No city income tax in Imlay City

Charles Palmer, the railroad engineer who platted Imlay City along his new Port Huron & Lake Michigan line in 1870, laid the place out as a produce market. The signature produce these days is blueberries — celebrated with a festival every summer — and the tax picture is still market-town simple: Imlay City has no city income tax.

Lapeer, fifteen minutes west on I-69, is the county’s exception, one of just twenty-four Michigan cities with a local income tax. That’s the reason the question comes up in Imlay City at all. The split works like this: live in Imlay City but work in Lapeer, and Lapeer’s 0.5% nonresident rate comes out of those wages. Live and work in Imlay City, and no city touches your paycheck — just Michigan’s flat state tax and the federal bill.

That’s also the whole map for Lapeer County. Under the 1964 state law, a city income tax exists inside a city that votes to adopt one and nowhere else — villages and townships can’t levy one at all — and of the county’s two cities, Lapeer alone ever did.