From ArborWiki

Thanks to Thomas Jefferson's ideal of the small community of citizen-farmers, influential around the time the Michigan Territory was created, Michigan has a rich array of local governments, including 30-odd Townships, Charter Townships, Villages, and Cities in Washtenaw County. In the post-war era of cheap transportation and subsidized mortgages, this fine-grained patchwork of local control has been blamed for enabling "balkanization" of the Detroit region, and impeding regional solutions to problems.

The Ann Arbor area has a decent selection of activists and busybodies to go along with the assortment of governmental layers.