This is our very first recap episode! We break down what happened to the annual budget passed by Council last week.
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Link:
–the Quick Build presentation at Transportation Commission
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Transcript
JL: Hi, Ann Arbor AFers. This is cohost Jess Letaw with one more thing. We’ve been talking at you for months – now we’d like to hear from you! What do you like about the pod? What do you wish we were doing more of, or better? What ideas do you have for future episodes? We’ve put up a survey for you to fill out. There’s a link to it in the show notes, or go to annarboraf.com/survey. That’s annarboraf.com/survey. Send us your thoughts, questions, feels and feedback on the pod so far; we want to hear it all. And as always, get informed, then get involved. It’s your city!
MH: 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 Michelle Hughes and my pronouns are she/her, I’m Jess Letaw and my pronouns are she/her, and I’m Molly Kleinman and my pronouns are she/her. We’re your cohosts to help you get informed, and get involved. It’s your city!
JL: Before we get started, we have a website and arbor af.com you’ll find all the episodes show notes and transcripts.
To help pay for hosting and other costs if you’d like to give us a few dollars to keep it all going, you can find us at K oh dash F i.com slash in order as.
Today we’re doing our first ever City Council review instead of our usual previews we thought listeners might want to hear where the annual budget ended up.
If you want to get up to speed, you can check out the last episode, but you don’t need to have heard it for today to make sense, a quick process note we are finally recording a few days after the Council meeting, which means we don’t have to worry about Agenda changes for once.
I will kick it off to myself to talk about three of the proposed amendments.
Amendment one was to reduce dear call funding and increase funding for the Center of the city by Council member Rami that was defeated.
A Member Amendment five, was to reduce dear call funding and increased funding for Center of the city that one was by councilmember hainer that was also defeated.
Amendment seven was to reduce funding for single family zoning and to increase funding for the Center of the city.
I am really glad to see that Council didn’t support this the allocation for the Community conversation around single families owning which was originally $100,000 that was left untouched.
So the amendment was defeated the Center of the city Commission did get their dollars, which will touch on in another amendment.
Michelle.
yeah.
MH: Wait actually i’m not sure we’re going to get that another amendment are we um.
JL: Oh.
MH: Okay, take a stab okay okay yeah I mean they got the money from the deer call basically the vehicle money was was cut up was cut apart into a few different into a few different places.
And that was one of them.
It was $120,000 to fund all of our dreams.
JL: Which funded many dreams, but no.
MH: Call games.
But not at the hotel.
So Okay, I want to talk about amendment number for this was an amendment to remove to have this of the full time employees that were asked for by the offices sustainability.
For their.
For the project of getting us to carbon neutrality by 2030.
They had asked to hire three and councilmember hainer propose this amendment to let them hire only one new new person.
Fortunately painter was the only person who voted for this amendment as well, because I think the rest of the City Council understand understood that.
That getting to sustain getting to carbon neutrality is not something that’s going to do with it’s going to happen if we don’t spend money on it and do things about it so i’m glad that i’m glad that this was an unpopular amendment.
hainer also had some weird ideas he he voted against the entire budget at the end of the at the end of the amendment process i’m saying that there hadn’t been enough cuts.
And, and he didn’t want to vote for a budget that had a structural deficit.
In my opinion, the proper way to address this if he had had this this problem with the budget would have been to offer a more amendments or offer.
or pass resolutions ahead of time asking for asking for cuts and changes, but instead he only this was the only substantive budget proposal that he made that.
That cut money he, and this would have only cut if if we had if we had not hired these sustainability officers.
It would have saved us 179,100 $79,098 and that’s, a far cry from the somewhere between two and $3 million that the structural deficit is I couldn’t find the exact number of the structural deficit because.
The budget resolution is very difficult to read.
there’s, a thing that says.
General fund revenues and general fund expenditures, those were exactly equal and then there’s a total revenues and total expenditures line in the in the budget resolution in which revenues exceed expenditures by $41 million that includes all the like.
Spending on things like with all the various villages and all of our other obligations that are kind of non negotiable.
