Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Monday, December 21st, 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!
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 (00:00):
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 and local politics and policy governance and other civic good times. I’m Jess Lita, and my pronouns are she her.
Molly (00:15):
I’m Molly Kleinman and my pronouns are she her.
Michelle (00:19):
And I’m Michelle Hughes and my pronouns are she her.
Jess (00:22):
We are your co-host 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 21st, 2020. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items. It isn’t comprehensive or else this podcast will 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. Here we go.
Michelle (00:52):
All we want to talk, we’re go. I think we’re going roughly an agenda order here,
Jess (00:58):
Roughly an agenda order.
Michelle (01:00):
And so I think the first thing we have here is a communication from the city administrator, which is not something that’s going to have to be voted on, and I don’t think it’s even going to be discussed at the meeting, but it’s got some very interesting information that I would like Molly to tell us about.
Molly (01:21):
Thank you, Michelle. So this is the report back on the Healthy Streets Initiative, which was a sort of pandemic motivated reconfiguration of many of our city streets, most of them, but not all of them downtown. In order to make more space for people outside of cars to walk and to bike. Traffic volumes and cars plummeted, especially in the early months, but people were trying to get outside while also staying as far apart as possible. And so all around the city, the CH P parts of streets mostly, not whole streets, that was a different thing, but for Healthy streets, lanes of streets were opened to bikes and closed to cars, and the city collected a bunch of data on the healthy streets and
Michelle (02:16):
Most of the healthy streets
Molly (02:18):
On most of the healthy streets. And depending on what the point of the Healthy Streets was, but even D, no matter what the point was, I would say that they were a success. They got a ton of use, they got a level of use that was surprising even to staff in some locations
Michelle (02:39):
It, and so what they did was they put barrels out and they put barricades out and they would block off a lane of traffic and be like, this is now a bike lane. And then they’d like on a four lane street or whatever, they’d block off one of the lanes and then that would be a bike lane, and then the cars can share the other side of the road.
Jess (03:06):
So perhaps and an or foreshadowing some later frustration. There was some frustration on the early end of the project because as Molly mentioned, this was a pandemic response, and yet most of the projects didn’t get installed. I know the downtown ones didn’t get installed until August 27th, and I think the rest of them were kind of towards the latter end of August where folks who started working on this started working on this in May and June when the weather was really nice when school was out, when April, everything was shut down. Excuse me, April, thank you.
Molly (03:37):
The city staff, city staff had a report, had basically a proposal for how to do this in April. And because of delays by City Council, mostly didn’t, we lost a lot of months when we could have had more space on our streets
Michelle (03:57):
And then we had to sit there and read on Twitter about how Paris was doing this and all these other cities were doing it. It was so amazing.
Jess (04:04):
Got 74 miles of street,
Michelle (04:07):
Just we could then people could be writing cool Twitter posts about us.
Molly (04:16):
It was a fru frustrating process to try and get, to get the city to do a really very limited and constrained version of what some cities were doing on a much larger scale. It was not perfect. The deployment of Healthy Streets was bumpy in a few different ways, and I think that’s acknowledged in this report that the council is going to see. Jess and I both got different presentations on this report yesterday. I heard about it on Transportation Commission. Jess heard about it through the Downtown Development Authority. Is that what the A
Jess (04:49):
Is? Yes. That’s what the authority is. And since this is the first time we are mentioning some of the hats we wear, now would be a great time to say that opinions expressed on this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of the organizations we represent.
Molly (05:01):
Correct. That is also true for me,
Michelle (05:04):
And I’m not any sort of fancy person, so I just saw the report when it was released on the agenda to the public.
Molly (05:13):
Right. So the report is really interesting, and I
Michelle (05:18):
Guess I could have paid attention to the, I guess you can also pay attention to the agendas of the Transportation Commission or the dda. I just didn’t
Molly (05:28):
A little much, I feel like it’s much, but I do want to acknowledge that they were not perfect and that there is a lot of room for improvement. A big issue I think was we used barrels, barrels, and cones mostly to create these bike lanes. And so they looked like construction people don’t like construction. People didn’t always recognize what they were seeing. I think people on bikes didn’t always realize that that space was for them. The markings weren’t always as clear as they could be, but at the same time, it was really adjustable because it was all temporary. And so some of the places that had some of the most confusion, they were able to tinker with them and make them better over the course of the deployment, which I think is one of the real values of doing these kinds of tactical urbanist installations as a test run. But we don’t have on, oh, go ahead.
