Is local politics secretly boring? Co-hosts Michelle Hughes, Molly Kleinman, and Jess Letaw take up the question while preparing for Ann Arbor’s next City Council meeting on December. 7th, 2020.
They discuss the police purchasing contracts, and why ICPOC and budget season are the best ways to get involved for folks working to bring Black Lives Matter home. They also take up water rates, development, and sidewalk taxes, and why residents are – often unfairly – asked to make a lot of decisions that could be more centralized within the city. They end by dreaming up new things that City Council could be working on.
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.
Jess (00:06):
Hi, and welcome to the first episode of Ann Arbor AF podcast for folks trying to figure out what’s going on in Ann Arbor. We discuss current events and local politics and policy governance and other civic good times. I’m Jess Leeta.
Michelle (00:23):
And I’m
Jess (00:24):
I’m Molly Kleinman.
Michelle (00:25):
And I’m Michelle Hughes.
Jess (00:28):
We’re your co-hosts to help you get informed and get involved. It’s your city. Today we’re talking about the next city council meeting. Coming up Monday, December 7th, 2020. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items. It isn’t comprehensive or else this podcast would be as infamously long as some council meetings. We’re just here to reflect on the things that intersect with our interests in case they interest you too and offer up some ways to get involved to watch Monday Night’s Council meeting. You can stream it live or after the fact on the city of Ann Arbor’s YouTube channel or on ctn. You can also follow hashtag a two Council on social media. Let’s jump in.
Michelle (01:10):
All right, so what do we got on the agenda this time? I, I’d like to say I was looking through the agenda and I’m used to, in recent history, the agendas have been full of thunderous calamitous drama, and so I came here prepared to dish all the gossip about the drama. But this actually looks like a pretty straightforward agenda here. Everything is just basically just staff just moving everything one more through the machine. So if this is your first time and you’re like, Hey, maybe is civics interesting to me? I’m concerned that you might come away from this with the idea that, oh no, civics is entirely routine and boring, just like I thought, but I promise it gets a lot more dramatic than this. And a lot of the items that we’re going to talk about actually do have more dramatic histories to them. So I’m hoping that we can bring some of this dry agenda to life and then in the future when there’s more, more people pushing agendas and counter agendas in the future, you’ll have a background in knowing about the agendas and city council and so forth, and you’ll be ready to jump right into the fray.
Jess (02:41):
That’s so true, and even I looked at the agenda and my first thought was what a nothing burger, but
(02:50):
I found a couple of things that were actually pretty interesting. So getting into the consent agenda, this is something that we expect really to go through counsel without a whole lot of discussion. For example, items seven and eight is the resolution to approve a purchase of essentially some chargers for electric vehicles. But the one right after that is a resolution to accept funds from the state for those chargers. And so I think that’s pretty cool that staff were able to get a grant from the state to be able to do what we wanted to do with our sustainability goals. So good job sustainability staff.
Michelle (03:25):
And I think this is a good example of why it’s a good idea to have a sustainability department and sustainability staff. Even the idea of having an office of sustainability was a controversial when it was created, but if you don’t have people applying for these grants and looking for these grants, they’re not going to find themselves
Molly (03:45):
Great. And so the consent agenda, just to take a tiny step back, this is stuff that usually is going to get voted on all at all at once. The idea is that this is a compilation of things where the city council can vote one time and they’re approving everything in the consent agenda. In recent years, we’ve had a history of a lot of things getting pulled from the consent agenda for discussion and debate,
Jess (04:11):
Which contributes to those infamously long meetings reference Exactly.
Molly (04:16):
Keep things more efficient. And that hasn’t always been true in the past. I think we can expect it to be a little bit different this year. And the things that stood out to us aren’t necessarily things that we expect to get pulled for discussion, but just things that we thought would be interesting about for a minute.
Michelle (04:32):
And I remember when we had a lot of new city council members in 2018, the first city council meeting, after that, the consent agenda came up and the consent agenda is usually just no one discusses anything from there and they just vote yes. But this time, almost every single item got pulled. And I remember the mayor saying, okay, I guess we’re now calling the consent agenda, just the agenda.
Molly (04:58):
Well,
Jess (04:58):
It’s noting actually that we’re in a pretty similar situation now. We have a council where we’ve got five new council members as of the last meeting, so we’re already seeing something a little bit different. And to Molly’s point about what a consent agenda is and how, if you’d like to know more about how to read this, frankly, quite difficult document to read, check out episode two, how to read an agenda,
Molly (05:24):
Which doesn’t exist yet, but it will. But
Jess (05:26):
It will
Michelle (05:26):
And it’ll be awesome. We’re not going to release it until it’s awesome. That’s how we can promise that right now.
