Off-Grid Living in Presque Isle County, Michigan

I've been digging into Presque Isle County, Michigan for anyone thinking about buying land here and going off-grid, and the short version is: it's doable, but the jurisdiction picture is more tangled than most counties I look at, so read carefully before you buy a parcel.

Zoning is split between county and local governments. Presque Isle County has a countywide Zoning Ordinance (Ordinance #2007-1) run out of the County Building & Zoning Department, but a handful of townships and municipalities, Allis, Krakow, and Presque Isle Townships, plus the Villages of Millersburg and Posen and the Cities of Onaway and Rogers City, kept their own zoning authority. That means the office that issues your zoning permit depends entirely on where in the county your land sits. Weirder still, the Village of Millersburg has no zoning ordinance at all right now, which is unusual and worth double-checking if you're eyeing land there. For everywhere else, the county ordinance and the County Building & Zoning Department are in charge.

Dwellings, tiny homes, and RVs get pulled into zoning. The county ordinance defines "building" broadly enough to include tents, awnings, and vehicles used for shelter, mounted on wheels or not. So living in an RV or converted vehicle isn't just a building-code question, it's a zoning question too, and there's a separate zoning section specifically on recreational vehicle use. I found no local Appendix Q adoption for tiny homes, so Michigan's state baseline applies.

Building permits follow the state code, enforced locally. The County Building & Zoning Department enforces the Michigan Residential Code, Michigan Building Code, and related state construction codes (the county was using the 2015 versions), plus its own zoning ordinance. Permits are required before any new construction, including manufactured structures brought onto a site, and soil erosion permits kick in for qualifying earth-change work under state law (NREPA Part 91).

Septic and wells run through a different agency entirely. This isn't the county health department, it's District Health Department No. 4 (DHD4), covering Alpena, Cheboygan, Montmorency, and Presque Isle Counties together. You can install your own septic system, but you need a permit from DHD4 first, and septic approval has to happen before the county will issue a building permit; a well final has to happen before you get a certificate of occupancy. Presque Isle Township also recently added its own septic/well inspection rule tied to property transfers, so if you're buying there, ask about that specifically. Composting toilets aren't addressed anywhere I found, so that's genuinely unclear, ask DHD4 directly.

Greywater and rainwater harvesting have no county-specific rules that I could find, so the state's default plumbing code standards apply, administered by the state (LARA), not the county.

Full utility disconnection isn't addressed head-on, but practically speaking you can't get a certificate of occupancy without an approved well and septic system, so true off-grid water/waste independence is possible, it just has to be permitted and approved rather than informal.

Bottom line: confirm which government (county or your specific township/village/city) controls zoning for your parcel before you do anything else.