Michelle (06:21):
Oh, I noticed that on Broadway, on the Broadway Bridge, instead of doing Doing the barrel thing, they had little, what do you call those? Ballards or whatever. They had these flexible plastic and they were placed there. Instead of having movable barrels, they glued them down. I didn’t realize they were glued down until I read the report. And I think that was a little bit more inviting in terms of for the bike people and a little less frustrating for the car people, which is not to say that the car people in on the Broadway Bridge were not frustrated.
Molly (06:59):
They were mad. So I could talk about this for our entire episode. I’m not going to do that. The other thing that I just want to highlight is that we mentioned this already, that the use of the Healthy Streets was surprising even to staff and how many people were using them. And these are situations where it was the summer, the population of Ann Arbor was hollowed out. The commu commutes were way down because so many people were still working from home and lots of folks weren’t leaving their houses at all. And we still had, in most cases, over a hundred people a day using these installations. And in some cases they could do sort of pre-install counts, but in a lot of places there is no pre-install count because there was no facility for bicycles before. And so in a temporary, messy looking, confusing version, we still had a lot of use. And there, if you build it, they were will come. It’s not alwa, it’s not always true. But this was clearly a situation where it was, we built it and people found it and people were using it. And I just imagine how much more use would bike lanes, protected bike lanes in some of these places if we could do it in a more permanent way and at minimum find it a more attractive way to do it starting in the next spring.
Michelle (08:34):
And another thing that the opposing side of the people who were against these bike lanes were people who were driving and they were mad that the bike lanes were going to, that they thought that the bike lanes were causing all these additional traffic delays and stuff like that. Well, the report shows that they didn’t, and what delays there were pretty light. And if it hadn’t been a pilot project, if these had been a more permanent installation, then they could have adjusted traffic light timings elsewhere that would’ve alleviated those problems. But,
Jess (09:18):
And what Michelle’s referring to about it not being a problem, the team working on this recorded 30 to 92nd delays twice a day. And I don’t mean twice a day for a period of time, I mean twice a day. So I, it’s like Molly said earlier, we’re Michiganders, we’re cued to be irritated when we see a construction barrel. And I think we came ready to fight when we saw streets not behaving, we’re used to streets behaving. But in actual fact, like I said, that the data doesn’t support that there were ongoing problems.
Molly (09:54):
Right. And I think that that was one of the really striking things is that there were very few delays. The delays that did happen were pretty much all during the afternoon, peak rush hour time. A lot of them were fixable and they were not anywhere near at the scale that you would’ve expected if you had read the comments on Reddit or next door about the Healthy Streets. People in cars, especially people who don’t live in Ann Arbor who just drive through or to Ann Arbor, a lot of those folks hated healthy streets and I don’t care, frankly,
Jess (10:34):
There’s a line in the sand. Yeah,
Michelle (10:38):
Yeah. I mean the streets need to be safe and it’s not okay to put people’s lives at risk because you want to move 90 seconds faster.
Jess (10:51):
I will say in talking to again, the team that worked on this and some of the DDA staff, what they said, so in the survey responses to the Healthy Streets initiative of the d a respondents two thirds had used the projects as a cyclist or a pedestrian, and one third had either not used it or used it as a driver of the two thirds, I believe over 80% found them safer, more convenient. I’m just going to go back to safer again, both because of the pandemic and how dangerous it is to move around on streets. But there was reasonable criticism. Like Molly said, it wasn’t without bumps, but largely people were like, yeah, this is good. Let’s keep it going in the, the overwhelming criticism came as I mentioned, from either folks who didn’t use the projects or users in cars and staff noted that when they had the opportunity to connect with people beyond comments on social media, which typically took the form of email or phone exchanges, that most people when they heard more about the project’s values actually came around where they were like, okay, this is still a little bit frustrating for me, but I see that what we’re trying to do is build a safer community for more people.
