Who Pays When the Heartlands Leaves Commercial Forest

There is a bill attached to the Keweenaw Heartlands that almost nobody has mentioned in public.

Michigan law says that when land leaves the state’s Commercial Forest program, the owner pays a penalty to the township where the land sits. At least part of the Heartlands is enrolled in that program, and the same law waives the penalty if the land is donated to a public body before withdrawal, and does not say the same for a sale. Roughly 32,000 acres, and one distinction in one statute.

Why the land has to come out

The Commercial Forest program is a tax break for private owners. The DNR describes it as a voluntary program for “private landowners,” who pay a flat specific tax of $1.35 per acre per year for tax years 2022 through 2026 instead of regular property taxes.

A note on our own reporting. Our September 9 piece said it was unclear whether Commercial Forest enrollment would continue on the parcels the DNR buys. It is still unclear; we did not find a provision that answers it. What the statute does settle is what happens if land is withdrawn, and withdrawal is where the money question lives.

What the statute says

MCL 324.51108 sets it out. Subsection (6) grants withdrawal “without payment of the withdrawal application fee or penalty” in three cases, and only three: land “donated to a public body for public use prior to withdrawal”; land exchanged for public body property that stays commercial forest; and land “condemned for public use.”

The words sold, sale, purchase and conveyed do not appear anywhere in that subsection. A donation is free. A sale is not. Note the sequence, too. The donation has to happen before the withdrawal, not after.

The penalty under subsection (3) is built from five factors: acres withdrawn, times half the county’s 2007 per acre valuation adjusted for inflation, times “the average millage rate levied by all townships, excluding villages, in the county,” times years enrolled up to a maximum of seven, times a county multiplier. Keweenaw County’s multiplier is 0.8, the highest in Michigan, shared only with Lake, Missaukee and Ontonagon.

The money goes to the township treasurer but does not stay there. Subsection (9) requires it to be distributed “in the same proportions to the various funds as the ad valorem general property tax is allocated in the township.”

Which way it is actually going

Toward a sale, at least for the state’s portion. Scott Whitcomb, director of the DNR’s Office of Public Lands, told the Mining Gazette in October 2025 that federal money would be used “to purchase the land from The Nature Conservancy.” Phase I, roughly 4,500 acres, was approved by the Natural Resources Commission earlier in the summer of 2026; Phase II, a 5,476-acre acquisition in Grant Township, went before the NRC afterward. (TNC’s Rich Bowman dated Phase I’s approval to July in an August Mining Gazette interview; a September Mining Gazette report describing the same two approvals put them in August and September. The Gazette’s own two accounts do not agree on the month, so we are not printing one.) On September 17, 2026, The Nature Conservancy delivered a $1,937,000 check to Grant Township, completing the commercial forest withdrawal fee required to move roughly 10,000 of those acres into public ownership. State law requires the township treasurer to divide that payment among the State School Aid Fund, Keweenaw County, Grant Township and the Copper Country Intermediate and Grant Township school districts in the same proportions as ordinary property taxes, the Mining Gazette has reported.

This is not a question we are raising from the outside. Julia Petersen of The Nature Conservancy raised it with the Keweenaw County Board of Commissioners on July 16, 2025. The minutes record: “There are a few ways not to pay the penalty but if it isn’t paid, the county and the townships could lose money.” That was fourteen months ago, and the minutes carry no dollar figure.

How to check the number yourself

Subsection (4) of the same statute requires the DNR to publish the inputs. For every county, the department must post the 2007 valuation figure, the inflation adjusted value, and the average township millage rate. Those three numbers, plus your acreage and your years enrolled, give you the penalty. They are in the penalty table linked from the Commercial Forest program page at michigan.gov, and questions go to program leader Jennifer Eyde at DNR-Commercial-Forest@michigan.gov or 517-930-4329.

What we are not printing

A figure of $6.2 million has been circulating in comment threads as the withdrawal cost, attached to an oddly precise 32,541 acres. We could not source either to the DNR, the county, The Nature Conservancy or any public document, so neither appears here as fact. Published acreage figures range from 32,000 to 32,600. We did not find how many of those acres are enrolled, which is what the penalty is calculated on.

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