Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Tuesday, July 20th. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including water main breaks, city charter amendments, and a little light fangirling.
Transcript
JL: hi and welcome to Ann arbor E, F 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 just the top and my pronouns are she her.
MK: And i’m molly kleinman and my pronouns are she her.
JL: Michelle Hughes is taking a hiatus to focus our energy on the Jeff hanger recall effort, so the two of us are here to help you get informed and get involved it’s your city.
Before we get started, we have a website Ann arbor af COM.
you’ll find all the episodes show notes and transcripts thanks again to all of our supporters who donated to help pay for hosting and other costs we super appreciate you guys if you’d like to give us a few dollars, you can find us at coffee molly did we decide that it’s coffee.
MK: I assume, so.
We spelling it out anyway because it’s.
JL: Fair enough alright, so you can find us for a couple of dollars at K oh dash FM COM slash and our graph.
MK: Today we’re talking about the next City Council meeting coming up on Tuesday July 20 that’s a Tuesday it’s not on Monday this week.
we’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including water main breaks city charter amendments and a little light fam darling.
A quick process note we record this a few days before the Council meeting, which means there will likely be some changes to the agenda between now and then.
I think we’re going to start off with a something from the consent agenda that I was excited about this is CA six a resolution to approve a construction contract for universal access improvements at ARGO livery.
I just wanted to call this out because the Americans with Disabilities Act is 30 years old and, as a country we’re still really terrible about ensuring access.
Accessibility of our like all of our public spaces, both the ones, run by our governments.
And the ones, run by private entities and so i’m really glad to see the city just continuing to make most to improve accessibility and specifically access to the huron river.
for people with disabilities so Gala delivery apparently added an accessible easy launched in 2014, and this is going to be to.
Add similar accommodations to ARGO livery.
plus a bunch of other things, including accessible pathways and accessible picnic area accessible parking lot and some green infrastructure changes.
But more than half of the funding came from Michigan dnr and that’s department of natural resources and i’m just excited to see that these changes are coming to ARGO.
JL: That is exciting i’m I don’t know that I would have thought to pick up on all of that, on construction contract line from the consent agenda, so I really appreciate you highlighting now.
I am going to jump into many parts of the agenda with one single item and that’s the early least ordinance was that what yellow stands for so.
This shows up a bunch of different places, you will see it in public hearings under pH one you’ll see it under second reading ordinances under be one.
And you’ll see it under new businesses and first reading see one that’s a bit confusing I checked in with one of the co sponsors of all three of those pieces of legislation on the agenda.
councilmember travis Regina who very helpfully responded.
To me, doing the homework 20 minutes before the podcast and clarified that this ordinance has been kind of under construction, for the last three and a half months.
And the overlays of amendments and changes and attachments and agenda we’re starting to get a little bit Pal obsessed a like hard to read.
So what the co-sponsors did councilmember Nelson Council member to Regina and now with Council member at least a dish signing on as a co sponsor is that they’ve authored.
A new single very clean ordinance that incorporates all of the amendments that’s been that have been discussed so far and that’s really what’s going to be coming.
forward so the public hearing and the second reading are going to.
likely be permanently postponed, and then the first the one that’s coming out for first reading is going to be the one that moves forward most likely.
MK: that’s My guess, and you said all of the amendments, but I think it’s it’s just all the amendments that have passed right, so I think.
JL: There will, yes.
MK: There were some discussions at the last Council meeting I think councilmember briggs had introduced a possible amendment to shorten the amount of time, so this is the early leasing ordinances about.
Making landlords wait a certain number of days from the start of ELISE to when they can start showing the apartment to other prospective renters and.
That timeline had been one of the big sticking points was how how much time do we want to give renders balancing that across interests like when finals are and the different needs of undergrads or Grad students but um I believe it’s still at 210 days Is that correct.
JL: that’s correct.
MK: So that’s what this final one will still look like is the 210 days.
JL: yep yep so just kind of wanted to clarify that For those of you and I know that there are many of you who are closely reading legend Star and frustrated that things are showing up in multiple places.
For for all of you for all four of us, I just wanted to clarify that that’s what’s going on, so it is speaking.
As a renter and just generally as a human being i’ve been a pretty enthusiastic fan of this ordinance and I I understand why there’s been a fair amount of work on it.
i’m glad to see it closing in on being finalized, especially as we’re coming in, on lease beginning time in August and September.
Alright, so that’s the early leasing women’s yellow I wanted to talk a little bit about this proposed development um, so this is on the agenda public hearing to.
A new business under boards and commissions one, because this is coming out of a recommendation from planning Council or excuse me planning Commission.
New development at 300 West here on so folks who are familiar with the downtown, this is the corner, that the relaxation station is on which is for some reason, a light Teal blue adobe like one story airs while gas station.