Jess (12:11):
So maybe try calling somebody and instead of yelling at them, say, Hey, I really don’t understand this. Help me understand, which I feel like is good advice for a lot of different areas. So speaking of helping us understand, Michelle, I see that there are a couple of things in the consent agenda that stood out to you,
Michelle (12:30):
Right? Yeah. So one of the things that I think about is police and how I wish that we had a better way of providing public safety that we could direct some of the money that we spend on policing towards other things like affordable housing and the things that people need. So I noticed there are two police things here on this agenda, and I’m going to start by talking about CA 15. So that’s a police union contract with a police union that I was not previously aware of. It’s called the police, what is it? The police special services or something like that. And it’s the, it’s civilians who work in an administrative capacity with the police. So probably working on this union contract isn’t going to be as important as when we actually worked with the police officers contract last year, but I think it’s something that needs to be looked at. I don’t really have the expertise to understand how important it is to look at this and how it needs to be changed to, or if it needs to be changed in order to serve public safety interests. But I want to call at the attention to in case somebody does know what they’re talking about and can look at that. That’s 15. The police special services bargaining contract.
Michelle (14:24):
Yeah. The other thing that’s on there that’s about the police is ca nine, which is to spend $70,000 on some equipment that I don’t understand. And I know we’ve seen a police expenditure like this on every council meeting, and it’s not just couple, just
Molly (14:48):
That 70,000. It’s actually part a six year quote for, I think it’s, so it’s dashboard cameras, evidence.com, cloud storage and like wifi offload hardware, it sounds like it’s dash cams and all of the attendance storage for vehicle for the patrol vehicles. And this stood out to me just, yeah, we are seeing some big expenditure for the police in every single council meeting. And these are not opportunities to actually address defunding the police. That’s something that has to happen in the budget process. But we are now, as we noted earlier, we’re now in budget season, so this is actually in the larger scale. This is the time. But these things come to council routinely in part because the police are such a big part of our budget, so much of our spending is related to the police department, and it’s something that really stood out to me as I started looking at these agendas. More regularly,
Jess (15:52):
We’ll be doing an episode coming up soon on understanding the budget season. I often say that in activism it’s hard to take you seriously until you’re talking about dollars. It’s important to talk about the values that drive the change you want to see, but you also have to understand if you want to actually impact that change, you have to understand the bottom line because the dollars are the pressure points. So what we’re going to get into in the budget episode, which I’m super looking forward to recording with you guys, is how to actually affect the change that you want to see. And it’s a pretty invisible point in the council calendar. I really don’t think most folks have budget season on their radar, but it, it’s a great time to advocate with your council members, with your commission members. This is the time that staff are putting together their budgets for the next fiscal year, the time to make the change. So we kind of wanted to highlight that, yes, these purchases are on there, but even if you were to call and yell at council really, really loudly, nobody’s going to take this off the agenda, but budget season is coming up and we can talk about it then.
Michelle (16:58):
Yeah, just last Monday, the city council had a working session where they kind of talked about their strategic plan and stuff like that. So if you look on the city council calendar and find that meeting, you can read the city’s strategic plan and give feedback about it.
Jess (17:15):
What is the strategic plan for? Is that for a calendar year?
Michelle (17:20):
I couldn’t even follow it. It was,
Jess (17:26):
And there’s civics folks,
Michelle (17:31):
But if you’re a super submission, then you can check it out. Very good.
Jess (17:38):
Well, the thing that I saw on the consent agenda that stood out to me is just a little tidbit. There’s a contract going to the Shelter Association of Washington County for shelter and warming center services over the winter. And I just want to call out that we will also be having an episode coming up soon on warming shelters. So stay tuned to Ann Arbor AF for more exciting content. All
Michelle (18:01):
Right. Yeah, this is moving through
Jess (18:03):
The agenda.
Michelle (18:04):
This is the thing that we work on, the warming center stuff that we do just about every winter, but I’m real concerned about, we had the hotel that was specifically for putting people who are at risk of covid 19 so that they didn’t have to be so packed in together and stuff like that. And that hotel is going to go away as they get remodeled. And so what’s going to happen? Where are we going to put people? That’s what I’d like to talk about in a future episode
Jess (18:39):
For sure. I can’t wait for that to come up. All right. So getting into the ordinances, I will start the first one, c1, which is an ordinance to amend sections. And then your welcome listeners, because I’m not going to read off all these numbers. But anyway, it’s an id. It’s a proposal to go back and revise sections of our zoning code. And I wanted to call out one particular thing in here that stood out to me about ADUs. Folks who are familiar with my work know that I’m very interested in housing. In fact, I’m going to talk about it at least twice more in this very episode. But ADUs or accessory dwelling units are essentially sub rentals within a main house or on a property with another home. And I’m super interested in ADUs and how we can make more of them possible just because I have a lot of family in New Orleans, Louisiana. I am so used to carriage apartments and basement part apartments and garden apartments, and I think they’re charming and also often cheap. And I wish Ann Arbor had more of those. So anyway, they’re amending the ADU code. I got excited and I went and took a look at it, and it is an extremely boring routine paperwork update that functionally changes nothing. So that’s my update on ADUs.