Jess (05:33):
All right. So anything else stand out to you guys from the consent agenda?
Michelle (05:39):
There was on a resolution to authorize the purchase of four police motorcycles. And I feel like since this is the first episode I want, I want to talk a little bit about defunding the police. It’s something that I’d like to see us do is spend less money on police and more money on social services. Things that we sort of end up, we create social problems by not funding adequately the solutions that we know work, and then we expect the police to clean up our mess. Well, they clean up our mess by harassing minorities and causing problems for people. And that’s what if we just made those problems not exist in the first place. So that’s kind of a long term policy goal that I’d like to see happen is to make that is to spend our money on social services instead of police. We spend 30 million a year on police. How much do we spend on affordable housing? Not 30 million. We spend maybe a million dollars out of the general fund. And then we just passed the new
Jess (07:02):
Millage,
Michelle (07:02):
The new millage, and that’s, that’s going to get us, I forget how many mil, maybe about
Jess (07:07):
1000006.4 million a year. Six
Michelle (07:09):
Approximately. Okay. 6 million a year. But that ain’t no 30 million.
Jess (07:15):
And it should be noted that’s an additional tax on taxpayers. That’s true. And not out of the general, the city’s general fund, which are taxes that are already paid. So yes, it’s not 30 million and it’s an additional expense that if we could have found a way to pull it from another spot in the general fund, for example, at least the 30 million
Michelle (07:37):
Budget,
Jess (07:38):
That’s an additional we wouldn’t even have had to ask taxpayers the question.
Michelle (07:43):
Yeah, I think the idea is if we spend money on social services that prevents the social problems that we wouldn’t have to spend on police. So when I talk about defunding the police, I’m not just talking about keep everything the same and remove the police department because that’s that going to solve the problems. I’m really more interested in solving the social problems, but I consider the police to be one of them.
Jess (08:14):
So what would you recommend for folks who also care about defunding and abolition? How would you recommend they get involved?
Michelle (08:21):
Yeah, so we have the Independent Community Police Oversight Commission, which meets every once in a while. I forget how often they meet. And yeah, you can go to their meetings, you can call in, you can listen in on the work that they’re doing. And they’ve kind of taken up the idea of working on this project of figuring out how we can spend money on social services instead of policing. There was a resolution back in the summer, June, back after the George Floyd protests started where the mayor tried to pass resolution, like asking the independent police community Police Oversight Commission, the I C P O C to create a task force to work on defunding the police, but they didn’t like the form of that resolution. So they said, give it to us. We’ll work, we’ll workshop that. And just at the last meeting, the chair of the I C P O C, Lisa Jackson said that they have a document they’re working up, that’s like their response, here’s how we would like to proceed with the work of defunding the police. So get in touch with the I C P O C and get hooked up with that ongoing work.
Jess (10:02):
And it’s worth noting that this upcoming meeting as well, the I C P O C reports out to council once a month. That’s true. And their monthly report out is at the upcoming meeting. And the best part is it’s right at the top of the meeting. So if that’s something that you care about, you can tune in and it’ll happen in the first little bit. I think that’s everything from the consent agenda that stood out to us. All
Michelle (10:25):
Right, moving on. So when I say these say these meetings are non-controversial, there’s always something that someone can have a controversy about. You noticed I had quite strong opinions right out of the gate.
Jess (10:37):
That’s what we’re here for. We’re basically That’s right. Walking bags of opinions. So moving on to the public hearings, and to Molly’s point a moment ago about format, if you’ve read through the 10 page agenda, you’ll see that there are some items that fall both under public hearings and under council business. And I have been following city council meetings for years. I consider myself somebody who pays attention, and I still got surprised by this. So Michelle, can you help me remember why is it that stuff shows up on an agenda twice?
Michelle (11:14):
Yeah. So the public hearings are an opportunity for people to, when there’s something that needs additional public input, usually these are ordinance changes, then it come there. The public has an opportunity to come and talk about it. And anyone who wants to talk at a public hearing gets three minutes and you don’t have to plan ahead and make a reservation or anything like that. And so what they do is they put all the public hearings together, they don’t have a whole bunch of people come to discuss the sign ordinance. And then city council talks about the sign ordinance for an hour. While the people who are interested in talking about Rudolph School of Ann Arbor annexation, the people who are interested in talking about that, don’t have to wait through the ordinance discussion to give their public comment. So everyone can give their public comment all at once. And then later on, those things appear on the agenda for city council to talk about.
