Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Monday, August 2nd. We touch on a bunch of interesting agenda items.
Links from today’s show:
– the investigation report on the soon-to-be-former City Administrator,
– the Ann Arbor Humans Who Wonk facebook thread from the last episode discussing the City Administrator firing/resignation,
– more about poet Robert Hayden,
– Scott Trudeau’s blog post on the Home Occupation ordinance,
– an LGBT map project, including conversion therapy, and
– a little more info on Michigan Dark Skies.
Transcript
NOTE: This version of the transcript was generated by an automated transcription tool and will contain (sometimes hilarious) errors. When we have time for human editing to clean this up we will update it, but we hope this imperfect version is better than nothing.
Michelle (00:05):
Hi. 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 and governance and other civic good times. I’m Michelle Hughes and my pronouns are she her.
Jess (00:21):
I’m Jess Leet and my pronouns are she her.
Molly (00:24):
And I’m Molly Kleinman and my pronouns are she her.
Michelle (00:27):
We’re your co-hosts to help you get informed and get involved. It’s your city. Let’s jump in
Michelle (00:40):
Before we get started, we have a website, ann arbor af.com. You’ll find all the episodes, show notes and transcripts, and thanks again to our supporters who donated to help pay for hosting and other costs. If you’d like to give us a few dollars, you can find us at ko-fi.com/ann Arbor. Today we’ll be talking about the next city council meeting, which is coming up Monday, August 2nd. And we’ll be touching on a bunch of interesting agenda items. And there’s just so many we usually try and do like, okay, here’s the highlights. 1, 2, 3. There’s, there was a lot of little agenda items today. Everything’s a highlight. Yes, it’s all highlights and we’re going to offer some ways for you to get involved. Quick process note, we record this show at a few days before the city council meeting, which means there’s likely to be some changes between now and then on the agenda. So let’s get started.
Michelle (01:41):
The first thing that I want to talk about is actually the first thing that’s on the consent agenda. So the first thing that I wanted to talk about is actually the first thing that’s on the consent agenda, and that is sidewalk gaps. We have a thing on the agenda that actually awards the sidewalk gap contract to a construction company to build some sidewalks on some roads that previously don’t have sidewalks. There’s four of them. Barton Drive Between Breed and Pontiac Trail Stimson from state to white Boardwalk from Eisenhower to Oak Brook and Traver Boulevard from Nixon to Lancaster. And I just mentioned that because I’m excited that these sidewalk gaps are going to get filled with a minimum amount of fuss because we have the new sidewalk gap millage, and it used to be the case that property owners a adjacent to the proposed sidewalks would have four opportunities to come and lobby against having a sidewalk because they were going to be the ones that would’ve had to pay for it. And I like that these are just going to happen. We didn’t have to have a whole bunch of city council time wasted on talking and arguing and fighting and possibly not getting sidewalks. We as a community decided to pay for it. And so that’s what we’re doing. So I’m excited about that. Next we’ve got something from Jess.
Jess (03:11):
Yes, it’s a big nothing burger, and I wanted to talk about it for a second. So there is a thing on the consent agenda called a DDA service fee. As a board member, I was equally excited to see something that said DDA and weirded out to see something that I didn’t expect to see that hasn’t been worked on in committee. Turns out all it is is something to do with waste management, nothing to do with parking or anything, any other way that typical visitors to the downtown interact with the downtown. So this affects business owners and building owners, but nobody else. So that’s all I wanted to say about that.
Michelle (03:48):
And it looks like those business owners are going to get to save a little bit of money, their trash fees because they’ve made some change to the contract with the company. Yeah,
Jess (04:00):
So that’s the whole thing.
Michelle (04:01):
Exciting. Exciting. Very exciting.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
This is ca five to consider creating a historic district for Robert Hayden’s house. So Robert Hayden was a poet. He was born in Detroit and lived for much of his life in Ann Arbor. He was the first black faculty member in the University of Michigan’s English department, and he served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. He was the first black person to do so, and this is a role that would later become the poet laureate. And I just thought this was pretty cool.
