Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Monday, October 18th. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including the “Moving Together” plan, menstruation, and Medical Center Drive.
Links:
– University of Michigan’s environmental metrics and the PCCN (President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality) report
– Ann Arbor’s A2Zero Climate Action Plan and Moving Together Towards Vision Zero Comprehensive Transportation Plan
– the city’s Equitable Engagement Initiative
– the City Administrator’s recommendations on ARP funds
– Ann Arbor’s crash map! The East Medical Center Drive bridge intersection with pedestrian and bike crashes is on page 32.
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.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hi, welcome to this episode of Ann Arbor af, a podcast for folks trying to figure out what’s going on in Ann Arbor. We discuss current events in local politics and policy and governance and other civic good times. I’m Michelle Hughes and my pronouns are she her.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I’m Jess Leet and my pronouns are she her. And I’m Molly Kleinman and my pronouns are she her.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
We’re your co-hosts to help you get informed and get involved. It’s your city. Let’s jump in.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Today we’re talking about the next city council meeting. Coming up Monday, October 18th. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including the moving together plan menstruation and Medical Center Drive, and we’ll offer 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. We have a lot to talk about today. And first up is Michelle.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
So we have a communication from staff and it’s the fiscal year 22 quarter one equity and inclusion report. And the most exciting thing I found in there was that it mentions the equitable engagement initiative and that is trying to create a more equitable way of doing public engagement. So always whenever we do things, the city wants to seek out advice from people and get the public’s input on things, but they often do it in a way where it’s like they put out a list on a city website and so only the most thoroughly engaged people come and the same people come to every meeting and say the same things every time. And we’re not getting a diverse cross section of the community. So maybe the community feel feels one way, but they get overwhelming input that says another way. And so the Equitable Engagement Initiative is trying to find ways to seek out more diverse input from people.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
And so they’ve created this steering committee of some 30 community members who are known for doing D E I work Diversity, equity and Inclusion. And they’re going to be coming up with suggestions on how to do equitable engagements. They have public meetings that we can watch and we have a link in the description to the city webpage about that initiative. And there’s some links there to some of their past of the past meetings of that D E I steering committee or the Equitable Engagement Steering Committee. And anyway, it sounds like a fun thing to watch and hopefully there will be cool things coming forward from it.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Now, a slightly more meta note about this report. I criticized its format in the first report of this year, so that would’ve been one of our January episodes. And I’ll hold to that, which is that while this report’s out on the city’s current d e i diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, it does so in really kind of a scattershot way there. There’s not consistent language, there’s not even consistent formatting across departments. And so I’m excited since that criticism, the Diversity Equity and Inclusion office and first employee or two I think have been authorized by city council. And so I’ll be really interested to watch how this report changes as a result of that work as well.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
And actually one of the things that we saw in a recent city council meeting was to create a position for a public engagement coordinator or that was already in the budget, but there was a thing to change the org chart to put that person to be directly reporting to the D e I officer who directly reports to the city administrator.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah,
Speaker 3 (04:15):
I think that it shows that we’re serious about trying to do more equitable public engagement and I’m excited to see the kind of public engagement that comes from it. Okay, we are on to Molly.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Yeah, so we’re moving ahead now to the consent agenda ca three, the resolution to authorize a professional service agreement with Sam Schwartz consultants for the moving together towards Vision Zero Action Plan and Associated Engineering services.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
So you plan,
Speaker 4 (04:48):