Michelle (19:59):
Wow. Wow.
Jess (20:04):
All right. I think I have the next one. C3 is a rezoning proposal for another Lockwood development. Lockwood Lockwood as a developer could probably get their whole own episode, which we won’t necessarily do at this point. But I just want to note that they are proposing me a new development on Ellsworth. And this is just for the rezoning from R one C, which is one of the single five single family designations that we have. We have R one, a, R one B, et cetera, all the way up to E. And then this is getting rezoned to P U D or planned unit development. And typically what that means is that the city and the community can leverage this change request for more benefit from the developer. And that can look like a lot of different things. It can look like a direct contribution from the developer to different funds in the city. The the last one that we saw in the last episode, the developer made a contribution to parks. It could look like some other community benefit planting trees, for example, or some kind of water medication. So the P U D doesn’t commit them to specific changes, but because they’re making a request, it opens up the city and the community to be able to make those requests. So that is of note.
Michelle (21:25):
And on this one, they’re offering significant contribution of affordable housing, which will be subsidized and below market rate and available to people who are making 60% a m I or lower. And this development is going to be a senior living. And it was previously, a couple years ago, it came before city council and City council rejected it at a different location. And so they’re coming back now at this new
Jess (22:02):
Location. And what a lot of neighbors had said at the time was, I’d be fine with this anywhere else in the city. So Lockwood is like, got it.
Molly (22:12):
And now they’ve tried a new location in the city and there’s a new bunch of neighbors who say, I’d be fine with this Anywhere
Michelle (22:19):
Else. In anywhere else. Yeah, it’s a thing. It’s, yeah, it’s a problem with the way we do development that we give special veto powers to the nearby neighbors. They’re the only ones that get the postcards. They’re the ones who get special meetings where they can talk about their grievances. And then we don’t get to, so it’s kind of like a divide and conquer type situation. We can’t just be like, Hey, okay, where should we put Lockwood? It has to be a specific proposal on the agenda, and then all the neighbors get a chance to say no.
Jess (23:00):
And I think this is one of the challenges of how Americans do housing, which is we say sometimes that housing is a human right when in fact housing is a commodity. And that’s how we treat it. And we also treat it a lot as an amenity, specifically if we are housed, we get veto power over whether other people get to be housed or not. What Michelle’s referring to about they get the postcards. That is a requirement of community engagement for a new developer. Developers are required to send postcards to neighbors within a specific radius, typically between 500 and 1500 feet of a given project, which is nice in that they get informed, but then the system is really set up to ask the neighbors it, are you going to say no? Now? Are you going to say no? Now? Are you going to say no now and not How can we deliver housing?
Jess (23:52):
Or more generally, how can we deliver a good project? I feel so strongly that I wish we understood better that housing is actually a system. We need apartments and cheap garden apartments and big fancy homes and senior housing, and we need all of these things in order to have the same kind of diverse community that we want to have. We need diverse housing for diverse people. So in some ways, I empathize with the, or I’ll say I’ll sympathize with the neighbors and not wanting their neighborhood to change in scary and unexpected ways. But at the same time, the argument, I’d be fine with this anywhere, it’s just not here. Starts not holding water when it’s used by every neighborhood.
Michelle (24:38):
And also they come up, each neighborhood has a specific reason that they don’t like it. And so it’s really easy to get bogged down in the specific reason that a neighborhood gives. Well, of course we can’t have it here because the reasons that they say, but if it wasn’t in that, it would be something else. I think there’s
Jess (25:00):
A lot of, and the two most common reasons, traffic and water. So if you’re ever concerned about a new development in your neighborhood and your concern is traffic or water, maybe call city staff and ask them questions. Say, tell me more about this project and see if there’s another concern. Because our traffic engineers and our water engineers typically do a pretty good job at keeping us safe.
