A plan to establish a “green corridor” for a Pittsfield Township street that’s landscape changed dramatically from county road construction has been approved.

The $146,000 project, passed by the township’s Board of Trustees Wednesday night, will plant trees and natural landscape and set up rain gardens along Textile Road, adjacent to two township-owned preservation lots and the Marsh View Meadows Park.

The plan comes after a $4.6 million, 2018 Washtenaw County Road Commission project cut down trees from the neighborhood for paving and redirecting major traffic onto Textile Road.

Residents protested the decision at the time, arguing that not disturbing nature was more important. Township officials say they were not consulted in the road construction design.

Pittsfield Township was awarded an approximately $46,000 grant from the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments for its new project. Those funds will establish a rain garden and bioswales along the northern edge of Marsh View Meadows. Both landscaping techniques use native landscape to reduce storm water, pollution and nutrient runoff.

The rest of the balance for the project, about $99,500, will come from the township’s Tree Mitigation Fund. Property owners along Textile Road can work with the township to plan for tree replanting on their lots at no cost to them, Supervisor Mandy Grewal said.

“The last decade we’ve tried to use our arterial roads and retrofit them with a lot of non-motorized, multimodal amenities, and create some linear park spaces," Grewal said at Wednesday’s meeting. "I think what this hopefully will do for us moving into the future is then leverage those amenities inside creating a much greener aesthetic and use sort of bioswales, rain gardens, native gardens, tree canopies, to really start to make our water and air quality, and soil quality, better through some of these initiatives.”

Courtesy: M Live