You may recall the title of our recently passed Comprehensive Transportation Plan is a two moving together towards Vision Zero Plan. So now the Comprehensive Transportation Plan passed in June and despite the fact that it is very long and very detailed, it’s actually still pretty high level. And so now this contract is to make a plan to implement the plan. This resolution, this contract would be with the same company Sam Schwartz that we worked with to do the comprehensive transportation plan. So I think that probably makes sense. They’re going to be the most familiar with the plan. There was an R F P process. There was actually a member of the Transportation Commission who participated in reviewing the proposals. So I think the thing to note about this, there are two things. One of them, the Comprehensive transportation plan passed counsel unanimously back in June. So if this doesn’t pass unanimously, I would look for who those people are who voted to pass the plan but not the implementation of the plan.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
Because to me what that says is that these are people who want to perform caring about our transportation goals without actually changing anything about how our transportation system works. The other piece of this is that it’s a big contract and it’s according to the agenda, it needs eight votes. And we were a little unsure about why it needs eight votes. And I was going to sort of loop Jess in on this piece of it there. There’s an explanation in the memo, but we’re not sure what the rule is. It says the eight vote requirement allows the funding for the project to remain available in F Y 2023 to complete the entirety of the project scope. So this was already budgeted for it’s we’re not asking for aid votes because this wasn’t in the budget. We did budget for this, but the aid votes thing means that there is some risk that it might not pass
Speaker 3 (06:55):
And that’s why we’re already getting fighty about it.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
Yeah, anticip fighting,
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Right? And maybe unnecessarily, maybe this will pass as unanimously as the plan itself did, but anytime I speaking for myself, I see eight votes, especially on the consent agenda. I get a little nervous because that’s when things tend to get politicized is when there’s a chance, when there’s a chance for a split vote. I feel like people look for a reason to split the vote sometimes, not always, but sometimes, and this in particular transportation can be contentious. And so even though it’s on the consent agenda, which as longtime Ann Arbor, if listeners know mean means, gets kind of voted on as a block at the very beginning of the meeting, it should pass unanimously without any discussion. But because the eight votes is required, we’re a little sensitive about it
Speaker 4 (07:47):
And there’s a lot of stuff in the comprehensive transportation plan that we know some people don’t like. It’s one thing to say, yes, we sign on to all of these values and it’s another thing to sign on to say, yeah, no, we are actually going to take away parking lanes and put in bike lanes, or we are actually going to divert through traffic through neighborhoods and make it so that cars have to go through more traffic lights so that people can have comfortable bicycle boulevards. So see, this is where the rubber hits the road.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
That’s really,
Speaker 4 (08:25):
So next up is Michelle.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
All right. So we have ordinance that’s at first reading today. There’s actually a couple of ordinances that are at second reading, but we’re not discussing them because we did that last time and it doesn’t seem like they were contentious. But there’s one at first reading today that will be an ordinance to require any public restrooms in the city, including ones that are in businesses. Those will now be required to have sanitary supplies such as toilet paper and soap. And the most important one because most public restrooms have those things. But so the most important change is that it will require public restrooms to have menstrual products provided for free, and that will be good. There’s, at the state level right now, they’re actually talking about trying to repeal the tampon tax. And I think that passed at the State House, and I don’t know what its status is at the state senate, but there’s a lot of times in which people’s menstrual needs are not taken very seriously by the government. And I
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Not just taken seriously, this is a small tangent,
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Not
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Just taken seriously, but periods in general we treat as gross and a secret, which is just another way to be anti-feminist. So it’s exciting to me that this really more normalizes the whole process of having a period and having a period visited upon you and having products easily available to you. So I’m a whole government side to this that we’ll talk a little bit more about. I actually like the community conversation part of this, which is let’s just talk more about periods.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Exactly. And one thing that I’m excited about it is that this new proposed ordinance does not specify that that menstrual products only have to be supplied in women’s restrooms. The implication being that they have to be supplied in all restrooms. And that will be a big boon to our menstruating men and our menstruating non-binary people who do not use women’s restrooms. And one thing I’m a little bit worried about it is that it’s implied in the language, but it doesn’t explicitly say, yes, you have to do it. You have to put these menstrual products in every restroom regardless of the gender marker on the restroom. And so I’m a little bit worried that businesses will interpret it in the way that’s obvious to them because they’ve never met any trans people and put it in only menstrual products in the women’s room and then it’s going to be up to vulnerable populations to get the law enforced.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