Jess (12:28):
And for folks who are tuning into the echoes of Ann Arbor politics, if you ever hear folks talk about three minute people, what they’re talking about is the three minutes that’s allowed at public comment and that stand up to speak about things that are interesting. So I think everything that’s under public hearings also shows up under council business. So we can probably go right in the council business.
Michelle (12:53):
Oh, I also wanted to mention, since you talked about three minute people, there’s also, in addition to the public hearings, which are at about specific topics at the beginning of each city council meeting, public comment, reserve time, 10 people who’ve made a reservation ahead of time get to speak in those three minutes. And that’s even on things that you don’t get a public hearing about. Those are usually the people we’re talking about when we talk about three minute people.
Jess (13:22):
That’s fair. And like you said, you have a piece of business or a grievance or something that you’d like to see on the agenda that isn’t an opportunity to talk about it. So there, transparency, communication to and from the city is never perfect. But I feel like Ann Arbor tries to make opportunity available for folks to be able to contact. So going on to council business, I’m going to jump into Bright Dawn and I’ve lost my place in the agenda, but I’m going to talk a little bit about the history of it before talking about what’s on the table. So Brighton,
Michelle (14:08):
It’s DB three.
Jess (14:10):
DB three. Thank you. Because I was confused about the agenda. I wrote all my notes on public hearing and have successfully confused myself and probably others. So welcome. Brighton is a development that’s been on Ann City’s radar for several months now, Brighton’s off of Burton Road, which is not the same as Barton Drive. Two things that I mix up all the time. Burton Road is on Packard. So depending on your point of reference, you’re driving out of town. It’s either towards the White Castle or the Cat Clinic depending on your life’s decisions. But you’re headed in that direction. And then Burton Drive is right before you hit 23, the overpay, the 23 overpass. So that’s the area of town that we’re talking about, kind of the southeast section of town. There have been multiple attempts at this one developer creating development over there. And the development process is neighbors get a say in what gets developed to a point.
(15:16):
It’s a property that’s owned by an individual or by a corporation. And if something that is proposed called by right, excuse me, or what’s permitted by law, then that is really easy to develop. But the early stages of the process are an opportunity for the community to offer input. I’d like a garbage pad here instead of there. I’d like the driveway moved a little bit down this way, or to obtain benefit from the developer. We’d like to see more affordable housing as a part of this development. Or we’d like to see some kind of payment in what’s called a pilot, a payment in lieu of taxes to the city to typically to a particular fund. So in this particular case, what’s being brought forward is a second or third try, I think. And the first few had more affordable housing offered, but didn’t pass the preferences of the near neighbors. So now what’s come back is a buy right development that is a hundred percent market rate, which means there will be absolutely no discounts offered for any of the apartments. But the good news is it is I think 120 new units, which is great cause Ann Arbor needs some new housing and what they offered was a contribution to parks. So that’s coming up and because it’s by, it’s most likely that it will pass,
Michelle (16:43):
I think. I think there’s a lot to step back and talk about there. So much. So when we talk about a development is a buy right development, what that means is that, so the city has zoning laws, the zoning code, and everyone that owns a piece of property is allowed to build on their property that they own. As long as they follow the zoning codes. If they follow the zoning codes, there’s nothing we can do about it because we already told them what we wanted, they’re doing what we wanted. And so that’s called a buy right? Development state law doesn’t allow us to interfere in that process. If we told ’em what they wanted and they’re doing it, we can’t stop them.
Jess (17:34):
Zoning code is things like commercial, residential, single family, residential, industrial, things like that. So you can’t build a shopping mall where a park is supposed to be, but you can build an apartment building where an apartment building is supposed to be.
Michelle (17:46):
And it also includes things like setbacks, like your building has to have at least this many feet between the footprint of the building and the road or something like that. It can’t be this tall, that kind of thing. And when the bright dawn developers came up and they said, Hey, this is what we want to build, at first they had an idea that was an idea that wasn’t permitted by our zoning code. And so they tried to get a special designation called a planned planned unit development where they said, we’re going to build something that doesn’t conform to the zoning code, but it requires special, it requires special approval from city council. And what
Jess (18:32):
They were asking for was more density. They wanted to put more units on there.
