No city income tax in Belding

Ionia County is one of the few corners of Michigan where the city-income-tax question genuinely depends on which town you pick. Ionia and Portland both levy one: 1 percent on residents, 0.5 percent on nonresidents who work inside their limits. Belding, the old mill city on the Flat River, never has.

There is a wry bit of timing in that. Belding was the county’s industrial heavyweight once — the Belding brothers’ silk mills employed well over a thousand workers at their peak — but the mills shut down in the 1930s, three decades before Michigan’s 1964 law made a city wage tax possible. By the time Silk City could have taxed a payroll, the payroll was long gone.

The arithmetic for anyone living here now runs like this. Live and work in Belding, and no city touches your wages. Commute to Ionia or Portland, and their half-percent nonresident rate comes out. Drive into Grand Rapids — a common run from this end of the county — and it is 0.75 percent, half of that city’s 1.5 percent resident rate.

Belding’s own levies all sit on the property-tax bill instead, the same bill that keeps up the riverside parks and the 1906 Belrockton, the silk-mill dormitory turned museum on Hanover Street. Paychecks pass through town untouched.