Michelle (04:33):
And it looks like this is going to establish a committee to
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Establish a study committee to consider creating this historic district like a historic, it’s, I think it’s like a historic place. I know we often are skeptical of historic districts because of the way they can be used to prevent housing and prevent change, but I think recognizing a specific person and a specific building is a reasonable thing to do, especially in this case.
Jess (04:59):
I mean, you’re absolutely right, Molly. There’s no question that we need to recognize the history on this. I have questions about why we’re creating a single resource historic district and not simply naming the, filing this house under his register of historic places. I understand that the process for that is super onerous and possibly less onerous is to go through the historic district process. But it is a problem. And I do want to highlight that Ann Arbor has 14 existing historic districts compared to the entire city of Detroit, which has 26. Now, Detroit has hundreds of locations listed on the National Register of Historic places, of course. But I find it concerning that we have more than half the number of historic districts of a city, much larger in our size in terms of both land and population. So I’m glad to see Robert Hayden kind of resurface as getting recognition and some acknowledgement. I have reservations about the process.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
Cool. I, I’ll be interested to learn more about that. So the next
Michelle (06:05):
Up is, oh, actually just real quick, Molly, you were cutting out at the beginning of your thing and I was hoping that it was, since you’re the one doing the recording, it actually got all the way to the recording and just, we didn’t hear it, but I don’t know if we wanted to do something about that or, okay. The next thing is the rental housing period ordinance. It’s been on the city council agenda a whole bunch of times already. It was on there three times as a first reading. And this is actually it’s second reading with a public hearing and hopefully we’ve got everything right this time. So, okay, I ap, I apologize, I haven’t been on the show for a little while, but you guys have probably talked about this before, is that right? Yes.
Michelle (06:55):
But yeah, so it’s the rental housing period ordinance on the agenda with the 210 days. There’s been a lot of argument about exactly how many days that number should be and what that number is of course is the number of days after you sign your lease that you’re safe from your landlord asking you to sign for next year and you’re safe from the landlord showing your apartment. And what’s being proposed is 210 days. And that’s been the biggest point of contention so far in most of the discussion and most of the calls from the public. And
Jess (07:41):
Do you remember what the range was, Michelle? Wasn’t it between I think 70 and 240 days.
Michelle (07:46):
70 is the current number of days that we have on there. I think the lowest that anyone proposed on the new thing was 150.
Jess (07:55):
I see, okay.
Michelle (07:57):
That was what the landlords were asking for. And I think they realized that if they said 70, no one was going to listen to ’em because the people proposing the new rental period ordinance was a broad coalition that had done a lot of work. So I think landlords realized they couldn’t just say, Hey, can we stick with 70? But yeah, 240 I think was the highest number we heard. But 210 was the compromise and it’s kind of too late to change that. It could be changed at this point, but that would kick it back to a first reading and it would be on the agenda again next week. I don’t think that’s going to happen. What is different from last time it came? So yes, the reason it came, the reason that it couldn’t just pass at the last meeting after it’s public hearing was that they did a couple of changes, which kicked it back and mean meant that we had to have another public hearing about it.
Michelle (08:55):
And the thing that they changed was that there were concerns that the ordinance didn’t actually, it didn’t actually give enough power to enforce the ordinance. And so the previous version included a right of first refusal and just cause evictions. So the right of first refusal being that the current tenant has, you can’t just rent it out. A landlord can’t just rent out the apartment from under the current tenant. The current tenant gets the first chance to say, yes, I’m going to stay here, or no, I’m not going to stay there. And then the just cause eviction would say you can’t evict someone without just, cause can’t just a landlord can’t just kick someone out because they don’t like them. But those were on the previous version of the proposal. But there were concerns that we didn’t actually have the power to create that law under state law and that this would’ve created a very large opening for landlords to sue the city. And the city council does not giving people opportunities to sue them because people will sue the city even without an opportunity.
