Today we are talking about Ann Arbor’s next election, with applications for absentee ballots going on now and then voting happening from early October through November 2nd. The ballot has been finalized; there are no candidates, only four proposals, all pertaining to amending Ann Arbor’s city charter.
Proposed Ann Arbor City Charter Amendments:
– Proposal A: Best Value Purchasing
– Proposal B: Ranked Choice Voting for the Election of City Officers
– Proposal C: Emergency Procurement
– Proposal D: The $25,000 Dollar Limit
Tl;dr: the pod votes YES on all four.
How to vote:
– by mail: request a mail-in ballot
– by dropoff: drop-off a mail-in ballot at the ballot drop-off box at City Hall (301 E. Huron St)
– in person (early): in the City Clerk’s office at City Hall, M-F 8am-5pm, excluding lunch breaks 12-1pm and holidays, early October through Tuesday, Nov. 2nd;
– in person (at the polls): Tuesday, Nov. 2nd, 7am-8pm; find your local polling place
– read your ballot in advance: here
Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter and Facebook, or catch cohost Michelle with music by women (and the occasional Council recap) on wcbn.org Tuesdays 6am-9am. And hey, if you wanted to ko-fi us a few dollars to help us with hosting, we wouldn’t say no.
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.
Molly (00:05):
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 Molly Kleinman, and my pronouns are she her. I’m Michelle Hughes, and my pronouns are she her.
Jess (00:24):
And I’m Jess Lita, and my pronouns are she her.
Molly (00:27):
We are your co-hosts to help you get informed and get involved. It’s your city. Let’s jump in.
Jess (00:39):
Today we’re talking about Ann Arbor’s next election with applications for absentee ballots going on now and then voting happening from early October through November 2nd. The ballot has been finalized. There are no candidates, only four proposals, three of which pertain to amending, excuse me, all of which pertain to amending Ann Arbor’s City Charter, the nuts and bolts about this year’s election. IT applications for absentee ballots are going out now and then mailin voting and early voting will start in early October and go through Tuesday, November 2nd on that day, Tuesday, November 2nd. Polling places will be open, 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM If you’re voting by mail, we’ll put in an application for an absentee ballot, the link to receive that application in the show notes. You can also vote early in person at the city clerk’s office at city Hall Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM excluding holidays and the lunch hour 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM. You can also drop in your mail-in ballot at the absentee ballot Dropbox at city hall at any time. Absentee ballot applications scenario. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Exactly’s
Molly (01:57):
A scenario November two. That’s,
Jess (01:58):
That’s what? November two. Yes. November two. Thank you. November
Molly (02:01):
Two
Jess (02:02):
Absentee ballot applications are already being mailed out to people on the permanent absentee voter list. I got mine a couple weeks ago to get on that list again, we’ll drop a link in the show notes. A reminder that the US mail recommends at least seven days lead time for mail-in ballots. So with all that, we’ll get into the proposals and Molly’s kicking us off.
Molly (02:25):
All right. So first we have proposal a Ann Arbor City Charter Amendment related to best value purchasing. We first covered this amendment in the episode 31 of the podcast. The language of proposal A is shall section 14.3, subsection D of the charter B, a amended to require the city to award contracts for supplies, materials, or public improvements to the bidder that is deemed the best value to the city rather than the lowest responsible bidder. The short version of the reasoning behind this amendment is that it would allow the city to consider things like the percentage of local workers who a contractor is hiring the environmental record of the contractor, what kinds of job safety protocols they use, and other things related to the quality of the work and the value for the city beyond dollar amounts. So the current ordinance says basically the same thing, except that the contract shall be awarded to the lowest responsible bidder.
(03:32):
And so this is distinction between lowest responsible bidder and best value bidder. So there’s a little bit of history with this one. In July of 2020, the city revised this same ordinance. So the, it’s the ordinance for purchasing, contracting, and selling procedure to give more definition around what a responsible bidder was. So lowest responsibility, responsible bidder was already in the charter, but they wanted to expand on what responsible meant. And this was a change that was supported by one of the construction unions in Michigan. And they made this change to expand this definition to think about things like, as I said before, local percentage of local workers and union workers and things like that. However, the city charter requires that each contract be to the lowest responsible bidder. And so my understanding is that the emphasis has been on the lowest and not on the responsible part.
(04:41):
And so city staff have been hamstrung in their ability to actually enact this responsible bidder policy that was first passed last year. And so as a result of this lowest bidder situation, there have been problems with work quality in recent years in the city, including some pretty high profile things that have happened in the last year, including there was a bad water main break on maple earlier this year, and there have been a bunch of sewage spills. So in short, the goal of this charter amendment is to give the city more flexibility to hire, to choose contractors based on quality and not just price. This is a pretty nuts and bolts governance kind of a charter amendment, but our take is to vote yes. So yes, we should change this rule so that we can hopefully have some higher quality work and fewer water main breaks.
