Today we’re talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Monday, October 4th. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including council rules, sustainability, and a quick rant about fatphobia.
Links:
– to this week’s Council agenda,
– to the benchmarking ordinance, and
– to the episode previewing the November 2021 ballot.
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 (00:04):
Hi, and welcome to 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. It’s just Molly and Jess here today. Michelle is taking to the streets for abortion rights. Today we’re talking about the next city council meeting. Coming up Monday, October 4th, we’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items including council rules, sustainability, and a quick rant about fatphobia and offer some other ways for you to get involved or some ways for you to get involved. 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. So first up, we have got sustainability with Jess.
Jess (00:48):
Yes, we’re talking about benchmarking and I love talking about benchmarking even though nobody knows what benchmarking is. So on the agenda is an ordinance to add a new chapter to city code called Chapter 1 0 4 on energy and water benchmarking. And I wanted to start with what it is by starting with a metaphor. So imagine you go to the doctor and having them tell you, like look at you just visually inspect you and say you need to lose weight. You could just do that or you could check your cholesterol, your L D L and H D L. You could check your blood pressure, you could do a review of your family history. You could check your health goals to see what it is that you want to accomplish if your numbers are in line, but for example, you’d like to get better sleep, maybe it’s more about switching to less caffeine and having it earlier in the day than actually reducing the number of calories that you take in.
(01:44):
It’s a better health health outcome for you and has nothing to do with losing weight, but you never would’ve done that if you hadn’t taken a closer look at your health metrics. That’s benchmarking. You want to start with where you are, a very quantitative look at where you are before figuring out where it is that you want to go. The chapter that’s being added to code. Of course, we’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s actually quite interesting. There’s a very visual and engaging one pager on what benchmarking is. And then of course the text for the chapter itself. If you’d like to learn more about it, I encourage you to take a look at it. One of the things that I appreciate about this ordinance being passed is that it’s a phased adoption approach, allowing slower adoption for smaller buildings, which typically means smaller businesses and that’s appropriate like energy benchmarking in particular water too.
(02:41):
But energy benchmarking in particular is really opaque and there are many rants that we could go on about how our energy utilities work hard to obfuscate the information that they have to make it harder for us to use less. They are incentivized to do so no matter what kind of greenwashing they do, but all of it’s there. It just takes a while to stitch together. And so allowing for slower adoption, but eventually bringing all commercial buildings in Ann Arbor in to this benchmarking program is really going to allow for comprehensive look at the energy use of our city, of the buildings in our city, I should say, and what we can do to improve that. This is really important because in terms of greenhouse gas emissions buildings typically account for over two thirds. So if we’re serious about sustainability, if we don’t want to take little nibbles at the pie of what it means to have a healthy planet, but actually to take a big all of that bite, then what we need to do is take a look at our big users, in this case buildings and how we can take a meaningful approach to reducing our use or getting more efficient in our use.
(03:50):
Conservative estimates are with good benchmarking, we could save 7% of our energy usage. Typical buildings find that they end up saving a lot more. It depends a lot on the type of building that it is, right? Like a water plant is going to use radically different kinds of energy and water than a restaurant would, but taking a look at where we are will give us a really good roadmap to where we want to go and where we can be. So that’s great. This is also, I’m sorry, Molly, go ahead.
Molly (04:21):
I just had a question, which was yeah, so this program is about identifying setting benchmarks for all of the commercial buildings in the whole city,
Jess (04:31):
Correct? Public and private.
Molly (04:34):
Oh, so public buildings and private buildings. And the city is, I assume the city is going to be creating a program to sort of help these various commercial buildings figure out those benchmarks.
Jess (04:44):
So the nice thing is the program already exists. It’s through the Federal Department of Energy, it’s called Energy Star, and a lot of buildings who have already been paying attention to their energy usage and efficiency are already in energy star individually. Part of what this ordinance does is creates a citywide port, what’s called portfolio that all buildings in the city can roll into. And there are sometimes concerns about, oh, is my next door neighbor going to be able to read my energy usage? No, everything rolls in an aggregated way. And so there’s no way to disaggregate individual buildings and individual users into their usage in a citywide portfolio. So that’s the tool that they’ll use to measure and kind of get everybody apples to apples. One of the things that we don’t want to do is compare the tenant of one building to the entire building next door. So can we get everybody on the same page and Energy Star is the tool that we use to do that.