Michelle (10:15):
So those things are both gone from this ordinance. It’s just the 210 days, but it does increase the amount of, it does increase the amount of enforcement that we have over the current ordinance because the current ordinance, you know, have 70 days of safety. But if a landlord doesn’t comply with that, there’s not a whole lot that can be done. But the new law will give actually a private cause of action so you can sue your landlord if they’re violating the ordinance. So yeah, that’s happening now and I’m hoping that we’re, what we’re going to do is we’re going to pass the things that we can pass now and find some other way to get the, just cause evictions or the right of first refusal, maybe there can be some part of that allowed under state law and we’ll see it in the future. So Molly, would you like to talk to us about outdoor lighting?
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Yes. There are so many sort of little things on the agenda that still feel worth talking about. So C1 is an ordinance to revise our outdoor lighting rules. And I wanted to highlight this because street lights especially, I think have become something we tend to, I automatically get my hackles up a little bit when we’re talking about streetlights because of the history of streetlight in Ann Arbor, but this is not that. So this is about making our outdoor lighting ordinances dark sky friendly. So the idea here is that we’ve learned that light pollution at night can cause all kinds of problems for nature, for human health. And so this is to try and make our skies darker at night. So these recommendations came out of a working group that was formed with members of the Energy Environmental and Planning Commission. So a lot of the different commissions and interest groups working together to propose these amendments that will basically mean, and as new lighting gets installed or as lighting gets replaced, it will have to comply with this ordinance. It’s not going to require a total overhaul of all the lights in the city. It just means that going forward we’re going to have to use lighting that is going to be more dark sky friendly. That’s really all I wanted to say about that, but I know in case other people have the same reflexive reaction I do that the lighting conversation is going to be something bad. This is actually, I think, a good thing. Yeah,
Michelle (12:53):
Yeah. Oh, there’s a U of M group I think called Michigan Dark Skies, and they’ve been advocating about this. They’re the PE first people. I heard about this issue from years ago, and I definitely looking up at the sky and seeing stars, and it doesn’t have to be the case that you can’t, that when you look up at the sky in the city, you don’t see the stars. If we do things like this, then maybe one day we’ll be able to see the stars up here.
Jess (13:21):
And it dark sky work does a couple of different things. One, it preserves the nighttime sky for people to be able to see it. Despite city illumination, it’s also better for non-human inhabitants. So our animal and bug neighbors do a lot better. The less kind of proliferation we have of our artificial lighting at night. Obviously we need a certain amount for safety, occasionally for aesthetic reasons, but there are ways that we can light our place in ways that are friendly both to us and to our animal neighbors.
Michelle (13:57):
You can see diagrams in this ordinance about, it’s about having, making sure that the light is shielded and so it doesn’t actually illuminate upwards. Some of our old street lights in town are shaped like a globe and they just emit all this light up in the top up towards the sky. And it’s like just why? And we can have a well litt sidewalk and well lit human habitation areas without sending all that light up into the sky, if that’s cool.
Jess (14:28):
So I am going to talk for just a second about c2, which is an ordinance revised the part of our code discussing home occupations. And I’ll start this by saying I don’t know enough of the backstory and I don’t know what all is at stake on getting this wrong to be able to talk about this. Well, our friend and neighbor, Scott Trudeau has written a blog post on it and we will drop a link to that in the show notes. If you want somebody who has scrutinized every word of the ordinance, take a look at that. What I will say is that this whole process in this particular, a lot of the language in this ordinance makes me feel super itchy because it’s classist. There’s language in there around, you can’t have, I don’t remember exactly what it is, but you can’t leave materials for your work laying around outside either at all or a certain number of hours of the day, which is tricky if you work on cars or bicycles at your home.
Jess (15:28):
You can’t have noise going on in your home outside of certain hours of the day, which is tricky if you have a music studio in your basement and redundant because we already have residential noise ordinances. So layering this on top of the other is saying, Hey, you can do whatever you want, just not here. And we already have language to take care of that. So I just want to say I’m, I’m not super thrilled about what’s coming forward, but I also don’t know a whole lot about it. So this isn’t a blanket criticism all that to say whatever revisions that we’re making, I hope we’re doing in support of people who are able to make a living using their house as a place for business in ways that are consistent with norms that we’ve already established for how to run our city in ways that keep us good neighbors to each other. So that’s what I wanted to say about
Michelle (16:17):
That. On my normal dog walking route, I see there’s someone who has a landscaping business and their driveway is full of potted plants and it doesn’t bother me. Why should we make that illegal? And there’s another, somebody else who has a wood fired pizza cart that they keep in their driveway and then their driveway is full of wood and a big old log splitter and they’re not hurting anybody.
