No city income tax in Grand Traverse County

Grayling, a city of about 1,900 people, charges a city income tax. Traverse City, roughly eight times that size and the hub of the northern Lower Peninsula, does not. Size was never the logic: Michigan’s two dozen income-tax cities are mostly old factory towns downstate — Flint, Jackson, Muskegon — collecting from commuters as well as residents. The resort north never signed on.

That leaves Grand Traverse County simple. Traverse City is its single city; Kingsley and Fife Lake are villages, and villages and townships cannot levy an income tax at all under the 1964 act that created these taxes. Of the 24 cities statewide that use it, the closest to a Traverse City commuter are Grayling, an hour east on M-72, and Big Rapids, well down US-131 — each takes 0.5 percent from nonresidents who work there.

So local government around the bay runs on the property rolls, and the property carries it easily: waterfront, orchard land turned subdivision, the storefronts along Front Street a block off the water. What a Cherry Capital paycheck owes is what every Michigan paycheck owes — Lansing and the IRS. The Governmental Center on Boardman Avenue collects at the tax bill, not the W-2.