Michelle (18:37):
That’s usually what they want because if they’re able to build more units of housing, they’ll get a bigger return on their investment. And then a lot of times neighbors, the nearby neighbors complain about that for various reasons. Generally nearby neighbors are mad about a lot of development with no matter what kind it is, just because it’s going to be disruptive to their life. And so they have an opportunity to, if they have an opportunity to come and complain that it’s going to be disruptive to their life, they often avail themselves with that opportunity. And when it’s a planned unit development, then city council has the opportunity to listen to that and be like, Hey, yeah, actually let’s not do this. But, and that’s what happened. But then Dawn came back and they said, okay, well we’ll just do it according to the regular zoning code, and you can’t say no this time. So
Molly (19:32):
I feel so often the conflicts that we see around city council issues are the conflicts between what the handful of neighbors want and what the rest of the city needs. And I don’t think that the neighbors would frame it that way, that, oh, they’re making things worse for everyone because now there can’t be more housing and housing prices are skyrocketing and people can’t live here just saying, well, traffic in my neighborhood is going to be worse. Or there might be shadows where there previously were not shadows. And so it’s this really individualistic looking way of approaching city governance.
Jess (20:18):
Well, it’s individualistic, but it’s worth noting that our system kind of incentivizes that We put a high premium on folks who own their home and we give them extra opportunities to contribute to the civic process. But typically the opportunities are, here’s 10 points at which you can say no and not really a path to saying yes. Michelle, I want to go back to something you said a second ago when you kind of characterize neighbor resistance as resistance to inconvenience. I think that’s partly true, but I think even more than that, when people move into a neighborhood, and I think even more, this is a distinction I’m going to make as a renter, when people buy into a neighborhood, they feel like they’re buying into a contract of what that neighborhood is. So it feels like it has this many people, it feels like it’s this close to, or this far from businesses and busy streets.
(21:21):
And so when changes are proposed that are counter to how we feel like we had a contract with our neighborhood to be, again, we feel like we have an obligation to rise up against that and preserve the character of the neighborhood that we enjoy. The challenge with preserving neighborhood character over the neighbors that might want to live there is that prioritizing buildings and streets and infrastructure over humans. And I think that’s at what’s at the heart of a lot of these conversations. So that was just a distinction, Michelle, that I wanted to make. Listeners who stick with us will understand that I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about development and those will come up in many of our conversations.
Michelle (22:09):
Well, another thing too, I think is that we have a lot of thoughts and feelings about development. We have a lot of thoughts and feelings about how it impacts the city. And so somebody said a minute ago talking about the difference between how it affects us versus how it affects the city. We don’t do a whole lot of talking about how things affect the city. So it’s like someone is being asked, Hey, can we make a whole bunch of people move near your house and use a bunch of traffic and use a bunch of parking? And it’s like, they’re like, okay, what do I get out of this? And that argument hasn’t been made in a compelling fashion to a lot of people. So it’s like they have an opportunity to say no. They could say, even if we did incentivize, even if we did give them opportunities to say yes, why would they? Right. It’s something that, cause we’re
Jess (23:03):
Asking them about can we put four story buildings here and not, can we put 120 cool weird people here?
Michelle (23:12):
I would
Jess (23:13):
Rather have that conversation.
Michelle (23:15):
And also though I think you know us because we’re kind of nerds and we’ve been studying this, we have a pretty clear picture of that. We want there to be more housing. We want there to be more cool weird people we want. And we think that housing, even if it’s at market rate, is going to be helpful for the city. Not everyone shares that idea. And some people find that pretty counterintuitive. Why would building new apartments make the city cheaper? The city was cheap, the city was cheaper years ago when it didn’t have those apartments. And they’ll see new apartments get built and everything’s more expensive. Are these things correlated? It’s something that we’re nerds and we’ve read a whole bunch of papers and we’ve read opinions one way and the other. And we’ve been convinced the one way and not the other. But not everyone’s had that. So when they say, when someone comes in and they say, Hey, hey, can we put this building in here? You can totally say no. Do you want to say no? You can totally say no.
Jess (24:31):
Community engagement process around development is life.
Michelle (24:34):
Right?
Jess (24:35):
Are you saying no? Yeah.
Michelle (24:36):
Right. And then it’s like, well, why would someone say yes?
Jess (24:40):
So we’re, we’re never going to get to a point of resolution about this, except I will say really quickly, I am in favor of the Brighton development. I just wish the earlier version had passed. But in talking about things that are counterintuitive but necessary, let’s go on to the thing that Molly had kind of tagged in the council business.