Jess (16:45):
There’s also language in there about how you can’t have store vehicles over a certain size on your property more than there’s some arbitrary language in there. Like a reasonable amount of time. Yeah. Well, the amount of time, a reasonable amount of time. And for folks that use their vehicles in their jobs, are we seriously asking them to what, get a storage space outside of the city to be able to, I just feel like this is not in support of small business, of incremental business of folks that are using the resources that they have to make a decent living.
Michelle (17:19):
And one thing that I’m kind of hoping is the case here is that this is actually liberalizing in some way. Cause I don’t know what the current law is. It might be that just home occupations are entirely banned and this is some kind of incremental step towards allowing some of them. But if this is just locking down a bunch of random stuff, I’m not sure why we’re doing that at this time.
Jess (17:48):
And I think if I’ve heard the right rumors and parse them correctly, I think the point of this ordinance was to clean up the language and make it more permissive than it had been. My concern is that the language that remains isn’t accomplishing that goal. So I, I’m on board with the intent, but not with what feels like the impact. Speaking of which, Michelle,
Michelle (18:14):
Oh, the next thing is the conversion therapy ban. And yeah, this is going to be a real important one. This is conversion therapy is where you is somebody tries to convince you not to be the sexuality or gender identity that you are. It doesn’t work it, it can ruin people. It’s just a bad thing to do. And so we’re going to pass a law banning, sending minors to conversion therapy. So this would be kind of in the situation where a parent doesn’t like their child’s sexuality or gender identity, and so they send the child to a therapist who will promise to fix that, and we’re going to make that illegal to do. It only applies to minors and it only applies to licensed providers like therapists, marriage counselors, that sort of thing. So conversion therapy can still be practiced by random people in the community or by some kind of church member or something like that. But if you’re a licensed therapist, you can’t be telling people that you are offering conversion therapy. And so that’s a good step forward. I like that. It
Jess (19:37):
Is a good step forward. Michelle, I’m going to ask you a question that’s kind of a pop quiz. Yeah. So all the conversations that I’ve heard about conversion therapy politically in the news have been at the state level. So I’m curious what we’re doing here. Are we going further than our state law? Are we belt and suspending it just in case Michigan? Because Michigan has something on the books I think.
Michelle (19:59):
I don’t think we do. Oh, okay. I see. I don’t think we have anything like this. Yeah, I see. Okay, thanks. Yeah, we’re just doing this because somebody has to do this and I know that this has been a long time coming. I talked to Travis Ena about this months and months ago, and he said that this was coming and they had to have the city attorneys look at this real closely to make sure that there wasn’t anything in here that was disallowed by state law or anything like that. So they carefully crafted this to do what it can. That’s probably why it can’t ban conversion therapy of people who aren’t licensed therapists or whatever is probably because we don’t have enough power over such people, but yeah. Oh, and one thing I wanted to mention is that the, there’s a penalty of, that’s a civil infraction, $500 per day if someone tries to practice conversion therapy. But then I also mentioned bringing a private cause of action, which is also something that I mentioned earlier in the rental period. Ordinance if, because sometimes it’s hard to convince the system to go after someone, but this gives you the ability to also go after someone in court in a civil court.
Michelle (21:22):
So yeah, that’s that. The gay agenda. Woohoo. Thank you. Yay.
Jess (21:27):
Game hockey is out here to protect everyone whether you like it or not.
Michelle (21:31):
Yes. All right, chess, you’ve got something next.
Jess (21:36):
I do. It’s my favorite drum to bang, which is process. I just love making everybody’s eyes glaze over. Okay. But this time it’s
Michelle (21:44):
About, there’s a lot of people who talk about process and I hate it, but when you talk about process, you do it well. Like I feel like you’re doing it in good faith, you know, want processes to work well, you don’t want, so you’re not trying to, you’re not saying process just because you want to mi down things that you don’t like.