And so I hope that it is made clear to everyone when this ordinance passes, that it applies to any restroom no matter what the gender marker is. And so I’m hoping I emailed some city council members to make sure they mention it at the city council table so that any business owners who are hearing about it will hear that. And maybe it’ll be get picked up in the newspaper, but that’s the part that I’m excited about it. And also the part of just having menstrual products available for everyone is going to be really important. It’s something that a lot of people have to deal with and it shouldn’t be a point of shame and it shouldn’t be so private. It should be like everyone’s got to wipe their butt. So we have toilet paper. Yeah, it’s going to be exciting.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
And honestly, this is a little bit more petty than I usually get, but I’m, I’m going to go there. So what if we made it a huge pain in the ass and a big stink about making this in men’s restrooms? So we actually moved towards gender neutral restrooms and we stopped assigning rooms that people went into.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
What if we did? Yeah,
Speaker 2 (12:26):
On that note, let’s talk about redistricting. I wanted to talk briefly about the reapportionment of wards. This is C3 on the council agenda for all of you following along. And I just wanted to tell our listeners first nothing is changing. We have gone through the census, the 2020 census. We have seen how the populations in our wards and precincts have changed. It’s been relatively even across the city. And so no ward boundaries are changing.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Alright. I thought there was a little bit of change in there, but I thought there was a couple of places. There’s like a map on there. There
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Is a map on there, and I thought I looked at the boundary pretty closely and I did not see a single ward boundary change. If I’m wrong, that’s pretty exciting for those
Speaker 3 (13:15):
500
Speaker 2 (13:15):
People.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
No, the map was confusing, but there is, in the wording, it says something about how, let’s see, it says something about how the wards are changing a little bit the size of the first and second. Okay, wait, it reduces the size of the first and second ward and increases the other three wards. It’s pretty small changes on the map. They’re highlighted with hash marks or something like that. But there are some small changes
Speaker 2 (14:01):
We can link to the map in the show notes and maybe clarify on Twitter and Ann Arbor humans who wonk when we post this online where those changes are because it would be helpful to understand that mostly because most people in our city do not know that they live inward and they don’t know who their city council members are. So just raising the awareness about what it looks like to be a citizen locally, and I use that word mindfully, not live in a community. We all live in a community, but the folks who are voting and being mindful of their city council members.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
So yeah, definitely the first thing I checked was to make sure that I wasn’t followed up into Ward five because that’s right, I live right on the boundary and so I was worried that I was going to get swallowed up, but no, it didn’t touch me.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
There is text here about the proposed boundary changes. They focus on the downtown area in order to follow the guidelines set forth in the city charter for the creation of the ward boundaries specifically that the wards are each a pie shaped segment coming out from the center of the city. We’ve talked about this pie-shaped map for the changes also meet the requirements of the charter and the state law that they be compact and contiguous. So the proposed changes were made with the goal of minimizing impacts. However, all five wards have some modifications with wards four and five moving more into the downtown area. I don’t dunno what that means, but it sounds like most of the shifts were happening downtown, which is interesting because that’s where the wards are closest together. It’s easy to walk from one to the next because
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Of That’s interesting. And that explains actually why I missed it because I was paying most attention to how the lions radiate out. I was not paying attention to the ward boundaries deep downtown. One of the things that we’ve touched on this podcast before, and I think is worth bringing up again, that the city charter was written before we had our current demographic set. By which I mean we really didn’t know how many students were going to live here. And one of the things that our current districting does in terms of apportioning the wards as PAs is really splits up the student vote in a way that makes it hard for students to have coherent, unified political voice. There’s pros and cons to that, but the city hasn’t really done anything to give students more of that cogent, unified voice. And this doesn’t do anything to one way or the other to make it better or worse. But I, I’m just noting that students tend to live in a lot of these wards that, or precincts, excuse me, that we’re talking about. So I’ll be interested in to see how those are shifting.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
