The boardwalk at Innovation Hills is nearly empty by four o'clock on a Tuesday in mid-September. The water pumps that ran all summer sit quiet. A jogger passes the tree-shaped playhouse without slowing down. The loudest thing on the trail is a phone chiming near the main lot, someone pulling up the ParkMobile app to pay for parking they never thought twice about back in July, when half of Oakland County seemed to be here too.
That phone chime is newer than most of what makes the park worth visiting. The city started charging for parking at Innovation Hills on May 27, 2025, after City Council approved the plan that April. It's a small detail that changes how a longtime resident should think about the park, and about two others most people don't realize are tied to it.
The meter tells only part of the story
Innovation Hills draws more than 450,000 visitors a year, a figure Parks and Natural Resources Director Ken Elwert has called "over and above" what the city expected when the park opened. That kind of traffic is why the parking fee exists at all. Rather than build a staffed booth, the city went with a contactless system called ParkMobile, charging $1.50 an hour through the app, a QR code on the signage, or a phone call. Parks Division Manager Dennis Andrews described it as "a very user-friendly and convenient way for people to pay for the parking."
Walk in, bike in, or park across Hamlin Road in the free lot, and none of this applies. The fee only kicks in if you drive into the main lot. For a lot of Rochester Hills households, though, driving in is the whole point, especially with kids in tow or a kayak in the trunk.
Same sticker, three different fee systems
Here's the part that surprises people who've lived here for years: Innovation Hills isn't the only park running this meter, and the annual pass that gets you out of paying it doesn't work the way most residents assume.
Rochester Hills charges vehicle entry fees at three parks, and they don't all charge the same way:
- Innovation Hills runs on the $1.50-per-hour ParkMobile meter.
- Bloomer Park runs on the identical $1.50-per-hour ParkMobile meter.
- Spencer Park runs on a flat per-visit vehicle permit instead, priced separately from the hourly system entirely.
What ties all three together is a single Annual Parks Pass. Buy one sticker and, per the city's own ordinance language, an annual permit purchased at any one of the three parks is honored at the other two. A resident pass costs $35, or $20 for seniors, military, and accessible passholders. Non-residents pay $70, or $40 at the discounted tiers.
That single detail is easy to miss if you've only ever thought of Innovation Hills as its own destination. The pass isn't really an Innovation Hills product. It's a three-park product that happens to be priced around Innovation Hills.
The timing that makes this worth knowing right now
Two things about the calendar make this a useful moment to think it through.
First, Spencer Park's beach and boat rental have already wrapped up for the year. Swimming reopened for Labor Day weekend and then closed for the season on September 8, boat rentals stopped on August 22, and concessions shut down August 24. If your only reason for holding a pass was Spencer's beach, that reason is gone until next May.
Second, the pass itself doesn't prorate. It's valid from the date of purchase through December 31 of the year you bought it, full stop. Buy it in April and you get eight months of coverage across all three parks. Buy it in September, as fall settles in, and you get roughly three and a half months for the same $35, covering Innovation Hills and Bloomer through the quiet season and into the park's own December light display, but not stretching into next year.
None of that makes the pass a bad idea. It just means the math depends on which parks you actually use and when you buy, not on some fixed idea of what a "park pass" is supposed to be worth. A household that walks Innovation Hills twice a month and occasionally drives over to Bloomer is stacking two different fee systems onto one sticker, which changes the arithmetic faster than looking at Innovation Hills alone ever would.
What's actually worth seeing this month
Fall is when Innovation Hills looks least like the summer crowd scene and most like what the 110 acres were designed to be. Sixty-two of those acres sit south of the Clinton River, with another 48 acres of green space north of it, and the shift from one side to the other happens by way of a suspension bridge the city added in recent years, connecting the main trail to a forested nature path most casual visitors never find.
The wooden boardwalk stays clear year-round, winding through wetland where turtles and wading birds are easier to spot once the summer foot traffic thins out. The design has picked up real recognition too: the park won the Michigan Concrete Association's Special Innovative Decorative award and Park Design of the Year from the Michigan Recreation and Park Association, largely for details like glow stones embedded in the walking surface and a turf-covered slanted wall that doubles as a slide at the playground.
Speaking of the playground, the 3-acre nature-themed play area built around a multi-level treehouse is fully accessible by design, and it's a lot easier to actually enjoy without a crowd. If mornings work better for your schedule, the city runs Sensory Friendly Mornings every Wednesday and the third Sunday of each month from 8 to 9:30 a.m., a lower-stimulation window at the playground before the regular rush arrives.
A kayak landing is also in the works along the river, part of an ongoing round of improvements that has included a stormwater pond built as a water feature with waterfalls. It's not finished yet, but it's one more reason this park keeps changing shape year over year rather than sitting still.
The other kind of crowd, coming in December
Innovation Hills has its own holiday lights walk, and it's genuinely a separate thing from the two other big light displays Rochester Hills residents talk about every winter. Downtown's Big, Bright Light Show wraps building facades in more than a million points of light. Meadow Brook Hall runs its own ticketed Winter Wonder Lights and Starlight Stroll on the estate grounds. Innovation Hills does something quieter: a free evening stroll along the same boardwalk, lit up and reflected in the water, past a giant chair, cornhole boards, and climbing structures turned into photo stops, with holiday music playing softly along the path.
In recent years the display has typically run from late November or early December through mid-January, timed to the park's usual 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. hours. It's worth checking the city's site for this year's exact dates closer to Thanksgiving, since they weren't posted as of this writing. What's already settled is that anyone holding an Annual Parks Pass walks into that lit-up boardwalk the same way they'd walk in on a plain Tuesday in September, without reaching for their phone at the meter.
For residents weighing whether this is the year to finally get the sticker instead of tapping ParkMobile every visit, the honest answer depends on how you actually use these three parks together, not on Innovation Hills in isolation. That's the kind of detail about daily life here that's easy to miss until someone lays it out plainly.
If you're thinking about what else makes Rochester Hills work the way it does, from its parks system to its neighborhoods, Jane Evans is always glad to talk through what she's learned after more than two decades of calling this area home. Let's Connect.