Michelle (25:23):
You’re talking about storm water and
Jess (25:25):
Yes,
Michelle (25:26):
And I know at the last time Lockwood came around it, the concern was the gelman plume because it was near the epicenter of the gelman plume and staff and state officials looked at it and they didn’t think that it would be a problem. And they showed the scientific documents of why they didn’t think it would be a problem. But I don’t know. They’ve got the new neighbors, the new neighbor, the new Lockwood neighbors have a different problem this time. And
Jess (25:56):
So we’ll see how that goes.
Michelle (25:57):
Something’s got to get built somewhere. We won’t have any new housing. Right.
Molly (26:02):
And actually this, we can sort of transition to the other rezoning on the agenda that I hope will be less controversial. I wanted to bring up that we made some guesses on our first episode going into the council meeting about what would pass and what would not. And we were wrong about a bunch of those guesses. And so I’m not going to try to make a guess about how this is going to go.
Jess (26:25):
That’s not the lesson I learned. The lesson I learned is keep guessing someday you’ll be right.
Molly (26:31):
I like that lesson. I believe that at this point, this other rezoning is less controversial than the Lockwood one. It’s a 2111 Packard, and it’s to change the zoning of a big empty parking lot from parking to fringe commercial or commercial fringe, fringe commercial, which is what the adjoining building on that lot already is. And there’s a developer with a really great plan to build an apartment building there three stories, so not super huge, not out of line with the rest of the neighborhood with ground floor retail. And there’s a lot of really thoughtful things about this development that makes me hopeful that it will be less objectionable. The parking is in the back. So the building fronts on Packard, and by putting parking in the back, it means that for people walking or biking along that stretch, it’s a really easy hop into the whatever that retail’s going to be.
Molly (27:34):
Along that same stretch, you can contrast that with York, which is a really wonderful neighborhood institution in a little strip with parking in the front. And so the people parking at York are constantly in conflict with pedestrians walking through there and with bikes going by there. And it also really sucks if you’ve parked there because then you’re backing out onto Packard into traffic. And so those mistakes aren’t there on this other one. There is in fact no driveway going out onto Packard, which means that there are, it’s, it will actually reduce the number of conflict points between pedestrians and bicycles and the cars coming in and out. So I’m hopeful it’s going to go through. I think it’ll be a great addition to a stretch of Packard that is really largely empty parking lot right now. So I’m hopeful, but I’m not making a guess.
Jess (28:32):
And I also wanted to pick up on something that both Molly and Michelle said. Molly, in reference to your guesses and Michelle to your comment earlier about fancy people, I just want to highlight that part of the reason we’re doing this podcast and that we’re talking to you and that we hope you find it helpful, is that there’s really no such thing as perfect in any of this. There’s no such thing as a perfect understanding. You’re never going to get all the way to the bottom of any particular barrel of monkeys you dig into. But that’s okay. Just pay attention, just show up, just ask questions. Just connect with other people who are interested in the things that you’re interested in and you’ll start to have a bit better context. So I just wanted to say that we are modeling imperfect participation for you. We’re all welcome.
Molly (29:19):
Good work.
Jess (29:21):
I feel so
Molly (29:22):
Much better about not
Jess (29:23):
Being fancy. Now you’re totally fancy. Oh my gosh, you have more meetings under your belt than all the rest of us combined.
Molly (29:32):
I
Jess (29:32):
Would get to inform you. You’re fancy. I just
Molly (29:35):
Uhoh.
Jess (29:41):
And the last thing on the agenda for me today was DC one, which is a resolution to direct amendments to city code regarding short term rentals. And I wanted to bring this up because I think this is a really nice placeholder for a larger argument that is often being had. So short term rental rentals is a typically euphemism for Airbnb. So vacation rental, occasionally B R B O. But the concern that people have is around Airbnbs. So what this is is something pertaining to our local code about that. This particular resolution doesn’t interest me a whole lot. What super interests me is the community conversation and specifically the community argument around Airbnbs. And I think it’s really interesting that we’re typically using proxy arguments to get at the thing we hate. So when you hear folks and Molly and Michelle, tell me if you understand differently, but when you hear people saying, oh, I don’t like Airbnbs, I wish we didn’t allow them in the city, typically what we hear is they’re noisy people. The owners are never home. There’s cars parked in weird places and it’s TA taking housing out of the market and making Ann Arbor housing more expensive. And typically the real sensitivity is, I don’t know those people and I want to know my neighbors, but we use all these proxy arguments instead of actually saying that. So that’s the interesting thing to me about short-term rentals.
