Today, we are talking about the climate millage coming up on the November 2022 ballot. Last episode, we interviewed Office of Sustainability and Innovation director Dr. Missy Stults about what passing the millage would accomplish. This time, we get into some differences of opinion about the millage, including a little skepticism and a little hope.
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!
01:01
Jess: Today we’re talking about the climate millage that will be on the ballot this November last episode we interviewed Office of Sustainability and Innovation director Dr. Missy Stults about what passing the millage would accomplish; this time, we want to talk about our thoughts and feelings.
01:22
Molly: If you’re listening to this episode right after it was released, the election is almost here! The primary election, that is. So vote! Help your friends and family vote! These midterm City Council primaries are often decided with only a handful of votes in one way or another, so really truly every vote counts when we’re talking about these elections, and every single individual can make a difference. So get out there, get your friends out there, and vote.
01:49
Jess: That’s right, and once the primary passes, we still have a general coming up in November! So many elections to look forward to.
So – this climate action millage! Where did it come from?
December of last year, Council voted to put a climate action millage on the ballot. They talked a little bit about the language, had it approved by the Attorney General, had it approved by Council, and now it’s coming up on the November ballot. We are spending a little bit of time talking about it because it is a consequential amount of money; and, while I think largely in Ann Arbor we support working on the climate, I think there’s enough nuance to this millage that it was worth really kind of getting into it.
But we’re not just going to get into it; we’re going to get in to it! In talking about the millage, Molly and I discovered that we have a fundamental disagreement about it; we so rarely disagree about anything, this felt like an opportunity to really explore that difference. We also believe, for ourselves, and as the pod, that knowing how to disagree with people is really important to knowing how to work with them; so we wanted to model that process for you all. So we are here, fighting!
It’s going to be the kindest, gentlest fight ever. Which I think is a good place to start, right? You start with the easy ones to build your muscle for the more challenging ones. I’ll just name for the listeners, and Molly, maybe you feel this way, maybe you don’t; I’m not entirely comfortable doing this! But I also felt that it was really important. So I’m really glad that we’re having this conversation.
03:32
Molly: We’re all going to learn some things in this conversation.
03:39
Jess: All right. When this first came, when we first started talking about it, we realized there’s a difference; what I realized is that you’re not a fan. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
03:50
Molly: I can, and I will.
I want to preface all of this by saying that I am probably going to vote yes on this millage and I’m probably going to encourage our listeners to vote yes on this millage. As I expected, our conversation with Missy really helped deepen my understanding of what this was about and the potential for how we could spend this money; but the discomfort is not going to go away. What that comes from for me with this millage is that there are enormous things we could be doing right now that would make a major difference, a measurable difference, that we know about in our climate emissions that would not cost the city any money. They could potentially even save us money, or bring in new money – and we’re not doing them. And we’re not going to do them. Tomorrow or maybe even anytime soon. And it’s because the political leadership isn’t there. (I’ve been saying that it’s about political will. What I’ve realized is that it’s actually more about political leadership, and I mean that both in terms of our electeds and in terms of people out in the community.)
We had similar fears going into the new sidewalk millage of 2020; people said that the way we were going to get new sidewalks was to overcome this issue of assessments, where property owners had to contribute to the cost of a new sidewalk in a place where there wasn’t a sidewalk and that, if we took that away, then we could put in new sidewalks wherever we felt we needed them.
05:26
Jess: And, specifically, that requirement for the contribution led to a lot of people saying no, citing economic hardship: I cannot afford the sidewalk, therefore we cannot have the sidewalk.
05:38
Molly: Correct. And City Council often sided with the property owners in those cases; there are sidewalk gaps that we still have not filled. However, the objections to the new sidewalks have always been about much more than money. So, when this new new millage came out, I didn’t buy that it was actually going to help us get new sidewalks. It turns out that my concerns have panned out. We have had repeated situations where the city is going to fill a sidewalk gap and the property owners, since they can no longer object in terms of money, they object in terms of their trees that have to be cut down; or they object in terms of the parking spots they’re going to lose; or they object in terms of being responsible for the maintenance of those sidewalks in shoveling the snow. And, in some cases, City Council has continued to side with the property owners. There continue to be sidewalk gaps in places where we now are taxing ourselves. We’re paying the money to put in the sidewalks, and we’re not getting them.
06:41
Jess: And can’t spend the money.