MK: surrounded by a lot of landscaping like.
Right downtown.
JL: that’s right so there’s a sentence you didn’t expect to hear today all of those things together so that.
The relaxation station is actually on one property this developers combining three properties on that corner and combining.
Taking away three old buildings and put in putting in one new building, which will be a six story 95 room hotel that’s on the same corner as live.
The sushi restaurant NICO is right next door to that there’s an enormous amount of parking at the brown block and right across the street that actually.
it’s close to the corner of the M life building and where those condos are so just to give you a little sense of where it is.
I had fun digging into the planning Commission documents on this I enjoyed reading, so this is D to the zoning designation V2.
Which means it has it can incorporate a number of different uses it could be office, it could be residential it could be retail could be hotel in this case it’s hotel de to also references how tall, it can be this one can be up to 60 feet tall, and this one is.
So that was interesting I think my favorite part of the submission packet was the neighbor emails so as part of any new development, the developer is required to notify neighbors within a certain radius of the proposed development in this case, it was 500 feet.
Excuse me about what’s coming and invite their feedback sometimes they do meetings, sometimes they.
Actually I think they’re required to do meetings, but they also typically offer the ability to you know contact them via phone or email.
In this case I believe they were all emails and because 111 North Ashley the M like building has so many condos and apartments in there and there’s so many businesses in that area they sent out a ton hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of postcards.
Out of those postcards they got back five.
neighbor responses, but they were really thoughtful and I enjoyed reading the comments of people who care about where they live in work there was one.
person who owns a couple of retail buildings downtown or buildings with retail in downtown.
And said, as a fellow business owner, welcome to the neighborhood we’re excited to see a hotel here, because you guys are an important part of the 24 hour activation of a community which I don’t think i’d quite thought of in that way and I appreciated that framing.
Part of the reason that I bring it up, besides that it was just pleasurable to read and, if you want to just get your want nerd on for a moment, read the neighbor postcards it’s fun was.
One of my favorite suggestions and all of the suggestions brought forward we’re pretty reflective and thoughtful, which I appreciate it.
They said we’re excited to see hotel, you know we live downtown we’re excited to be close to people who are traveling through here.
Which is not something you often hear public meetings so that was nice and then they said, we hope that, as part of the activation of the site, you can include retail or restaurant or bar.
Which is great feedback and definitely a part of activating a site beyond you know one particular to kind of person one particular kind of us.
The response that came back from the developer was Thank you we really appreciate that we do like to do that, given the constraints of the way that they said it was given the constraints of the lobby.
And, given the constraints of the zoning we’re actually not able to do that, and the reason that lobby is a constraint is because, on this.
Okay explicitly there’s coming on this tiny ass site, they are required to provide 14 parking spaces if they did not have to require our have to provide 14 parking spaces on site.
Then we could have had something really fun there, like a little restaurant or a new little shop or something like that so yet again we are recommending on this podcast do away with parking minimums please, especially in the downtown but everywhere.
MK: Yes, 100% I will have a quick little sidebar, which is that if you are worried about the relaxation if that was a local business that you cared about.
They still exist, they have relocated to packer they’re right next door to the packer location of the August farm stuff they’ve got a cute they’re in like another cute little house he building and they’re still going strong so don’t don’t worry for the relaxation.
JL: molly are you telling us to relax about it.
MK: Yes, hey.
I see a lot on social media when some small older like small buildings are being taken over by big buildings and people worry about the businesses there’s.
there’s this you know ongoing discussion about the thing on packer that a thing on South Packard where there’s a big green like they said mean like.
it’s sort of a warehouse kind of store it’s not super public facing and people like well, but what about the green store and i’m like you have never been to the green store.
So that when there’s that reflective concerned about the business that was there before.
Your new life.
JL: that’s right relax maybe go to the relaxation station definitely so yeah we should have a new hotel on that corner in the next.
Knowing Ann arbor several years to decades, but no in a few years, we should have enough of new hotel in the corner so that’s exciting.
I also wanted to take a moment for no reason whatsoever, except that it makes me really happy to note that there is a resolution to appoint Jonathan overpack to that energy Commission.
I don’t think on this podcast yet at least we’ve taken any time to acknowledge individual appointments to commissions.
Oh, Jonathan so amazing so first of all he’s the dean of the University of michigan’s school environment sustainability so he’s a seasoning he has multiple degrees and earth sciences.
And he was recently appointed to the governor’s Council on climate solutions now, many of us on this podcast are on public boards interventions.
And many folks in the city.
Many folks in the city are as well, but I just I feel.
lucky for Ann arbor that somebody with this level of expertise and care for the thing he basically the purview of the Commission that he’s joining it is paying attention to things at a city level so i’m grateful i’m excited Jonathan high five to you.
