Does Frankfort have a city income tax?

Main Street in Frankfort runs straight at Lake Michigan and stops at the beach, with the 1912 pier light standing out on the breakwater at the end of the view. The town’s economics point the same direction: harbor, cottages, charter boats, and the property taxes they generate. A city income tax has never been part of it. Frankfort is Benzie County’s one and only city, and since Michigan’s 1964 city income tax law shuts out villages and townships completely, it is also the one government here that could ever levy the tax. It does not. Even the county seat, Beulah, is a village and legally out of the game.

The county’s small scale keeps the whole question tidy — Benzie is Michigan’s smallest county, 316 square miles — but the answer holds across the region too. Traverse City, where a fair share of Benzie commuters point their cars every morning, has no income tax either. Of the 24 Michigan cities that levy one, none is anywhere near Grand Traverse Bay; the list runs to old factory towns like Flint, Saginaw, Jackson, and Pontiac.

So a paycheck earned in Frankfort, or hauled home over the Betsie River from a job up in Traverse City, clears whole. The tax bill here comes for the cottage, not the wages.