Today we are talking about this summer’s primary election, coming up in just a few weeks on Tuesday, August 2nd. Absentee voting is already open, so make your plan to vote!
Links we mentioned:
- Preview your ballot
- Request an absentee ballot or find your polling place
- Learn about and support the AAATA transit millage
- Between now and July 30, vote us as the Best Local Podcast of Washtenaw!
Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter and Facebook. And hey, if you wanted to ko-fi us a few dollars to help us with hosting, we wouldn’t say no.
Transcript
Jess: Hi, and welcome to this episode of Ann Arbor AF, a podcast for folks trying to figure out what’s going on in Ann Arbor. We discuss current events in local politics and policy, governance, and other civic good times. I’m Jess Letaw, and I’m here with my cohost Molly Kleinman. We both use she/her pronouns. We’re your cohosts to help you get informed, and get involved. It’s your city! Let’s jump in!
00:32
Molly: Today we’re talking about this summer’s primary election coming up in just a few weeks on Tuesday August 2nd. We’ll be focusing on the Ann Arbor Democratic primary races for City Council and mayor, as well as the Ann Arbor Area Transit Authority (AAATA) millage proposal that is also on the August ballot. And, as usual, will offer some ways for you to get involved.
00:51
Jess: Something that Molly and I wanted to say at the top of the episode, since she and I both wear a lot of hats, is that all opinions that are about to follow – and there will be some opinions! – are all very firmly with our Ann Arbor AF podcast hat. In particular, the roles that I wanted to distinguish is that I’m not speaking on behalf of: one is as a board member of the Downtown Development Authority. My opinions in no way reflect that organization or the other members on the board. I also administer and moderate the Ann Arbor Housing For All group. I’m getting ready to publish a survey that the candidates filled out on their prospective policy approaches to housing, and I am absolutely not making endorsements in that race; the candidates’ words are going to be turned over to you guys verbatim so that you can see what they said about their policy plans and you can decide for yourselves, so I just want to be really clear: Housing For All, no endorsementl DDA, not speaking on behalf of the organization. A2AF opinions.
01:55
Molly: Yeah and all of the same is true for me, plus also I’m not speaking for my employer. Jess is lucky that she works for herself.
02:04
Jess: My employer encourages opinions!
02:06
Molly: Mine has nothing to do with any of these opinions, nor do any of my various volunteer or elected positions. So with that we’re going to do a quick rundown of the ballot.
02:18
Jess: Yep! So since the ballot is not too long this year, we’re going to do, like Molly said, a quick rundown of the whole thing.
To orient ourselves to what we’re looking at: In Michigan, primaries – not general elections, which are the ones in November, but primary elections in August – are partisan, which means you pick the same ticket for a single party, and then you vote for the candidates on that ticket. So, in an August primary you’re never going to be voting for a Republican versus Democrat or a Green Party versus whatever the other thing is. You will only ever be voting for the various candidates for one specific party. This is why local and down-ballot races for heavily one-party places like Ann Arbor matter so much: if you don’t have another party candidate running in the general, you’ve basically finished your election in the primary/ I know we’ve talked about this a number of times before on the pod, but I feel like it bears repeating an infinite amount of times, because this is not an intuitive concept. And if you don’t understand that the primaries are partisan, it can seem lower stakes, but in Ann Arbor and other one-party places, your local elections are done in August. So please vote! In November you’ll see nonpartisan races, including judgeships, the Board of Education, and the Ann Arbor District Library board, there may be others that I’m not thinking about; and you can see millages and ballot proposals at any time of the year, including May special elections. But, in general, during August all you’ll see are millages and the partisan races.
Speaking of millages, I want to preview that in November there’s going to be a climate action millage on the Ann Arbor city ballot, which is dense enough that we are devoting the next two episodes to it! The first one, Molly and I are going to pepper Missy Stults with clarifying questions about the millage; the dollars will go to support the City’s climate work, including her department, which is the Office of Sustainability and Innovation. One reason that we wanted to talk to her, in particular, is she is so deeply informed, but as a City employee she can’t actually advocate for it; so she is really thoughtful in educating in a very holistic 360-degree view way about what’s at stake for the dollars, how they get spent, things like that.