Molly (24:59):
I was just going to say, speaking of opportunities to say no to things, we’ve got some sidewalk gaps on the agenda. And the way filling sidewalk gaps works is it’s maybe not immediately obvious. So a sidewalk gap is a place along a road where people want to walk, where there could be a sidewalk and there is not a sidewalk. And Ann Arbor has many, many miles of sidewalk apps all through the city. And some of them are more perilous than others. There are sort of quiet residential neighborhoods without sidewalks where it’s pretty safe to walk in the road. And there are other parts of town where there’s more car traffic or there’s a school nearby. And the absence of sidewalks can be really dangerous. And the way we fill those sidewalk apps, the city has a prioritization process that I’m definitely not going to dive into. Now, there are many different factors that go into how the city prioritizes filling sidewalk gaps, but the city is committed to filling them and to putting in more sidewalks. And eventually over time, all those perilous gaps will be gone. In theory. The problem is that while the city pays for a big chunk of filling the sidewalk gaps, there’s also an expectation that the landowner where the gap is, is going to pay for some portion of the sidewalk. And that expectation is called a special assessment. And so the prop,
Jess (26:30):
Do you remember, it’s an expectation, but it’s actually called, the whole thing is it’s a special assessment district or a sad, and I just feel like that’s very appropriate for this conversation.
Molly (26:40):
Super sad.
Michelle (26:41):
Sorry, Molly. Go.
Molly (26:42):
Yes, thank you. So there’s a special assessment district and the homeowners are, or the landowners, cause it’s not always homes. The landowners are going to have to pay not the whole cost of putting in the sidewalk, but some cost. And the city tries to be really, really flexible with the landowners in terms of allowing them to pay over many years. They do everything they can to find other sources of funding so the landowners don’t have to pay the full cost of the sidewalk. But the system that we have in place is that city council approves every sidewalk gap assessment and the property owners have an opportunity, multiple opportunities to object and to lobby counsel to reject the assessment so that they don’t have to pay for those sidewalks and they don’t have to maintain those sidewalks. And sidewalk maintenance, we mean mostly shoveling snow and dealing with ice.
(27:37):
The sort of fixing jenky sidewalks is a thing that the city pays for with a millage actually that just got renewed. So in the recent past we’ve had sidewalk gap assessments come up for council approval and they keep getting rejected. The one that really always comes back to me is that as a situation where there was a major sidewalk app near an elementary school and actually a kindergarten through eighth grade school, that the parents whose kids went to that school really had been wanting a sidewalk for a long time. The city applied for a grant and got a federal safe roots to school grant. So they got a bunch of money to help pay for the sidewalks. But the handful of homeowner of landowners, I think in this case it was homeowners in the special assessment district objected, and they made a big stink at council and City Council voted against those sidewalks, which meant not only did we give up that federal money for the sidewalks, but it also means we can’t a going to be a while again before we’re even allowed to apply for that money for a different place where there’s a gap by a school where kids need to be safe.
(28:51):
So that’s like the semi short history of sidewalk apps. And so I don’t know, I don’t heard whether these particular sidewalk apps are going to be controversial, but we have a new majority on council now, and I am very hopeful that they will pass this special, this Sidewalk app project and that we will get new sidewalks along Nixon and Traver. It’s Traver, right? And not Traver.
Jess (29:18):
It is Traver because that’s where I lived when I first moved here.
Molly (29:21):
Cool. I’ve been here for a long time and I still don’t always know how to pronounce the roads. So yeah, I’m hopeful. But I wanted to take a moment to sort of dive into the sorted history of sidewalk apps in Ann Arbor.
Jess (29:34):
That would make really awesome episode titled The Sorted History of Sidewalk.
Molly (29:40):
I have a whole episode’s worth of stuff to say probably about sidewalk.
Michelle (29:44):
Well, I think we also have to talk a little bit about the sidewalk gap millage that we just passed. Also that was proposal B on the most recent ballot because now we’re going to pay, we’re all going to pay extra on taxes so that we have more money to put into paying for the sidewalks to hopefully reduce the amount that the adjacent property owners are going to have to pay. And that’ll hopefully make the sidewalk filling process go more smoothly.
Molly (30:24):
In theory, by reducing the landowner obligation or the property adjacent property holder obligation, it will reduce the objections to sidewalk apps. I will believe that when I see it.
