Off-Grid Living in Lenawee County, Michigan

I'll be upfront: Lenawee County, Michigan is one of those places where the county itself does almost none of the zoning and building work. There's no countywide zoning ordinance here. Instead, each of the 19 townships and the two cities (Adrian and Tecumseh) writes and enforces its own rules under Michigan's state Zoning Enabling Act. So when I say "it depends," I mean it literally depends on which township your parcel sits in.

Zoning is handled entirely at the township or city level. Madison Charter Township, for example, has its own ordinance adopted under the old Township Rural Zoning Act. The Lenawee County Planning Commission plays a coordinating/advisory role, reviewing township zoning actions, but it doesn't control land use directly. If you're scouting land, your first call needs to be the specific township office, not the county.

Building permits work the same way. The county's own site explicitly says building, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and zoning questions go to the municipality where the property sits. Michigan's Residential Code applies statewide as a backstop, and LARA's Bureau of Construction Codes steps in for areas without a certified local building department. There's no Appendix Q (the simplified tiny-house code) adopted at the state level, so tiny homes generally have to meet standard residential code minimums, wherever your township enforces them.

Where the county does step up is environmental health, meaning septic and wells. The Lenawee County Health Department handles on-site sewage systems up to a fairly high volume threshold, with EGLE taking over larger municipal systems like Adrian's. You need a construction permit from LCHD before installing a septic system, and they'll evaluate your soil, water table, and setbacks first. Composting toilets aren't specifically addressed in what I could find, so I'd ask LCHD directly how they treat those.

Wells are similarly centralized at LCHD. You need a permit before drilling, an evaluation of the site for contamination risk, and eventually a water sample for approval. This applies to single-family wells and to bigger wells serving things like campgrounds.

Greywater and rainwater harvesting don't have Lenawee-specific rules that I could confirm, so they fall back to whatever the state plumbing and residential codes say.

As for going fully off-grid, disconnected from public utilities altogether, I didn't find an explicit county ban on that. But site-plan submission requirements do ask you to show your well and septic (or other approved water/wastewater solution) on paper, which tells me you're expected to have some functioning system, on-grid or off, before a dwelling gets signed off.

Bottom line: treat the county health department as your septic/well authority, and treat your specific township or city as your zoning and building authority. Don't assume one township's rules apply to the next one over.