Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Monday, November 1st. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including staff changes, a potential sustainable energy utility, and the election that concludes this week, and 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.
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.
Michelle (00:21):
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 the next city council meeting. Coming up Monday, November 1st, we’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including staff changes, a potential sustainability energy utility and the election that concludes this week and offer some wains 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 kicking us off that very halloweeny sexy election, Michelle.
Michelle (01:09):
All right. So yeah, the election is, there’s a special election that’s happening and it is concluding on Tuesday, November 2nd, and there will be in-person voting Tuesday, November 2nd, 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM at your polling place. Back in the olden days, we used to call that election day and say that that was the election day, but now that there’s so much more emphasis on voting by mail and so forth, I like to say that’s the end of the election time. But if these times and places don’t work for you, you can also go to the city clerk and cast an absentee ballot there. Anytime.
(01:50):
What is on the special election, there are four city charter amendments and I recommend voting yes on all of them. That’s what I did. There’s one that’s about responsible contracting to make sure that the city can hire not just the cheapest, not just the lowest cost bidder, but the most highest value bidder. And that allows us to take into account things like labor practices and whether they’ve done good work and can be trusted. And that is previously something that the city council has not have been able to consider because of the charter saying that they have to go with the lowest bid. The other things are there’s, so that’s proposal A. Proposal B is ranked choice voting, and that would allow you to vote for the mayor and city council. You’d be able to say like, okay, here’s my first choice, second choice, third choice.
(02:57):
And so if you had a situation where there was a three-way race, then there wouldn’t necessarily be like a spoiler effect and more can more candidates, the more candidates the merrier because you can just rank them and not have to worry about, you wouldn’t have to consider who you think is going to win as well as who you want to win because you could cast your votes according to your heart and put your second choice vote as the more pragmatic option or whatever, if that’s how you go. And that would be that we would have a primary, that’s by rank choice voting, and then a partisan election. That’s by rank choice voting. And so that’s proposal B. Proposal C and D are about, I kind of forgot what those are.
Jess (03:57):
Yeah, they’re both about the budget restriction or the contract amounts that city council has to review. So right now the threshold is $25,000 and the recommendation is to lift that threshold from 25 to $75,000 for contracts that are already budgeted for essentially have been pre-approved by counsel so that they don’t have to do extra paperwork on that. Co staff is determined that that would take approximately 48% of the consent. I consent, consent agenda items out of the consent agenda, which would save both counsel and staff time.
Michelle (04:32):
So we’re saying is sit on for items that the city council has already approved on the agenda, they then have to approve the actual contract to implement the items that they’ve already budgeted for. But there’s a certain threshold by which if the contract’s cheaper than that, city council doesn’t have to approve the specific contract. They only have to approve, they only have to approve it if it’s expensive. And what does expensive mean? Currently it means $25,000, which basically means city council has to look at all contracts because there’s basically nothing that we do that’s $25,000 or less because this was a thing that we wrote into the charter in the eighties. But this would raise the cap to $75,000 and make it movable with inflation.
Jess (05:17):
That’s right. So we don’t have to write a charter amendment every time cost of living changes up or down, mostly up. So in the future, this can be adjusted according to inflation and not according to Charter Amendment, which is a much more flexible and nimble way to govern.
Michelle (05:37):
So that’s proposal C. Then proposal D is the one that’s, that allows the city council to create ordinances specifying when the city administrator can make emergency purchases. There was things like a water main broke and it took a while to hire someone to fix that because they had to convene the city council first and get an official vote and so forth, and we could fix that bypassing proposal D, we did a whole episode about this where we talked about it in depth. You can go listen to that.
Jess (06:14):
We dropped the link in the show notes.
Michelle (06:18):
But yeah, Tuesday, November 2nd, 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM That’s election day. Or you can go to the city clerk anytime between now and then that they’re open. So I e Monday or Tuesday, you can actually go there on Tuesday instead of your polling place and cast your vote. We recommend yes on all four of those proposals. Okay. Molly’s going to talk some stuff,
Molly (06:44):
And this is another thing that’s not technically on the agenda, but it felt important to at least mention, which is that we have a new city administrator, again, longtime listeners have been following all of the various happenings with our past couple city administrators. And we have now hired an official interim city administrator. His name is Milton. He comes to us most recently from Phoenix. And the idea here is that Deney is not a permanent city administrator hire, but he is here to keep things steady while we do a more in-depth search for a new city administrator. The last search happened in a perhaps less in-depth way, and the outcome was not optimal, I would argue, as evidenced by the fact that we didn’t keep that new administrator for very long. So this will be city administrator, DE’s first city council meeting as the city administrator, and he, it’s, I think he’s a pretty exciting person to have here, even though it’s only going to be temporary. He’s extraordinarily qualified. He’s coming to us most recently from being the assistant city administrator in the city of Phoenix, which is way bigger than I, slightly
Jess (08:13):
Larger than I, Barbara,
Molly (08:15):
Just a little. And Jess, there was something about his background that you particularly were excited about, right?