06:43
Molly: I mean we’re spending, we are managing to spend it; it’s not like we’re not getting any new sidewalks. But we’re still having the same barriers.
So going into the climate millage, that’s the thing that’s top of mind for me. We are going to tax ourselves, and the things that we need to do to achieve climate neutrality – like reduce our vehicle miles traveled by 50%, like create denser neighborhoods where people can walk and bike to all of the things that they need – we’re not doing those things. These were my feelings coming in with this millage.
07:29
Jess: I know what you mean about saying yes with reservations. How you’re describing how you’re going to vote for this, that was how I felt about the schools millage. I think it was also 2020? Or maybe it was last year? I don’t remember. All I remember is, it was $1,000,000,000.
07:45
Molly: Billion dollars! I said yes with reservations.
07:48
Jess: The specific reason that I had reservations was that the school didn’t put out a plan ahead of time for how they were going to spend the money. What they put out was a case for the needs that they had, which largely had to do with the schools themselves, the physical facilities, and talking about technology and building capacity for the future. So they talked about the needs, but they didn’t talk about how they were going to spend it; there wasn’t a proposed budget, there wasn’t suggested allocations. What it made it feel like to me was, “We’re not totally sure… we’ll ask for a billion dollars and just hope that it works out.”
Once the vote passed (Ann Arbor, turned out overwhelmingly in support of this millage despite the size), afterwards I think the school put a committee or something into place to create a plan about how to spend this money. But, as with you, my fears have been realized: the school continues to drop huge sums of money that aren’t really totally consistent with any strategi. goals or framework that they’ve identified. I’m thinking, in particular, of a couple of land purchases that they’ve made over the last year. It feels like they’ve done it because they have the money and not because they’re using it to make the schools or facilities or capacities any better. So I absolutely hear you with the “yes with reservations”.
09:16
Molly: Right. And to be very clear, this climate millage does not look like that. There’s a lot of detail about how the money would be spent, and we know exactly the kinds of things that it would be going towards. My big concern comes down to, I’m afraid that our political leaders (and I’ve seen them do this) would treat millages as the end and not the beginning of the work.
For example, we have electeds in Ann Arbor who have been vocally supporting the climate millage, climate climate climate – but who voted in favor of widening the East Medical Center Dr bridge. Who voted in favor of not installing sidewalks because property owners didn’t want sidewalks there. They’re doing this thing that looks good, but when the hard votes come, they’re not voting the way we need them to. So I’m really worried about passing this millage and then having the whole city think we’re done. That’s not okay. That will not get us the things that this millage is promising.
10:30
Jess: You’re absolutely right.
Counterpoint: there are a lot of things that the millage does, that the budget allocations can do, that don’t require political or politicized decisions; basically it comes down to staff execution. Missy talked on the episode about bulk equipment buys; she talked a little bit about implementing existing programs, including at the state level; Michigan has a number of sustainability programs, often geared towards low-income folks, which this millage and OSI, the Office of Sustainability and Innovations, are really well poised to help carry out, and nothing else is and no one else is. They are also in a great position, and this money helps them be in an even better position, to help support ongoing community conversations that continue to identify what’s needed in our community. Whether it’s putting solar on schools or on the landfill, or helping low income and older homeowners. One of the things that I was reminded of in that last episode is that 25% of Washtenaw County seniors live in poverty. 25%! And aging in place in their homes is difficult, expensive, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous. Resources like this millage help put resources to those programs, and we don’t need a political decision. That doesn’t happen by vote; that doesn’t happen by community engagement meeting; that just happens by, we have the money, we’ve already identified the priority, we finally get to do it.
11:58
Molly: Right. I will say, both when we were talking to Missy and then again when I was listening to that episode to prepare for this one, when Missy talked about the grant that she brought in to install solar for two households that were going to probably have to leave their homes, that she was able to make that difference for them and bring that sort of carbon transition into their lives in a way that made their lives better, I got choked up both times. Real verklempt over here. So that was a particularly compelling piece of the argument for me, for sure; that there’s so many things we can do that are not political decisions. I think that, more than anything, is probably the thing that pushed me over the edge to where I’ll probably vote yes, whereas with the sidewalk millage – I don’t think I’ve said this publicly anywhere – I voted no. I voted no on that sidewalk millage because I did not believe it was going to do what we needed it to do. But this – it’s convincing that we could be doing all of these things and funding them in ways that don’t require writing grants constantly. Because I know how much labor that takes.
