No city income tax in Clare County

The corner of McEwan and Fifth in downtown Clare has hosted oil money, Purple Gang regulars, and a 1938 shooting at the Doherty Hotel bar. One thing it has never seen is a city wage tax. Neither Clare nor Harrison, the county seat up US-127, has ever levied a city income tax — and no other government in the county could if it wanted to. Michigan’s 1964 law reserves the tax for cities, and townships, which cover most of Clare County’s ground, are shut out of it entirely.

Only 24 Michigan cities use that law, and none of them is where Clare County actually goes to work. Mt. Pleasant levies nothing. Midland levies nothing. You have to get all the way to Saginaw before a city takes a slice: 0.75 percent from nonresidents who hold a job inside its limits, 1.5 percent from its own residents.

Local budgets here ride on the property-tax bill instead — city millage in Clare and Harrison, township millage everywhere else, schools and county on top. The oil boom of the 1930s put Clare on the map without any tax on wages, and the lakes around Harrison fill the county with cottages the same way now. Paychecks were never part of the deal.