Molly (05:44):
Cool. I always thought Energy Star was just about telling you how efficient your fridge was going to be
Jess (05:50):
A reasonable thing, and yet the fridge thing comes from the measurer and not the other way around.
Molly (05:56):
Oh, see, you learn something new every day.
Jess (05:58):
You too. I wanted to give a shout out to Ann Arbor 2030, which is a local nonprofit that’s part of a national effort called Architecture 2030, and it is this acknowledgement by architects that buildings, again, are really one of the biggest bad guys when it comes to climate emissions, or excuse me, greenhouse gas emissions and the climate emergency, which means that architects and really everyone who works on designing and maintaining buildings have an extra onus in participating in these solutions. So Architecture 2030 created a model that individual cities could use in policy and practice in getting their buildings more efficient in specifically typically the three areas that buildings look at efficiency is energy, water and waste, waste being trash or any kind of thing that you don’t want anymore. Different cities adopt different efficiencies in Ann Arbor. Technically we have only adopt the energy one, but the aspiration is that we would also get to water. So they’ve written both energy water in into the benchmarking code, which I again think is really smart. This is future proofing the work really. So thanks to the folks at Ann Arbor 2030 for raising the awareness of really this is about the power of collective action and about how private businesses and the kind of mechanism of the government can work together to produce better outcomes. So thanks to the folks at 2030 for helping to make this happen.
(07:38):
Awesome. I think that’s everything that I had to say about benchmarking and fatphobia, at least for now. Molly, what would you like to tell us about rules?
Molly (07:46):
So this is DC one, the resolution to approve a amendment to the council rule seven. And when I’m looking at a council agenda, anytime I see anything about council rules, my spidey senses get tingling. But this is actually a really good one and I would imagine not contentious at all. So this is about the rules that govern addressing council during meetings for speakers and members of the public. And it seems as though it was a very short rule to start with. It just the rule says all public speakers must speak from the podium, and what this amendment would do is add to the end unless the public speaker is attending remotely. I think this is great. I imagine that the purpose is to enable remote participation in council meetings even after they return to meeting in person. I’m not aware of a plan for them to return to in-person meetings, but they’re looking ahead.
Jess (08:50):
I think the current executive order permitting, it lapses December 31st of this,
Molly (08:56):
So potentially we’re looking at a January return to in-person meetings. And this is a rules change that came out of the council administration committee. So the committee was following the process and I imagine have been talking about what meetings will look like in the future. And I think this is great because even pandemic aside enabling remote public comment makes it so much easier to address counsel and to participate in these meetings. I know one thing that I learned after I made my first ever public comment is that our local news organizations sometimes use public comments to write their articles. And so it is actually more than just speaking to the 11 people sitting on council. It’s actually a way to potentially really get some coverage and some visibility to whatever issue the person is speaking about. And so being able to do this remotely, even after the pandemic is over, I think is great. And Jess, you said that there are some other cities that are also starting to do this, right?
Jess (10:01):
Yeah. I read an article towards the end of last year from Denver, I believe, who had measured their online participation specifically in city events during the pandemic as opposed to before. And what they found was probably not surprising, but again, they benchmarked it. They put numbers around the increase in participation, both people watching the meetings and the number of people commenting on them. And the diversity really the age diversity was the biggest thing. There were many, many younger folks and folks who work multiple jobs who were able to participate in watching and commenting on public meetings that had not been able to before when the only way you could do it was in person. So I think that it was a really lovely kind of case study of how a change can actually benefit a much wider group. I’m not aware of any municipalities in Michigan that have done a similar measurement of the change in amount and quality of public participation prior to Covid and in the middle of covid. And now as we’re still in the pandemic by the way, but starting to emerge from the effects of it. But I would be really curious to know about our numbers, and I am very heartened to see that we are continuing to include measures that include more folks in the community.