So I couldn’t find where this two or $3 million deficit is so I couldn’t get you an exact number, but it was the main thing that was being talked about during all these amendments, so it was on everyone’s mind but.
It the budget made it through the amendment process with this with the deficit intact, which means we’re going to be pulling from our.
reserve money, money but we just had set aside in the bank we’re going to spend that down unless we get more money from the arm.
Was it called the American rescue plan.
JL: c plan and actually I want to pop in because i’m not sure if we knew this at the time of recording last week.
So the funds originally designated to Ann arbor from the Federal Government government for the American rescue plan was supposed to be $11 million.
But per capita that was significantly less than other Michigan cities were seeing, and so, thanks to the advocacy of our really our federal representatives our.
Congress and Senate Congress people and Senators that allocation has gone up from 11 million to I think a little bit over $24 million, so this budget does not rely on any funds from the American rescue plan, but it is nice to know that those are coming.
MK: Right and my understanding is that there will be some separate process to allocate those funds it’s not clear to me what that process will be or how visible or or public, it will be because it’s not a part of the budget process and it happened outside of the timeline for the budget.
So I will be, and that was a question that came up on Twitter, there was a lot happening on the two Council hashtag on Twitter during the budget discussions last week and.
That was a question that came up that I think a lot of us have, which is why are we so concerned about this $2 million deficit if we have 24 million coming in from the Federal Government, I don’t I don’t know the answer.
MH: One of the answers I remember from that night was that the America rescue plan was a one time.
boost of money, whereas.
This deficit, you know is contains recurring funds, and I think that’s why they call it a structural deficit.
That it’s you know about when you add up our recurring expenditures and recurring revenues that.
This is the, this is the deficit we get so.
The America rescue plan will help, but I don’t know if it’ll help in perpetuity.
Hopefully, at some point revenues will recover from.
From the state and we’ll have more money coming in from the state, because I think part of what the problem is with what’s causing this deficit is that coronavirus happened, the city accounts on money coming in from the state from.
Sales taxes income taxes things like that, and those just aren’t coming in this year so well, some of the money we have banked.
JL: that’s 100% true part of the issue is also, I will remind folks and make my standard disclaimer I am on the board of the downtown Development Authority, I am a no a speaking for that body i’m just on that board.
and part of the deficit that we’re seeing at the city is a fast decrease over 50% in parking revenue.
of which 20% of gross revenues specifically from parking get turned over to the city that’s typically around 5% of the city’s annual general fund.
So part of what we’re seeing is the reduction in DDA fees as well, so yes state funds need to recover, yes, local funds need to recover, yes, hopefully aarp will help cover some that gap.
MH: So um.
yeah anyway that’s a we got off on that tangent because as we’re talking about that we are, yes, going to continue to spending money on sustainability and they are going to hire those two sustainability analysts.
JL: Who so.
MH: With that, let me pass it off to.
molly to talk about healthy streets.
On healthy discussions.
MK: How they That was a seriously unhealthy discussion, it was really shocking to me the level of vitriol that we heard from some Council members about healthy streets but.
This was the amendment to to provide funding for healthy streets deployment, this year we have healthy streets last year, there was a lot of work to create a program for this year Council.
passed a resolution allotting $40,000 for planning over the winter, but then, when the actual plan came forward.
It needed eight votes because it was an off cycle budget amendment and it only got seven so got the majority, but not enough you all, probably remember all of my feelings about this from past weeks.
But the solution to this problem was to put it into the regular budget, which only needs a simple majority to pass and.
that’s what happened, it did it got seven votes and passed and so now we’re going to have healthy streets they can’t start until July 1 because that’s when the new fiscal year begins.
But the city is doing a lot of work to lay all of the groundwork and get as prepared as possible so that on July one.
The the process can begin, so that we should be seeing healthy streets deployments as quickly as possible, it sounds like neighborhood streets are going to roll out first.
And then the Packard and main streets a little bit later, which makes sense because the hell, the streets are just signage and.
barricades and both men and Packard are bit more involved, because they involve paint and on Packard and part of it, some repaid some resurfacing so yay we are going to get our healthy streets We just have to wait a little bit longer.
that’s all I have to say about that I.
MH: I also wanted to add that.