Jess (22:00):
All right. Well, you guys heard it here. Michelle complimented to me on my process conversation and I’m just glowing a little bit, so that’s nice. Here’s a thing every now and then we say things on the podcast that we just didn’t really expect to say on the podcast. And here’s one. Apparently we’re talking about fur. There is an ordinance C4 on this week’s meeting agenda, discussing, expanding and editing the language under our current endangered species and businesses and trades parts of Ann AOR City Code. So I’m just going to leave it there that that’s happening. Here’s my criticism. I get worried slash suspicious of ordinances that don’t either originate in committee, originate in some kind of discussion at the council table or roll up to a higher policy agenda. We talked earlier on this podcast about how the city, the establ, the city has a policy agenda at the city and state, and I think federal levels established annually by the city.
Jess (23:08):
The fur ordinance does not really accomplish any of those goals. There’s no language in the, whereas clauses of the resolution, there’s no language in, there’s no accompanying memo identifying where this came from. What problem are we solving by doing this work? I am as in favor of animal safety as anyone, but I, I’m just not sure based on the information that we have in the council agenda, what problem we’re solving. So I would wish for some kind of accompanying memo, I would wish for more robust. Whereas language, what I really wish for is that this had come up through committee because I feel so much more comfortable when a group of community members who have volunteered, who have a vested interest in that particular area, like the Planning Commission, the Energy Commission, like the Housing and Human Services Advisory Board, all of these have a chance to have a conversation that the language really make it better as a group before advancing it to council.
Jess (24:13):
Having said that, I was making that criticism in my head and getting quite articulate about it, and then kind of questioned myself about, okay, well what committee would this have come up through? And I’m not a hundred percent certain, so it’s possible that that was one of the challenges of this. Maybe they could have stretched it and put it through the Environmental Commission. I’m not sure that this would’ve fallen under umbrella, under their charter. I’m not sure. I will say that on the D D A board. I’m a member of a number of committees and there’s some work that we do that has in the past been challenging to manage through committee one of those being affordable housing. We don’t have or didn’t, before last year we didn’t have an affordable housing committee, so we kind of made it work through a committee called Partnerships. And through our finance committee, we were able to do the work regardless. But affordable housing, again until last year, wasn’t really named as a part of our work. So maybe that was the issue here, but I wish for us good process, and I’m not sure that this particular agenda item hits that mark.
Michelle (25:20):
Yeah, I think even if this accomplishes a goal that I am happy with, I kind of want to make sure that I wish I knew that it did what it was supposed to do and didn’t do anything else, and that it was written well. And I’m not sure who to call about that. All I know is the city council members who are sponsors, but it’s like, did they work with anyone else? Are there any groups? Are there organizations? Is this based on a model law of some sort? I just don’t know if this is right. Well crafted and
Jess (25:58):
Without that accompanying memo, without that accompanying, whereas language, which we saw with the earlier this year, the unarmed responder program, that was another one that did not come up through committee, but extensive community work had been done. Many, many people engaged in terms of giving feedback, giving direct edits so that by the time it made it to the council table, a lot of people who have been doing this work for a long time had had an opportunity to thoroughly vet the work that came forward. I don’t think anybody was completely happy with it, but it was a community effort. We have no information based on what’s in the agenda right now, what kind of community work has gone into this, which means, unfortunately, it looks really special. It looks like somebody cared about a thing, and now that thing is on the agenda. So moving forward as a better process point, it’s my hope that we can do a better job about documenting where ordinances, where agenda items, excuse me, that again, don’t originate in community, don’t originate through discussion at the council table and don’t roll up to a higher policy agenda that things that don’t hit that mark get a little bit better documented.
Jess (27:16):
Speaking of good process, there’s another council rules thing on today’s agenda.