13:07
Jess: Molly, I have so appreciated you bringing up your hesitations about this millage, because it’s really gotten me to question my support and make sure that I’m not just signing a check because “I do believe in the planet and here’s a blank check do some green stuff with the money!”
When I was reading through the budget, the allocation, the memo and the A2Zero framework again, one of the things that I really, really deeply appreciate is, as Missy reminded us in the last episode A2zero framework is set up, with seven pillars, seven areas that are absolutely required for us to work on to get to sustainability. I think she said there’s no one tactic that’s going to get us there, they’re tactic-agnostic; but they have to work on each of the seven areas. When it comes to the millage, what they did was, they proposed a general allocation per year for each of the seven pillars, but what they said was, this isn’t specific; we are reserving the right to kind of figure this out as we go along. But they did get really specific about the types of things – I think in each of the seven areas, if there were fewer than 10 tactics mentioned for each one, I’d be surprised. It was comprehensive! What they were saying is, this is the kind of thing we’d spend for in each of the seven pillars; this is approximately what we think the relative allocation should be, but we reserve the right, as we get better information, to adjust that as we go along without going back to the voters and without going back to Council. So, again, it’s that element of it that isn’t politicized. And the fact that they’re building that flexibility into it, the fact that this millage feels like a learning millage (but in a good way) – that gave me extra confidence in it.
15:02
Molly: Yeah.
I’m going to jump to my next point against the millage. Which is about the fact that we’re funding through another tax increase because, if we were allowing a lot more density and development than what we currently allow, we could be funding this work purely with the increased revenues that that development would bring; and, if we had been doing this development over the last 10-20 years, we would not be in the position we’re in now where we keep having to put millage after millage forward to fund our values.
Ann Arbor tends to vote yes on millages (with a few notable exceptions), so I worry about millage fatigue; and I also worry about voters thinking they’re done, just like electeds: “I voted for the climate millage, I’m done, we’re good, I don’t have to think about the city changing in ways I don’t like, I don’t have to think about my own personal lifestyle changes.” One thing that Missy really talked about is that it’s going to take everything from the micro to the macro to prevent the climate catastrophe that we’re already facing. I think it’s important not to put it all on the individual; but some of it is with the individual. Especially when we talk about things like transportation. It’s like, “Oh, I’m paying for this with my taxes, I don’t have to ride the bus or drive less or do anything to my home to make it more efficient.”
16:42
Jess: That’s a great point, and I’m going to disagree with you, by agreeing with you! In my purist self and my purist heart, I don’t think this money should come from a millage. I don’t think it should come from an incremental tax. I think it should come exclusively from building. Whether it’s new builds or redevelopment, I think that that’s how we should be capturing this money. I would love to understand whether and how those tax dollars get allocated to carbon neutrality work. My problem is, all development takes time; and in Ann Arbor it takes even more time, if it happens at all, which it often doesn’t. If we’re going to wait for that development, in this current policy environment, and to name what you said a failure of political leadership, and also being realistic, in this current labor and material supply environment, we’re not going to get this work funded; if we’re waiting to do it the right way, then it’s no way. For me, that feels like the perfect being the enemy of the good.
Having said that, I will acknowledge that part of the reason we have a carbon neutrality framework, this A2Zero framework at all. Is because they took land use strategies out of it, and that is, in my opinion, devastating. I think that they hollowed out what this could be by not making that plan commit to land use patterns, and that means both housing and transportation.
You said you took a look at the millage budget, and one of the things that includes is an allocation for non-motorized transportation, how are we using roads in ways that don’t necessarily prioritize cars. But do we have a clear priority and mandatory emphasis on that? We do not. Because Council at the time said they wouldn’t vote for it if that was in there. So land use was backed out of it; and that’s one another one of the reasons that I am hesitant to not support the millage in advance of waiting for development dollars, because Council said, We’re not going to support carbon neutrality work if it means we have to make hard decisions about housing and transportation. Honestly: I think that is true. I think that is true of this Council as well.