Michelle (05:42):
I also wanted to mention there was a at least one contract this past year where the city council saw it go through and they said, Hey, wait a second, how we end up awarding this contract to this bid, to this bidder because we have this responsible bidding policy where they have to be to do meet this and this and requirement in order to qualify as a responsible contractor. And the staff was like, well, they filled out the questionnaire. They said they’re not responsible, but they filled out the questionnaire and that meets the goals. And so staff kind of didn’t feel like they had the leeway to recommend a different contractor. And at that time, the city council did decide to override the staff recommendation and award the contract to somebody else. But this makes sure that that is something that will be happening every time.
Molly (06:34):
I think of it as sort of a refinement to the ongoing process we’ve been in to improve our contracting policies. A similar process has been going on in at the county level. Washtenaw County has also put forward this responsible bidder policy and they’ve also had to refine it since the first time they passed it. And I will say that in terms of city, city politics, this seems to be a pretty bipartisan measure where partisan, it’s all the Democrats, but it seems to be supported, have support on both sides. So next we’re going to do proposal B and that’s Michelle.
Michelle (07:13):
Yes, proposal B is Ann Arbor City Charter Amendment for ranked choice voting for the election of city officers. And the text that’s on the ballot will be, shall the charter be amended to provide that? The mayor and city council members are to be nominated and elected by a ranked choice voting method when it is authorized by state law. And we first discussed this on episode 32 when the city council approved putting this on the ballot. And so yeah, what this would give us is it is the system of called ranked choice voting. And what that would mean is that when you get your ballot and you’re voting on who you want to see on the city council, you don’t just have one vote where you say, I want person A or I want person B. You can say you can put them in order of choices.
(08:08):
And so if there’s more than two candidates, you can say, okay, well this is my number one choice. This is my number two choice, but oh boy, do I not want number three? That kind of thing. You just put ’em in order like that. And the way it would work then is when they’re tallying the votes to see who won the election, they look at everyone’s first choice. And if only by counting the first choice votes, nobody gets more than 50%, then what they’ll do is they’ll take the lowest scoring candidate off and look at all the people who voted for that person as their first choice. They’ll pick their second choice. Okay, well, and they’ll redistribute those votes. And then now, okay, now does anyone have more than 50%? And then they’ll keep cutting off the lowest candidate until somebody gets more than 50%. And so this is the best way to pre this is the theory is that this is a good way to capture people’s ranked choice preferences. And one thing that this gets you is that you don’t have the spoiler effect.
(09:17):
If there’s one candidate that’s good and one candidate that’s like awesome, but you know like them, you like them a lot, but you don’t think they’re going to win or be popular, you don’t have to say, ah, well I really want that guy to win. I really want that person to win, but I’m going to vote for the person who I’m going to vote for the best person who I think can win. Don’t, not as much of that strategic type of voting. And there’s not as much of that strategic type of running because like a candidate who, if you want to be a candidate but you sort of agree with someone, you don’t have to say, well, okay, they have a better chance of winning, so I’m going to throw my weight behind them. You can say, well, no, I’ll run again. I’ll run against them on our differences and the voters can sort it out.
(10:04):
And if they don’t want to put one of us as number one and one of us is number two, then we’ll see how that shakes out. I had the county clerk, Lawrence Kestenbaum came on my radio show back when I did. I was doing a show like this called Civics Party on W C B N one a couple years ago, and Laurie Kestenbaum came on there and talked about rank choice voting. And one of the things he said that I liked was, he said that it exposes the natural divisions in the electorate, you know, have to, everyone has to arbitrarily group themselves into one box or the other. And I think that right now, because we use this winner take all election strategy, there’s a lot of incentive to side with one of the factions. And I think there’s some people who don’t like that there are two separate factions on the city council, or they deny that the two separate factions exist.
(11:06):
But this winner take all election thing is kind of why we have that, because you have to pick one or the other. Whereas if we had the rank choice voting, then people could be like, well, here’s what I think, and I’m running, even though I mostly agree with so-and-so. Here’s where we differ, that kind of thing. One thing this doesn’t fix is the student participation problem, which is something that people are worried about a lot because the way we do our elections right now for city council is that we have an August primary where we decide who the Democratic Party candidate is, and then we have a November election where the Democratic, whoever won in, whoever won the Democratic Party in August will be running against whoever won. But no one else when else runs in any other parties. So the
Jess (12:06):
Occasional independent,
Michelle (12:07):
The occasional independent. And so there’s people who feel that the real choice is August, who’s going to be the Democratic primary candidate And August, it’s unfortunate because students aren’t here to participate in that election. This doesn’t fix that. It makes the August election ranked choice voting and it makes the November election rank choice voting. So it could be beneficial for some of these independent candidates or maybe third party or other parties could become more influential than they are now because it doesn’t have to be, you could put the Democrats as your number two choice, but we don’t actually have, state law doesn’t actually allow us to muck with the election dates very much. There are only three election dates May, August and November. And so if we want to have a primary and a general election, August and November are the ones that make sense and are proposed in this thing, no one’s proposing to change that.