Michelle (27:22):
So I was prepared for this to be another high drama item, but I looked at it and it actually looks like it’s a pretty low drama item. So that’s the main reason I wanted to mention it is because it’s going to be a low drama item and it looks like it’s going to be, it’s just, just clearing the path for that we’re going to be able to have people call in to city council member to city council meetings in the future after city council has started meeting in public again and in person that I think a lot of people have liked the freedom of being able to talk to city council without having to find childcare, travel, all those sorts of things. And so it’ll be good to be able to continue having taking city council comment over the phone and over the computer, and this just paves the way to do that. Oh, I have two back to back agenda items I wanted to talk about. The next one is DC two, and that is the motion to reconsider the resolution to conclude Tom Crawford’s employment. So this was a motion that came up at the last City Council meeting after we’d recorded the podcast. And I’d say, when I say we, I mean Molly and Jess,
Jess (28:46):
But there was a good discussion about it. We always post these episodes in the Facebook group, Ann Arbor, humans who wonk. And when we saw this on the agenda, we included that in the thread in wonk, and there was a really robust discussion about it online. And in fact, I was kind of glad it came up that way. I wish, Molly, that you and I, that it had shown up on the agenda in time for us to discuss it. But failing that, the discussion, it really was fairly wide ranging and I appreciated it.
Michelle (29:14):
Good. Yeah. So, oh, Molly, did you have something to say? Oh, I thought I saw your mouth open. Just
Speaker 4 (29:21):
That, yeah, so we did, because we didn’t get a chance to talk about it last week, but it happened last week. This was to conclude the employment of city administrator Tom Crawford, and it passed with a substantial majority, but the person who’s bringing it back voted yes on it last time so they could bring it back for reconsideration, right?
Michelle (29:42):
And I think just in case people don’t know what’s going on at all, there were some city employees who had concerns about Tom Crawford, our city administrator who was recently hired, and about his use of language that was either racist or homophobic and basically made an uncomfortable working environment for some of our employees. And so they brought that concern to the city council because they couldn’t bring it to human resources because human resources works for the city administrator. So the only person that the city administrator works for is the city council. And so they can contracted a private or an independent investigation of the situation. And they went and talked to a bunch of city employees who all were consistent in their stories about negative interactions with Tom Crawford. And so they found that he had violated some of the city’s policies on unemployment. And so the city is looking into concluding his employment and I’m,
Jess (31:18):
That’s really nice way of saying agnostic about we’re firing him or he’s going to take retirement or whatever. Basically we’re breaking up, it’s, it’s me. It’s just very chill. I don’t want to say chill language, but it leaves a lot of space for what that separation looks like,
Michelle (31:35):
Right. So the thing that we saw at the last City council meeting was kind of a two-pronged resolution that both released that report into the public and oh, we should drop that link to that report in our, what do you call it, description here. But I released that report into the public and then it also directed the staff to look into concluding the employment. So I don’t think we’re even to the point where we’ve decided how we’re concluding the employment. Is he fired? Are we executing a for cause thing? Is he just resigning? I don’t think that’s actually been decided yet. And it’s just a matter of the city’s looking into how to make that happen.
Michelle (32:24):
So I kind of don’t. Okay, so here’s the part where I have opinions. I don’t like that this is being brought back for reconsideration because it’s a done deal. There was the majority of the city council members voted on this, and they want to protect the vulnerable staff members who came forward. They want to make sure that our city is a comfortable place to work, even if you belong to some sort of, even if you don’t belong to the cis white hetero majority. And I think those are laudable goals keep to the city a comfortable place for people to work. So to bring it back for reconsideration, that’s just causing more drama, it’s sowing more discord in the community and it gives an opportunity for some city council members to signal that they’re okay with racism, they’re okay with homophobia, it’s, it’s just fine a little bit as a treat. And I don’t think that’s a good thing for city council members to be saying. And yeah, I think that’s what I have to say on that. Some other people might have some opinions as well.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
So rather than focus on the fact that this is coming back, I think one, we like to give you things to do some potential action items. And one way to do that is to take a more forward looking approach on this. So we know that the city is going to be hiring another city administrator. And one thing that we can be asking for from our council members is to have a more transparent and inclusive hiring process than the one that we had last time where it seemed to a lot of people, including some of the external candidates that hiring Tom Tom Crawford was a foregone conclusion and there wasn’t a lot of consulting of the community. The things that came out of that independent investigation are things we probably should have learned during the hiring process and did not. So something we can be asking for from our council members is a better hiring process and hopefully hiring an administrator who’s actually going to help us live up to our stated values. I want to see a hiring process that’s open to the public that it’s including and consulting with members of historically excluded communities, especially communities that were specifically disparaged by our former administrator. And so that’s something that we can be asking for and pushing for as we look ahead, because we know that Tom Crawford is not going to be our administrator anymore, and we’re going to be hiring another one.
