Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Monday, November 15th. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including cars, churches, and the return to in person meetings.
Links we referenced:
– the A2 Humans Who Wonk thread on how to follow along with a development
– NYT article about how police spend their time
– the brand-new Renters Commission is now accepting applications!
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. And hey, if you wanted to ko-fi us a few dollars to help us with hosting, we wouldn’t say no. Support the show
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.
Jess (00:11):
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 Jess Leet and I’m here with my co-host Molly Kleinman. We both use she her pronouns we’re your co-hosts to help you get informed and get involved. It’s your city. Let’s jump in.
Jess (00:42):
Longtime listeners will have noticed from the new introduction that Michelle Hughes is no longer with the show. We wish her the very best in all her civic endeavors and remind you that you can find her weekly@wcbn.org. 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM on Tuesdays, hosting a radio show featuring music made by women as well as the occasional council meeting recap. And on Twitter at x mega Michelle X and on the A two council hashtag. Good luck, Michelle. Today we’re talking about the next city council meeting. Coming up Monday, November 15th, we’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including cars, churches, and the return to in-person meetings 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 as she often does. Molly’s going to kick us off with some thoughts and feelings about cars.
Molly (01:35):
Yes, always This time we’re talking about CA six, which is in the consent agenda and it’s about the city buying some cars. And there are two different vehicle purchases going on in the agenda this week, but this is the big one. It’s $360,892 worth of car, and it’s for a mix of police vehicles and other city vehicles. And what I thought was interesting about this purchase is that you can really see the contrast between what it looks like to buy police vehicles versus the rest of the city’s fleet. So the city’s labor contracts with the Ann Arbor Police Officer’s Association and the Ann Arbor police supervisors require that vehicles used by their members will not be driven more than 80,000 miles or six years, whichever comes first. I don’t know about you all, but I drive cars for a lot longer than six years and usually a lot more than 80,000 miles.
Molly (02:35):
And so seeing that limitation, I was like, Hmm, this feels like they’re getting a lot more new cars than they probably really need. But then in the very same resolution, you see that that’s actually true because for the rest of the city’s fleet, there’s an evaluation process and they assign points based on how, again, how many years and how many miles and condition, how much money they’ve had to spend on repairs. And what you can see is that I probably, in most cases, city vehicles are lasting longer than six years, more than 80,000 miles. So this is relevant because of the ongoing conversation about police funding and specifically about the unarmed response resolution that city council passed last spring. So one thing that I hear about creating an unarmed response program are concerns about how we’re going to pay for it and sort of an expectation that it would be very expensive.
Molly (03:32):
A few other cities have already launched programs like this, and we know that they’re actually not very expensive. They’re doing them pretty efficiently and more cheaply, more cheaply than you might expect. And the reason is that having police do anything is more expensive than having not Police do the exact same thing down to driving a car. It is more expensive when the police are driving a car around than when not police are driving a car around. So I think this is just a really nice example of the ways in practice what it would look like When people talk about defunding the police and the police are taking up so much of our city budget, multiply this across all the different ways that we’re spending money on police. And you can start to see, well, oh, maybe for these things that we don’t actually need an officer for, we could do it more cheaply.