So that’s the first episode. Second episode: Molly and me fight about it!
04:56
Molly: Like a very little fight, not a big fight.
04:59
Jess: Not a big fight! But this is an area where Molly and I our views actually diverge, and that happens so rarely that we felt like it was worth spending a little time on. And, we wanted to model for you guys (and honestly for ourselves, too) what it looks like to engage in disagreeing discourse. So that’s how Molly calls it. I call it getting into a fight. Whatever.
05:24
Molly: Yeah, it’s not a big fight, though there are some things, and yeah I’m not gonna say anymore right now.
05:33
Jess: No, no, but I think it’s going to be a really fun conversation, so the next two episodes are going to be about a millage that’s not even on the August ballot; but we’ve got a kind of full fall schedule ready for you guys (which I’m pretty excited about and will tell you about later this month).
In the meantime: today is ballot explainer, next two episodes are the climate action millage. Speaking of our ballot explainer, let’s get in!
I wanted to clarify a term that I used a moment ago, which is down-ballot. People use this term on a regular basis – up-ballot, down-ballot. What they mean when they say that is fairly literal: what races are you going to see closer to the top of your ballot, and which ones do you see closer to the bottom? The ones at the top are for larger and then decreasing geographies so if you’ve got federal races, those are at the very top; Congressional races; statewide races; and then on down to local and then hyper local. If you’ve got a Ward precinct delegate or a County Convention delegate, those are at the bottom; and then at the very bottom, if there are any, are ballot proposals. If you’ve been in Michigan for a year or two and you’ve been paying attention to Voters Not Politicians, those ballot proposals are at the very bottom. Molly, I’m going to look at you to fact check me on this: we’re probably going to have something pertaining to reproductive rights on the ballot this year, right?
07:04
Molly: It sounds like they’ve had really excellent success getting signatures and that’ll be something that we will want people to vote for it would codify reproductive rights in Michigan. And there may be some others as well. I know there’s been a lot of signature gathering campaigns, but I don’t know where the rest of them stand now.
07:21
Jess: Yeah. The November ballot proposals won’t get finalized until a little bit later in the summer, and they won’t know the final language and placement on the ballot until I think sometime in September. So I just wanted to clarify if you’re hearing people who have been in campaigns once or twice (or more than that) talking about up-ballot, down-ballot, the reason that it kind of makes a difference is that especially in the physical polling place (I suspect that this is less of an issue when you get your ballot mailed) folks don’t necessarily know to turn over a ballot. So if you’ve got a ton of races in a given election and it spills over from the first page to a second page, there is a huge huge drop off in how many people vote for the down-ballot races . That’s really challenging, because if that’s where the ballot proposals are, if that’s where your hyper-local races are and it’s again a long ballot, then you’re unlikely to see and actually cast your vote. For those races, I’m remembering correctly, I’ve read a few statistics on this that Democrats are actually way worse at turning over the ballot, so we tend to lose our voices on down-ballot races. So: up-ballot, down-ballot – it’s not an indication of priority or importance, it’s just an indication of physically where it falls and how likely people are to vote for it.
Molly, do you think I covered that okay?
08:56
Molly: Oh yeah. I think that’s it.
08:58
Jess: Awesome. Okay. You want to do the first couple races and then I’ll do the second couple?
09:03
Molly: So the first few are uncontested. At the very top of the ballot this year we’ve got the governor race and Governor Gretchen Whitmer is running for reelection and she is uncontested on the Democratic side so that’s an easy one, and right below her we’ve got our congressional representative. The Congressional districts, as well as all of the other districts that we’re going to talk about, redistricted in Michigan in this last cycle, so we’re all in slightly different places than we were in the past in the last election. As I understand it, in Ann Arbor Debbie Dingell remains our congressional rep and she is running for reelection. She’s uncontested on the Democratic side, again, but then some of these lower ones, things have gotten moved around a bit so Jess you’re going to talk about the next one.