Jess (35:37):
I think I also want to say something to a couple of the comment, well, actually many comments that came up in the wonk thread when we posted and were talking about the Tom Crawford thing, and there were several folks that were really grieved about this, not because of the employment separation, but because unquote, this is not Ann Arbor, and I feel like we should know better by now. We know that a white oriented, CIS supporting patriarchy supporting CI system is what we have. Like yes, Tom Crawford’s behavior actually exemplified the Ann Arbor that we try to tell ourselves we aren’t. And so we can’t fix it. We can’t fix it because we don’t look it in the eye. I am appalled that anyone had to go through the uncomfort and fear and frustration and anger of that. Tom Crawford’s comments caused the previous CI city administrator’s comments caused.
Jess (36:49):
What I’m hopeful for is that by taking them seriously, we are looking ourselves in the eye, and as Molly said, we have values that are better than this. How do we move forward? So I just want to say that report is not in spite of Ann Arbor. That report is Ann Arbor. I also want to acknowledge that the fact that we are going to be onto our third city administrator in two years is going to make it hard to hire. We recently, within the last couple of years, had a pretty high profile firing of our last HR director. Our police chief regularly has investigations after into him and into his department. Any candidate worth taking seriously is going to look at Ann Arbor and question whether it’s a good place to work. Legitimately. I think we have to make the case that we hadn’t been and we can be. And that’s all I wanted to say about that.
Michelle (37:53):
I’m not aware of any of, I’m only aware of one like inve investigation to the police chief. Is there something I missed?
Jess (38:01):
I was aware of. I thought too, this current police chief, and of course there was the, oh, right. So there was the door breaking down in the last six months. There was the speeding ticket thing in the last year. I think. Of course there was the investigation in the wake of r Ross’s murder in 2014, although that wasn’t this current police chief. But what I’m saying, I see what you’re talking about. What I’m saying is we regularly have city employees showing up in the news for questionable slash outright terrible behavior. And so there’s going to be a question in candidates minds about what am I walking into? And I think it’s a reasonable question. And I guess that’s what I want to say to city Council is I hope you take that seriously. I hope you look that in the eye as this process moves forward. And don’t hope that good candidates apply in spite of it, but that you make a good case for the future of Ann Arbor with them in it.
Michelle (38:58):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
So moving on to DC three, which is a resolution to order election. An election. And I’m not going to read the whole thing. It’s super long. It’s a resolution to have a ballot question about whether we should amend the city charter to allow for ranked choice voting. Ranked choice Voting is a system that has most recently been visible in the city of New York. And it’s a way to, rather than sort of winner takes all approach to electing city government. Basically you get to rank all the candidates by preference. And one of the things that I think a lot of people like about rank choice voting is that it gets rid of the whole spoiler candidate possibility and it’s an opportunity for third parties to really potentially get a foothold in government. So ranked choice voting is not currently permitted under state law. What this would do is it would put a charter amendment on the ballot so that we could approve rank choice voting so that, and when the state does legalize it, and Arbor would be ready to make that switch right away.
Speaker 4 (40:11):
And there has been some movement at the state level to potentially legalize rank choice voting. And so this will get us ahead of it and that way when and when it’s possible, we can do it. And rank choice voting makes a lot of sense in a place like Ann Arbor where it’s our primary is really where the decisions get made. It’s a single, it’s everyone’s coming from the same party. And this is an opportunity to bring in what I would be some candidates farther to the left and without having concern about a spoiler candidate. And that’s pretty much all I wanted to say about this. I was surprised to see it on the agenda because I didn’t think we were going to ever get anywhere with rank choice voting, but there’s some movement at the state level. And so this is a chance for us to get ahead of it.