Jess (30:43):
I also, I want to go back to something, Molly, you said super in passing, but I feel like it’s worth picking up on. And that is that we have a new majority on council. People have been so focused on the presidential election, and even when they look at down ballot races, a lot of times folks stop at the state level. And there was a lot to look at this year with the state Supreme Court, the state level proposals that were under consideration. There was a lot, lot to do. But quietly in August there was a local primary as there is every two years to determine the Ann Arbor City Council. And of our five wards, all five wards saw a new city council member voted in. So I’m, I’m going to interpret what you said earlier, Molly, and tell me how I’m reading it. So when you say a new majority, you’re talking about a new majority in terms of prioritizing non-motorized transportation, specifically pedestrians and people on bicycles. It’s a little more expansive than that, but easiest to say. Pedestrians and people on bicycles. And am I right in reading that’s what you meant?
Molly (31:52):
Yeah. I would say people outside of cars.
Michelle (31:55):
People
Molly (31:55):
Outside cars, yes. Cause it also encompasses transit users. Yes. Thank you. Have not been well served in recent years, but people outside of cars. And the thing is that even people who drive cars to get where they’re going are sometimes outside of cars. And the way we’ve set up our infrastructure, it’s often dangerous for those people too. So yes, we have a council that I believe and hope will be more, we’ll demonstrate more commitment to the safety and wellbeing of people outside of cars throughout the city.
Jess (32:31):
Okay. So anything else under council business that we saw that stood out? I, I’ll say that it was really bright dawn for me
Michelle (32:42):
There. We don’t have a whole lot of time to go into it, but I wanted to talk a little bit about the water rates ordinance. Oh yes, thank you. Yes. Yeah. So we have to increase spending our revenue from water bills in order to pay for some necessary fixes and things like that to the water treatment plant that we expect to have in the next several years. Sort of as a side thing, city council a few years ago did a study with a consultant who came up with this new way of structuring how, who we charge what amounts to, in terms of water so that you’d have to, if you use more water, you have to pay more per amount of water than if you use less water. The first this many gallons of water you get at this price and then the next, this many water gallons of water you get at the next price. And that’s sort of thing. And that was, it’s
Molly (33:54):
Four tiers, right? Yeah. So like tier one is the lowest tier, so the lowest tier. And I think the idea is that most households are going to be in tier one and is that right? I don’t have as much
Michelle (34:10):
Background, something like that. But basically I don’t if we have enough time to really get into it right now. But my point is that it was extremely controversial, but this rate structure survived several challenges from city council members in the past where they would try to, they knock holes in it and say, oh, this is a partisan attempt to do this and that and this and that. And every time they tried to do it was always found that like, well, no, this was based on data and research and this
Jess (34:45):
Is just, so I’m going to add on just one more layer of information on this. So in looking at the water rates, there were essentially three groups of people. There are the four pricing tiers, but three groups of people that were affected. It was commercial property owners, single family households, and multifamily households, which is typically apartments could be duplexes, quad plus because things like that. The state of Michigan requires, and I don’t have the language right in front of me, but it requires an equitable lens to water access. And if you know anything at all about Flint or Detroit, you understand that Michigan is not exactly ahead of the ball on this, but good that they have that there. So Ann Arbor had to apply an equity lens to understanding how to develop water rates. And what they came out with is that it costs more to deliver water farther than nearer.
(35:40):
So people further out rather than closer in tend to pay more. And it costs more per person to deliver typically to single family households than it does to let’s say a hundred person apartment complex. So you spend, let’s say the same amount of energy for the home and for the a hundred person complex, but the a hundred person complex, of course that energy is divided a hundred ways. And previously to the water rate adjustment, both classes of residential users had been paying the same. So applying the equity lens, essentially the state of Michigan was saying, no, you have to charge homeowners more. That’s what the study found. And so that’s what council enacted and guess who got mad?
Molly (36:24):
Homeowners?