Speaking of sustainability, I also wanted to take a minute, this is also a fan growing moment actually to talk about DC to which is the resin resolution to amend a to zero plan and as a reminder, this is Ann arbor carbon neutrality plan.
Specifically strategy six to implement sensors to monitor and strategies to manage heat or quality waterways and flooding.
i’m specifically speaking to the sensors part of this resolution and saying that i’m glad to see this.
It can be easy to miss the importance of benchmarking or measuring where you are in this moment in order to have a better sense of where you want to be.
And I just really can’t overstate the importance of measuring at the outset, so that you understand what improvement looks like, on the other side of it.
Doing that at the fifth in Detroit project, where the DDA the downtown Development Authority, excuse me executed a construction project intended to increase.
pedestrian and bicycle safety over there, in an area which is typically both fairly car heavy and fairly foot track of foot traffic heavy.
They did some initial measurements and showed that car compliance when pedestrians and other people were in the road was below 50%.
After the implementation of that project car compliance was between 95 and 98% like it was an enormous increase.
I also just had the opportunity to watch the netflix documentary this changes everything which is not about infrastructure at all it’s about the lack of gender parity in the film and television industries.
But there was an interesting story in there were fx a journalist had talked about the major networks failure to provide gender parity at every level.
Excuse me of the production of different kinds of media and one of the things that she called out was the network effects, saying that 89% of their stories were directed by white men 89%.
The network director who had self identified as a feminist was a little bit shocked at how poorly his network was doing and implemented fairly sweeping changes at every level of the business.
And within I want to say 16 to 18 months had gone from 89% white men lead productions to 49% led by women.
In that short amount of time, so again like measuring at the beginning, having the feeling that you’re doing well or doing poorly is not enough, we have to know.
And so you know, look at fx look at the Environment it’s all kind of the same thing, so I just wanted to call that out that i’m glad to see this.
MK: awesome and now i’m going to jump in with a few things that were lumping together here so we’ve got consent agenda to CA to which is a resolution to ratify.
An emergency change order in a contract with cadillac as fault, as well as DC three and DC for DC three in DC for are both.
Resolutions to put valid questions on the next ballot specifically to amend the city charter DC three is to amend the city charter around what we’re caught what they’re calling best value purchasing and the other one is related to it just says emergency but it’s specifically around.
Emerging bending so all three of these things are related to a water main break that happened on the what do we call that chunk of town around Jackson and they.
JL: Just the West side.
MK: By side.
The West side of.
Big water main break on June 22 a portion of the city was under a boil water advisory for 48 hours, it was it was bad news, and it was in an area where work was already being done.
And the criticism that we’ve been hearing from some of our leaders is that the way the city charter is set up, it requires it requires us to go with the lowest bid.
Regardless of the quality of that bid regardless of things like hiring practices, and so the goal of DC three would be to allow Council to make a decision based on the best value, which would include price but also things like quality.
DC for is because basically if there’s an emergency happened and we needed to change a contract really quickly in order to address it.
And so there may be situations where we want the city administrator to be able to approve.
A change to a contract, without going through the time it would take to get it before city council, and so this would allow for those kinds of approvals in cases of emergency.
And then that contract amendment is to deal with the existing contract that was involved in the water main break so all of this is around.
Better governance, I would say it was prompted by this specific emergency this specific failure, but I think.
These seem like good changes to me especially this idea of best value, making a best value determination, instead of like lowest bid determination.
And I just think it’s interesting that these are in the Charter, and that we have to, we have to actually take it to the voters to to change the city Charter in order to make.
These shifts that seem to me to be about governance in a way that I don’t I don’t know that I would have expected it to be in the city charter.
JL: right that feels kind of like a staff policy bullet.
MK: right but it’s okay it’s gonna have to go to the voters so and another I don’t know I guess would be this.
JL: phone number the yeah I think the all the Charter amendments that I saw on the Council gender excited to go to the ballot November 2021.
MK: Right so in November you’ll get a chance to vote on these these changes to the city charter.
And then Oh, am I doing DC five to.
JL: Know i’m going to do it, I realized that I had gotten to say that I wanted to talk about DC five, which is another.
Amendment to the city charter, this one is called the resolution to order election and to determine ballot question for amendment to the part of the city charter related to the $25,000 limit.
i’ll talk about this specific one in a moment, but I wanted to speak a little bit more broadly for just a second about why this is an ordinance about a valid question.
So the one of the checks and balances of our local democracy is that city council our elected officials politicians cannot change the city charter.
By and large, I think that this is a great thing, it means that the the elements of our city that are really core and central to how we operate.
Are not politically vulnerable in in ways that are easy to get I think that that’s fantastic it does mean that changes are really sticky they’re they’re hard to make they’re slow to make.
And typically voter education on charter amendments can be challenging because this is really in the weed stuff.
