Wexford County's Zoning Patchwork Since the 2017 Repeal

The repeal: Wexford County Zoning Ordinance #5, gone as of January 1, 2017

Most Michigan counties fit a simple pattern: a countywide zoning ordinance fills the gap for any township that hasn't adopted its own. Wexford County broke that pattern. Its Board of Commissioners voted to repeal the county's own Zoning Ordinance #5, effective January 1, 2017, over the objections of township supervisors who wanted the county to keep administering zoning. Fourteen townships lost their county zoning coverage at that point: Antioch, Boon, Cherry Grove, Clam Lake, Colfax, Greenwood, Hanover, Henderson, Liberty, Selma, Slagle, South Branch, Springville, and Wexford Townships. The county's Planning Commission itself kept existing under a 2009 ordinance and the Michigan Planning Enabling Act, but its role since 2017 has been planning and coordination rather than direct zoning authority.

Ten townships formed a joint planning commission with a shared ordinance

In response to the repeal, ten of the fourteen affected townships -- Antioch, Boon, Cherry Grove, Hanover, Liberty, Selma, Slagle, South Branch, Springville, and Wexford Townships -- formed the Wexford Joint Planning Commission (WJPC) and adopted a shared Wexford Joint Zoning Ordinance in 2017, revised in 2022. For a parcel in one of these ten townships, the WJPC (which opened its own dedicated office to streamline the process) is the zoning authority to contact, not the county.

One township wrote its own ordinance instead

Clam Lake Township took a third path: after initially relying on the county's zoning while it existed, the township adopted its own master plan in 2018 and then its own independent Zoning Ordinance (No. 55) in August 2019, following a planning commission public hearing and township board approval. A parcel in Clam Lake Township is governed by that township's own ordinance -- not the WJPC's joint ordinance, and not any county-level fallback.

Three townships still have no zoning ordinance at all

That leaves Colfax, Greenwood, and Henderson Townships, which did not join the WJPC and have not adopted zoning ordinances of their own. Wexford County's own Building Department confirms directly that these three townships currently have no zoning in place -- meaning there is, as things stand, no zoning-based restriction on land use in any of them. That can cut both ways for a buyer: it may mean fewer restrictions on what you personally can build or how you can use the land, but it also means no zoning-based protection against a neighboring landowner's future incompatible use showing up next door. Henderson Township has separately adopted its own noise ordinance (effective January 9, 2026), which is worth knowing about even though it's not a zoning ordinance and doesn't govern land use the way zoning would.

Two additional townships, Cedar Creek and Haring, were never part of the county's pre-2017 zoning ordinance to begin with and are reported to administer zoning independently -- though sourcing on Cedar Creek Township specifically is mixed in this research pass (one source describes it as having no zoning at all, while the hub's original research described it as self-zoned), so confirm Cedar Creek's current status directly rather than relying on either characterization.

The bottom line for a buyer

Identify the specific township a Wexford County parcel sits in before assuming anything about its zoning status, since the honest answer here has four different possible shapes: WJPC joint-ordinance coverage (ten townships), an independent township ordinance (Clam Lake, and reportedly Haring), no zoning at all (Colfax, Greenwood, and Henderson, confirmed via the county's own Building Department), or a genuinely unresolved status (Cedar Creek). Contact the specific township, the WJPC, or the Wexford County Planning Commission directly to confirm which of these applies before relying on any zoning assumption for a specific parcel here.