Jess (08:23):
Yeah, for sure. So I am on the board of the Downtown Development Authority and standard disclaimer, I am here representing my own opinions, thoughts, feelings and dog and nothing with respect to the organization, but we are in the process of searching for an executive director there. And one of the things that’s been really interesting and challenging is that in emphasizing a search for diverse candidates, diverse representing a lot of matrices, matrices, losing my on air, but representing a lot of different factors, not just demographics, but also backgrounds. Sometimes we have to take candidates and try to figure out, okay, how does your work experience relate to what you would be doing and aspirationally doing with the D D A, we don’t have that issue with Mr. Deney. So our MO two most recent city administrators omitting John Cornier, who was acting city administrator for a hot second after Tom Crawford’s departure, who was most recently the city C F O, his background as accounting.
(09:28):
And before that, Howard Lazarus, his background as civil engineering, he did public works. And so those are folks who had very specific technical backgrounds who worked their way up into administration. Mr. Deney is an administrator. His background is managing its people. And so for somebody, it’s hard for me to imagine somebody more naturally stepping into this role than someone with Mr. DA’s background. I’m excited that he’s joining us in Ann Arbor. I’m, I’m excited that he considered this an interesting opportunity and I very much appreciate that we’ll have a steady hand at the rudder of leadership as city council embarks on a new and hopefully lasting search for the next city administrator.
Molly (10:09):
And one thing that I think is worth mentioning, and correct me if I’m wrong here, but my understanding is that these sort of interim, the ship positions are what Dhani has been doing for the last several years. So this isn’t a situation that’s correct, where we expect that we might try to keep him forever. He’s going to swoop in.
Jess (10:27):
It’s unlikely
Molly (10:29):
If this was one of these movies about the high school teacher who comes in and whips a rowdy class into shape and then runs off to the next class of difficult teenagers, I think that’s how we might imagine Mr. Deney here in Ann Arbor.
Jess (10:44):
Wait, so in stand and deliver, who does that make us?
Molly (10:48):
I don’t think I’ve seen that movie.
Jess (10:52):
That’s all right. We’re the rowdy, rambunctious kids.
Molly (10:56):
And so that was all I wanted to say about the city administrator, and we can move on now to the sustainable energy utility report, which is going to be the, I think probably the bulk of this episode. We have a lot we want to say about this,
Michelle (11:09):
And this isn’t even something that’s getting voted on at the city council meeting. It’s getting a presentation about it from Missy Stoltz, the director of the Office of Sustainability and Innovations, who’s kind of been tasked with making the city carbon neutral by 2030. And they have released this report that is about 40 pages long and it talks about creating a new sustainable energy utility. And what is that? So okay, right now we have a power utility, which is D T E, and they provide natural gas and electricity, and they’re the only ones that are allowed to sell you power. They have a monopoly, no one else can sell you power, but the city actually has found that the laws allow the city to create a utility that does compete with D T E and exists in parallel to D T E. And so what they want to do is create a new utility that will focus on power generation more than it focuses on the distribution of power right now. So I
Jess (12:39):
Just want to pause on that definition real quick because that’s not necessarily clear to most folks. So power generation is the actual creation or production of power. Power distribution is getting power from the source of that creation to the end use. So from the coal traditionally, most recently from the coal mine to your microwave, that is generation versus distribution. And Michelle will talk in a little bit about the power and wire model or the pole and wire model of the utility, but I just kind of wanted to make that distinction because in thinking about utilities of the future, it means rethinking both the processes and the owners of generation and the processes and owners of distribution. Okay, carry on please. Madam Witches hat.
Michelle (13:26):
I’m wearing a witch’s hat. So yeah, what D t E has is they own some of the power plants, but they also own the power lines that bring the power to your house. And we don’t really have a power plant inside of Ann Arbor very much. A few people have solar panels that they sell their power back to D T E. They do have a couple of solar installations here, but mostly what they’re doing is they’re generating power at their coal power plants or at other power plants throughout Michigan and throughout the northeastern grid. And they’re buying power from them and then selling it to us. And our interaction with D T E is kind of at the last mile power distribution where they get pull it from their high power lines and bring it to our houses. And our power has been going off a lot lately in the city, as some of you may have noticed, to your great chagrin.
