For The Best City Battle Of The Burbs Fabulous Four: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Battle Of The Burbs Fabulous Four is and who runs it

The Battle Of The Burbs is a listener vote run by WGRD-FM, a commercial radio station broadcasting at 97.9 FM in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The ballot carries the headline Vote For The Best City - Battle Of The Burbs! (Fabulous Four), and the page describes the round in its own words: it is the throwdown of the suburbs, and visitors are asked to vote for the best or their favorite city in the station's listening area. The field has already been cut down to the Fabulous Four, which is the stage this page covers.

WGRD carries the vote on wgrd.com itself, with no third-party balloting service in the middle. The ballot sits under the station's news categories, which include Grand Rapids News, Michigan News and West Michigan News. That placement tells a supporter something useful: this is a station content feature aimed at its own audience, not a regional awards program with a formal entry process. There is no nomination form to file and no business to register; the cities themselves are the contestants.

Anyone voting faces a simple picture. A suburb in WGRD's listening area is competing against other suburbs, listeners pick a favorite, and the bracket advances round by round until a winner stands. The table below collects the facts a supporter needs before casting anything.

The dated history: which editions ran and when the window falls

Confirmed editions of the Battle Of The Burbs ran in 2019 and in every year from 2022 through 2025. That history shows a program with roots at the station but also a gap: after the 2019 run the ballot does not appear again until 2022, and from that point onward it has run in consecutive years. A supporter should therefore treat the Battle Of The Burbs as a recurring WGRD feature in recent seasons rather than assume an unbroken streak back to its first edition. The next expected cycle is 2026.

Within a cycle, the voting window falls in March. The confirmed page dates Round 1 (Sweet 16) voting at March 28 - 29 and shows Round 2 (Elite 8) voting also in March, with the exact end date of that second round cut off in the text held for this page. The bracket structure is visible in the round names themselves: a Sweet 16 stage, an Elite 8 stage, and the Fabulous Four stage this page is named for, each stage halving the field until a winning city remains.

Unpublished items matter here too. The station offers no full round-by-round calendar beyond those March dates, and nothing on the ballot page sets a per-supporter cap, a comeback frequency or eligibility conditions. A supporter planning a push across the later rounds needs the dates as they are printed on the live page once each round opens; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes in the Fabulous Four round today

Voting takes little explanation. During a live round, open the wgrd.com ballot page, see which cities still stand in the Fabulous Four, and vote for the best or favorite city in WGRD's listening area. No account requirement is described on the page, no nomination step remains at this stage, and there is no separate platform to sign into; the whole vote happens on the station's own page under its Grand Rapids and Michigan news categories.

Because the format is a bracket, voting is not a single act. The Sweet 16 round runs March 28 - 29, the Elite 8 round follows in March, and the Fabulous Four round is the stage this page documents. A city cannot win on a lone push in a single round; its supporters have to return each time the next matchup opens. That makes the printed round dates the most useful piece of information on the page, since a supporter who misses the window for a round has no way to cast a vote for it afterwards.

The page itself is also the source of truth for the current matchups. The confirmed text places the field at the Fabulous Four but the names of the paired cities do not appear in the material behind this page, so a supporter who wants to know which suburb faces which needs to read the live ballot during the round. Everything a vote requires sits on that page: the pairings, the form, and the round dates printed above it.

How this ballot sits beside its Michigan neighbours

The Battle Of The Burbs is unusual among Michigan public votes because the contestants are cities rather than businesses, people or venues. Among the Michigan programmes covered here, the nearest comparisons are reader and community awards that ask a similar audience for a different kind of pick. Grand Rapids Magazine Best of GR covers the same city with a magazine's best-of format, while Detroit News Readers' Choice and the DN Readers Choice Awards run the readers-choice model on the east side of the state.

Further afield in the sibling set, the Detroit Community Choice Awards and Best of Northern Michigan both collect business and community favorites across their regions, and the Detroit Music Awards sits in a different vertical altogether. WGRD-FM also runs West Michigan's Favorite Tattoo Artist on the same domain, which shows the station treats listener voting as a recurring content format rather than a standalone event.

What makes the Battle Of The Burbs different is civic pride as the fuel. A supporter is not promoting a shop they patronize; they are arguing that their suburb is the best place to live in the listening area. That changes how support behaves: the audience is whole towns, not customer lists, and the bracket format gives every round a fresh head-to-head story the station can promote on air.

Strengthening support for a city in the Fabulous Four round

Support in this ballot is a round-by-round job. Because the field is down to the Fabulous Four and each round has printed dates, the strongest move is organizing a suburb's supporters to show up together when the matchup opens and again for the Elite 8 and any final that follows. A city's fans are geographically concentrated, so a local social media post, a downtown business's window sign or a community group's message thread can reach far more of the voting audience than scattered individual appeals.

No published rules govern what outside help WGRD-FM permits in this ballot, and the page is silent on any cap per supporter too. The safe reading is the conservative one: support that comes from real people who actually care about the suburb matches exactly what the ballot asks for, a vote for the best or favorite city in the listening area. For context on paid support in public votes generally, see this page on award-vote support, and check the live ballot's own rules text before a round opens.