I will say that now looking at the map, Jess, that I can’t really blame you for missing the nuances. There are no words on the map are the city produced ward Ward maps are one of my biggest peeves in the city, Ann Arbor. They are so hard to read and sad that in this year 2021, we still are producing brand new, very hard to read word maps.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
If you look at the map, nothing has changed. So I’m helpful. I’m glad to know that you guys are reminding me to be literate and to read all the words. So you heard it here first. It’s confusing. You’re welcome. Ann Arbor,
Speaker 3 (17:26):
There’s a whole bunch of attachments on here that are different maps and plans. The one I’m looking at right now is called 2021 Ward Reapportionment Plan final, and that has a few slides on it and one is the entire city where you can’t really see the changes because the changes aren’t noted on it. And then there’s another slide that’s to zoom in on the downtown of where the changes are happening.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Speaking of things that are confusing, I’m going to bring us to East Medical Center Drive big sigh.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
We have a little section on our spreadsheet of what we’re talking about. It says who’s talking about what and it’ll say like, oh, Michelle’s talking about this one. Jess is talking about this one. This one just says all. We all have something to say about this, but let’s start with Jess.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
All right, I’ll start. So one fun thing that I appreciate about this particular agenda item, and we will talk more about the agenda item in a moment, is how all three of us approached it in a different way. Michelle looked really closely at what’s being brought to this meeting. I looked really closely at what gold documents, policy goal documents from the university and the city. This agenda item is intended to address and I, I’m not sure about the prep that Molly does besides just generic transportation goddess as she always is. So with that in mind, I’d like to talk about the policy aspect of it first, and I guess I’ll name what the agenda item is, which is, this came up at the last City council meeting. This is a proposed change to East Medical Center Drive. There’s a bridge there that Michigan, I don’t know, the state of Michigan safety people are saying requires stabilization that the bridge has deteriorated and requires repair.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
The university hospital is taking the opportunity of required infrastructure, infrastructure work there anyway to request an additional lane of traffic over there. This came to the last city council meeting and ran into a brick wall of pedestrian and cycling advocates who said, hold up. This meets none of our goals. This is an extremely heavy U heavily used area by pedestrians and cyclists, and yet this proposed change talks about nothing except car users. We don’t like it. City council agreed and said, sharpen your pencils and come back. And they’ve come back and we’ll talk about whether or not they’ve sharpened their pencils. On the policy side, this whole issue feels like a lot of road design where it’s designed to set up conflicts among vulnerable users, and in the meantime, the people in power scoot around friction free in roads, pedestrians and cyclists often have to fight for the same intersection space and against the same dangerous or deadly car behavior where drivers are typically at most in danger of being inconvenienced.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Here we’re seeing staff request what appears to be a rational change in road design, but it’s counterintuitive to what we know about best traffic management practice and also counter to these institutions own stated goals to those goals. The University of Michigan, I looked at their 2025 sustainability goals and thought it was interesting that there’s basically nothing that pertains to transportation that’s possibly unsurprising, given that transportation related goals are scope three instead of scope one. We have talked about that on the show before, but briefly, scope one emissions are greenhouse gas emissions that pertain directly to the business of a business. So the operat in the university’s case, the operation of the buildings, the operation of their cars, that kind of thing. Scope three are ones that are generated as a requirement for, I should have looked up the direct definition right before this and I didn’t. But anyway, it’s greenhouse gas emissions that are caused incidentally as a result of doing business. And in most incidences and in the university’s case as well, scope, the largest chunk of scope three is typically commuting by people who work there. Given that the university has 50,000 students and approximately 50,000 staff, they’re commuting emission emissions are not small, but
Speaker 4 (22:04):
Jump in with the scope three definition. So they indirectly impact this, these emissions. That’s,
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Thank you. Yep. Indirectly impact. Thank you Molly. And this,
Speaker 4 (22:14):
It’s a definition that comes from the E P A, but I’m going to say something about it when you’re done, Jess. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