(14:32):
And that’s mostly a fault of the last mile. Those lines and poles that are outside of our houses on the streets and so forth, bringing the power to you. But what the sustainable energy utility proposes to do is not so much to take over the power distribution, not to buy up the lines and poles, not to try to create a citywide network or compete with the citywide network or take over the citywide network. They, they want to create a little series of micro grids, and that might be one person’s house that would have solar panels on it. And so the sustainable energy utility would be generating the power on the roof of your house and then giving it to you and then selling it to you. But the solar panels still be owned by the utility and maintained by the utility. And one of the things that, well, okay, wait, hang on then. So you might be buying power from the top of your house or you might be buying it from the top of your neighbor’s house or something like that because they do propose actually to build some power distribution within neighborhoods, but not necessarily all connect them to each other and not necessarily hit every building with those things.
Molly (16:07):
So my question, and this is sort of the full disclosure, Michelle and Jess have both read this report, and this is also Jess’s area of knowledge. I think I have not read the wrong,
Michelle (16:19):
Yeah, so I’m talking about it, but Jess actually knows stuff, so I’m hoping she’s going to jump in when I say things that are wrong. I
Molly (16:25):
Haven’t read the report and I have no idea. I don’t am the naif here. So my question is, and maybe we’re getting to this later, what is the problem that the sustainable energy utility is trying to solve and for whom
Michelle (16:41):
It’s trying to get to carbon neutrality by 2030? And so right now, that’s going to be hard because for one thing, we want our power generation to be greener because the power that we buy from D T E is mostly going to be coming from coal. And it’s really hard to convince them not to do that because coal power is the cheapest power. And there’s also like, okay, if we want to have more distributed power generation, more different places that have solar panels and things like that on the house generated right on site where you don’t have to depend on the distribution network to be perfect, that’s awesome, but it’s hard to provide the incentives to create that because a lot of times you can buy solar panels and put them on your house and you can buy batteries and put them in your house, but it takes a long time to pay that off in terms of your savings aren’t the savings that you get from generating power on top of your house aren’t going to be so much that it’s going to pay for itself in just a year or whatever. It’s going to take a long time. And so you have to be someone who owns your house and intends to stay there for a really long time and has lots of capital upfront and wants to spend it on this.
Molly (18:26):
So in theory, this would expand, make solar specifically solar generation accessible to more households in the city.
Jess (18:37):
So Michelle had a great answer and now I’m going to take over and not answer your question directly, but then I will in a second. Okay. So you asked what is the problem we’re trying to solve and for whom? And one of the things that I love, well, first of all, I just love the three of us talking about anything because we’re similar but different enough that we tend to approach anything in complimentary ways. Molly, who will resist this title until the day she dies is unfortunately in academic. And so she just goes, I know she made a frowning face. I’m sorry,
Michelle (19:07):
I wish you could see that frowning face.
Jess (19:11):
Yeah, that was pretty great. So thank you for the succinct and clear framing of the problem. What is the problem we’re trying to solve? So in the report it notes that 40% of our city’s carbon emissions comes from the operation of buildings, and a substantial majority of that comes from commercial and residential buildings. So where we operate, where we we do business and where we live. So that’s really where we have a lot of room to make headway into the carbon emissions that living our daily lives causes. Transportation is a healthy chunk of that. There are other aspects of that that report to work on. But for the purposes of the S E U, we’re really focusing on that 40% of carbon emissions that’s generated through the operation of buildings in those buildings, specifically looking at homes, Ann Arbor has approximately the report notes, so helpful and interesting, 49,000 households.
(20:06):
Of those households, 75% are natural gas powered. 22 approximately percent are electric powered, and the remainder are a variety of coal, oil, wood, and other things that I had no idea people still used whale oil. I don’t know. When you talk about who, that’s where this gets really interesting because it notes that of the 75% of natural gas powered homes, almost a hundred percent of that is homeowner occupied. Whereas in the 22% electric powered homes, that is over 80% renter occupied. And when it talks about equity in this report, a lot of times what it focuses on, at least specifically, at least at this point, is what’s renter occupied and what’s owner occupied that has really interesting demographic income justice implications, which are not named in this report, but which are inferred. So the problem we’re trying to solve is how do we generate green energy for these respectively powered homes and how can we do it in a way that ensures what’s called a just transition? So what we’re saying is how are we making sustainability? We’ve talked about this with sidebox, not an amenity, not something you can opt into if you can afford it, like Michelle was saying, but part of our infrastructure. And so this report is not only positioning at an s e U as something that we want to go for, but trying to prioritize the end users, thinking about the end users in terms of prioritizing its actions. Does that answer your question?
Molly (21:46):
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s incredibly helpful. So I have another question because I’ve been seeing in some of the conversations about the S E U, I’ve been seeing it sort of contrasted with a public power municipalization approach where we would take over the utility from in D T E because that’s what we have. And that conversation seems to be a lot about the sort of resilience and redundancies so that we don’t have all of these outages. And my question is whether the S E U also relates to that or whether it’s really about this energy transition and not so much about resilience.