Molly (11:23):
So if you’re looking for a reason to call into the council meeting this week, speaking in support of this rules change, I think it’s probably going to happen. But it’s always nice for them to hear. I think that people are paying attention to this particular thing around participation and involvement
Jess (11:40):
Because that’s also very pleasantly meta. I would like to call in support of calling in.
Molly (11:45):
Yes, exactly. So that’s all I wanted to say about this, just that it’s coming. I’m really, I think it’s going to be great.
Jess (11:54):
And in general, this was a really light council agenda that is everything specifically from the agenda that we wanted to cover. A couple of other things that we wanted to bring up is the fact that the interim city administrator has been identified. Council had interviews last month and chose a candidate from there to be our interim city administrator. He’ll start later this month. His name is Milton. He is most recently out of Phoenix. He was the assistant city manager there, but he has been in city administration really his entire career and having somebody with this depth of expertise in a variety of different municipalities. He’s been in Ohio and Kentucky out west and now coming here feels very comforting and I’m excited to add his leadership to our city and add our city to his long list of leadership. I’ll be curious to see how he and counsel work together on the various not small pieces of work they’ve kicked off like the sidewalk snow maintenance that we’ll be looking at this winter term.
(13:01):
The carbon neutrality plan of course, that we’re always working on, and the recently established diversity equity inclusion office. Mr. Deney is coming into an active city working on a lot of complicated work, and I’m just really excited to have somebody’s hand at the rudder while the city council takes a little bit longer to search for and hire a permanent city administrator. We don’t yet know what that process is going to look like. We have no information right now about the timing, but now that we have somebody in the city administrator seat that process, it feels like it takes some pressure off of the timing of that process to me. Anyway.
Molly (13:41):
Yeah, I think that that’s right. There’s been so much upheaval in city leadership over the last two years and this, it’s not over yet, but hopefully we can have at least a plateau while we figure out our next slightly longer range plan
Jess (13:58):
And change isn’t necessarily bad, especially the last city administrator Tom Crawford. It seemed pretty clear that it was the right thing for him to depart. It’s the intentionality with which we could bring to that change. And so I think city council identifying that the appropriate next step wasn’t a full on hire, but was to get somebody experienced, steady, calm in the seat, identifying that as a priority and then making it happen very quickly. I’m pleased about their leadership on that. As I said, I’m delighted about Milton, his resume. If you’re interested in a civic scavenger hunt of a million different kinds of work, Milton’s resume is a really fun one to read, but it feels like a good fit. I’m glad that it happened as quickly as it did, and now I feel like I can breathe a little bit about what the next step looks like.
Molly (14:46):
And his birth date is soon, right? It’s later this month.
Jess (14:49):
It is. I believe it’s later this month. I was looking, see if I could be the expert and say he starts on this day. I am not that expert, but yes, he starts this month. Speaking of things that are coming up the election, there is an election this year. Folks who listened to our last episode, the ballot preview will remember that the in-person poll day is November 2nd, but applications for mail-in ballots have already gone out. You are welcome to request one. I’ll put a link to our last episode in the show notes. It’s got all the information for the ballot proposals and all the information for all of the various ways that you can vote. Speaking of enabling participation, you no longer have to vote in person on voting day, on election day. There are a lot of opportunities to vote in person before that, and you don’t have to show up anywhere at all. You can mail in. So check out that episode and you don’t even have to listen to the episode if you don’t want to. Show notes are pretty comprehensive and A T L D R to all of it. We’re voting yes on all of the ballot proposals. Yep. It’s about as easy as it can be.
(15:56):
And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor af. Come check out our episodes and 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 Want Group. And you can catch co-host Michelle’s radio show 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 are your co-hosts, Molly Kleinman and myself, Jess Lita, and with gratitude to Michelle Hughes for banging the drama of abortion rights for us today. And thanks to producer Jack Jennings. Theme music is Ida Know by Grapes. You can reach us by email at ann arbor af pod gmail.com. Get informed, then get involved. It’s your city.