Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Monday, January 3rd. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including sidewalks, safety, water, and poetry.
Linked in today’s episode:
– this week’s agenda
– Unarmed Responder response memo
– Coalition for Reenvisioning Our Safety Facebook page
– Pedestrian Safety Improvements Around Schools report (the map Molly referenced is on page 3)
– Stormwater Management, Soil Erosion, Site Plan code amendment
– Energy Commission’s love letter to – I mean resolution recognizing the DDA for its decarbonization and sustainability
– Eve Ewing’s poem, “upon seeing a picture of a car in a school book”
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.
Transcript
0:11
Jess: 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 in local politics and policy, governance, and other civic good times. I’m Jess Letaw, and I’m here with my cohost Molly Kleinman. We both use she/her pronouns. We’re your cohosts to help you get informed, and get involved. It’s your city!
Let’s jump in!
0:42
Molly: Today we’re talking about the next City Council meeting coming up Monday January 3. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including sidewalks, safety, water and poetry, 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 may be some changes to the agenda between now and then.
1:05
Jess: This is Jess! As our first episode for the new year, I wanted to start with a little meditation that has nothing to do with the new year, it has to do with my birthday, which is December 29th! I like to think of myself as totally immune to the New Year New You propaganda, but I do look at the occasion of my birth as an opportunity for rest and reflection and refinement of my vision of the future. This year I’m 42 which, according to at least one very important source, is the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
So I was thinking about this in the context of this podcast. What I really feel led to say is to remind you, and probably even more than that myself, that I hope all of the energy and time that we pour into caring about our city are in service of a larger and really expansive vision of our community, and not just in response to the latest irritation. There will always be one more annoying ordinance to consider – we’ll be talking about at least one today! – but what I care about is – What is it really all for?
For me, I have this vision of Ann Arbor as a community that lives and breathes generosity and imagination around housing. We as a city believe that housing is a human right and we offer lots of ways to live here at lots of accessible price points in ways that encourage and nurture building community. I see so clearly, a city who fights not to bring forward six units at a time, but to see how fast and how well it can meet its current housing means trying to get to the next milestone. I see an Ann Arbor that delights in civic engagement, not in spite of the difficulty of doing so, but because the city invites us in. Welcomes us as we are and offers us all ways to get informed and get involved.
That’s why I’m here y’all. I see that city so clearly. I can taste it (it tastes like ice cream) in my conversations with you and many other people who care about the city, I can feel it just so so so…just literally I can feel it.
This makes me impatient with mediocre work and half hearted effort, because I know we can do so much more, I hope, through this podcast and my other civic engagements and culture moves and your civic engagement and culture moves that together we can bring that city to life together.
So let’s get into it! Molly, what do you have to say about today?
3:43
Molly: So, to start with, we have another thing that’s not on the agenda, but it is sort of on the agenda, but not on the agenda, which is this unarmed public safety response memo. We’ve talked about this a few times at this point, but what do you know about this memo and why we have it?
Jess: Right, so I know the memo. I think that the memo asks staff to explore an unarmed responder program that is either different from police responding to every call, or possibly outside of the police department. Why do we have this? I mean my fast answer is because abolition is good, but actually I’m not totally sure why we have this memo.
Molly: Right. So. Yes. City Council, back in April, asked staff to come put together a plan for an unarmed crisis response program and it was a little open-ended what it was asking for. This memo is the response to that and it’s not a plan yet. That’s the first thing Council asked for a plan, what we have in this memo is not a plan, and I think yeah the deeper reason for why Council asked for this was about growing demands for shifting a lot of the safety work away from police, thinking about the inadequacy of police for responding to certain types of calls. Things we know about the huge likelihood for especially mentally ill people, that they will be killed by police when police show up for a wellness check and, of course, also what we know is the deep seated racial bias across the country throughout history and policing. So that’s the bigger why, but the smaller why is, City Council asked staff to figure this out. This is sort of a small step in that direction. I think there was some hope and some expectation that this was going to be a proposed plan. But at the same time, a lot of concern about that, because there was not really any public engagement, like our public engagement that happened to create this proposal.