Jess (22:29):
So I’m going to preface this by saying I hope Michelle answers this question first. I think she has a both and answer, and I a want to answer another question answer.
Michelle (22:41):
Yeah. So I was talking to some of the public power people on the phone this morning. So in terms of resiliency, I think that the S e U can provide, what the S e U can provide is that if the grid can’t provide power to your house because it’s gone down somewhere, then hey, you’ve got solar panels and you can still buy power from the S E U if your solar panels go down because maybe it’s just hasn’t been enough solar power. Maybe something’s broken up on the solar, on the roof, you’re still going to need to buy power from the grid. And they’re not especially envisioning that people are going to cut themselves off from D T E. They’re kind of expecting that people will continue to pay both bills, although you won’t pay much on the D T E bill be if you’re on the S E U and you’re getting a bunch of power from your neighborhoods grid and batteries and stuff.
(23:57):
Yeah. So the report definitely talks about the S E U as being the solution to resiliency because you don’t need the entire distribution network to be functioning perfectly. But I think that it also notes that you are still going to need to be connected to the grid for full resiliency. And so the people who are behind the public power push trying to buy up DTS equipment, their goals are to improve resiliency, to make the distribution network function better and go down less often and to green the grid. And what they say about what they say about making the utility more reliable is that once the city owns it, then we’re not going to be motivated by profit, we’re going to be motivated by service. And so we can start doing things that are more long forward thinking. We can bury the lines, we can the lines up on poles where the problem is we can also get new transformers, all these things that are the things that break whenever there’s a rainstorm. And because D
Molly (25:25):
T E has really not invested in the sort of maintenance and updates that just we would need,
Michelle (25:31):
Right? Cause and they’re trying to make profits and so they want something that works just enough, just enough that the law doesn’t get involved.
Jess (25:42):
So one of the things that I appreciate about the report is how it names things and it used very conventional namings, but also it feels like, ah, sick burn. So the S E u, obviously the sustainable energy utility is what the report about is about. It contrasts itself to utilities like DTEs, which they refer to, again industry standard term as I O U or investor operated util or investor-owned utility. And so essentially what they’re saying is what is each one driven by? And I think that’s super interesting and funny.
Molly (26:13):
Okay, so then Jess, what’s your answer to the question?
Jess (26:18):
Oh, debating about what to say out loud, what I’ll say, what say is that your question focuses really narrowly on generation and problems with distribution and when folks in the industry specifically building industry professionals talk about heavy quotes, sustainability, and what I mean is more efficient, buildings production is the last thing on the list. And that’s actually implied, not stated explicitly, but implied in this report. So an Ann Arbor, s e u would focus to a limited extent on generation. It would focus on facilitating individuals, property owners, building owners to install or at least operate solar panels and geothermal systems. Absolutely. How do we produce energy? More greenly? I started my career in Ann Arbor in the building industry with a firm called Meadowlark de Design. It’s now called Meadowlark Design and Build. Shout out to my meadowlark team folks. They are all awesome. And if you ever have a chance, by the way to go see their 18 hundreds schoolhouse building that they operate out of Wagner Road, or excuse me, it’s out Liberty and Wagner.
(27:38):
It is a very cool building and they will give you a sustainability tour and it is worth every minute, like it’s super fun. Unfortunately not ADA a accessible, I will say that. Having said that, Meadowlark talked a lot about what it meant to get to a sustainable building. And their formula was use less, excuse me, lose less, use less, and then produce. And what they’re saying with lose less is that in America, we have really leaky, leaky, leaky buildings. We have super leaky buildings. So energy that we create tends to just penetrate out through the wall or the walls, the doors, the not very insulated walls, the windows, things like that. The general wisdom is that in typically insulated and sealed homes, there is the equivalent of a two foot by two foot hole in your wall. Wow. So you are heating, cooling, otherwise conditioning the interior of a home that has four square foot of leakage.
(28:40):
So you’ve got to tighten that up because no matter how well you generate and how well you distribute, if you’re still losing that amount, it is insanely inefficient, like it’s pointless. So you’ve got to lose less. You’ve got to have better sealed windows, better sealed doors, better insulated walls. And one of the things that this report talks about is how do we get, a lot of times this is referred to as weatherization, how do we weatherize homes in a more efficient way, especially when the homes that need it are often occupied by renters. Michelle, I noted that one of your questions is how do we incentivize something that’s currently disincentivized? How do we incentivize investments in homes that people don’t occupy? The report goes into a couple of different examples. It doesn’t say we will do X, but it says we could do X. One of the things that they’re talking about are green leases, which essentially ties your rent to your utilities and makes the utility cost accrue to the homeowner rather than the renter, which is currently not true.