The money from the money from this.
You know we’re not we’re not increasing the deficit at all by by.
Doing this healthy streets program because.
The money is coming from the major street fund and the local street fund, which are both funded by gas taxes that come from the State and that money is all allocated towards something.
And so, all the money that was going to be spent on how the streets is money that would have been spent on other street projects which is you know, in a large in large amount it’s repaving of streets and one of the questions that was asked.
At the meeting was somebody asked if we didn’t do healthy streets how much more, how many more blocks of repaving would it, let us do, and the answer was like three or four blocks.
MK: Three or four three or four yeah yeah.
MH: Three or four blocks of.
reef surfacing or we can have healthy streets all summer, some of which are permanent installations.
MK: yeah exactly and the the bulk of the spending is on the permanent installations, as well the neighborhood streets pieces only like $33,000 so yeah with a very small dollar project in terms of what transportation usually costs with a really high impact, in my opinion, so.
JL: I wanted to ask did I learned from you guys last week, I feel like I did, but I didn’t catch it until after that for budget amendments, the proposing Council member of Council members also have to say where those dollars are coming from.
MH: You know all of these do say that I don’t know if that’s a requirement or.
MK: Is that last week.
MH: yeah it seems OK sense to me because, like you know they can’t just ask the city, they can’t just point it to the city administrator to say okay you.
You figure from because this is, this is the amendment to the budget, you know.
JL: Alright, so i’m going to say that because I think it’s helpful and then listeners if you know better, please, as always, email us and give us a correction.
I think that’s one of the reasons why we saw that healthy streets and the other things that past didn’t.
result in an overall increase of the budget, I think it is a requirement of the amendment that the funding source be identified and that’s why everybody was kind of hungry Hippo in the deer call money.
For my thing now I wanted for my thing and it ended up the.
date they get hungry hungry Hippo it.
MH: So yeah and the one I suppose someone could have proposed an amendment which said that the you know which specified that the money would be drawn from the fund balance and increase the deficit, but I don’t think anyone dared to propose such an amendment.
JL: That would have been really interesting i’m checking in with myself and I have some feelings about that strategy, so I would be curious to see if that happened.
The other thing that I wanted to say, specific to healthy streets is that.
we’ve talked about this a little bit before but staff have ended up chungking out the city wide healthy streets projects from the downtown district healthy streets.
downtown is now referred to as people subset of the people from the streets projects that we already do which tends to focus on pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and improvements.
The downtown ones are proceeding as usual this year we’ve got weekend street closures we’ve got expanded sidewalks eating for restaurants and retailers, so those started, I want to say a month ago in April, I believe.
And are continuing through this summer, so I just wanted to call that out those are the downtime ones are ongoing, and then it sounds like the neighborhood and other ones will pick up a little bit later this year.
MH: And that includes the very popular division protected bike lane.
JL: yeah yes coming up this fall to be protected bike lane and division yes.
MK: it’s gonna be.
Alright, so next up, we are talking more about the deer co funding with them and then six right.
MH: So okay Amendment six was to add a to add an officer to add a person on staff whose job is to watch diversity equity and inclusion.
or dei and.
It was the these positions This position was funded out of the year call and by reducing some of the money from the office of sustainability for.
For.
A to zero goal to get to get the carbon neutrality by 2030, but I think this is good, this is real good this is real good.
In 2020 the City Council passed a resolution declaring racism, a public health crisis and that resolution took no steps made no promises.
offered no spending, and this is the first time we’re actually seeing the city take that promise seriously um and by actually funding a person whose job it is to.
Look at what the city is doing and what looking at what the city could do in terms of racial equity and other types of dei.
When the county pass a resolution declaring racism, a public health crisis they actually.
They actually created a racial equity office and hired a racial equity officer at that time, and I am glad that they did that and i’m glad that now we’re taking that step as well um I remember hearing some.
some hesitation at the Caucus it’s the meeting that some city council members have before the meeting before the City Council meeting.
There was some Council members who didn’t understand the purpose of the officer and thought that the I was only about hiring of city staff and making sure that we were doing that and an equitable way.
But it sounds like they got.