(13:19):
There’s a little bit of history behind ranked choice voting in Ann Arbor. We did use ranked choice voting on one election in the past, and that was the mayoral election of 1975. We had a Democrat, Republican and someone from the Human Rights Party, which was a third party that was, they were styling themselves as an ultra-liberal party left of the Democrats. And so those three parties ran in 1975. Nobody won a majority in the first round. And so they took the human rights party candidate redistributed their votes to those people’s second choice. And the Democrat, Albert Wheeler was elected by a close margin. And Albert Wheeler was our first and only black mayor here in Ann Arbor so far. And that happened in 1975. In 1976, Ann Arbor had a special election to repeal ranked choice voting. So that was the history of that,
Jess (14:25):
Not a good look, Ann Arbor,
Michelle (14:27):
Not a good look, good luck,
Molly (14:29):
Successful election. Right? So we repealed, we repealed it right away, basically.
Michelle (14:33):
Yeah. And so that was the only election that we’ve ever had ranked choice voting. Now since that time, the state has passed laws centralizing how elections are done. And so this is kind of a problem right now because even if we were to pass this in November, we still wouldn’t be doing rank choice voting until the state let us, the state decides what voting machines are currently available and current voting machines that are available do not support rank choice voting. There might also be some other changes to state law that are required to allow rank choice voting. But what this would do is make us, we’d jump right on that as soon as the state law allowed us to, and it might spur the state to action if it knows that there are cities waiting for rank choice voting and we would be the second city that’s waiting for rank choice voting.
(15:28):
Ferndale passed this in 2004. They’ve been waiting ever since. But maybe if the fifth most populous city in the state Ann Arbor were to pass this, it might spur the state to action. Lansing was going to vote on it in this same election, but they changed their mind. The city council passed the thing putting it on the ballot, and then they passed the thing taking it back off the ballot. Cause they were worried that well state, the state law doesn’t implement it yet, so let’s not even have the election to find out if this is what we would want.
(16:03):
So that’s kind of disappointing because it would’ve been nice to be joined by Lansing in the queue waiting for rank choice voting. One interesting thing is that East Point, Michigan has been using rank choice voting since 2019, and that was the result of a civil rights lawsuit from the US Department of Justice. They said that they had East Point had at large elections, which is not what we do in Ann Arbor except for the mayor. And in Ann Arbor we vote by wards, but in East Point they had some at large city council members, and this is a city that’s 30% black and no black people ever kept on winning the elections. And they said that it was because of this winner take all type of thing. That was the, that’s the argument that was put forward by the US Department of Justice. That case won. And so now, now the city is doing, has special dispensation and is required to do ranked choice voting. So I wonder if it would have a similar effect here in this city of taking the interests of black voters and allowing them to have more power. So that is interesting. I will be voting yes on this and so, so say we all here on this podcast. So
Jess (17:36):
Yes, black, and I also want to expand that to non-white and Ann Arbor, our black population is less than 10%, but our non-white population is greater than 30%. So in that sense, we are similar to Ferndale, but I just of wanted to expand our definition of what inclusive is. Yeah, right. All right. So we’ve done proposal A, we’ve done proposal p b, moving on to proposal C, guess what? It’s an Ann Arbor City Charter Amendment. I bet you didn’t see that one coming. This one is related to emergency procurement. The text of the amendment goes sa, excuse me, of the ballot proposal goes, shall section 14.2 of the charter be amended to require city council to establish by ordinance the procedure by which the city administrator may make emergency purchases? I am completely freeloading off of Molly’s tail. What is the thing? Your coattails here, because it’s pretty closely related to proposal A.
(18:35):
It actually came out of the same incident, the water main break on maple, which caused a lot of distress and delay for several weeks on that side of town. As with proposal A, we first discussed this ballot, proposed ballot amendment on the pod in episode 31, which the rest of the world knows is the July 20th council meeting. This one is really about granting staff the flexibility to respond to time sensitive urgent problems. At that time, staff had to wait for city council to make a decision. And in the situation where you’ve got massive amounts of water gushing, you really need to be able to take independent action and then as soon as is reasonably possible, then talk to your governing body about what to do next. So this is about establishing appropriate procedures for emergency response management. Our take on the pod, oh yes, this is good governance.
