This is the drive home.
8,000 trees along these roads are marked to come down. Nobody elected the five people who decided it.
They meet Tuesday, September 8, at 3 p.m. You can be in that room without saying a word.
Can’t make it? Send me what happens.
Why we put up with the winters
There is a reason people stay in Kalamazoo County, and it is not February.
It is the drive out in the third week of May, when the canopy closes over the road and the light goes green. It is the shade on the shoulder where the bus stops. It is the fact that the road you take to work looks like something instead of nothing.
Somebody left those trees standing for us. Most of them were putting down shade before anyone reading this was born, and not one was planted by a person who expected to sit under it.
That is not decoration. That is the place.
The strip in front of your house
You mow it. You rake it in November. You shovel the end of it every time the plow comes through, and when a limb comes down you drag it off yourself. You pay taxes on the parcel it sits in. When you bought the house, those trees were part of what you were looking at.
Nobody asked you.
No letter. No hearing. No vote. No form. One day in May there was orange paint.
We are not going to argue with you here about who owns what — that depends on your road, your deed, and a survey, and there is a page about it. What we will say is simpler, and we think most people in this county already know it: whatever the paperwork says, that strip is part of your home. You have looked after it for years. You should have been asked.
Is your tree marked?Nobody voted for the people doing this.
The Road Commission of Kalamazoo County is five people. None of them is elected. They are appointed, and they set their own policy on which trees come down.
There was no public hearing on removing these trees. There is no appeal if yours is marked. There is no independent auditor checking whether the agency follows the policy it wrote for itself. When the Road Commission presented this project to the public, it said in advance that it would not take questions that night.
Whatever you think about trees, that is how this was decided.
What we’re asking for →The people who appoint them weren’t told either.
The Road Commission won a $25 million federal grant in September 2025.
The Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners — the nine elected people who appoint every road commissioner — did not receive a presentation on this project until July 2026. That presentation happened after residents raised it at a county board meeting in June. No vote was taken on it.
So for the better part of a year, the only body a resident could vote for did not know that 8,000 trees along county roads had been slated for removal.
And when the county board did finally hear it, one commissioner said plainly on the record what the board’s power actually amounts to: the Board of Commissioners does not control what the Road Commission does, and its only influence is whether it reappoints Road Commission members.
One of those five seats comes up on December 31, 2026.
Open the full map — easier to use on a phone.
Find your road.
Eleven routes. One hundred thirty miles. Fifteen townships. Five years.
Most people we talk to had no idea their own street was on the list. That was true of us until the orange X’s showed up in May.
And the map is not the whole story. The Road Commission has been marking trees on roads that were never part of this project at all. When residents on M Avenue asked why their trees were marked, a Road Commission staffer told them the agency is trying to clear roadsides wherever it can. They took roughly 1,500 trees in 2025.
8,000 is the floor, not the ceiling.
Is your tree marked?What the Road Commission is doing
In September 2025 the Road Commission of Kalamazoo County was awarded $25 million through the federal Safe Streets and Roads for All program — the largest such grant in Michigan and, by the agency’s own account, the tenth largest in the country.
The money pays for centerline and shoulder rumble strips, edge-line markings, curve signage, some shoulder widening and paving — and the removal of every tree the agency classifies as a fixed object inside the clear zone along 130 miles of county primary roads.
In its own FAQ, the Road Commission put it this way: trees within 33 feet of the road centerline “are classified as fixed objects and will be removed as part of clear-zone safety work,” and the agency “is not replacing removed trees at this time.”
Cutting is reported to begin October 1, 2026.
“But didn’t they cut it to 4,000?”
They said so, this summer. They then posted a revised clear-zone policy on their SS4A page: 17 feet from the outside white line instead of 33 feet from the centerline. Where there’s no white line, 17 feet from the edge of the pavement — which takes more.
Here is what they did not publish: a list of which trees came off.
There is no published inventory, no independent audit, and no third-party auditor of any kind to check whether the agency follows its own policy. Residents are reporting healthy trees still wearing an X well outside the new zone, and dead trees that were never marked at all.
We are not going to run this campaign on a number an agency can revise again next month without telling anyone. Publish the list. Until then, we count 8,000.
Publish the list — send the letterWe’re two people from Kalamazoo County who noticed the X’s
We started this in May, after orange marks appeared on trees along our road. We are not lawyers, arborists, or engineers. Everything technical on this site comes from the Road Commission’s own documents, which are linked, or from people we name.
Here’s what we’ll say against our own interest: these roads do have a real crash record, and the Road Commission has a real job to do about it. We are not claiming otherwise. What we are saying is that the agency’s own board minutes show only three serious or fatal tree crashes on these eleven routes across five years, and that the cheapest, best-evidenced fix in its own presentation is rumble strips — which are already going in on all 130 miles either way.
Showing up has already changed things
Since residents started attending board meetings and writing to the County Board:
- The Road Commission revised its clear-zone policy, and some trees came off the list
- Saved trees have had their X’s painted over in black
- The agency has re-surveyed trees for residents who spoke at board meetings and left their contact information
- It adopted an 18-month pilot to cost-share replacement trees 50/50
Where this stands:
- 2,088 people had signed the petition when it was delivered to the Road Commission in mid-July 2026. 2,153 by the end of August 2026.
- 343 of those households have trees marked for removal on their own property.
- About 50 residents came to each of the first two Road Commission board meetings. Both rooms were full.
The board meets in a room that holds more than fifty.
None of that happened because anyone sent an angry email. It happened because people showed up, in person, and put their names down.
One more thing we learned the hard way: emails sent only to the Road Commission went largely unanswered. Emails that copied the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners got responses within days — and led directly to a sit-down between residents, Road Commission officials, and two county commissioners.
What we’re doing next
Public records requests. Pressure on the County Board, which appoints every Road Commission commissioner. And, if it comes to it, an injunction under Michigan’s environmental protection law.
How that works, and what it needs →
Write to the Road Commission and your county commissioner →
Send me what happens
We post after every board meeting, whether it went our way or not. The mailing list is moving to a new provider this week. Until it’s connected, email hello@savekzootrees.org and we’ll add you by hand.
In five years, the road past your house looks the way it looks now. The curves are safer, because rumble strips went in. The water is off the road in April. And the trees are still standing, because on one Tuesday afternoon in September, enough people drove to 4400 South 26th Street and sat down.
Winter here is five months long. What people stay for is the other seven, and most of it was left to us by people who never saw these trees at full height.
Nobody plants a roadside oak for themselves. The ones out there now were left for us by people who knew they would never sit under them.
I'll be there September 8