(29:45):
And so that payback that they need in order to feel like, yes, I want to invest 10,000, 25,000, $50,000 in this upgrade to my home, they’ll actually see that money and it doesn’t come at a hit either at the rent or the utility side to the renter. So that’s one example for that. So that’s lose less use less is making sure that what we have in our homes is efficient, especially after 2000, 2004, 2008, the appliances that we have have gotten more efficient. But that’s not always true. See earlier comment about 75% of homes in Ann Arbor operate off of natural gas, which don’t let the marketing phrase clean natural gas fool you. That will never be a clean source of energy. So we’ve got to figure out ways to convert people from natural gas to electric appliances and folks who have electric appliances to make sure that they are sipping rather than drinking electricity.
(30:44):
And the s e u report, it goes into generation and distribution, but it talks a lot about how the financing behind these tactics, behind these approaches, why people currently don’t do them. And talks a lot about how it could bear the weight of financing at a large scale for weatherization, for better installation, for better door and window ceiling. And you know who that’s going to help. That’s going to help renters, that’s going to help older folks, that’s going to help people in older homes. I note one of the things that the report has is a housing count by building age. It’s on page 19 for those of you who are going to follow the link in the show notes. And 60% of Ann Arbor’s households were created between 1960 and 1980. That’s the majority of Ann Arbor’s apartments. So 60% of what we need to get at are rental households. And that comes up six different ways from Sunday is this report. We’ve got to help renters, we’ve got to help renters, we’ve got to help renters. So we have to be creative in helping landlords actually take the step in making these improvements. Molly, that’s a long way around, and I completely didn’t answer your question, but did that answer the non answer?
Molly (31:56):
No, that’s really helpful because it helps me understand who the for whom Pete piece of this and the various dynamics that are in play. And so then I guess my next, I’m just interviewing you both now
Michelle (32:09):
About this. Oh, I wanted to talk to for a second again, because Jess Jess’s thing made me think about stuff. I hope that’s all right. But just that there’s a lot, so I kind of focused, when I was talking, when was describing what the S e U is, I kind of focused on the power generation, but the report actually focuses even more than on power generation. It focuses on the financing and it focuses on this getting appliances updated, getting your weatherized and all that kind of thing. And I have some personal examples of that because I’m someone who is highly motivated to do my part to help out society. And so I’ve been trying to save up for a geothermal installation, but that means that I’ve got to pay $20,000 to install this geothermal thing that isn’t going to affect my life really in any way. It’ll give me it, it’ll make my bills cheaper so that it’ll pay itself off in what, 10 or 20 years? Yeah. Why am I so am I going to take 20, $20,000 upfront? Unless that’s not something that you do, unless you’re someone like me who’s just like, I think it’s important and I want to do it. And we can’t really rely on people being in the financial position to that. That’s their number one concern. That can’t be our only way to do this.
Jess (33:38):
Well, that’s the thing. And it is 40 pages and you guys, it is a bit dense. But I got to say the devil’s in the details on this one. When an S e U first came up, I groan. I didn’t want to talk about it because any conversation about sustainability that revolves around consumption is not interesting to me. We cannot consume our way out of this climate crisis. We cannot have to find different ways of being in the world. But this s u actually is one of the ways in which we can fund, because it operates at scale, our consumption actually does help us operate more efficiently. And the reason that I’m encouraging you to read the report directly, even though it’s 40 pages, even though it stents, even though it’s kind of technical, the devils and the details means the boring stuff like the financing and the weatherization is the meat and potatoes of this report.
(34:32):
We can talk about the utility and who provides that’s necessary, but it’s really not the majority of the work or the point of the work. And so the more we can familiar ours ourselves, familiarize ourselves with the details, the better. I think our conversation around this will be an analog to this is in transportation where we want to talk about hyperloops, we want to talk about the boring project, we want to talk about drones and micro mobility. And if what we did was in invested in buses and bike lanes to a significant extent, then we wouldn’t have to worry about all of this massively expensive, massively non incremental infrastructure. We just have frequent more reliable, cheaper buses. So think of this in a bus. It’s the bus for your house.
Michelle (35:23):
Okay. Yeah, because this is actually about, a lot of this report is about reducing consumption and how to use less, use less and how to incentivize that. Okay, Molly,
Molly (35:34):
So my next question, you both have mentioned in different ways financing in terms of the way this would work for property owners, homeowners, landlords. Does this report talk about the financing from the city side? Where is this money coming from? What would a timeline look like? What’s the cost, all those kinds of things? Is that in there?
