icing priced per application. Two proposals in different structures cannot be compared, which is how a board ends up picking on gut feel.
Require the certificate of insurance with the proposal, not after selection — commercial auto that names plowing operations, workers’ compensation, and general liability. Michigan licenses none of this, so the certificate is the whole of the verification.

Price

What Little Is Published, and What It Implies

No Oakland County contractor publishes a private-road or association rate card. Two reference points exist and both are worth having in front of a board:

The one local operator that discusses this work publicly states commercial contracts start around $15,000 a season, billed monthly October through March, and lists private roads alongside private schools, churches and non-profits as the property types it handles. It also notes it may have room for one or two new accounts — capacity in this segment is genuinely limited.
The City of Novi 2024 bid records are the only itemized local numbers in existence: a season of municipal lots and selected neighborhood roadways at $144,000 from the winning bidder against $255,745 and $483,500 from the others; 4x4 pickup rates of $80, $150 and $295 an hour; per-push rates of $650 to $1,500 at a Priority 1 site and $125 to $400 at Priority 2.

The implication for a board is not that $15,000 is the price. It is that two competent operators can be three times apart on the same road, and that nothing in the market will tell you which one you are talking to.

If the Informal Arrangement Has Failed

The Act 139 Route

Michigan’s Act 139 of 1972, Maintenance of Private Roads (MCL 247.391–247.398), authorizes a township board to provide for the maintenance and improvement of private roads by contract, with the cost recovered through a special assessment district on the benefiting owners. The statute covers petitions, cost allocation, public hearings, annual programs and contracting with the county road commission.

It is the formal answer to the problem every unincorporated shared road eventually has: one or two owners decline to pay and there is no mechanism to make them. A special assessment is that mechanism.

One honest limit: the act’s own definition of “maintenance” could not be verified for this page, so nothing here claims the statute names snow removal in its own words. What is documented is that the township-contract and special-assessment mechanism exists, and that the townships themselves state private-road snow plowing is the owners’ responsibility. A road association considering this route should take it to its own attorney rather than to a contractor.

Gravel

If the Road Is Not Paved, Say So First

More than 750 miles of road in this county are gravel, and private roads are disproportionately among them. Two things change: salt does nothing useful on gravel, so ice control becomes sand — which is what RCOC uses on its own gravel mileage — and a blade set for pavement will move the road surface along with the snow. An operator who has only run paved subdivisions will quote a gravel road as though it were one.