09:51
Jess: The state Senator races, you and I have different state senators. For mine, there’s three candidates: Sue Shink and somebody and somebody. I am personally voting for Sue Shink. I appreciate her track record on County Commission. She hasn’t been specifically my county commissioner, that’s Katie Scott, who’s the next race we’ll talk about; but Sue has shown herself to be an effective collaborator and a fairly effective listener, which is really important to me, so of the three candidates she’s the one that I know best, and I’m comfortable with her background. I think you’re looking at a different race?
10:31
Molly: yeah mine, I have my ballot here because I knew I was gonna be checking stuff, I have for state Senator Jeff Irwin and he’s running unopposed and he was our representative before so I think it’s the same.
10:43
Jess: All right, and then County Commissioner, mine is Katie Scott – Katie for the County! – and she is uncontested.
10:49
Molly: And mine is Yousef Rabhi, also uncontested. This is his first time running for County Commissioner but a familiar name because he’s been our state rep for a long time.
10:59
Jess: Now, and we encourage you guys to take a look at your ballot for these races because. Like Molly’s in line differ yours will probably differ as well. In the show notes will drop. There’s a Michigan Secretary of State link where you can digitally preview specifically your ballot. Before you cast your vote, whether you do it absentee or in person – for me, I tend to rely on these a number of times leading up to elections: A, because I can’t remember which races are uncontested, and B, because I do end up writing down everything. I believe in absentee voting, but I love my little elementary school polling place, and so I actually go physically and cast my vote; so I take my digital ballot, I print it out and I bring it in, so I don’t have to memorize anything. All of that to say, we both encourage you to please digitally preview your ballot and research your races. Know where you are before you vote.
Okay. Going into the mayoral race: as a reminder, the Mayor is elected in midterm years, which in Michigan happens to be the same years that we elect the governor; so on even-numbered years, we’re either electing a President or governor, and if we’re electing the governor we’re also electing the mayor.
12:20
Molly: So this year, we have a choice between former City Council member Anne Bannister and current mayor Christopher Taylor. And we are both in agreement on this one, both of us will be voting for Christopher Taylor for re-election as Mayor. We both have different metaphors for elections and voting that I think are relevant here.
12:44
Jess: This is an interesting race, because these are both people who have a history of public service; both people who, at one point or another, have been elected to office. Anne is not currently sitting on Council, but she used to; Christopher has been the mayor, for the past one to two terms, I think he was elected in 2014, and before that was a city councilmember, and before that I believe was on Planning Commission; so they have a record. What that means is you get to see what they do that you like; and you also get to see their baggage. And we’ve got two contestants with baggage.
My metaphor – I heard this a couple of years ago, and I jumped onto it, because this is really helpful for me in races where I feel frustrated at the choice I’ve been given – is that voting is not like getting married; you’re not making an eternal commitment, you’re not devoting your single identity to one relationship (don’t do that in a marriage, either), but this is not that kind of totalizing commitment. A better metaphor for voting is that we’re catching the bus. We’re taking a look at the schedule, we’re seeing the route that runs closest to where we are and where we want to go, and we’re picking the person that will get us there. So, essentially, the person whose values line up with ours, their track record lines up with where we hope they’ll go: that’s the candidate that you would want to hitch your wagon to. And, since we’re going to be talking about a transit millage…
14:09
Molly: I figured I would bring up my metaphor, well mine is not exactly a metaphor, but I heard a few years ago, this idea that elections are about choosing your opponent. So for advocates and activists, no matter who’s in office we’re going to be fighting them on stuff and asking them for things and an election it’s not about finding the person who is going to have some perfect alignment and because no one will probably, and if that if there’s someone who’s really perfectly aligned with my values I think there’s going to be an uphill climb for them to get elected here. But I’m choosing someone who I think I’m going to be able to move more in the direction that I want them to go. And so with Christopher Taylor, there are things where I think we more or less line up, around especially housing and the fact that we need to build a lot more of it, and there are things where it’s sort of a mixed bag like transportation, where I think he’s sort of generally on the same page as I am, but there have been moments like, for example, with the East Medical Center Dr bridge, where he is not pushing as hard as I would like him to. And then there are things where we like fully disagree, especially around policing the choices that he’s tended to make. Really sort of favor the police, they seem to rest on this belief that there’s not much we can or should do to criticize police, to examine our criminal legal system and perhaps change or really change it. And so this doesn’t feel like a perfect fit, you know it’s never going to be perfect, but for me in this race Christopher Taylor is the one who feels closer. And the one who I think might at least listen to me when I’m asking him to do things that he wouldn’t necessarily do.