They people told them or somehow they figured out what what was actually going on.
By the time of the actual resolution, and so the DTI amendment passed unanimously and so just so anyone here isn’t confused.
When we talk about it, the officer we’re not just talking about you know how the city hires its own staff we’re talking about all at the officer could watch everything that city does and be the person who’s bottom lining racial equity at the city level and it’s something that.
is an area of expertise and I think it is not reasonable to expect you know someone that we hire for random things to be able to you know oversee the entire cities, the I think in a holistic manner.
And I think it’s a lot more reasonable to have someone who is 100% job is bottom lining that effort.
And you know, certainly it’s it’s important to have every person in the city, who is working, you know.
Keep the Ai in mind keep racial equity in mind, but I feel a lot more comfortable having somebody bottom lining math and so.
that’s why the.
And I, and I am and i’m glad that all of our city council members seem to agree with that and passed passed unanimously so yeah some of the money was taken from the deer call.
Some of the money was taken from the office of sustainability and well sustainability is important racial equity really needs to be part of the sustainability effort.
JL: or not well and right.
And I want to say missy stoltz who’s the head of osi offices, sustainability and innovation has done a phenomenal job of forefront in environmental justice as a part of our carbon neutrality plan.
it’s my hope that taking some of the dollars away from that office actually more robustly supports the work that she and they are already doing so I don’t see this as.
I now sustainability, to get less equity now I see it as everybody gets more.
MH: that’s my hope exactly.
All right now it’s molly’s turn.
Okay.
MK: Yes, we are back to looking at some more of the transportation amendments so first we’re going to talk about Amendment eight, which was called the amendment to reallocate streetlight replacement funds.
But, which was in practice a rearrangement of the entire $500,000 in spending from the county mental health millage that is directed towards pedestrian safety.
A chunk of that was planned originally for street lights, but it was also planned for other things.
We talked about them at more length in the last episode, but they’re all good things and they’re all thing the way was reallocated they’re still going to be some streetlight replacement, but there are also going to be some.
projects that align with the recommendations of the comprehensive transportation plan the there was this issue where the none of the transportation spending in the original budget.
addressed the comprehensive transportation plans like layout for how we should be going about reforming our transportation system.
MH: of transportation can certainly didn’t say we must spend 100% of our money on street lights.
MK: That wasn’t even 100% that’s why the name of this amendment is is slightly strange there was there were some other things, it was going to get spent on to um so I don’t know why this one focused on the streetlight part of it.
But there was no plan, there was no plan to do anything about the transportation plan and so councilmember briggs and a couple of Members of the transportation Commission spent a lot of time.
Trying to come up with some things that were high in the priority level already for the city that we could then.
do spend this money in a in a more strategic way, and this did pass so that’s good news and Michelle you had a question about this that you want.
MH: yeah um I, I want to know why did this have to come in as an amendment, why did councilmember briggs and the transportation Commission have to.
have to do this because the city administrators should have seen and been involved with the creation of the comprehensive transportation plan and why was the spending, not a lot not already aligned with that.
In the city administrators proposed budget like, why did it have to come in as an amendment in the 11th hour here like.
MK: that’s a that’s a really good question I have only a partial answer, which is that the comprehensive transportation plan which we have been talking about now for months has not actually passed Council yet.
So it’s gone through many of the steps that it has had to get through, including original review by transportation Commission review by lots of stakeholder groups like ours, our county neighbors and the transportation authorities.
It came back to transportation Commission and planning Commission we had our big joint session on April 20 and.
We are we said yes it’s great we recommend it to Council, the Council still hasn’t voted on it so it’s not officially our transportation plan yeah.
That said, what we have is like pretty close to final and it’s definitely going to pass, and so I think it would have been totally reasonable for this, even the city administrator and staff to build out the 2022 budget using that as a guide.
But it is true that it’s not officially our transportation plan yet it’s coming to counsel for a final vote sometime in the next few weeks it’s almost there but it’s not there yet.
JL: tech likely neither is the single families owning thing and they a lot of money for that and it feels like the same category.
