No city income tax in Gladwin or Beaverton

A good share of Gladwin County’s paychecks are earned somewhere else — Midland’s hospital and chemical plants pull commuters south every morning. The tax math on that commute: nothing extra. Midland has no city income tax, and neither do Gladwin or Beaverton, the county’s two cities. The nearest payroll that carries one is Saginaw’s, where a job inside the city limits costs a nonresident 0.75 percent — half the 1.5 percent Saginaw charges its own residents.

That split, 24 Michigan cities with a wage tax and everyone else without, mostly tracks the old factory map. Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, and Lansing adopted theirs back in the 1960s, when their payrolls were enormous. Gladwin, which incorporated in 1893 as a lumber town first called Cedar, never had a payroll like that — when the pine was gone, so was the boom. Beaverton, at the dam on the Tobacco River, tells the same story one river over.

So the county’s two city halls live on property taxes, the township halls on their own millages, and wages go untouched by anything local. Cedar Avenue still carries Gladwin’s original name through downtown; a city income tax has never gotten anywhere near it.