(19:36):
We like it. And rolling straight on into proposal D. It’s an Ann Arbor City, a charter wait for IT amendment related to the $25,000 limit. The text for this one reads, shall section 14.2 of the charter be amended to permit the city council to delegate to the city administrator the authority to approve purchases and to enter into contracts when the cost to the city is equal to or lesser than $75,000 to be adjustable for inflation? So there’s really two important pieces of this. One is that we’re raising the current limit, which is $25,000 to $75,000. And the other one is that this is adjustable by inflation Right now, there is no mechanism within the city charter for us to adjust this, the contract limit oversight by anything under other than a city charter amendment every single time. So what this one is doing is PEG pegging contract amounts to inflation and saying that we can change it by policy next time rather than by vote.
(20:46):
So it builds in a little bit of future flexibility, which I kind of like. I want to point out that this doesn’t change really anything except how city council meetings are run. All of these expenditures are approved with the annual budget. It’s just a part of the amendment, excuse me, of our city charter right now that city council review and approve every single contract over $25,000. And as we’ve seen on this pod as longtime E two council followers, note, there are a lot of contracts that fall into that category. And it also means that expenses that we have approved can get politicized in the regular course of business. That’s not necessarily a bug because it is nice to have kind of the alert of, oh, all right, the police department is purchasing another taser contract. Let’s talk about that some more. But it does mean that council is doing a fair amount of business that is already taken care of through other parts of their process.
(21:54):
In the memo that accompanied this ballot proposal in the original council meeting agenda, this one was originally July 20th, but this particular ballot proposal got moved to the August 2nd meeting. So if you’re looking for the documentation on that, and I know all of you are, it’s not in July 20th. I know I made the same mistake, it’s in August 2nd. But what the staff memo said is that changing the dollar limit would mean that council would see 48% percent fewer items in the consent agenda, almost half, which is tremendous, where those items account for only 4% total value of all of the contracts that the city enters into every year. So that is a huge ROI sync like that is, well, huge. I’ll just say terrible. That’s a terrible time sink the council was spending. So we’re taking a lot of time off of council’s plate, which is great. We’re taking a ton of time off of staff’s plate. They’re estimating a savings of 625 fewer staff hours expended on processing resolutions for contract approvals. So again, super try good governance all around Ann Arbor AF votes. Yes. So again, just a really quick recap for proposals all pertaining to City Charter Amendments proposal A, proposal B, proposal C, proposal D, our take is to vote yes on all. Okay, I just want to do, Michelle, should we
Michelle (23:21):
Actually, should we actually say the short titles of each of them or whatever
Jess (23:24):
Proposal A? Sure. I’ll go back in. I’ll go back in and do it. So A is, and I’ll just stipulate that all of these are city charter amendments. So proposal A is related to best value purchasing. Proposal B is related to ranked choice voting for city officers. Proposal C is related to emergency procurement, and proposal D is related to the $25,000 limit. Thanks for the prompt, Michelle. The podcast says yes, all podcast says yes. Yes. All right, so quick recap on election logistics. Absentee valid applications are already out. If you haven’t received one, please request one for everything. We’ll drop links into the show notes once voting is open, both in-person early and mail-in. Those will be accepted through November 2nd, Tuesday, November 2nd. In-person voting Tuesday, November 2nd. Polling places are open, 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM If you’re voting early, it starts early October and goes through November 2nd at the city clerk’s office at City Hall, that’s Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM excluding holidays and lunch hour from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM. You can also drop your mail-in ballot off at the absentee ballot Dropbox at City Hall at any time. Absentee ballots, as I mentioned, are already being mailed out to the per permanent absentee voter list. If you are on that list and haven’t seen yours, get in touch with the city clerk and just see if you can track down what’s going on. And a reminder that US Mail is recommending at least seven days lead time for mail-in ballots. And that is your very first Ann Arbor AF ballot preview. Thanks guys.
(25:10):
And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor af. Come check out our episodes of transcripts at our website, ann arbor af.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AERs on Twitter at the a2 Council hashtag and Facebook in the Ann Arbor Humans Who Walk Group. And you can catch co-host Michelle on wcbn.org. Tuesdays 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM It’s mostly music made by women, but also the occasional council recap. And hey, if you wanted to send us a few dollars@kofi.com slash ann Arbor aef to help us with hosting, we always appreciate it. We’re your co-hosts, Molly Kleinman, Michelle Hughes, and myself Jess Leeta. And thanks to Producer Jack Jennings. Theme music, I dunno by grapes. You can reach us by email at ann arbor af pod gmail.com. Get informed and get involved. It’s your city.