Jess (36:26):
Homeowners. So that’s a little bit of just a tiny bit more detail to that. But
Molly (36:33):
I should say though, because it’s not all homeowners, not all homeowners, most homeowners were not going to be super affected by this change because they just don’t use
Jess (36:45):
That much water
Molly (36:48):
In order to use the kind of water that’s going to bump you up into the higher tiers. With higher rates, you’re watering huge lawns all summer or filling
Jess (36:58):
Your pool on a regular basis,
Molly (37:00):
Refill in your pool with city water on a regular basis. This is not ordinary water usage in an ordinary household, whether that’s a homeowner household or an apartment. And so it was a specific class of homeowner that was angry about the water rates and a specific set of council members who were sympathetic to that anger
Jess (37:24):
That, so this all happened in summer of 2018. And Michelle, you talked earlier about there was a whole bunch of new council members in 2018, a lot of them ran on the water rates issue and did so successfully. People worked up about it. And I think there was some misinformation too out there as there often is about a complicated issue like this. And it didn’t die after council passed it, the new council commissioned, I think two, at least two follow up studies attempting to invalidate the initial consultant’s findings about how to determine the water rates. And the two follow up studies actually confirmed that. So all of that to say what we’re seeing on council agenda is the commission of the water rate increase that we saw go, that we saw past two years ago.
Michelle (38:18):
So actually what we, okay, so we have been charging the rates using this tier structure that was so controversial since it was passed in 2018. In addition to that, we’ve been increasing the rates in order to pay for the improvements to the water system. But the most recent IMP increase in rates, former council member Jane Lum put forward this resolution saying, Hey, can we actually put off this rate increase for six months? Because she wanted to have more time to reevaluate the rate structure and hoped that we could delay the rate increase until then, but the rate structure survived that challenge. And so now we have to increase people’s water more to pay for the six months that we hadn’t increased it before. And then also the increase that we would’ve done at this time anyway. So people will see a larger jump than they would’ve, but we’re going to end up at the point that we would’ve been anyway. Although, okay, so I did want to go back and say, because you talked about that we have to charge water rates based on equity. It’s not entirely true. We have to charge water rates based on the cost of delivering that water. That
Jess (39:53):
That’s true. How that came about was through an equity inquiry of water service throughout Michigan. So I think I’m going a bit meta on that, but
Michelle (40:03):
Okay.
Jess (40:04):
We’re both functionally that they ended up,
(40:09):
So to clarify, cool. This is falling on the agenda under first reading. So this is typically what council does for ordinances is they have two readings. They have a first reading where they essentially put it on, introduce it as new business, and then kind of commence, I don’t want to say commence working on it because this has been on their dockets for years. But it allows two weeks for folks like us residents of Ann Arbor to kind of get informed, reach out to their council members, reach out to staff, find out more about it, and then the ordinance itself will actually get voted on in the meeting in two weeks, which is the, help me with the math. The 21st, I think December 21st,
Michelle (40:52):
There might not be that. There was some funky dates in here, weren’t there? I’m sorry. Okay. No,
Jess (40:58):
But all I’m saying is that the actual vote on this would be at the next council meeting.
Michelle (41:03):
And at that time there will be a public hearing,
Jess (41:06):
A public hearing, and we have come a circle on the agenda.
Michelle (41:11):
Oh,
Jess (41:13):
Awesome. First agenda you guys.
Michelle (41:15):
I’m curious. Even the boring agenda, we were able to talk all kinds of, I was able to talk fire and brimstone. We were able to talk drama. We’re bringing this agenda to life.
Jess (41:31):
All right. So made it through the council agenda. I’m curious, what’s one thing that you wish you could have seen on here?
Michelle (41:41):
Well, I think that
(41:54):
We could be doing more to make it easier to build housing. One of the things that we talked about was when there’s a buy right development, a developer is following all of our zoning codes that we can’t say no. And yet it goes on the city council agenda. City council has to debate about it. People get a chance to, and people get a chance to say no. And the only thing that could happen at that point is the city says no, gets sued and then has to then turn turns around and has to say, yes, this has happened before. City council said no to a by right development got sued. And then the developer got what they asked for anyway because it was their right. And it’s an expensive thing for this for developers to do. And developers aren’t going to pay that out of their profits.
(42:59):
They’re going to pay it out of charging people more for those houses that they’ve built. And so the more barriers we put into this type of development, the more expensive things we’re going to get. And so I think I’d like to see us do something like, look, if they’re just doing what we told them we want them to do, don’t make it come to the city council. And then if we don’t like what we’ve asked them to do, then it’s on us to ask them for something different. So that’s what I’d like to see is by right developments don’t have to come to the city council.
Jess (43:39):
And the Michigan Municipal League has a thing called the redevelopment ready certificate that Ann Arbor has not yet totally qualified for. I think we’re like 80% of the way there or something like that. So if we could get that redevelopment ready certificate, what exactly what you’re talking about is a part of that. So yeah, that’d be all. Let’s get redevelopment ready on the agenda. Molly, what about you?