Molly (04:23):
So there was a review, the New York Times did last year of the data from a few different cities. They had public data about how police are spending their time and it, it sort of worked out to about 4% of their time on serious violent crimes. And that’s the thing where people seem to sort of feel like, well, we need police to show up for when a situation is violent. There are all these times when we have to have police there, well, across multiple cities, we’re talking 4% of the time that that’s what police are responding to. The other 96% of the time. It’s not a violent crime. Ann Arbor is a very low crime city. I think our numbers are probably even lower. They’re not, as I understand it, there’s people working on the data. It’s not public yet. But again, this just felt to me like a really nice clean example of what people are talking about when they say defund the police or we should think about spending our money in a different way. It costs more down to the vehicles they drive to have police do these things when we could be having other people do them. So that’s what I wanted to say about this consent agenda item. It’s going to pass. It’s fine. You don’t need to call in about it. I just wanted to sort of use it as a teaching moment. And so the next thing we have up is Jess talking about one of the public hearings,
Jess (05:50):
Which I’m excited about the public hearing, but I’m not ready to move on from cars yet. So I wanted to note that this is not the first time we’ve had this conversation. I think the very first episode of Ann Arbor F, we were criticizing car purchases by the police department. We all noted then, and I just kind of wanted to highlight now as Molly just said, that the call to action is not let’s protest this contract. The call to action then as now is we need to take a closer look at our overall city budgeting process, which by the way, it’s going to kick off in a couple of months, get in that New Year’s celebration, and then let’s get ready to talk about budget for four months. But it’s also a repeated call to look at with more scrutiny at the Labor Union contract, specifically with the police department. This is an area where we could tweak the terms there to invoke less cost and less onus on the city. So I just wanted to again, affirm what Molly said. No need to call an outrage, but less pay really close attention as we did last year to the budget process and to the labor negotiation process.
Molly (06:54):
And there’s actually another opportunity to be paying close attention to something related to this, which is about the unarmed response planning, which as I understand it, the plan will be, there will be a plan coming to city council in early December. So just a couple more weeks probably. We’re going to have a chance to see City Council said, let’s figure out unarmed response. And we’re about to see what the city administrator and staff have come up with for that. And that’s going to be a chance I think for a lot of public engagement if we as the public feel we need it.
Jess (07:29):
Right on. Thanks for the reminder. Yeah. Okay. So I wanted to move on to public hearing two slash b2, which is a second reading of the menstrual hygiene ordinance. And the extent that I wanted to say is, yay, we were glad before that it’s coming forward. Still glad that it’s coming forward. Really glad that it’s gender neutral language around this particular ordinance. So thanks counsel. This feels like an area of getting it right in a place that matters. Okay. Moving on to public hearing three slash DB one. Grace Bible Church has submitted a site plan for approval, which is an expansion of their existing facility by 34,000 square feet. And the thing that really jumped out to me 107 new parking spaces, and I got my hackles all up, so I wanted to know a little bit more about it. The 107 includes 23 EV installed spaces, which means spots where you can charge electric vehicles and 57 what’s called ev ready or EV capable spaces, which essentially means that the electricity can be available at some point in the future and just needs to be wired to those specific spots and equipment involved, or excuse me, installed.
Jess (08:41):
So that’s 80 spots potentially in the future, but 23 today that are adding to our EV parking inventory. But we’re still adding on top of that 84, if I’m doing my math off the cuff correctly of just regular plain old parking spots. I read the supporting documents where church representatives note quite eloquently the insufficiency of their current parking lot, including how parishioners park across South Maple where the church building currently now is and have to cross it. So while I may not love all of this expansive parking, I do understand where they’re coming from, but as some of my young friends would say, here, this ain’t it. First of all, adding this amount of impervious surface is really undesirable from a stormwater management perspective, which means we got less rainwater infiltrating directly into the ground. We’ve got more pollutants being funneled from the asphalted or whatever it is, parking lot into our stormwater system.
Jess (09:42):
And second of all, this is addressing the parking pane without under addressing the underlying issue of all cars on the road. I just feel like they could have been a little bit more thoughtful about approaching this problem, and maybe they were internally within their congregation, but there was nothing in the supporting documents that I saw that suggested that they had advocated, for example, for a more pedestrian friendly crossing at that point, maybe even two, because that’s a big road and it’s got a wide frontage on South Maple. What if they had an initiative enabling more parishioners to attend service outside of cars? Is there anything about ride sharing? I take took a look at their website. This is not a church or a congregation that I’m super familiar with, and their website indicates that this is a faith with a strong focus on a lot of things, but not necessarily the environment or the planet. And I just want to come into this conversation saying that I am not a person of an established faith, but there is a lot about environmental theology, also known as Creation Care that is also consistent with the city’s carbon neutrality plan. And I guess I have a hunger for faith-driven, mission-driven organizations to have both a cultural sensitivity and environmental sensitivity. And this is just an lost opportunity. So we’re about to have 107 new parking spaces and it is what it is.
