No city income tax in Harrisville

Twenty-four Michigan cities take a cut of the paychecks earned inside their limits. Harrisville is not one of them, and from a porch above the Lake Huron shore you would have to drive roughly 70 miles inland — straight down M-72 to Grayling — to find the closest city that is.

Harrisville counted 437 people in the 2020 census, which makes it one of the smallest cities in the state, a county seat you can walk end to end between coffee and the harbor. It is also Alcona County’s only city. Everything else here is a township, plus the village of Lincoln, and under the 1964 state law that created city income taxes, only cities can levy one. Townships and villages never can. So one small city declining the tax settles the question for the whole county at once.

What Harrisville does collect is property tax: a city millage stacked on the county, school, and other local levies, the way every Michigan town funds itself. Wages are a different story. The state takes its flat income tax and the IRS takes its share, and the little harbor town at the eastern end of M-72 keeps its hands off the rest.