16:13
Jess: This conversation kind of shows what we’re doing, but I just want to be explicit about what we’re up to. Molly and I have talked a number of times about this episode leading up to it, about how we wanted to approach talking about candidates. What we decided is that we want to talk about who we were voting for, and why; and we’re not going to talk about negative reasons for candidates who we’re not voting for.
That’s a very specific stance to take, and there’s a lot of reasons for it, and if you ever meet us at a happy hour, we’re happy to explain it; it’s not that it’s a secret, it’s just complicated to get into, and the nuance, I think, is hard to do in this format, in pre-recorded audio. But I just wanted to be really clear that we’re approaching how we talk about candidates in a very specific way.
17:04
Molly: Yeah that reminds me that there’s something I wanted to actually give Mayor Taylor credit for specifically around policing, which is that he was the person who brought forward the unarmed response resolution. And while he did it, I think, without building a lot of consensus or developing a lot of communication and beforehand, the fact that he brought that resolution forward opened the door and some pretty amazing advocates have walked through that door. Things are looking promising for us to get a really robust unarmed non-police crisis response program in Ann Arbor that I think is going to make a real difference and potentially save lives, and so credit where credit is due, like I said it’s not it’s not like we’re on totally opposite ends of the spectrum on these things were just a little bit farther apart.
17:54
Jess: Well, since we’re talking about metaphors I will give one, I may have talked about this on the podcast before, but I was talking to a woman who has lived in Ann Arbor for many, many decades. She said in the garden of politics, typically the different parties are like different vegetables, or sometimes vegetables and fruits; in Ann Arbor, all we have are species of tomato. We’re just not different! Politically, values-wise, issues-wise. Which is why where we do have those differences attracts an intensity of attention and feeling. it’s not that those differences don’t matter, and it’s not that they aren’t significant; it’s just, in the grand scheme of things, we’re having different fights in Ann Arbor than we are, for example, in Lansing or in Washington.
18:41
Molly: So let’s –
18:44
Jess: Let’s actually talk about some contested races. We’re going to talk about all five wards. Molly lives in four, I live in ward five. To contextualize the race a little bit: the city has five wards; each ward has two seats, one of which is up for election every even-numbered year. That means we have five ward seats going up in presidential election years and we have five ward seats plus the mayor going up and for election or re-election in gubernatorial election years.
Two of the wards are uncontested and obviously we don’t live in all of them, but we’re just going to go through, and say if we lived in a place this is who we vote for. So: Ward one.
19:25
Molly: I can do that one, so if I lived in Ward 1 I would be voting for Cynthia Harrison.
19:29
Jess: I would also vote for Cynthia Harrison.
19:31
Molly: yeah I think we have pretty much solid consensus throughout this episode. Cynthia currently serves on ICPOC, that’s the Independent Community Police Oversight Commission and has done a lot of work in the community on a variety of criminal legal system advocacy, especially around youth and the system. She’s also a volunteer with NAMI, what does NAMI stand for, National Association of Mental Illness, it’s an advocacy group specifically for people and people with mental illness and their families. She’s got just a really long history of really active engagement in the Community, and I think that she’s great.
20:15
Jess: She is great, and her life experiences and her work experiences intersect in ways that matter to me. She’s paid very close attention to housing issues for a long time; she cares about housing as it intersects with the carceral state, she cares about it as it intersects with mental health and with disability issues. It’s rare to find somebody, especially at the city level, who has such a nuanced take on the kind of cascading problems of housing scarcity. I’ve had an opportunity to talk to both candidates, I appreciate the professionalism and thoughtfulness that they’re both bringing to the race. Cynthia just lines up with my values and hopes for the city. Right so ward two is uncontested, but if we lived there we’d vote for Chris Watson.