Molly (44:00):
So this, it’s a similar thing in that I’d like us to get to a point where there can be things that are not on the agenda. For me, it’s about road reconfigurations. So historically changes to lane configurations, especially things like road diets where there’s a reduction in car lanes in order to create space for other road users. Those were staff decisions based on engineering analyses and the priorities set by city council. So Ann Arbor is attempting to be a Vision zero city, which means no road deaths. And so with that priority, it’s city staff who are trained engineers can figure out how best to reconfigure roads usually at the time that resurfacing is happening. So it’s usually a pretty cost efficient way to do it. But this old now, we get to call them the old council majority, this outgoing council, majority past resolution that they had to approve all lane reductions.
Jess (45:04):
Did that complicate the process? It politicized it,
Molly (45:07):
Yeah. It politicized the process a lot and it took the decisions out of the hands of trained engineers and put them in the hands of politicians who had other interests in deciding how we design our roads. And what I would like this new council to do is to hand that authority back to staff so that every single adjustment to erode can, that can be a staff decision. It will also make that process much faster. I’d love to see us be able to do the kind of quick build changes that some cities have done, especially in response to the pandemic to create more lanes, address the fact that there was more speeding because there was less traffic. And we really couldn’t do that. We couldn’t adapt quickly, and we can’t adapt quickly as long as counsel has to approve all changes. What about you, Jess?
Jess (46:01):
I’m thinking a little bit, and I can’t think of anything that is kind of hovering in the near orbit that I’d like to stick on the agenda. But the thing that I probably think about every day that I wish we had, and I hope we’ll have soon, is a 10 or 20 year affordable housing plan. We’ve touched a little bit on the fact that Ann Arbor has most communities in America starved its affordable housing fund to the point of $0. We essentially pay for staff and enough for buildings not to fall down. And that’s it. We’re not building new and we’re not really building new at all. And it’s a real challenge to create communities that we can be proud of. Although I think the Housing Commission has done a fantastic job at doing just that. But they’ve also been in reactive mode and kind of in beggar mode, can we have this property?
(46:52):
Can we have this 10, 20, 50, a hundred thousand dollars? Which isn’t a lot when you’re talking about hundreds of families and dozens of units. But now that we have this new affordable housing millage, now that the housing commission will have actual meaningful dollars coming in, and Jennifer Hall, who’s the director of the housing Commission, has said that depending on the funding type, she can leverage up to $25 in federal funding for every dollar in local funding that she gets. So 6 million here actually translates to 150 million, which for our purposes probably into about 1500 units. That by itself is actually only a third of what consultants have identified Ann Arbor’s need is. So I feel like we need a plan, not just for the dollars that are coming in, but also how holistically, how are we going to meet this need. The housing folks in general, and the housing commission in particular, I think have struggled to get attention to get political attention, to get taxpayer attention.
(47:57):
And one benefit of the Black Lives Matter uprisings this year has been an increased focus on housing as a tool for equity. I’m really proud that Ann Arbor has passed this millage, but we can’t constantly be scrambling. We’ve talked about this multiple times. What is the avenue to Yes. Versus what is the avenue to, no, I don’t want to say road, because Molly’s here. What are the paths to these different things? How can we just get a really, really smooth path to such great affordable housing communities here in Ann Arbor? That’s what I want. I want plan. I want to plan.
Michelle (48:31):
I think that sounds great. I got actual goosebumps when you said those numbers. The that’s
Jess (48:36):
From your goosebumps to council’s ears.
Michelle (48:39):
One thing I want to put a plug in for is that there was a thing that was passed last year or so to look at certain properties that the city already owns and decide how we can build affordable housing there. And so some of these plans are in the works and they are seeking engagement about them. And I wanted to tell you about the website that you can go to in order to engage on these issues. And that website is called Community Engagement ann arbor.com. And it’s spelled community dash engagement dash, Ann Arbor is one word.com. And that’ll tell you all the properties that were identified as being ones that could be developed quickly for affordable housing. Yeah, and we mean by affordable, we mean subsidized housing.
Jess (49:41):
Yes. Thank you. Don’t worry at some, yeah, lots of deep dives on housing and affordability, right? All that juicy stuff. All right. Well that’s Council for December 7th, 2020. Michelle and Molly, you guys are awesome.
Michelle (49:55):
You’re awesome. And also listener. You’re awesome
Jess (49:59):
Listener. You’re awesome.
Michelle (50:03):
Have a good time.