Something that we know about the funding mechanism is that this is a 20-year millage; if passed, it goes into effect January 1, 2023 and is intended to be in effect for 20 years. We still don’t have a current comprehensive land use plan, Missy mentioned that in the last episode as well, and she said that’s really urgent work; and in this city, we’ve never had a comprehensive housing plan. Ever. So I’d like to see us use this millage time to plan for how development is going to pay for our carbon neutrality work in the medium and long term, meaning at the general fund, so that this millage doesn’t have to be renewed. Let’s plan obsolescence! Let’s say this millage is the last millage.
19:52
Molly: I like that a lot. Not every millage needs to be renewed, not every millage needs to go on forever. I’m not super confident we will actually use that time that well, given what we know about the political environment and specifically around doing a comprehensive land use plan. We have talked about the comprehensive plan in the zoning episode, right?
20:24
Jess: We did. We did a deeper dive (maybe we should deeper dive ourselves on that) but yeah, we did talk about it, we talked about the fact that it was stale; and we’re almost a year and a half later and it’s a little bit staler now, yeah.
20:39
Molly: Right. So this brings back to when we were planning out this episode and trying to lay out points for and against, I really only have one point against, and I’m just saying it in different ways. But it’s this: I think the challenge for this millage, especially if we pass it,is that it won’t do anything about the political obstacles that we still need to work through. Jess mentioned the fact that land use was omitted from the framework, the fact that while we currently have a majority on Council that’s somewhat development friendly – I’m not going to say it’s like the friendliest because, especially when we talk about things like the TC the transportation corridor zoning, that’s moving at a snail’s pace, we’re being so slow and cautious about it –
21:32
Jess: You know who’s going to beat us to upzoning? Florida. Florida is going to beat us to upzoning. Damn it, you guys, we can do better!.
21:40
Molly: – yeah so a little bit development friendly, but we also (and it’s a slightly different set of people but it’s still a majority on Council) very clearly have said that they prefer car centric roads over people centered mobility; when it comes down to the votes, that’s how they’re voting. This is one of the seven pillars! I would have thought that seeing that this millage is specifically going to help support the protected bike infrastructure and the pedestrian infrastructure that we continuously don’t have enough money to do, the demand for neighborhood traffic calming is vastly outstripping our ability to do it. In theory, some of this money is going to fund that work – and we still don’t have a tiny snowplow, which is the reason why we’re not putting in real protection on our bike lanes, because we can’t plow them. The city budgeted for it, but it’s an ongoing issue. If we had this millage, we could just buy the damn snowplow and put in some real protection. But these are still mostly Council decisions! And if Council’s going to keep not doing it, or if staff isn’t even going to put it forward because they don’t trust Council to accept what they want to do – yes, absolutely, solar for people who can’t afford it is great, a lot of these nonpolitical decisions are super important and, again, probably the reason I will end up voting yes on this millage – but the political obstacles are all still going to be there. And I worry about the millage moving us not in a good direction in terms of getting over those obstacles.
23:38
Jess: I agree with you.
I think we have a process problem; I think we ask for permission too often and at the wrong points in the process. I’ve been thinking a lot about community engagement for the past – forever, I don’t know, long time. I absolutely believe that we need strategy and policy that is deeply informed by the community it’s intended to serve; and I think once that strategy has been identified, we need to trust our staff – who are the technical experts, who have professional experience and expertise – to align with those values, to align with that future vision, and determine how to implement. One of the challenges you’re talking about, political leadership and the ways that people check out or check back in in the wrong ways – let’s say a bike lane, right? We’ve identified that we need to reduce vehicle miles traveled by 50% by 2030, which is in like a minute.
24:35
Molly: By the way, very soon!
24:37
Jess: That means making both housing and transportation choices. But we still put up a lot of housing for public discussion and public input, and we still put up bike lanes for public discussion and public input. As though it’s a question of whether or not we need them, when we’ve already said we do! One of the challenges with those community engagement meetings and well intentioned surveys is, it really comes across as (and I think staff generally genuinely are) asking for permission: please, may I have this bike lane? When we’ve already said yes, and we need to just implement.
(I saw this wonderful article title in the last week or so that said something like, “We’re still asking for permission on bike lanes when we’ve collectively agreed that the planet is burning,” and I very much agree with that. I think part of what we’re looking at is a political leadership issue; I think another part is a process issue, where we’re asking too many questions. Because we are tokenizing “community” “engagement” in absolutely the wrong ways.