Michelle (35:58):
Yeah, there’s a couple things they mentioned. One is that they, they’re either are or they’re expect, or they’re expect to be lots of federal grants to get the ball rolling. And then once the ball is rolling, then we’ll have rate payers and we can use the money from that to kind of snowball this thing. So yeah, get the ball rolling with federal grants and private donations and from organizations like that, they also talked about the possibility of the voters approving a millage to get the ball rolling too. Because the bigger, faster the snowball starts rolling, the faster it can accumulate.
Jess (36:49):
Is that And to your, sorry, go ahead, ma.
Molly (36:52):
Is that this climate millage that I’ve been hearing sort of chatter about? Or is this a different millage?
Michelle (36:57):
I don’t know if those two are connected yet. I never heard anything about what this climate millage would entail. Okay. Yeah, it’s, it’s possible that this is the sort of thing that could be used for that climate millage money could be used for, but I don’t dunno.
Jess (37:12):
Yeah, I mean, the climate millage was explicitly in support of A two zero, our carbon neutrality plan and its work and the S E u, even before all of this was again explicitly a part of a two zero. So it’s possible that they were connected. They weren’t at the outset. Okay, Molly, so to your question about timeline there, in addition to the report, excuse me, report, we’ll drop in a summary PowerPoint, that’s 12 very easy slides. So if you’d like to dip into the S E U, the PowerPoint’s a nice way to do that. And one of the things they talk about is that one of the first things that needs to be done is a determination of the governance structure and staffing needs and rate analysis, both of which taken together would give us a little bit more detail on the timeline. So just as a reminder, the s e u, we are in such early days, this is the first, I would say, substantive conversation about this. Your question is a good one, and I I’m delighted to say that it’s too early to answer it Well,
Molly (38:07):
Okay.
Michelle (38:07):
And also the report said that the report itself says that they kind of issued the report a little bit earlier than they would’ve liked to because the
Jess (38:15):
Conversation, I actually love this statement. Yeah.
Michelle (38:18):
Because the conversation about public power is already happening, and so they wanted to make sure that the s e U was part of that conversation. Okay. So there’s advocacy works kids get out there. Yes. Yes.
Molly (38:32):
Not really a lot of, I have my little notes here as we’ve been talking, and my last question is fight the power question mark, d t e, is this going to help us fight the power that is D T E? Whether or not we think municipalization wholesale is good, is good or feasible, I do want to fight back against D T E in some way because they seem to be serving our whole region so poorly. And so I’m curious about the, that’s maybe my final question. I think we’re running out of time for this topic.
Michelle (39:04):
Well, I think that, yeah, I don’t know. I think that it seems like, okay, when people talk about hesitancy about municipal, the city, they talk about the lawsuits and the protracted negotiations that will have to happen in order for the city to buy up DTS infrastructure. This report paints a pretty rosy picture of that. They think like, oh yeah, we can just do this. And is DT really not going to fight us on this? We’re building a competing utility and we believe that we can do this, but I do expect some lawsuits from them. Yeah. Yeah. I like the idea of, I like the idea of municipalization buying, buying up the existing infrastructure. I also like the idea of anything else that puts pressure on them. Because if we put more pressure on D t E to say like, okay, well if you don’t green, if make this this more reliable, then we’ve got options. Then D, that puts more pressure on D T E to be like, okay, I guess we’ll clean up our act. One thing that the report actually says though, is that they think that the s e U is a model that would be easier for other municipalities to follow, whereas they think that smaller or poorer communities might have a hard time achieving municipalization. They think it would be easier for them to achieve an S E u. I don’t really know how to evaluate whether that any of that is true, but
Molly (40:59):
I do like that idea because it does seem as though we have to be thinking regionally about like Ann Arbor municipal, when D T E serves a much wider area, most of which does not have as much money as Ann Arbor makes you feel like we’re not actually solving the problem for anyone but ourselves.
Michelle (41:18):
Right? Yeah. Oh, and I wanted to talk about another thing I heard about from the public power people, which is that because one of my questions about the municipalization effort is like, okay, if we municipalize, we believe, so we’re saying we believe that a municipal utility could do a better job of making the grid reliable do, but I didn’t understand how municipalization could actually cause the grid to be greener because we wouldn’t be buying power generation, we would be buying power distribution. And so we still be having to buy power from the same sources that D T E is buying from. And what they told me is that there actually are a bunch of green power infrastructure on the grid. There are solar power panel plants, there are wind power plants in Michigan and elsewhere in the hole northeastern grid that are being underutilized because the coal can be provided so much more cheaply that there’s solar power being generated that’s just getting thrown away because it’s cheaper to buy coal.