MK: I don’t and the transportation plan update or the comprehensive transportation plan it articulate a lot of the values that we theoretically already hold, and so we could have been working towards those values and Budgeting towards those values, even in the absence of that official plan.
MH: I also kind of like it’s it’s like Okay, if even if the transportation plan hasn’t passed yet have Council like.
Was there some kind of guide like what.
The city administrator must have prepared this budget under some guidance and i’m like what guidance, were they using that made that made them, you know allocate them allocate the money in that, in a way that they did um.
JL: I still don’t totally understand why we budgeted for the D I person via Amendment Council has been talking about this for months.
Is it that it didn’t fall under somebody’s department like this it’s so funny you guys we’ve been talking about the budget for six months now, I have different confusion than I did when we started, but I wouldn’t say I have less.
MH: yeah well I tell you what, though, like the Di amendment the Di person.
I think that I, I think the way it should have happened is that city council should have should have passed the resolution months ago, or even back in 2020 when the.
You know, stating that this was a goal of ours, and you know, I think.
I think that the reason that city administrators and put it in there is because they didn’t have any official guidance to do it yeah you know.
And i’m glad it got in there, but yeah I wish I had gotten in there earlier, so that it like you know the city council members, you know Regina and song didn’t have to.
scramble around for the money, and it could have been like the city, the city administrator could have had that guidance and found the money for it in the budget, you know, while they were doing the budget but.
JL: And I also.
yeah I am too, I want to make an observation about this that I see in other areas of city work, which is that.
The later, a change gets introduced or inactive, the more politicized it gets and what I mean is.
when something happens organically in terms of Community engagement or Commission work or something like that, if it happens in a really boring way that’s consistent with our set of processes.
It doesn’t seem to attract as much attention or divisiveness as something that is introduced at the 11th hour of 11th hour by an individual, whether that individual is a Community Member or a Council member.
And when that happens, it seems to attract a lot more attention and a lot more disagreement.
So I think that was part of my frustration around the DEA officer, especially given that it ended up having a unanimous vote couldn’t We have done this, the boring way did we have to do it the interesting way I don’t have an answer for that, but it’s just an observation.
There is a there’s a lot of stuff in the budget that we didn’t get a chance to talk about this because we didn’t deep dive deeply enough into the budget bike yeah if the DTI officer hadn’t come in as an amendment, what do we even when we have even noticed it to talk about it.
Right.
MK: And it’s something we’ve been talking about for the length of the show, at this point.
JL: yeah I think from almost the very first time yeah.
MH: yeah also okay um I can I can take a little bit of time because a while back molly mentioned that this.
This money that’s being spent on the transportation.
On the transportation plan priorities is coming from the mental health millage and I feel like every time we say that we have to talk about the entire history of that millage.
MK: Really i’ll do a really short for.
MH: Now okay so.
MK: there’s I don’t think I can do a short version.
there’s a countywide mental health millage the past few years ago.
In 2017 that is allocated to the different cities and townships throughout the county based on a bunch of different things, and a chunk of that mental health millage was to go to the sheriff’s Office to do mental health related stuff.
MH: familiar with, called the mental health and public safety millage so that the mental health portion of that village did go to the county’s mental health program the public safety portion of that knowledge went to this one to the sheriff’s office.
MK: Correct for cities that already have police departments, they get that money back as a refund and cities can do whatever they want with that money and arbor passed a resolution, a few years ago called the 14th 2017 2017 the 40 4020.
thing.
i’m so great at city today guys so it’s and the what that did was it allocated.
How we’re going to spend this public safety rebate portion of the county mental health and public safety millage and the City Council decided that some of that money was going to go to other city mental health stuff yes, I can.
MH: Okay, the 40 4020 it was 40% of the of that money was going to be spent on.
ability.
Sustainability on climate climate action 40% was going to be spent on affordable housing and 20% was going to be spent on.
pedestrian safety, so the money that’s the money that it was that were there was being talked about here in a Min in in the amendment.
That is now going towards addressing the goals of transportation plan that money is the 20% of the rebate of the public safety portion of the.
