Marquette Township's Busiest Year Announced Itself With a Garbage Cart Shortage

"We have a 48-unit development starting up full speed ahead right across the highway. We know it's coming and we're going to need half of the carts that we're ordering just for one development."

That's Marquette Township Manager Jon Kangas, talking to the Township Board earlier this month about an unglamorous line item: 100 new garbage carts and 100 new recycling carts from Cascade Engineering, because the existing stock had simply run out. No groundbreaking shovel, no ribbon, no press release. Just a supply problem that gave away how much building is actually happening around here.

If you've driven Brookton Road or Venture Drive this summer, you've probably clocked at least one of the four things currently reshaping this corner of the Township. What you might not have clocked is that they add up to something. Three years ago, growth along U.S. 41 meant clearing ground for national chains everyone already recognized. This year it means something quieter: existing buildings getting new tenants, existing land getting a very large civic project, and existing infrastructure getting stretched by housing nobody put a sign up for. The visible story is cranes and ceremonies. The real story is what the Township had to scramble to keep up with.

The building nobody could fill, until two neighbors traded keys

For a while, the empty big-box building on U.S. 41 that used to be Best Buy was one of those spaces that just sat there. Then, this spring, Mount Manufacturing, a medical device manufacturer that moved its headquarters to Marquette in 2022, needed more room than its current 10,000-square-foot facility on Brookton Road could give it. Rather than build new, Mount is expanding into that vacant former Best Buy building. That move, in turn, freed up Mount's old spot for Cherry Creek Construction, a custom builder and general contractor that had been eyeing the location.

"This building is something we've been eyeing for a while, and it was pretty exciting to see it come up, it's a great location," Cherry Creek owner Sam Holcomb told a local news crew when the plan was announced in April. The Marquette Township Planning Commission approved the swap unanimously, and Cherry Creek expects the new headquarters on Brookton Road to let it expand what it offers customers, including in-house design services.

Neither company needed a permit for new construction on open land. Both needed square footage, and they found it in each other's old address. That's a small, specific fact, but it's the kind of fact that tells you something a headline about "commercial growth" never would: right now, growing in Marquette Township often means moving into a building someone else just outgrew.

Venture Drive is getting a roundabout, a veterans' home, and a farewell visit

The bigger and far more visible project is happening a short drive away, on 38-plus acres off Venture Drive near the Township Hall. That's where the state is building the new Michigan Veteran Homes D.J. Jacobetti facility, ground broken in May 2025, on track for completion in 2027 with veterans expected to move in that fall. The new building will hold 108 private rooms with private bathrooms, replacing the current Jacobetti home on Fisher Street in Marquette, which has operated out of the former St. Mary's Hospital building since 1981.

"This site was chosen and we couldn't be happier," Township Supervisor Lyn Durant said at the groundbreaking, calling it an upgrade to how the region cares for the people who served it.

The project carries real money behind it. U.S. Sen. Gary Peters secured $57.6 million in federal funding for construction through the VA's State Veterans Home Construction Grant Program, and he stopped by the site on August 26, five days before this was written, as part of what he's calling his 10th and final motorcycle tour of the state before retiring at the end of his term. A roundabout meant to reroute traffic around the site, with exits for both directions of Venture Drive plus a service entrance, was targeted for a spring 2026 opening, which means anyone who drives that stretch has likely already noticed the new pattern even if they didn't know why.

Here's how the four threads line up against each other:

The 48 units nobody put on a sign

Of the four, the housing development is the one with the least public paper trail, and that's exactly the point. There's no press release, no groundbreaking photo, no quote from a developer. The only reason anyone outside the Township office knows it exists is that Kangas had to explain, on the record, why the Township was buying 200 more curbside carts than usual. Growth that shows up in a supply order before it shows up in a news story is still growth. It's just the kind residents notice on their own street before they read about it anywhere.

Why the Township wrote a five-year plan for exactly this

None of this is happening in a vacuum. In July, Marquette Township adopted an updated Master Plan for 2026 through 2030, a long-range document meant to guide land use, housing, transportation and economic development decisions for the next several years. The update was funded in part by a $50,000 Housing Readiness Grant from the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, which let the Township bring in planning firm SEH Inc. to run the public engagement and data analysis behind the document. The stated goal, in the Township's own words, is to help it respond to growth pressures while maintaining the qualities residents already value.

Read against everything above, that's not boilerplate. It's an acknowledgment, on paper, that the Township knew this stretch of activity was coming and wanted a framework in place before the cart order had to be doubled and the manufacturer had to find 30,000 more square feet somewhere down the road.

What this actually adds up to

Put the four pieces side by side and a pattern comes into focus that no single ribbon-cutting would show you. The commercial corridor is filling in existing space rather than clearing new ground. The civic corridor near Township Hall is absorbing the single largest project, a state veterans' home with a nine-figure funding trail and its own traffic infrastructure. And the residential side is growing fast enough that it's outpacing the Township's own supply chain for something as basic as trash pickup. That's three different kinds of growth happening at once, in three different parts of the same small Township, in the same six months.

If you live here, you've probably already felt one piece of this without connecting it to the others: a longer wait at a stoplight, a familiar storefront with a new name on the door, a neighbor mentioning a new building going up somewhere you hadn't driven past yet. None of it requires you to do anything. It's just useful to know what you're actually looking at the next time you pass Brookton Road or round that new curve on Venture Drive.

If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's changing in your own backyard, or you've got a friend or family member wondering what any of this means for property here, Team Erin Wasik keeps an eye on exactly this kind of local detail. Erin Wasik and Jen McCarthy work Marquette Township and the wider Upper Peninsula every day, and they're always happy to talk through what's actually happening on the ground, no pressure attached. Start Your Search whenever you're ready.