Michelle (31:19):
I definitely hear a lot of people talking about the housing market situation when it comes to short-term rentals and they say, oh, these short-term rentals are taking housing off of the market and turning them into short term things where they could be apartments for regular people to live in or whatever. And what I think is if we want more housing in the city, let’s build more housing. If that’s the problem, it wouldn’t be a big deal to have this many Airbnbs if we also had enough housing that housing was reasonably that if it was reasonably priced and not too expensive.
Molly (31:56):
And I think the other piece of that, cause I think that’s absolutely right, and the other piece of it is that short term rentals are causing measurable negative impacts on some cities where there are so many of these short term rentals that they’ve taken enough housing off the market that housing prices are going up, there’s house like housing availability is going down. But that’s not the situation in Ann Arbor. We don’t have that many of them. And many of the ones that exist are people live there, people move out of their house on football weekends eight times a year and rent it out, and the rest of the time they live in that house, it’s not having the same kind of effects that we’re having. We’re seeing in places like San Francisco and New York. And so it’s really unfair to take that argument and assume that it applies here. I think that’s thing we see with housing discussions here in general is people bring arguments that aren’t relevant to the Ann Arbor context.
Jess (33:05):
That that’s a really good point. I know of one study in New York, I think it was Zillow actually that did it, that demonstrated I think a 5% in increase in rental prices specific to Airbnb restricted rentals. They have a housing market that allow, that’s large enough to allow for that kind of sophisticated analysis. They are a city that is hugely attractive for tourism culture and professional reasons and others as well. So in New York, I think you can expect to see that kind of dislocation at scale. But even then a 5% increase while not great because everybody’s already paying too much in rent and for their mortgage, it, it’s not as terrible as it could be. More compelling to me is a study released by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, either this year or last year, demonstrating data that cities below a certain size were not being adversely impacted in terms of rental availability or affordability just because their markets aren’t big enough to have Airbnb actually dislocate anything meaningful. And I think that one got almost no airplay at all, and it was much more relevant to the Ann Arbor market. So on that thrilling note, I think that was everything that we wanted to cover from the agenda. This was a pretty mild one. Well,
Michelle (34:28):
Yeah. So there’s actually, okay, there’s one more thing on the agenda that I wanted to mention. Oh, about not, I don’t even especially want to talk about that agenda item, but I want to talk about it highlights some, it highlights a couple issues I want to bring up. So there’s a thing on the agenda about electric vehicle parking for electric vehicles. And what it does is that in when a new development is being built, if this passes, if a new development is being built, then we currently have parking minimums. New developments have to have a certain number of parking spaces per bedroom or per unit or whatever. And this new ordinance would have it be so that a certain percentage of those new parking spaces have to be for electric vehicles or have to be upgradable to be for electric vehicles at some point in the future. And it sets different percentages of, okay, these ones have to be ready now. These ones have to be ready in that kind of thing.
Michelle (35:40):
And this whole thing only applies to site plans where the city council has to approve the new site plans. So the reason I bring this all up is because when we said this was a pretty mild agenda, I kind of was hoping that when we had new people on the city council, that we would see a whole bunch of changes to make the city more affordable coming out. And we’ve had two meetings go by where nothing earth shattering, no one, no, no one’s trying to make any visionary improvements. And at the very first meeting with the new city council composition, we had the thing about transit oriented development. And I was like, okay, we are on track to be, we’ve got visionary leadership, they’re ready to put stuff forward. But then the last next meeting and then this one, we haven’t seen anything like that. And I just hope that people aren’t pulling their punches. Cause I would like to see, there’s two things, two specific things in here that I think could be affected. Parking minimums, something that I want to see. I want us to eliminate parking minimums. I want it to be up to the developer to build as much or as little parking as they want. And we don’t have to say, oh, you didn’t put in enough parking. If they don’t want to put in any more parking, that’s fine.
