In northern Macomb County, $9.7 million is being spent this summer to widen 1.3 miles of 23 Mile Road from two lanes to five to accommodate traffic along a subdivision-congested stretch of road that a generation ago was mostly sod farms and plant nurseries.

Elsewhere in Macomb County, there are 800 lane-miles of roads rated in poor condition that the county and its municipalities cannot afford to fix.

Eight. Hundred. Miles.

This contrast of priorities exposes an issue that's largely gone undebated in the yearslong debate over road-funding in Michigan: We've built a state we can no longer afford to maintain with the current levels of taxpayer support.

And in Macomb County's townships north of the Hall Road commercial corridor, we're still building a state we can't afford to maintain with stagnant population growth and thousands of baby boomers leaving the workforce each day for retirement.

Outer-ring suburban townships, which get no state direct aid for roads, approve residential housing sprawl — and then dump the cost of infrastructure onto cash-strapped counties.

"I don't have the money for today's roads much less the new roads we're building," Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel said in an interview.

This is the public policy of Southeast Michigan transportation planning for past half-century:

A one-mile stretch of 23 Mile Road gets widened with local, state and federal funding to ease morning and evening congestion for commuters in affluent subdivisions with half-million-dollar homes.

But 10 Mile, 11 Mile, 12 Mile and (insert the name of just about every county road south of Metropolitan Parkway/16 Mile here) get worse and worse and worse.

Interstate 75 in Oakland County gets widened. But Nine Mile Road in Hazel Park is hardly passable in some places.

Something seems off here.

Hackel admits he's basically a political prisoner to townships that want to expand their tax base by turning farm fields into cul-de-sacs and residential builders that want to go about their business of turning farm fields into cul-de-sacs.

A generation ago, township leaders in Shelby and Clinton townships and the former county road commission basically left Hackel and today's leaders with the crumbling road network the state's third-largest county has today — and limited taxation options and below average per-vehicle state funding to pay for it.

"It's not unique to Macomb County," Hackel said.

But it's more pronounced in Macomb County, with all of the county's needs in older suburbs (full disclosure: I live in St. Clair Shores, where Harper Avenue is jagged and jarring).

And with each housing subdivision, there's virtually no accounting for the cost of additional damage to two-lane roads like 23 Mile and north-south connectors such as Romeo Plank Road, which is two lanes of blacktop with rim-bending, rutted gravel shoulders between 22 Mile and 23 Mile.