2017 county mental health and public safety millage and there’s significant confusion about it, because a lot of people, because it has the word mental health in there, a lot of people want that money to be spent on mental health, but it was.
that the money was spent on mental health, but they think that the police rebate that we’re getting should also go towards mental health and.
there’s no requirement for that.
Right, the City Council made clear what they were going to do before folders even voted on it.
MK: And one could argue that things like affordable housing housing is mental health policy safety isn’t the only streets he has mental health policy I I, I have no problem with this with the way we are spending those.
I made it, I made it that takes so much longer than it would have if I just let you go Michelle So here we go.
Along amendment 10, this is another transportation alone amendment to amend the major street fund budget for transportation plan implementation.
And three quick build safety projects this past it was introduced by councilmember brakes.
And the goal here was again that we’ve got this transportation plan that recommends we do three quick build safety projects, a year and we have this budget that does not fund those.
projects and so she said we should plan, we should be planning this now because, if we were already behind.
On our goals, especially around bike safety and by trap like like transportation, and so we need to, we need to get moving on this.
The amendment doesn’t say what the three quick build safety projects are that’s still open for discussion among staff and advocates and all the usual people who way in.
Quick build safety projects are paint and post is what people often call them it’s the stuff that can be done without rebuilding the street.
So repainting the lines, creating a bump out with just paint and some vertical plastic things that get glued to the ground, or maybe some concrete planters that get moved into the space.
Quick build can mean can there’s a whole lot of things that count as quick build safety projects, only a handful of those currently exist in the city as examples.
But all of them are on the table going forward they’re all sort of on this menu of options in the transportation plan.
There are a bunch of quick build implementations that are already around the city that have been incredibly successful.
By luck, we actually got a presentation about quick build implementations just this past week at the transportation Commission meeting.
And I really recommend that you watch this part honestly I think it’s really interesting, we have a link to directly to that part of the video in the show notes.
And, but there were a couple of examples that I wanted to point out here one of them, the very first one that we had in the city was what are called gateway treatments it’s those.
Vertical signs that are stuck in the middle of the road at crosswalks that tell drivers to stop for pedestrians and they sort of create these narrowing lanes and people slow down.
Our first gateway treatments were on Seventh and it was part of an m dot study, so we got them for free, and it was incredibly effective and slowing traffic at the park on that part of the road and we’ve now put them out in a lot of different places, another one that I really love is.
MH: That wasn’t the villain for one.
MK: I know.
Surprise um the other one was this shoulder thing I believe on Barton that sort of narrows the roadway at the intersection so the road is kind of wide.
And then, but it’s not to four lanes there’s no bike lane, and these little there’s just like a lot of sticks sticking up that narrow the road which makes makes it.
So that cars have to slow down before they turn right basically.
And this came out of a trap like a neighborhood traffic calming study they’d gotten lots of neighborhood input and neighbors did not want this.
It was not acceptable to the neighborhood but the safety data that they had showed that they really had to do something at that intersection it was not Okay, as it was so they put it in in this sort of short quick build cheap way.
To see what would happen, and they got exactly one complaint from a neighbor everyone else really liked it and it was fine and so now it’s still there.
that’s quick build stuff The other thing about this that I really like is that it’s going to allow city staff to be more systematic about quick builds going forward we’ve talked in the past about how a lot of these.
improvements for pedestrians and bicyclists are often tacked on to whatever is already happening for cars without regard for how we are creating fully connected networks for pedestrians and bicyclists throughout the city.
Having this money and this plan means that staff can can be more intentional and and more systematic about the way we do quick builds, which is, I think, really exciting and what we really need to see in the city.
there’s another amendments that appeared.
Amendment 13.
MH: I just realized I hadn’t I didn’t put this on on the list, and I wanted to talk about it.
It was the amendment to remove one F T chief strategy executive position from the police budget.
And yeah this was a this was a civilian officer, or whatever they call it it’s somebody who works for the police officer, but it’s not a.
JL: Not sworn I think.
MH: Not a sworn officer.
And they were going to be the chief strategy executive to help them implement Community policing.
and
I think travis for dina proposed this.
MK: amendment was.
MH: listed out do not do not hire that person.
And it pans it past that’s right, so we will not be hiring that chief strategy is executive and.