Molly (11:10):
Yeah, I saw this on the agenda and I was like, oh, that’s a lot of parking. I don’t love that, but maybe I shouldn’t be criticizing the church as the Jew on the podcast. And so I’m glad that Jess got to sort of do that one, but we
Jess (11:27):
Punted it over to the agnostic. That’s right.
Molly (11:29):
Yeah. I mean, maybe they could do an impervious parking service. That’s a thing that exists, isn’t it? Like there’s probably
Jess (11:35):
Pervious Yes.
Molly (11:36):
Oh, per right. The opposite of impervious is yes. Like, yep. Right. That’s
Jess (11:40):
A thing. So that would be another way to get at it for sure. Absolutely. I love it. Let’s brainstorm ways to help them do this better.
Molly (11:48):
They probably won’t listen to our podcast.
Jess (11:50):
Nah, that’s all right. So, so we have thoughts and feelings about electronic meetings. Let’s talk about that.
Molly (11:57):
Yes. So we’re moving on now to DC one. This is a pretty light agenda. It can always change by Monday. DC one is the resol. It says the resolution to continue electronic meetings for certain city boards and commissions after December 31st, 2021. We were super confused by this at first because it seems like, okay, cool, we’re going to continue electronic meetings. But actually what it’s saying is that there are a bunch of city boards and commissions that are governed by different kinds of state rules. And under the state open meetings rules, these commissions and boards have to start meeting in person in January of 2022. Relevant to our interests, this includes City Council and all council Committees, planning Commission, D D A Board, housing Commission, human Rights Commission, and the Independent Community Police Oversight Commission. So there are other commissions on that list as well. Those are the ones that we’re most likely to be paying attention to. All other boards and commissions will continue to meet electronically, and that includes transportation commission, disability commission. So it’s going to be a mixture starting in January. My understanding, given a resolution that was passed one or two meetings ago, is that public comment will continue to be possible electronically even after this change goes into place. Even after this change goes into effect. I’m not sure what that’s going to look like. So it’s going to be probably some transition pains in January as these new, well, go ahead, Jess.
Jess (13:34):
So sorry. No, I was just going to say, I’m thinking through the matrix of electronic meetings versus in-person meetings and then the in-person meetings that are recorded versus aren’t. And then within the ones that are recorded, are they actually streamed real time or are they recorded and then posted later so that whole, you can post public comment remotely. Thing is of limited value because most boards and commissions actually don’t stream live. I know the D D A records ours and posts immediately after it’s up right there, but there is no way to stream it, or at least there hasn’t been so far. And our facility is actually not set up to stream. So I appreciate the remote public comment enabling, and I have questions.
Molly (14:23):
I guess it doesn’t have to stream in order for a person to make public comment. If there’s a number to call in, you can just make the comment and you, it’s like speaker phone. But again, no idea what this is going to look like in practice. And it’s probably going to look different across different boards and commissions. City council will obviously be the most high profile commission council that for us to we’re, we’re going to see what this looks like. That’s all we have to say about that.
Jess (14:53):
I also, oh, go ahead. Well, that’s true. No, I’m going to just keep walking back into yours because I think they’re interesting. I did want to call this one out in the hall of fame of really confusing ordinances. It was
Molly (15:03):
So confusing.
Jess (15:04):
This one is titled The Resolution to Continue Electronic Meetings for Certain City Boards and Commissions. And the second resolution is that after December 31st, et cetera, the city and city affiliated boards, commissions and bodies on the list attached to this resolution are required to meet in person. So I get that they’re kind of covering all their bases, but I feel like the title could maybe have used maybe one more round of revision before going out because it was a bit misleading slash confusing.