21:09
Molly: Ward 3 is also uncontested and the one candidate is Ayesha Ghazi Edwin, who we would happily vote for if we lived in Ward 3.
21:20
Jess: For her we’d go out to drinks and dinner with her, we would hang out with her at fun places. She’s just cool.
21:27
Molly: Yes, so then moving into Ward 4 which is my Ward, it’s a three way contested race and the candidate that I will be voting for is Dharma Akmon. I have known Dharma for a really long time. Not all of those years did we know each other well, but we go way way back to like when I first moved to Ann Arbor and we were both grad students in the same program. But I have since had the opportunity to work with her, she currently serves on the Library Board with me, and it’s given me a chance to see how collaborative she is, and the way that she pays attention to multiple perspectives, the care that she takes in making decisions. She also has a real lived commitment to sustainability and to transportation safety. She’s a year round bike commuter and you know, I was biking to the grocery store with my kid the other day, and there was Dharma biking the other way with her signs on her way to campaign, and it was fun to introduce my kid, like “this is hopefully your next City Council member” so she’s here, she’s in the community, she’s walking the talk? Walking the talk, walking the walk, she’s doing the things that I want her to be doing, and I think that she would be great on Council.
22:41
Jess: Alright, so that’s ward four and then ward five, also a contested race, I’m going to be voting for Jenn Cornell. Like with Molly and Dharma, I’ve known Jen for a really long time. I’ve known Jenn almost the whole time that I’ve been in Ann Arbor, and I can’t say that about a whole lot of people, but I met her really early on because of an intersecting interest that we both hold, which is that the climate is burning and action is urgent. I met her at the Mission Zero Festival, which was basically a block party educating people about what it means to get to net zero waste, net zero energy, net zero water. I met a lot of local musicians that day, and a lot of really cool people working on sustainability issues in the community, and Jenn was one of those. She is on the board of the Ecology Center; she has worked with a number of communities within our community and beyond; she’s a great communicator; and it’s my hope to be able to call her my Councilmember, by the end of the year.
23:40
Molly: And that’s the Council races.
23:41
Jess: That’s the Council races. The very downest of down-ballots races is County Convention delegate and I don’t know about anybody else but I didn’t have somebody raise their hand for that one.
All right, we’ll talk about the millage.
23:56
Molly: Yes, alright, so this is the AAATA millage proposal. It’s a 2.38 mill levy that would replace an existing 0.7 mill levy that voters first approved in 2014 and renewed in 2018 and it’s going to expire at the end of 2023. So what that means is that while it seems like a really big millage, 2.38 miles is a lot, the actual total new mills would be 1.68. Which would work out to an additional $168 for every $100,000 in taxable property value annually. We mess up every time we try to explain taxable property and the Headley amendment and Prop A and we’re not going to do that, this time just giving you the numbers, this is what it looks like. So where did this millage come from? As I said, the existing millage is set to expire so at a minimum we need to replace it. However, it turns out that the original 0.7 mill levy that was approved in 2014 actually didn’t generate enough revenue to cover the costs of a bunch of new services that were introduced in the teens. And it also didn’t address a really strong growth in demand for services like paratransit that are more expensive to deliver. And so what has happened is that there’s this ongoing structural deficit in the AAATA budget. So far they’ve been managing that deficit by cutting internal costs, it seems like mostly by reducing administrative staff. And that sort of kept things afloat without any service cuts in the near term, but eventually they would need to make service cuts even if a 0.7 mill levy is renewed so because it was never enough, and so, no matter what the AAATA needs a bigger millage.
25:46
Jess: And that’s just status quo ante. AAATA actually had some big dreams coming up in response to community engagement that they’ve been doing for the last several months; I feel like Ann Arbor is responding to the urgency of the climate crisis and is really hungry for transit to be a part of that, and so they’ve asked AAATA to deliver some ambitious improvements to their services and expanding what they’re offering to the community… but those cost money.