Michelle (37:21):
The market is changing. People are, I think, and the market should change even if it’s not to be less car oriented and more biking oriented. But there have been some developments recently where they built downtown, the parking minimum said they had to build so many things. And then hardly any residents actually rented out those spaces because all the students who live downtown, they just want to walk and bike to things. But because we have
Jess (37:48):
These, and it’s worth noting in the carbon neutrality plan that was passed, was it earlier this year? This year has been a thousand years along the carbon neutrality plan that was passed whenever it was one of the central tenants of getting us to our carbon goals is a 50% reduction in vehicle miles traveled. That is a radical shift in our behavior around an approach to cars. And we can’t get it with one single strategy. We’re going to have to come at it a lot of different ways. So Michelle’s point about not mandating, not mandating parking, and not only expecting people to continue to drive the way that they already have, but anticipating that they won’t. Like you were saying, Michelle, that’s a part of visionary leadership and we need to get and stay there.
Molly (38:35):
And this actually brings us this, I’m going to bring it back to Healthy Streets because this came up at the Transportation Commission meeting last night when we were talking about what we wanted to recommend to city council. And the Transportation Commission ultimately recommended that city council should direct staff to do it again. And they should direct staff to look for ways to make some of these changes permanent. And one of the people at the meeting brought up concern, concern, they’d heard from a lot of concerned people who felt like the city was just trying to make driving miserable and that wasn’t going to be enough to get people to ride bikes. And so the question was to staff, do you know, feel like you have the data that you need to recommend this? And our staff are very careful about how they framed things. But I thought it was really brilliantly framed, which was not about the data, but about saying if we are a city committed to these carbon neutrality goals, we have to make big changes. We have to exactly reduce those car trips by 50%. And we’re not going to do that if we keep doing the same thing.
Molly (39:55):
We have to do some things radically differently. And one of those things has got to make it possible. We have to make it possible for a lot more people to get around safely, comfortably enjoyably not in cars. And that’s going to mean taking some space away from cars because there are no places to get that space from in many situations. So the drivers are going to be pissed. But we have, as a community committed to these goals, we have committed to this radical reduction in carbon. We have committed to zero deaths and we can’t get there if we don’t do anything.
Jess (40:35):
Molly’s plug for action.
Michelle (40:39):
And so that’s why I’m so frustrated that every meeting that goes by that doesn’t have something that gets us there. Yeah, it’s time wasted. And it’s like, what are we waiting for? We elected these people to do this stuff. Do
Jess (40:53):
It. Yeah. So last time we finished up our meeting saying each of us had one thing that we wish was on the agenda. I think all three of us, what I’m hearing us say is Give us more. Give us more.
Michelle (41:05):
Yeah. We want
Molly (41:06):
More stuff then just do more stuff. Please.
Jess (41:09):
Yes. Do
Michelle (41:09):
More stuff. Yeah. Are they like waiting for this to these things to be less contentious because that’s not going to happen. Like
Jess (41:20):
Well, and let, let’s bring the listeners up to speed. So Michelle and I and Molly, all three of us had kind of an offline conversation ahead of getting ready for today’s episode and where we talked about this exact thing. And the nice thing is that Molly and Michelle, or excuse me, Michelle and I view this slightly differently. Michelle is like metal to the metal. And I come at this a little bit more measured where I feel like this council is trying to be more careful of staff in terms of respecting the work that they already have on their plate and the recommendations that they’re making. Where for the last few years, it’s felt a bit like counsel has said, let’s make X, Y, Z changes, and then two weeks later, let’s make more radical change. There was a lot of radical change on the table, which meant there was a lot of thrashing and of often not a lot of follow through. So the story that I tell myself is that this council is being more measured in the revolution that they’re bringing. But really, time will tell. And I actually completely agree with Michelle that I’m hoping by the end of next month council, this new council will have been seated for almost three months at that point. I do, I want to see a little more revolution in my city council.
Michelle (42:38):
So I think that’s my action plan for this week is I’m going to call up my city council representatives, Lisa Dish, Jeff Haner, and say, Hey, we want stuff. We want stuff to happen. Give us less. Give rid of parking minimums. Do something.
Jess (43:00):
Yeah. But I think that takes us all the way through the agenda. Anything else before we sign off from you guys?
Michelle (43:08):
Nope, I think I’m good.
Jess (43:11):
Well, thanks for listening to Ann Arbor, AF thank you to Molly Kleinman, Michelle Hughes, and myself, Jess Lita and our producer Jared Malign. 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 and finish.
Michelle (43:34):
Yay,
Jess (43:37):
Jared, you need go all the way through. Thanks. Yeah, thank you guys.