(42:35):
And if we owned the grid, we would be able to, if we owned owned our local distribution, we would be able to say, no, no, we’re only going to buy power from the green stuff. And then that would create some financial incentives to create more green infrastructure because there’s more of a market for it. And this report talks about an alternative way of doing that without buying the infrastructure, which is community choice aggregation. Because there’s laws that say individual households can opt for green power and then D T E has to provide you a certain percentage of green power if you pay more for it. But what if the city could just pay everyone’s extra green fee and then DTS providing green power for the entire city and right now? So that would be cool if we could do that without buying up all those polls. But the state law doesn’t currently allow for it. So we would, in order to make that happen, our choices are changes of state law or municipalize. So anyway, my whole recommendation on this is the S e U is awesome. It’s everything we need to be doing, let’s do it. But let’s also not forget about the municipalization effort. Let’s do both things.
(44:03):
If we do power municipalization, if we buy up the infrastructure, bury it, we’ll be better able to distribute the power that we generate from the S E U and we’ll be more, we can make it more reliable and we can do the community choice. We can buy the green power without having to pass a new community choice aggregation law at the state level. It’ll take a long time. So anyway, I think these things are the missing part of each other. I think that the S e U would benefit from municipalization and municipalization would benefit from the S E u.
Molly (44:41):
Cool. Jess, did you have any last things you wanted to say about this before we move on?
Jess (44:45):
And it’s such a high idol on this. Yes, I have things I want to say in this issue in my head. I live, I think a little bit further out in the future where this conversation about who owns that kind of grid is irrelevant. What I mean is I’ve worked in various capacities with an organization the last few years called the International Living Future Institute. It’s specifically to do with the development of extremely efficient and healthy and healthful buildings and communities and ultimately cities. But it starts kind of at that more granular level. They have an sustainability certification program, and their icon for it is a flower. And the most you can earn is seven petals of a flower, six petals, five petals, whatever. And it gets really technical. But I love the metaphor of the flower as a certification. And the reason for it is the idea that a building should sit as lightly on its land as a flower does.
(46:00):
It should not sip any more energy, any more water, any more waste than is possible to produce on the piece of land that that building is on right now. That is impossible for us to consider given how we use appliances, how we live our lives, how our buildings are constructed. Building a building to code means you need electricity, you need that much to run a home that will keep you safe and alive. But I don’t think it needs to be that way. We can build healthier homes that don’t require a grid like that. And that’s why I get stuck a little bit on this question about municipalization because I don’t want to talk about a grid anymore. I want to talk about buildings that are healthy and smart enough that they don’t need that much energy. That we’ve got to be thinking, we’ve got to be doing scale jumping, not just the next neighborhood over, but the next city over the next region over to be able to power and water what we do. And this is what I mean when I say I don’t like talking about consumption. When I talk about sustainability, I want to talk about behavior change, and that means how we use our buildings and also how we build them. So I’d like to end this conversation about the grid by saying, I don’t believe in the grid and I hope we don’t have one in the future.
Molly (47:16):
I like that. That’s a real mind exploder of a way. To wrap up this conversation about power,
Michelle (47:23):
I want to put in a plug for watching the Energy Commission. Oh, plug.
(47:31):
I’d like to put in a promotional announcement for watching the October 12th Energy Commission meeting. I haven’t watched it yet, but it sounds awesome. There was a presentation at the Energy Commission from two power utilities that have recently Municipalized. There was one in Florida that successfully municipalized and has already paid back their things. And they’re well on the way to paying back their stuff. They’re burying their lines. Things are a lot more reliable. And then there’s another one, Boulder, Colorado, that tried to municipalize and failed, but so doing inspired their local utility, their investor owned utility to achieve some of the goals that they wanted. So there’ll be a link in the description to that meeting, so you can watch that.
Jess (48:33):
Thanks for your questions, Molly. That was a great way. This report gets out a lot. So your questions were a really nice way at teasing out a lot of information. And to Michelle for always reading the fine print, always reading every word. I just, y’all are both my heroes.
Michelle (48:49):
Aw, I wish all the words stayed in my head. There was some of those charts you mentioned that I was like, wait, what? That was in there. But
Molly (49:02):
I’m going to move us along to a conversation about a very different kind of grid, which is not really a grid at all and more of a pie. And that’s the way the wards are apportioned in the city. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode. The census was in 2020, and so after the census, we have to reapportion the city’s wards in order to adjust for population fluctuations. The city charter requires that the wards be shaped like slices of pie coming out from the middle of downtown. And so there we have to make these adjustments within the context of all these different rules. When we talked about it last time, we were like, this is confusing and the maps are confusing and it’s not really clear to us what’s happening. But we have a slightly better sense of what’s happening now, which is that there are some mostly adjustments happening in the downtown area, so near the center of the pi.