I do also want to refer back to when I was re-listening to Missy’s episode. First of all, it was super fun. The conversation was fun and listening to it was fun. She also said this, that resonated so deeply with me: “We can’t keep doing what we’re doing and expect to get out of the situation we’re in. We have to transform the things that are holding us back. That takes a lot of bravery, and that’s very challenging for local governments.”
26:11
Molly: I think that’s exactly what we’re seeing. It’s tough when the people objecting to a decision you want to make are your neighbors, are people your kids went to school with. It can start to feel so personal! On a local government level in a way that it doesn’t, when it’s so abstracted when there’s a handful of people in the Senate making decisions. You have to see your neighbors every day, and you have to live with the consequences of your decision in a very concrete material way. So, yeah. It is going to take some bravery, and I think some preparation, for difficult votes that I don’t know if anyone prepared them for what they were going to be dealing with. We’ve already done all the easy things, especially when it comes to transportation, we have already done every easy thing. All that’s left are hard votes.
So Jess, you want to ask this last question? Jess asked what my big concerns have been.
27:21
Jess: I do, because I have a couple of ideas about it.
Something that we’ve brought up a couple of times is, what does it mean to vote for this millage, but still keep up the heat; on our electeds, and on ourselves, to continue to make progress? I have a few suggestions for that
One, I think Council needs to ask staff what the consequences of omitting land use from the A2Zero framework are and what benefit it would be to bring it back in? Because I think what we’re going to hear is that we are leaving a huge means of making change on the table by not having it in there. I also think that we need to increase the pressure on updating the comprehensive land use plan, and on having our very first comprehensive housing plan. What I mean is not just affordable housing; that work is moving forward, and to an extent, it’s funded. But we don’t have a housing plan for housing at all levels of affordability, and we’re seeing that in the market. The last median selling price that I saw for houses in Ann Arbor, and this was two and a half years into the pandemic, was $478,000. I mean…we’re great, you guys, but we are not $478,000. Right? We’re not. So we need policy help, policy strategy, and policy support for affordability at all levels of the income spectrum.
Then I think we also need to take a critical look at our community engagement strategies across the board and understand how we’re tokenizing “community” :engagement”. This isn’t unique to Ann Arbor, but we tokenize it; we put out the survey, we say we’ve heard from the community, this is now a collaborative process – and I largely don’t think that’s true. We need to be more critical about when, in the process, and how we’re asking for feedback.
29:21
Molly: I think related to that is making fewer of these kinds of changes and decisions political, and making them operational staff decisions, which partly is about reducing the amount of public engagement that we do for things like housing and especially for transportation.
I’m working with my neighbors right now to collect signatures to ask for a sidewalk on a major pedestrian bike route in our neighborhood that does not have any sidewalks and that’s a very popular cut-through route for cars. We’ve been looking at all these different ways that we can ask for support, because we need sidewalks, we need traffic calming, we want traffic calming on the arterial that bounds our neighborhood so that we can get out of the neighborhood safely on foot or on bike. There are so many different processes through which we can make these requests! It turns out there are failed traffic calming petitions on almost every cut-through street in my neighborhood. And they’re failed because of the threshold of how many signatures you have to get to ask the city to consider investigating a speed bump. We could completely flip that and say, we know there are about 12 neighborhoods in the city that have major cut-through traffic issues; we’re going to calm them; we’re going to throw out some speed bumps; we’re going to do some stuff and we’re not going to ask permission and we’re not going to force the people who’ve been living with this to put in so much time and coordination that we could be spending on something else.
So that’s an example that’s fresh in my mind, because it’s happening right this second in my life. Taking the politics out of these decisions feels like it’s not exactly about keeping the heat on the electeds; it’s taking the heat out of the equation and making some of this work that default.
31:25
Jess: I appreciate that reframing. I do think that’s really important.
31:29
Molly: I don’t know how we do that. I think it probably takes a while to get there. But these are the ways of making it the default process, making it like the process that we do, as opposed to the process that involves sending postcards and having meetings and having public comments and allowing a really narrow slice of the population who don’t want any change at all to to be the voices that that we listen to.
32:06
Jess: I think that’s 100% true. It brings me back to actually what was my initial resistance to the millage. Talking with Missy talked me past it; but I’ve said on this pod before, and if you’re friends with me you’ve probably heard me say it 100 times, we cannot spend ourselves out of the climate crisis, we can’t buy ourselves out of it. It’s going to require transformational behavior change on the part of every one of us. I appreciated Missy because she agreed with me, and also was very careful to say we need to not put the onus of fixing this on individuals when a handful of companies in the world are responsible for 70% of the climate crisis manifestations that we’re seeing right now. She also affirmed that, no we’re not going to get 100% there without all of us participating in it.