So the university up till a report that they authored this year has only been concerned with their scope one emissions. And so it’s possibly sensical not great, but sensical that transportation actually wasn’t covered in their 2025 goals. It’s still surprising that there aren’t rudimentary goals about how once drivers are on campus, how they’re attending to bike and pedestrian safety. It might belong to a specific department or a specific committee, but it is clearly not part of their overarching policy goals when it comes to the university-wide sustainability metrics. Their dashboard includes 160 indicators by which they’re documenting and measuring sustainability. There’s nothing about road safety in there, which is a little un troubling, but again, indicative of the use the upcoming but not yet done. Scope three work. I hope what there is, this project could speak to the line items in that report that this project could speak to are campus bus ridership, M ride ridership, which is triple A T A with an M card swipe bike ridership, the number of parking spaces and the amount of imperf impervious surface area.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
There’s nothing in the land use section, which is approximately a quarter of the used sustainability benchmark indicators. There’s nothing in there that speaks to miles of infrastructure for cars, bikes, and people on foot. That would be really useful. I’ll also note, and this is a slight aside to this agenda item, but I feel like it’s really important in context that in the 15 years of metrics included in this dashboard, the number of parking spaces Universitywide went up from 23,000 to over 29,000 where the total number of people riding bikes went up from 3,400 to 4,500. That means that the absolute number of parking spaces has increased by more than all of the students and staff who ride bikes. This is a big do better moment for Michigan and a big do better moment for Ann Arbor to create more places to bike from.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
So those are the sustainability policy kind of goals on the university side, on the city side, I’ll call out eight 20, which is our climate action plan. 20% of that plan is devoted to a strategy called Reduce the Miles. We travel in our vehicles by at least 50%. There are a number of subpoint under that strategy that this project could potentially be helping. There’s also the moving together towards Vision Zero plan that we’ve already talked about that was adopted this summer. This project could speak to dangerous driver behavior and dangerous street design. So what I’m getting at is that it is a fairly copious and to me glaring oversight that this project is being brought forward, attempting to meet zero sustainability or safety goals despite the fact that both the university and the city have them. So what are we doing here, really?
Speaker 4 (25:32):
And this is where I can get very briefly on my Scope three horse, which is again the, and I
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Mean who doesn’t have a Scope three horse really
Speaker 4 (25:41):
The Environmental Protection Agency of the United States has defined these three scopes for considering emissions. And these are four governments and businesses and corporations. Everyone can have these different, this way to measure emissions. And it defines Scope three as assets, not owned or controlled by the reporting organization, but something that the organization indirectly impacts. And what I have no looking at both the university’s sustainability plan and the city of Ann Arbor sustainability plan is that both of them put transportation in Scope three,
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Correct?
Speaker 4 (26:20):
Only there is no larger organization as I understand it, that for whom individual commuters in their cars is in scope. Maybe the car companies that sell them the cars, it’s their scope one. But we know how much the car companies care about emissions, which is to say they don’t,
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Right? And their prioritization is consumption. So they’re never going to say buy fewer cars. They’re going to say buy more efficient cars.
Speaker 4 (26:49):
So the city of Ann Arbor says all of these 85,000 people driving into the city are not our problem. And the University of Michigan says all of these tens of thousands of people driving to our buildings to work in are not our problem. And that leaves us with the situation we have on this one little bridge where no one is treating it as their problem to address around either sustainability or safety.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
This kind of reminds me of the problem that we mentioned earlier where it was like we talked about that we approved the transportation goals, but then are we going to approve any implementation plans? And this is a place where we could implement some of these things and we just didn’t at all try at all.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
And even if we didn’t have policy direction, which we do, but even if we didn’t, we know that best practice road design talks about induced demand and how more lanes of traffic do not mean faster. They mean more traffic. That’s always what more lanes means. If you have any questions, talk to a friend of yours who commutes using 23 North. That’s what induced demand is. So the university, any,
Speaker 3 (28:09):
I’m just, they try it every time though. They try it every time. They try it every time.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
And I got
Speaker 3 (28:14):
To see as though they’ve never heard of it. What happened last time I tried it?