Jess (40:56):
And it’s worth noting that the only time that Ann Arbor did have rank choice voting was in the 1970s. That was the one and only time Ann Arbor voted in a black mayor Albert Wheeler. And immediately after that, the whiteness circled the wagons and changed the city charter. So that Ray choice voting was no longer allowed. So this would be both turning back the clots on history and moving forward in a way that I think is really productive.
Michelle (41:24):
I, so I also asked Lisa Dish about that. She’s my council member, and I was like, how were we able to have it in the seventies and we’re not allowed to have it now under state law? The state law has changed since the seventies and they centralized control of how elections are run in the state’s hands, which was not, it was a lot more decentralized back in the seventies. So we were able to make that change back then. And real quick, I wanted to just cover what is ranked choice voting real quick? And it’s where instead of voting normally you’ll say, okay, who do you want for this city council seat? And you have two or three people and you can choose one of them. And then they count the number of people who, they count the number of times each person got chosen and the number of whoever got the most votes wins. Whereas rank choice voting, you can say, well, this is my first choice, but this is my second choice and this is my third choice. So let’s you say, you know can say, okay, well I want the person from the super awesome agrees with everything. I want party to win or whatever. But if they don’t, I love
Jess (42:36):
That party.
Michelle (42:37):
Yeah, me too. If they don’t win, then please don’t let the God awful party win.
Jess (42:45):
I hate that party.
Michelle (42:47):
And then so you can say, this is the person I like the best, but if they don’t win, then my vote goes to the second choice and not my third choice. And so they just do that until somewhat what they do is they’ll count the votes and they’ll say, who? Okay, did anyone get more than 50% of the people choose anyone as their number one choice? No. Well, let’s take the prison. Who got the least number of votes off now? Did anyone get the most number? Get now? Did anyone get 50% of the vote? And they’ll keep doing that until someone gets more than 50% of the vote. And I think one of the little sticking points that makes it difficult to implement here is that there’s a law that says that vote tallies have to be available from the polling places. And rank choice voting means that those you can’t get the votes can only be counted holistically if you get vote totals from a polling place that doesn’t tell you anything about who won. And so that’s the sort, it’s that kind of weird stuff that has changed at the state level before we can actually implement this.
Jess (44:12):
No, it would be a positive move towards enfranchisement, not specifically of voters in this sense, but more of a broader spectrum of candidates. And so in that sense, it is enfranchising voters because the votes would more accurately reflect a more nuanced decision. So this is a good thing and we’re glad to see it. Yes. Speaking of ballot,
Michelle (44:35):
And by the way I should say the resolution on the council agenda doesn’t actually even implement the change in the city charter. It asks to put it on the ballot in November of 2021 that we can go and vote yes to change the charter or no, don’t change the charter to allow rank choice votes for the city council’s voting to let us vote.
Jess (44:58):
Yep, that’s exactly right. So as we mentioned on last week’s podcast, we talked about how city council cannot themselves change the city charter. That always has to go to the voters. But city council can put ballot language or ballot questions on a ballot to ask the voters, Hey, can we change the city charter in these particular ways? So this is a new one, but we’ve got two resurfacing from last week, DC four, which is a ballot question related to how the city manages emergency purchases and DC five, which is achar charter amendment related to city council’s approve. Do the dollar limit that city council approves for purchases. I won’t rehash those today, but if you’re interested to learn more about them, especially if you want to glaze your eyes over again on a process thing that I just really wailed the hell out of check out last episode.
Jess (45:53):
It was a fun conversation. And I think that is it for this episode of Ann Arbor af. You guys, we covered a lot of ground this time. Thanks as always, to you listeners who have supported us in general on socials, emotionally and on our coffee, if you’d like to shoot us a few dollars to cover hosting, we’d appreciate it. You can find us at www.ko-fi.com/ann Arbor. We’re your co-host, Molly Kleinman, Michelle Hughes, and myself Jess Leeta. And I just want to welcome Michelle back to the show. We missed you while you were on the campaign trail or on the petition trail, I guess I should say. So I’m glad you’re back and thanks to producer Jack Jennings. Our theme music is, I dunno, by Grapes. For questions about this podcast or ideas about future episodes, you can email us at ann arbor af pod gmail.com. Get informed, then get involved. It’s your city.