I remember him saying things like you know that we have a big deficit and this cutting this position would be a good one place, because we could save money.
And also that we’ve been seeing international protests, for the past year about police about police brutality and maybe this isn’t the time in which we want to be investing heavily in new police officers.
I think they’re in the before these protests started there was kind of a push from the city council to.
move the police department in the direction of community policing.
And that was the big thing they wanted to that was the change that they wanted to make it’s never been entirely clear to me and it’s never been made, been made entirely clear to travis for dina who proposed this what exactly this this position would have been meant to do.
What exactly is meant by community policing and so what that was one of the things that he said was like this is an under specified thing or just asking for money.
We don’t exactly know why, but once that once we see a more solid plan will think about it, but until then let’s.
You know let’s not lock ourselves into it well there’s.
People all over the world, and here in Ann arbor demanding that we.
rethink how we do public safety, so i’m really glad that this past and we’re not going to be hiring that.
That chief strategy executive.
MK: yeah and I think I will say, and I said this last week to this is.
A step in the direction of spending less on policing and thinking differently about how we do public safety, but it overall, this budget, it feels like a very tiny step.
MH: in that direction, I play the police budget was increased this year over last year.
MK: yeah every every department was asked to model 5% cuts and the police are getting more so it’s not.
MH: And I limit the amount we’re spending on the police is $32 million.
MK: it’s still not great.
Basically, this was.
JL: This word at the general fund.
One third of our annual fund goes to police and not only that, but we got unsatisfactory answers from staff and Council members on why this part of the budget.
was effectively unchangeable right, like all of us asked Council members, what if we just did less and I, we did talk about this last week i’m trying not to reiterate i’d love to be able to say something new.
But i’m still shocked that everybody seems to throw up their hands and say man, what can you do well if you’re in elected office and it’s your job to make the budget like.
isn’t that your job isn’t that what you’re supposed to do, why, why did this not only not change, but the thing that we’re praising is that it didn’t suck quite as much as it could have.
As you had said we’ve been protesting for a year we’ve been asking for this for a year.
And as late as I want to say march 31 of last year, then and now sitting Council members said, there was no appetite to change the Council budget that wasn’t true, then it’s not true now, and yet we’re still not seeing the change and i’d like to understand what the disconnect is.
MH: Sometimes they work really hard to get public feedback and you know they hit they have public meetings about you know always should we spend $20,000 on a.
On a quick on a turn lane or something like that, and they get they get five.
responses and they go wow what a great feedback well they they’ve been getting a lot of public feedback about the local budget.
When it comes to police and.
I think that they should take that more seriously.
JL: So I would like to thank our podcast listeners, and you guys.
I learned more about municipal budgeting the last six months than I ever expected to know in my entire life and, as I said, i’m ending with the exact same amount of Community confusion that I started with.
But at least it’s about different things, so thank you everybody for coming along on this learning journey.
I also want to thank everybody who’s been filling out our survey, we appreciate every single response it’s super informative.
If you haven’t yet please go to Ann arbor af.com slash survey it’s quick it’s easy and it helps us get informed and involved on making our podcast great for you.
MH: Thanks to those of you who have supported us on our kofi. If you’d like to send us a few dollars to cover hosting, you can find us at www.ko-fi.com/annarboraf
And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor AF. We’re your cohosts Molly Kleinman, Jess Letaw, and myself, Michelle Hughes, and thanks to producer Jack Jennings, stepping in for Jarod Malestein. For questions about this podcast or ideas about future episodes, you can email us at annarborafpod@gmail.com. Theme music “I dunno” by grapes. Get informed, then get involved. It’s your city!
JL: Hi, Ann Arbor AFers. This is cohost Jess Letaw with one more thing. We’ve been talking at you for months – now we’d like to hear from you! What do you like about the pod? What do you wish we were doing more of, or better? What ideas do you have for future episodes? We’ve put up a survey for you to fill out. There’s a link to it in the show notes, or go to annarboraf.com/survey. That’s annarboraf.com/survey. Send us your thoughts, questions, feels and feedback on the pod so far; we want to hear it all. And as always, get informed, then get involved. It’s your city!