Molly (15:32):
Yeah, so it’s continuing electronic meetings for some boards and commissions, but a lot of the higher visibility ones are going back in person in January. And there are other things in this resolution. You’ll have to show proof of vaccination. There are plans that they have in place to hopefully make this a safe transition to in-person. Again, we’ll see what it actually looks like.
Jess (15:56):
What are you guys doing over at the library board right now?
Molly (15:59):
We are continuing to meet virtually,
Jess (16:02):
Infinitely, or is there a plan to return?
Molly (16:04):
My understanding is that it’s indefinite. We are working right now on the plans to do a search for a new DI library director. Josie, her beloved director Josie Parker is retiring. And in the conversations about what that search process will look like, it sounded as though we were going to be doing a lot of this work virtually, although there will hopefully be some opportunities for in-person interviewing and touring and stuff once we get into the final phases. Interesting. Okay. Thank you. Yeah.
Jess (16:43):
All right. And that’s it from the official agenda, but there’s a couple more things from around the world in our community that I wanted to call out. First of all, you guys know that I lead in moderator group on Facebook called Ann Arbor. Humans who Wonk. There was an awesome thread yesterday, and I knew as soon as I saw the question go up that I wanted to call it out on the podcast. So one member, pat Z posted the question, it was an MLI attachment with a specific development that’s being proposed in Kerrytown. And Pat Z says, hi team. When I see articles about new housing developments such as this, I’m curious about the best ways I can learn how to support them. What legal bodies should I be keeping track of and where and in which order? Much appreciated. Now, this is like the Mr.
Jess (17:30):
Rogers of development questions. I am so utterly charmed by this. So I had a really busy day yesterday, so all I did was a plug for the podcast. But fellow A wonk user, Adam G actually has a super thorough and comprehensive answer on there that’s completely on target. And then there’s a slightly sideways, but equally interesting conversation about different aspects of affordability or the lack thereof in Ann Arbor. So I’ll drop a link to that thread in the show notes. I encourage you to check it out. And thanks to Pat c, Adam G and the other 23 people on that thread for making it as interesting and informative. I’ve learned things on there as it was. And the other thing that I wanted to mention is that remember all the hullabaloo around the Renters commission and then they made it, and we’re still kind of bummed about the landlord part, but the applications for the Renters Commission is open. So renter AERs, please go apply and encourage your apartment and renter neighbors to do the same.
Molly (18:31):
Awesome. Do you know when the commission’s actually going to start meeting?
Jess (18:35):
No idea.
Molly (18:36):
Great.
Jess (18:37):
Oh,
Molly (18:38):
Speaking of, there’s actually going to be an opening on the Transportation commission as well. So those of you who are interested in transportation, this is a commission that already exists, but we’ve got one opening now and I think another one coming down the pike. The applications stay open all the time, so you can go in and file your application. And I think, I’m not sure what the timeline is going to be for picking new ones, but it’s hopefully going to be soon because we start to get into quorum problems when we’re down more than one commissioner.
Jess (19:06):
Well, good. Since this is what we’re doing, there are two openings on the DDA
Molly (19:09):
Board.
Jess (19:12):
They also have open rolling applications, and we also have core Mission. So everything that Molly just said, but for the dda. So if you’re interested, there are some requirements for board members in terms of your property, in property interests and residents and various things. It’s not super complicated. But if you’re interested, just give us a shout on the pod, find me any way you want to, and we can talk about if this could be a good fit for you. So Renters Commission, transportation Commission, and D D A. It would be awesome to have some AERs on those places
Molly (19:41):
For sure.
Molly (19:48):
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 A two Council hashtag and Facebook in the Ann Arbor Humans Who Wonk Group. And hey, if you want to send us a few dollars@kofi.com slash ann Arbor AF to help us with hosting, we always appreciate it. We are your co-hosts, Molly Kleinman and Jess Leach. 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 and get involved. It’s your city.