26:15
Molly: So some of the highlights of what this millage would pay for if we get the expanded millage: One that I put a million exclamation points after is an Ann Arbor Ypsilanti express bus service on Washtenaw. Which is something we have been talking about and needing, for many, many, many years. They would include longer hours of operation system wide and increased frequency on the weekends, both of which are really important for the many people who work hours that don’t align with a nine to five work schedule, plus the people who want to like, go out on the weekend and use transit for non-work-related reasons. So many trips on our roads are not actually even about getting to work, they are about errands or about seeing friends or about schlepping children places, and increasing frequency on the weekends and longer system wide would both make transit more viable for more trips. It would also include a lot of improvements to Ypsilanti service which is both an equity thing, but also a big deal when you’re thinking about commuting into Ann Arbor, which is where a lot of these trips come from. So it would expand overnight service into Ypsilanti Township and the city and it would add customer service agents at the Ypsilanti Transit Center which right now is unstaffed. And there’s also a bunch of capital improvements and things that would happen. These are all things that we would get eventually, not right away, transit takes a really long time to ramp up, but this new millage would bring us a lot of the things that I’ve been really hopeful for that we saw in the long term planning process.
But I also think it’s important to talk about what happens if this millage does not pass. By law AAATA can only go to voters for a new millage or for any sort of millage once per calendar year. The existing millage expires in 2024 so they’re bringing us this ambitious millage now in 2022, so that if it fails they’ll have another chance in 2023 to come back with a scaled back millage. But that scaled back millage – they haven’t said this, I don’t think but it’s pretty obvious to me – that it’s still going to be more than 0.7 mills, because they still have to cover the structural deficit plus inflation. Hopefully this will pass. We’re getting to how I’m going to vote. I’m going to vote yes on this. And it’s going to bring us lots of things, but if this does not pass AAATA will have another chance next year to bring this back before voters.
28:47
Jess: For anybody who’s curious, the people who will be voting on this are the people within the transit shed: that’s Ann Arbor City, Ann Arbor Township, Pittsfield Township, Ypsi, and I believe Ypsi Township as well. I may be missing one or two other municipalities, but that’s essentially who is going to get to put the thumbs up or thumbs down on this vote.
29:09
Molly: So thank you for that, because I wanted to talk about the breadth of this. This one goes beyond just Ann Arbor.
I’m voting yes on this, I would encourage people to vote yes on this. However. This is not how we should be funding public transit and I want to be very clear that it’s, not that I think this is the way to do this, that the best way to do this is to just tax people into oblivion. If it were up to me, there would be a lot more federal and state money going to pay for transit and we would stop lighting millions of dollars on fire by widening highways. That is not the reality that we live in, although these are the kinds of things you can think about on your state level candidates, on your national level candidates, because these are policy changes that are bigger than just Ann Arbor. But my belief in the importance of transit is enough that I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is and vote for this millage and raise my own taxes to pay for the service improvements. But I mean this is not sustainable in any meaning of the word “sustainable.”
30:19
Jess: It’s challenging, even for a place like Ann Arbor which has a history of being pretty generous with millage proposal requests, to continually get requested to increase, increase, increase. For this one, I appreciate that the benefit extends beyond city borders – as it should: transit, like any infrastructure, is regional and it has to be considered in context. So I do appreciate that. But it’s not great. I will also note when Molly talks about the upstream versions of this, one of the reasons that the transit authority does this via a millage is that dollars that they raise through the millage are functionally unencumbered, which means they can use them however they need to. A lot of the Federal and State dollars that they get are entailed to really specific uses, a lot of which don’t cover overhead and growth. Which is really, really challenging! Essentially a transit authority has to manage capacity to their grant requirements and not to the agency’s requirements. So that’s another reason for the millage, and to echo Molly’s calling attention to the fact that this is a downstream solution to an upstream problem. If we solve it upstream with more federal and state dollars, for god’s sake take some of the brakes off of those dollars, because increasing the number of dollars without increasing what we can spend them on doesn’t fix the problem.
