• Michigan’s rural townships and villages struggle to find residents for local government positions
• Michigan assigns more critical responsibilities to its lowest level of government than most states
• Some states have taken power away from townships

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EAGLE RIVER — Even in Michigan’s sparsely populated Keweenaw Peninsula, Houghton Township stands out for its emptiness. Seventy-two people live here on the edge of Lake Superior, surviving winters that sometimes dump more than 25 feet of snow. There are just six children in the township, and the median age is 73 — more than 30 years older than the state average.

About 1 in 8 residents are paid or unpaid township officials, with several filling multiple roles. And with each passing year, filling those mandatory positions in township government becomes harder.

Worried about the future, officials last summer began exploring something virtually unique in Michigan: Could they merge with other townships or dissolve the township that has been on maps since 1861?

The answer is far from clear.

“We’re meeting our responsibilities, but it’s a mess,” said Linda Paradiso, the 72-year-old township clerk. 

Few states mandate as much responsibility to townships as Michigan, from assessing and collecting property taxes to running elections. 

Today, more than 75% of townships and villages report having more difficulty filling mandatory elected positions, according to a recent University of Michigan survey.

“It’s a thankless job,” said James Watt, who took over as supervisor of rural Amboy Township in Hillsdale County after the previous supervisor was “fed up and decided he’d had enough.”

“Everybody wants the world and nobody wants to do anything about it.,” Watt added.

Midwest states have pulled services away from townships or are working to eliminate some of them. But in Michigan, no township has been erased from maps since 1983, and their mandated services remain the same as they were before the Civil War.

While the Michigan Legislature has the power to transfer services from townships and make it easier to merge, there is little appetite for tweaking the system, Eric Lupher, president of Citizens Research Council of Michigan, told Bridge Michigan.

“The harm being done is so incremental that people don’t realize that things aren’t working right,” Lupher said. “You can’t whistle past the graveyard too much longer and assume local government can continue to do what they’ve done in the past.”

Many of Michigan’s 1,240 townships were established before statehood. Some, like 100,000-resident Clinton Township in Macomb County, have more full-time employees (341) than Houghton Township has residents.

But many are smaller than some high schools. About a third of the state’s townships have populations under 2,000, and it’s those small, predominantly rural governments, along with Michigan’s equally small villages, that are struggling to find people to serve in elected and appointed positions.

Local government to a fault

Townships are more critical to the day-to-day operations in Michigan than in most of the 20 states that have townships. In Ohio, townships’ primary responsibilities are maintaining local roads and managing cemeteries. Illinois townships assess property values, but aren’t responsible for collecting taxes on them. In Indiana, townships primarily dole out emergency financial assistance to low-income families.

Michigan and Wisconsin are the only Midwest states where townships manage elections. 

In Michigan, that job has become more cumbersome after early voting was approved in 2022 and absentee balloting expanded. That’s especially challenging in small townships and villages where the clerk typically is a part-time job.

“Elections are a big problem, because we don’t have people to run them the way they’ve got this set up in Michigan,” Paradiso said.

Related:

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• Help wanted: Michigan clerks willing to face workload, harassment

One possibility is to make it easier for townships to merge. Currently, each merging township must vote to approve the merger. Then, the merger must be approved by the county commissioners.

CRC’s Lupher has worked as a consultant on merger proposals over the past several decades, and he said they usually are voted down.

“Michigan loves government close to them, but it’s inefficient,” Lupher said. “And in some cases, there just aren’t enough people.”

Several Midwestern states are considering or have taken steps to limit the powers of townships.

Indiana is forcing smaller townships to dissolve or merge to save money and eliminate government redundancy. About 300 of the state’s 1,008 townships are expected to be wiped off maps by 2029.

In Indiana’s sparsely populated Warren County, 12 townships are expected to be merged into two.

“We have10 trustees who are going to lose their job, they’re not going to be happy about it,” Washington Township Trustee Danny Kincaid told Bridge. “But it could be a benefit to people in some of the less-populated townships,”

One likely to be merged in that west Indiana county is Jordan Township, which has 90 voters and an annual budget of $25,000 used for library cards and maintaining the township cemetery. “We don’t even have a building,” said trustee Joseph Silver. “When we have a meeting, we meet at the grain elevator.”

Iowa’s legislature is considering the total elimination of townships, which in that state includes fire and emergency medical services and cemetery upkeep. Those services would be transferred to counties. A bill passed the Iowa Senate in April and is now awaiting action in the House.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has long pushed to eliminate townships with populations under 5,000, as a way to save money and streamline government. That plan has met resistance from rural legislators who say eliminating townships hurt services. 

One possibility in Michigan is to change the state constitution, which currently acknowledges townships as legal entities. 

Voters will decide in November whether to call for a constitutional convention. The current constitution was ratified in 1963, with amendments made since then by ballot measures. Every 16 years, the question of holding a new constitutional convention is automatically placed before voters, and will be Proposal One on the November ballot.

Voters rejected calls for convention rewrites by wide margins in 1978, 1994 and 2010.

Changes to the constitution aren’t required to make significant changes to the powers of townships. The Legislature can tweak laws to make mergers more possible and move responsibilities, such as elections and property tax collection, to counties.

“It can be made easier, but then I’m not sure there’s the political will to do it,” said Lupher.

Amboy Township’s Watt, a longtime farmer, said townships serve an important role even when they’re struggling. “I’ve got to believe there might be some economies of scale if we were to combine things, but I’m not sure how that would benefit the citizenry,” Watt said. “Is that going to give them a better deal for their tax dollar?”

Another option advocated by rural township officials is to allow remote attendance and voting by board members. Michigan’s Open Meetings Act forbids it, though an exception was made during the pandemic when many meetings were held remotely.

Allowing remote attendance and voting would help small governments like Houghton Township. 

Its clerk, Paradiso, said only about 20 of 72 township residents live there year-long. She winters in Florida, but remaining members of the township board stay in the township through the winter, providing a quorum for meetings.

“Allowing remote (attendance of) meetings, I think that would give us a few more people willing to serve as a board member,” Paradiso said.

There aren’t simple solutions, says Elisabeth Gerber at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy.

“I see a major tension between the fierce desire for local control and the lack of resident willingness to volunteer to do the governance work,” Gerber told Bridge. members, especially younger folks?” 

‘We are losing diversity’

Michigan’s Office of Rural Prosperity, is holding a series of workshops around the state for local leaders to try to address the challenges, including a July workshop  in Hancock, in the Upper Peninsula. One of the office’s efforts, called Rural Readiness Network, connects officials to one and offers targeted training and technical assistance.

But a $1.8 million grant program specifically designed in part to build capacity in Michigan’s rural communities was left out of the 2025-26 state budget, and not re-established in the budget that goes into effect in October.

Some impacts of fewer people running for office in rural Michigan are more subtle but vitally important, Houghton City Manager Eric Waara.

“Our form of government requires a diversity of voices, experiences and skill sets,” Waara said. “You need a social studies teacher to be on the same board as a PhD physicist to get different perspectives.

“That’s my biggest worry — what seems to happen is we are losing that diversity” of people willing to give their time to public service, he said.

Meanwhile, Houghton Township officials plan to make another round of visits to neighboring townships in the coming months, to try to persuade them that merging would not cause them extra work of money.

“We’ll tell them that we can help out, we can volunteer,” said Paradiso. “We’d be willing to sit on their board if that helps.

“These townships are literally failing,” she said. “We have too many of them, and not enough people to support them and run them appropriately.”

And what happens if nothing changes?

“We won’t have local government here,” Paradiso said.

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