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Nope. You’re exactly right. And the thing that shocks me is that induced demand isn’t talked about in any part of the staff memo, even as something to push against to say, this is why we think this doesn’t count. It does, but this is why we think it doesn’t count against induced demand. Why are we overlooking a thing that we know is best practice in road design? And that’s true about every part of this project. So they went back, they didn’t sharpen their pencils and they’ve come back with something that isn’t different.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Yeah, I wanted to talk about that staff memo for a second because yeah, what happened was that the city council at the last meeting, like Jess said, the city council just postponed it. And with some, they said what they were interested in, but they didn’t give any specific direction to staff. They were just hoping staff was listening to the discussion. And so staff came back with the exact same plan, and then they wrote a memo in which they discussed some of the things that are staff that the city council talked about, but it was written, it’s written in a, it’s like a four page memo with 200 pages of bridge design bridge review attached to it. But it’s written in a style, here’s why we need to add a lane of traffic. And it’s not written in a, and it’s not written in a way that’s like, okay, well here’s how we can get to addressing your concerns and here’s how we can, here’s why it meets our goals to not add an additional lane of traffic.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Here’s why it goes against our goals to add an additional lane of traffic, why we need to do it. And we need to do it now and we need to do it without thinking about it because this is the time when we need to fix that bridge. Any delays just going to make it more expensive to fix that bridge. And we’re obviously inevitably going to need to add this lane of traffic, so why not do it now when we’re fixing the bridge, obviously. And it doesn’t consider the possibility that maybe it’s not a good idea to add a lane of traffic here. And maybe it is. Maybe it’s an important idea to consider pedestrian impacts instead. Well,
Speaker 2 (30:38):
That’s the thing, this whole project, and first of all the, I want to call out, this was a little bit confusing the first time around. I want to call out that this is for design. So they have not actually figured out what this is going to look like. It’s not construction. We’re not, we sign this and then there’s a shovel in the ground. This is, we’re beginning the process, but essentially what we’re doing is community engagement every time it hits the council table, which is kind of a bumpy way to do it. But okay, I’m not sure that they would’ve received such criticism from the community on this if they had just acknowledged that this is an incredibly intensively used area by people outside of cars. There are so many bus riders, there are so many people on bikes, there are so many people on foot and there is nothing about this project or this redesign that takes those users into account.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
If they had said, we are going to improve the safety of bike connections by X in this project, if they had said, we are going to put more benches there, we are going to attend to the safety of pedestrians. If they had said, let’s put in an extra lane and dedicate it only to buses so that it became much easier for people to move through this at scale. They might not have seen any complaints at all, but didn’t, what they said was, we want something that prioritizes one person at a time, one car at a time, and that’s all we want. And they said it the first time and we said it the second time. And honestly, it’s less compelling now than it was two weeks ago. So head up about this. I run out of breath at the end of my sentences.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
So I overstated my case a little bit because there is some part of the memo that does address this. And they, they talked about here are some plans for the border to border trail and pedestrian connections and things like that. It talks about them being part of the capital improvement plan and part of future projects about redesigning the intersection and things like that. And they said, and staff suggested there, they said, well, okay, if you want to make intersection redesign part of this project, here’s an amendment you could pass. And so if that’s the way it has to happen, then that’s the way it has to happen. And they should do that. But I don’t understand why. They can just say why they say and strongly argue for adding a lane of traffic without doing a redesign of the intersection. But they can’t say, oh, we have to like, oh, well, if you’re going to consider pedestrians, then we got to have a whole process. But if we’re only adding lanes of traffic, we don’t need a process. We got to do that now without thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