31:52
Molly: Yeah and one detail I wanted to add about the millage just because it’s a question I’ve heard multiple times, which is that Ann Arbor City Council Members don’t actually have any control over the AAATA, it’s an entirely different authority. There are things that Ann Arbor leaders can do to improve transit but it mostly has to do with how they’re allocating road space and other space within the city, they don’t have control over the budget, they don’t have control over service. And it’s not necessarily intuitive that that’s the case, but the transit authority is an entirely separate entity.
32:32
Jess: that’s a really good point.
32:34
Molly: And that’s everything on the ballot.
32:38
Jess: Speaking of catching buses (hich is my way of getting back to my message about voting)… how are we asking people to get involved?
32:49
Molly: Yes, what do we, what do we want people to do is vote.
32:52
Jess: Please vote. Vote please. Please make a plan to vote. If it’s going to be absentee, make sure, if you haven’t gotten your ballot already, make sure to request it. If you are going to the polling place, make sure that you know what time. If you are voting absentee but in advance, going down to the city clerk’s office, make sure that you know how to get there; if you’re biking where the bike parking is; if you’re carring, where the car parking is. No matter what you do, make sure you get your sticker! To me that’s a very important part of representative elections.
So that’s what we want everyone to do. If you are a citizen and have the ability to vote, please, please do. Regardless of your community status, if you have a little bit more appetite to contribute to all of the things that we’ve been talking about, every single one of the campaigns that we mentioned are starving for volunteers to serve a number of different functions. So if you’re interested you’ve gotten informed, you know how you’re voting you’d like to get a little more involved, reach out to anybody. Whether it’s City Council, whether it’s the transit authority, any of the mayoral or state races: just reach out! The candidates would be delighted to hear from you, delighted to talk to you, and delighted to help you find a place in the campaign.
34:01
Molly: yeah and there is actually an organized campaign for the millage and they do have a dedicated website that I will put in show notes, so you can sign up to volunteer. In the process of finding that website, I signed up for a yard sign. I know yard signs don’t vote, but I still like to have them. So literally every campaign on this ballot there’s something you can be doing.
34:20
Jess: Okay, so let’s go into a little bit of pod keeping.
First up, I wanted to thank you guys for a couple of things, one is for filling the survey out this past spring. The survey ended right at the same time we stopped talking to you and started doing the reruns, so I just wanted to make sure that I appreciated the folks that filled that out. We will share back some of the results of that like we did last year and tell you what we learned from you. But to that point, our fall programming is reflecting some of what we heard in the survey, so thank you for that.
And also wanted to appreciate you for listening to the reruns! We hope you enjoyed them as much the second time around as you did the first. I listened to them in the service of getting them ready to run, and I had a ton of fun going back and listening to the interview with Alex Thomas and listening to yours and my keening of grief on the on the Damn Bridge decision, even the hard moments: I really enjoyed listening to them again.
35:20
Molly: And I really enjoyed having the month of June off. So thanks everyone for sticking with us and letting us have a break, balance is important. Another thing that happened just before we went on our break is that we made it to the finals of the Best of Washtenaw competition for best local podcast. And so, now we get to pester you to vote for us again and some more. It looks slightly different now because it’s mostly the top six in each of the categories, and go explore the other categories, you will find restaurants that you love, people that you love in there for all kinds of different things, but for us go to the Arts and Entertainment section and find Best Local Podcasts and we’re right there at the top of the list.
36:09
Jess: At the top.
36:11
Molly: You can vote for us every day, between now and July 30.
And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor AF.
Come check out past episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter at the a2council hashtag and Facebook in the Ann Arbor Housing for All facebook group. And hey, if you want to send us a few dollars at ko-fi.com/annarboraf to help us with hosting, we always appreciate it.
We’re your cohosts Molly Kleinman and Jess Letaw; and thanks to producer Scott Trudeau. Theme music is “I dunno” by grapes. You can reach us by email at annarborafpod@gmail.com. Get informed, then get involved. It’s your city!