So what this means is that, if a charter amendment needs to be done, we have to go directly to voters to do it, and these molly did you say there were four charter amendments on this agenda.
MK: that’s right.
JL: yeah Okay, yes, so.
What Council is saying is that we have identified these opportunities in the city charter where our language does not currently reflect our practice or best practice three three charter Members, thank you.
And so what they’re doing is setting up a proposal for three ballot questions that would you know as we mentioned go to voters in November.
I don’t entirely understand the ballot process when it originates in city council, but it’s my understanding that if there’s a certain amount of.
Support on city council that it does not have to go out for like a signature gathering or petition process that it just goes straight from the Council table to the ballot and so that’s what this is.
MK: Great they have these seven vote limit their requirements, the.
JL: Minimum Okay, so not a not a straight majority but not super majority either interesting.
MK: yeah.
JL: We should call it a minor majority should have another fun name.
Right we’ll we’ll play with that later, so I just wanted to talk about that and part of the reason that i’m calling that out is that I think that’s a super interesting process or governance point.
I am reminded one of my civic heroes, as I was starting to get into politics and civics and trying to understand things said that the government when run well is really boring, and I just keep coming back to that.
As it really is kind of a metric of success that the more your eyes glaze over the more that people are doing things right, and so like I hope.
That I made you like check the time or scroll your instagram or like whatever for a second, because it means we’re doing things right so.
This particular amendment, I wanted to call it out, because i’m excited to see it because i’ve actually criticized this before on the podcast.
This specific charter amendment would raise the the contract amount or yeah contract amount essentially that city council has to review the current.
floor is $25,000, and this is saying that it would raise the floor to $75,000 the reason that I have criticized this is because we’re not talking about budget amendments we are talking about.
Work and dollars that have been approved, through the annual budget process which we have talked about extensively here.
So this is yet another time to put eyes on yet another time to fight over something that’s already been decided.
Councils, in my opinion, this is not a good use of council’s time, this is not a good use of staff time and, in general, it causes worse outcomes.
Even if, by and large, most of these are rubber stamped many of them aren’t and and that just it causes a fair amount of unpredictability.
On the staff side, which is detrimental to the operation of a smoothly running municipality so raising the floor from $25,000 to $75,000 I took a look into the staff memo around.
around this and what they were saying is that 48% fewer contracts would come to counsel in the consent agenda, which is awesome and it will also save close to 1000 hours of staff time over the course of the year.
MK: Which is phenomenal many hours.
that’s so many r’s.
JL: mm hmm.
MK: wow yeah.
JL: So just imagine the awesome new things we’re going to be able to get done with that reclaim time, so, in addition to raising the floor this ballot question would also allow Council in the future to adjust this amount related to inflation by.
ordinance rather than needing to do another charter amendment and I really like that they’re building this flexibility in initially I wasn’t sure about defining.
The reason for change as related to inflation, I felt like that was too restrictive, but actually I really like it, because what it means is, we can respond fairly flexibly.
To the natural flow of time and our economy if there is another reason to change the floor, they would have to go back to the voters and, on reflection, I actually am in support of.
That it does handicapped Council a little bit, but I think that that’s a productive check and balance.
MK: Right when we think about something like the approvals of lane changes which had been just a staff decision.
And then, a Council that wanted to block bike lanes basically took away that ability from staff, and it was really regressive and it slowed everything down and it took away, something that we needed, and so I can imagine.
i’m a certain kind of majority on Council wanting to rest back approval control over like every little budget thing because their goal is an.
Effectiveness they have other goals um so yeah I agree that that would be I think that’s a good way to do it next.
JL: So i’ll be curious to see my guess is that these charter amendments are going to move forward without a lot of.
I don’t want to say debate because they probably will talk about it, but my guess is, these are going to move forward with fairly broad support.
My curiosity at this point is i’m wondering how people are going to do voter education, because we don’t see charter amendments that often it’s confusing.
And these are minor in terms of the voters, but very consequential in terms of the city its operation.
And so, like getting to a yes is important and i’m just curious how folks are planning to reach out who they’re planning to talk to how they’re planning to say, this is what we’re doing and why we hope that the voters can support us i’m curious about that.
All right.
I think we did the things.
MK: yeah this was a pretty light agenda, although there are a lot of little things we wanted to talk about today yeah.
JL: Alright, so thank you to our listeners and those of you who have supported us on our we’re agnostic about it but let’s just call it coffee.
If you haven’t sent a few dollars and you’d like to to help us cover hosting you can find us at www K oh dash f.com slash and arbor af, and that is it for this episode of Ann arbor if.
We are your co hosts SMILEY kleinman and myself just lita and, of course, Michelle fuse and attention and thanks to our producer jack Jennings.
For questions about this podcast or ideas about future episodes you can email us at Ann arbor a def con and gmail COM get informed and get involved it’s your city.