And this comes back to something that we’ve talked on this podcast over and over and over again, which is are infrastructure for people outside of cars, is it an amenity or is it infrastructure? And process wise, we keep treating it. It’s an amenity, we keep treating it. It’s a nice to have add-on. And what you just said, Michelle, about if you want to have it, we’ll have to go through this whole thing. Whereas for cars, it’s an automatic part of their process. We really need this culture shift around infrastructure thinking. Cars are not the only device drivers are not the only humans who need infrastructure. All humans need infrastructure. All users of the road need their infrastructure and should be considered equally well, equally with equitably. Let me say.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Yeah. And I wanted to call out, the thing that annoyed me the most when this was discussed at the council table last time was that we had some engineers from the University of Michigan talking about this project and they said, oh, I don’t understand what the problem is. There’s sidewalks on both sides of the road as though that was going to be the entire, that’s like the only thing they even thought was important about pedestrian safety.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
That was part of why it was interesting to me to look at the policy documents because that was really disappointing to me. And I wanted to know what are the goals that you are being asked to fulfill at a higher level? And honestly, the goals are somewhat disappointing as well. That doesn’t mean that they have to sink to the level of their expectation. They could rise above them. We could still be seeing better.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
And we’re seeing that the university, maybe the university doesn’t have any goals, but the city sure does. And so why is our staff not pushing for this? Why is our staff putting it on the political leadership to say, no, you actually have to do the things that we asked you to do.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
So what we’re hoping to see, and we do encourage our listeners to reach out to your city council members, what we hope to see is a redesign. The bridge stabilization will happen regardless if there is a redesign of the road over there, that it’s one that takes into account proactively all users and is mindful of that, of the fact that there are probably the majority of users there are not in single occupancy vehicles. So let your city council members know you want a people friendly street.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
For those of you who like data, I just disappeared for a couple of minutes because I was pulling up the annual crash map, which is one of my favorite documents to the extent that I haven’t bookmarked in my browser. And you can see quite clearly like the crash map, the uses, these great heat maps where the more crashes there are at an intersection, the more it glows sort of ready orangey and that intersection, the intersection where this bridge is, is a hotspot for crashes of all kinds. And if you look at the overlay with pedestrian and vehicle crashes or pedestrian and bicycle crashes, you can see that people are getting hit by cars in that intersection and all along that stretch because it’s not, because a lot of people are moving through that space without cars. And it is not well designed for those people. And so if you want to be able to say to your council member this location, these changes in this location is unacceptable, and I have the numbers for you, we will have a link to the crash map in the show notes, and you can scroll to page 32 and take a look.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
Ooh, my fake conspiracy theory now is that the university wants this to be a dangerous intersection cause they want to drum up business for the hospital. Yes. All
Speaker 4 (36:52):
Right. Speaking of hating it and yet,
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Right, let’s talk about
Speaker 4 (36:57):
A RRP funds.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
Yes. Okay. So the American Recovery Plan is a congressional spending plan that was passed a little while ago to help the country recover from covid 19. And part of the plan is to give municipalities money to do things that need to be done. And we are going to be getting 24 million from the federal government as a one-time pot of money to spend on cool things. What are we going to spend it on? That’s up to us and I hope we spend it on cool things. So the city administrator, the city staff, came up with their recommendations about what we should spend the money on. And a link to that memo is in the show’s description. And that memo had a bunch of exciting stuff on there that I like. There’s things about bike lanes, there’s things about vision zero implementations, there’s things about putting solar power facilities on city property.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
There’s things about purchasing affordable housing and transitional housing for homeless people. There’s things about funding human services. There’s things about I, there’s even a universal basic income pilot project mentioned in that recommendation. And each of these things is funded to the level of a million dollars or more to the things that I mentioned. And one of the things, another thing that’s on there that’s interesting is that it mentioned unarmed response. And that’s something that I want to see is I want to see us transitioning to a less police focused approach to public safety and a more unarmed response social work type of getting people the things that they need type of approach to public safety. And so I’m excited to see that mentioned in the staff’s memo. One thing I’m a little suspicious of is that it’s kind of mentioned in the same breath as community policing and giving money to the police to do community policing. And I see these goals as opposed to each other. I think that the police work against public safety and that if you give money to police, we’ll end up with a less safe community. And I’m worried that the fact that it is mentioned in the same breath as the unarmed response makes me suspicious that the staff doesn’t see these goals as opposed to one another.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