This brings me to something lovely that keeps coming up in my Instagram feed that has me marinating on what action means in some really lovely and generative ways. There’s – I believe she’s an oceanologist, I know that she’s some kind of climate scientist, Dr. Ayana Johnson. She recently released a TED talk on what it means for individuals to productively and effectively engage climate change; she’s another one who says. We didn’t cause it, we are not the only ones responsible for fixing it, but we can engage it. She’s created what she calls the climate venn (in fact, there is a whole instagram account devoted to people’s climate venn diagrams). She says, you should look at what work needs doing, the climate and justice solutions that are needed; what you’re good at, your skills, your resources, and your networks; and thirdly – and she’s the only person I’ve heard talk about this – what brings you joy, what brings you satisfaction and delight? Finding the overlap of those three areas is your climate action.
For me, that’s one of the reasons that I bike for my errands. It actually does bring me huge joy. I feel like I’m 10 years old every time I climb on that bike. (I also deeply feel like I’m 42 years old!) So we do it because it’s good for the planet and climate, but I also do it because it’s really fun. (When it’s not unsafe and really scary it is really fun.) I think that that’s one of the things that I’d like for us to close this part with; is that this millage must be both/and. I want us to look at writing these checks as the beginning of a new phase of climate work for Ann Arbor.
34:41
Molly: Yeah. Yeah, I can get behind that.
34:46
Jess: Okay. Good fight, Molly!
34:47
Molly: It’s good! We disagreed on some stuff; turns out, we actually agree on some of the things.
34:53
Jess: We agree on…everything!
34:57
Molly: It just brought us to slightly different places.
We can start to wrap up!
First, I wanted to thank all of you who voted for us in the Best of Washtenaw best local podcast category! We will find out the results next month, and we will absolutely let everyone know the result here.
Speaking of next month, which is August, we are taking totally off from the podcast; we’re not going to do any rerun episodes – we’re taking a break. And then, when we come back we’re going to be doing something a little bit different…
We’re going to be doing interviews! We’ve done some in the past, obviously, but we’ll be talking both to people from around this community but also across the country, across issues and locations, to get some new ideas for Ann Arbor and for Washtenaw County. To get a better sense of what we have in common with a lot of these municipalities around the country that are experiencing a lot of the same things that we are; and also to think about the ways that we’re different and the things that are unique to Ann Arbor.
What this means is that we’re going to be shifting away from the Council meeting preview episodes. We learned a ton from doing those previews.
36:07
Jess: Man, talk about getting informed! Getting ready for those episodes by getting ready for those meetings, whew.
36:15
Molly: But we also started to experience the limits of what engaging at the Council meeting level really were, and started wanting to explore other ways of bringing about change by learning about other people, other ways of organizing, what’s going on in other places. Our goal is still about getting informed and getting involved; but it’s about expanding that conversation beyond the Council chambers.
That said! If there’s something particularly special to us, or a really big deal, coming up on a Council agenda, we might still bring those things back! It’s not like “never again are we talking about or thinking about City Council!” It’s just that we’re shifting the focus and trying to expand our lens a little bit; for ourselves, and also hopefully for our listeners too, to start thinking about the gestalt; the whole picture of what we’re trying to do.
37:10
Jess: One of the things that we’ve known about the Council preview format is that while it is an important part of getting informed and getting involved, it is also necessarily, and by definition, reactive. We are reacting to the business that’s put before us. One of the aspirations for pivoting to interviews is that Molly and I are looking to expand our imaginations – and, hopefully, by extension, your imaginations – about what’s possible; so we’re not just reacting to the business put before us, we’re asking for bigger things.
We felt like the climate millage was a really great springboard for pivoting to this. Missy said that, too; we ended that episode on big dreaming! We’re talking about this millage being the beginning and not the end; that’s kind of how we see the interviews.
We’ve got a few lined up that we’re really excited about; we’ve got a few more that we’re hoping will say yes, but we haven’t confirmed yet. We will be putting out the schedule when we have it, but we just wanted to let you guys know that the format itself is going to be changing, and to what, and a little bit about why.
Molly: 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!