(50:02):
And I think this is going to go through without a lot of controversy, but it does mean things. Some things have moved in and out of wards. And the main detail that I thought was helpful for understanding this was that there are two of them. One of them is that there’s some buffer in the rules about how far above or below the goal number, the target number we can be in each ward. And this reapportionment is very there. There’s very little deviation from the goal numbers. And the other one is that when you’re making these changes, you have to move whole census blocks together. So if there’s a really small difference, you can’t just like ship 10 houses over into the next ward. You have to do it census block by census block. And so that’s how these changes happened. We expect them to pass without any particular drama. But since we were a bit confused about it last time, I wanted to bring back a little bit of clarity this time. And the next thing we’re going to talk about is DC one. I think we’re finally to the major part, the central part of the end. Now
Michelle (51:11):
The enemies of democracy are on the move.
Molly (51:18):
That’s amazing. And yet
Michelle (51:19):
True, yes. That is what they’re doing in right now is that they have a petition going on that’s called Secure My Vote. And it’s one of these things where they’re trying to make it harder to vote. And this is a try.
Molly (51:36):
This is statewide, right? This is,
Michelle (51:38):
This is a statewide, this is a statewide petition that’s being circulated right now. And on the city council agenda is a resolution asking you not to sign that petition. And I am also asking you not to sign that petition. It was, it’s something that would make it harder to do mail-in ballots. It would make more onerous ID requirements and make, so it’s a voter suppression petition and it, they’re circulating it right now and they’re saying false things about it. So I’ve heard, I haven’t actually encountered these people yet, but there’s no good petitions that are being circulated right now. So I’m told, so just don’t sign any petitions. That’s what that’s heard. And the problem is, okay, so normally when you file a petition, you get like 400,000 signatures throughout the state, and then that puts it on the ballot. And these people are going to tell you, oh, well, even if you disagree with this, just put it on the ballot. Let the voters decide. The voters are never going to get to decide this one, because the state has this wacky rule where if the evil happened and the evil state legislature can just go ahead and pass the evil law, it never goes to the ballot. The May, the governor can’t veto it. And so voter suppression will become the law of the land if only 400,000 people or so sign this petition and you not sign the petition.
Molly (53:08):
And I just want to contrast that with the millions, I think millions of people who voted for the major overhaul to the state’s voting laws that we had passed in 2018. Exactly. Things that enabled more mail-in voting and just did a lot to really make it easier to vote in Michigan. And that was a petition that then had to go onto the ballot that then we all voted on, and this would undo that and then some. So it’s bad.
Michelle (53:37):
So yeah, the city council will be considering a resolution asking you not to sign that, but you don’t even need to hear it from them because you heard it from us. Don’t sign that petition. Okay. Next we got DC two ta. Let’s talk about that, Molly.
Molly (53:54):
Yeah. This is another personnel thing, which is that we are looking to hire a new city attorney, and the city council has found their candidate. Her name is Alene Carr. The background with this is that the current city attorney, Steven Postma ha announced early this year, maybe even last year, that he was planning to retire in 2022. And so that triggered a timeline to find a new one. We’re right on track. If you look at the timeline, this is right the time when we were hoping to find someone new who then we would go, there’s a whole process of negotiating a contract, and she wouldn’t actually end up starting until at some point next year. Carr is coming to us from a career mostly in the private sector. So most recently she was serving as assistant general counsel at the ZF Group, which is an electronics company based in Michigan. One detail that I think is cool is that she’s local. She’s been living in Ann Arbor for the last 18 years, and that means that presumably she knows what she’s getting herself into, given the assorted shenanigans of the last few years. I would worry about someone coming here from someone somewhere else who maybe wasn’t aware of all the nonsense. And so that’s pretty much all I wanted to say about her. But just that we’re getting a new city attorney sometime next year. Good luck, counselor Carter.
(55:19):
And that was, I think that’s it for us on what we wanted to talk about on this agenda.
Michelle (55:24):
And so one more plug to go vote in the special election. It’s Tuesday, November 2nd, 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM is when polls will be open at your polling place. You can also go to the city clerk at any time and fill out your ballot there. And we recommend voting yes on all four of the proposals. And that’s the only things that are on the ballot. And that’s it.
Molly (55:59):
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 AF listeners on Twitter at the two council hashtag and Facebook in the Ann Arbor, humans Who wonk group and catch cohost Michelle on wcbn.org. Tuesdays 9:00 AM 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 at k-fi.com/ann Arbor AF to help us with hosting, we always appreciate it. We are your co-hosts, Michelle Hughes, Jess Lee ta, and myself, Molly Kleinman. And thanks to producer Jack Jennings. The music is, I don’t 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.