They haven’t really messed it up yet. So keep in touch with your city council members about this funding and make sure that that goes to the right place and that we don’t end up with armed response money going into the police budget or whatever. But the thing is that all that stuff is kind of far in the future because that was just the city staff recommendation, and that’s not the final recommendation. That’s not what we’re doing yet. And we’re pretty far from the point of having a document where we’re just going to say yes, go, and then we go. And the next step towards getting to that part is the resolution that’s on the agenda today. And that is a resolution to direct public engagement on the use of the American Recovery Plan funds. And that will start the process of doing public engagement. And the public engagement process is set to last until December 6th and come up with the recommendation then. So lots of people have opinions about this. I’ve already seen them talking about it on Facebook about what we should and should not spend that money on and things that people were happy about and unhappy about from the city administrator’s recommendations. And this public engagement process is meant to collect opinions like that. Hopefully they’ll be doing that in an equitable engagement style. I’m not sure that the plans for equitable engagement are really fully baked yet, so it’s probably going to be done in the best style they currently know how to do.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
But if you’ve got cool ideas, then hopefully there’ll be public meetings where you can tell the city your cool ideas. And if you have terrible ideas, then the meeting is a different day than it actually is.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Keep those to yourself please.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
I
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Have cool ideas to add to the list. I, I’m pretty excited to see a lot of the things that are on there. The one that I just wanted to call out for a particular reason was the universal basic income pilot. I think the one that folks are most familiar with is the one in California where Michael Tubbs was mayor and pioneered that through his city for, I can’t remember if it was one or three years that was done through philanthropic dollars. And to me, that felt problematic for a lot of reasons. It’s super fragile, like the minute that your donors change priorities, those dollars dry up. And what we’re saying is that this isn’t worth prioritizing with our tax dollars when we absolutely know it is. So I’m happy to see this happening in Washtenaw County. I’m happy to see this happening in Ann Arbor. I’m really happy to see this happening outside of philanthropy and with public dollars. To me that’s completely appropriate, so I just wanted to call that one out,
Speaker 3 (43:01):
Although this is a one-time funding thing, so it’s just a pilot project. But yeah, hopefully the city decides to take this up with actual tax money later on. But currently it’s current. It’s guaranteed to dry up right now. Well,
Speaker 2 (43:14):
The federal sources, but part of this is intended to stabilize the revenue that we lost as a result of Covid with the hope that’s true, that a lot of that was going to be bouncing back. So while we’re not going to see a r p funds again, we are going to see increased revenues on the city side, hopefully bouncing back to pre covid levels. So again, the source may change, but the dedication doesn’t have to.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
That’s right.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
It lives in our hearts.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
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 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.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
One final note about a civics fund opportunity for you is that there’s an election going on right now, and the final day of the election is Tuesday, November 2nd. And you can vote in person on that day at your polling place. But anytime between now and then, you can request your absentee ballot to be mailed to you. You can request a ballot at michigan.gov/vote, or you can go to the city clerk’s office at City Hall and get your ballot right there on the spot. You can even cast your ballot right there. You can fill it out and return it immediately. And what’s on the ballot if you live in Ann Arbor is four proposals, and if you want to hear more about those proposals, they’re all city charter amendments. If you want to hear more about those proposals, you can listen to our previous episode of Ann Arbor af, where we talked about them in detail. Tldr, we recommend voting yes on all four proposals. So yeah, that’s going to be a good time.