Fighting city hall is hopeless when the fight happens in private. This registry makes it public.
People all over Michigan are getting squeezed by their city or township over ordinance violations — chickens on a farm, a family business run off family land, a horse farm that's been operating since 1999 suddenly told it's "not zoned right." The city has the lawyers, the letters, and all the time in the world — and the whole fight happens behind closed doors, where nobody can see it.
Overreach Watch changes that. A person files their dispute as a case, and the registry keeps a public, dated record of everything: what the city says the rule is, what the city did, the evidence the family has, and every response the city makes — or doesn't make. When cases pile up against the same township, with a running counter showing how long the city has stayed silent, that's a record a city has to answer to — because now the fight is happening where the public, the press, and the board members' neighbors can watch it.
The honesty rule, up front: every case here is sorted honestly into one of three findings — the city is probably right, it's gray, or it's city overreach — and the registry publishes all three, including the cases where the city was right and the resident was wrong. A registry that only cheered for residents would deserve to be ignored. The findings are the platform's assessment of the public record; they are not legal advice.
The scoreboard — cases by municipality
One case is a complaint. Thirty cases against the same township is a story. These counts are computed from published case records only — a case counts here when it has been verified and published under the registry's standard. Average days to respond is measured from the day the municipality was notified of a case to its first response.
Public cases
How it works, in three steps
1. A family files. They tell the registry what they do on their land, when they started — the single most important fact in any of these fights — and what the city has said and done. The filing form asks in plain words, and every question says why it's asked.
2. A reviewer verifies. Nothing goes public off the form alone. A reviewer checks the filer's identity, matches the property facts to public records, and reads the documents. Private information — phone numbers, emails, children's full names, account numbers — never reaches a public page.
3. The record goes public, and the clock starts. The case page carries the dated log of every city response — and a counter for the silence between them. When the city answers, it posts. When the city rules, it posts. When the city goes quiet for another month, the counter posts that too.
Read the full standard — the three tiers, the three findings, and the privacy line.