So what we have in this memo is a brief overview of what unarmed crisis response models look like in other cities. It engages directly with the recommendations from the Coalition for Re-envisioning Our Safety, or CROS, which is this group in Ann Arbor that came together after this resolution was passed to say, basically, we’re working on being confident that the city is going to come up with a plan that looks like what we think it should look like, and so we’re going to come up with our own and bring it to the city.
This report actually includes chunks of the CROS plan, does say that a lot of what CROS has laid out as recommendations are things that would give us a good robust approach in the end, which I appreciated that that is engaged with the CROS report, but it doesn’t get us very much closer to an actual plan. Which is disappointing because it’s now been many months later, but I think what I was starting to realize is that in an alternate universe, in which the old Council didn’t fire Howard Lazarus and we didn’t cycle through three more city administrators over the time span of this report being created, I think it’s possible that city staff would have had an opportunity to do the kind of deep engagement work that would have been necessary to actually make a plan, but there was so much other upheaval happening in the city that this is just a first step.
Jess: The resolution requesting this work in this memo had a deadline on it right like we had to provide about Okay, so that was that was a part of –
Molly: – December, which, so this memo was released in late December, just under the wire. Yeah, that deadline is a big part of I think why we’re seeing this first step. I don’t think there’s a ton more to say about this memo right now, because it doesn’t say much about what it’s going to look like. It does say that there needs to be some deep work with stakeholders, with public engagement, to actually create a plan. And it also does say that such a program is possible because part of the part of the resolution was like make a plan or tell us why you can’t and this definitely is not saying why we can’t it’s saying we can. It’s saying, I think that we will, but it doesn’t give us much in the way of details.
Jess: I have a question, Molly, about the original resolution requesting this memo. I don’t know if you’ve read it recently, this is a bit of a pop quiz. But you had referenced a minute ago how policing often disproportionately impacts people of color and often disproportionately impacts people with mental illness. And, of course, Aura Rain Rosser was killed by an Ann Arbor Police Department officer in November of 2014. I am curious if the originating resolutions cited Aura Rosser’s death as a reason for this work or if it did not.
Molly: I do not know off the top of my head. My recollection is that it did not, and I will say – you know, there are some things in here that I think for abolitionists, that are going to be disappointing. This report talks repeatedly about the importance of police and their role in community safety. The way Ann Arbor currently does things – first of all, we outsource our emergency mental health response program to the county; we also outsource our 911 dispatch to the county. Those things all go through the sheriff’s office, and so a lot of what’s currently happening is happening through the sheriff’s office. This report basically says the process that we have now where calls come into 911 and they sometimes dispatch a mental health worker through the Community Mental Health Program, they’re almost always accompanied by a police officer, an armed police officer. That’s the way this report talks about it, sort of like, we’re good, like on the mental health response stuff, we’re good, and let’s look at the other kinds of crisis response where there are currently gaps, and look at how we can fill those with a program that’s based in the city. It’s definitely a thing that’s going to be attention throughout this process, is what the city relies on the county for, how much we want to be at, we can ask the county to make changes versus how much we’re going to just end up doing our own thing in the city. I think there is of course a desire for a lot of this work to be countywide eventually, the problems don’t end at the borders of Ann Arbor.
So that’s sort of the bigger picture, but no it doesn’t engage super deeply with the Aura Rosser killing, or with the larger trends around who is killed by police or how often. How often police are not bringing safety to a community, it does not go there, at the same time. There were some things that are in this report, where I was surprised, I was surprised that it was so clear. For example, one of the lessons they got from a program like this in Albuquerque was that if you don’t want armed police showing up to crisis response calls you can’t house your crisis response team in the police department. Which is true, but I was surprised to see it in the report.
Jess: The times that I feel the most shock and surprise is when a government report says something clear simply. One of my favorite examples is when certain government reports declare as the result of a study with total sobriety and no sarcasm whatsoever that if we want to house people, we’re going to need to build more housing! and like it’s the most consequential statement and I appreciate it, right? Like that’s where we got to start. So if we don’t want police in our business, we need to not put our business in police. Okay, great great places.
Molly: Yeah. So that gives me some cautious optimism for how this eventual unarmed response program is going to shape up in terms of what this means for public engagement.
There’s nothing to do right now, like things that you, our listeners, can do. No vote is happening right now; the work that was directed by that resolution continues and, in theory, hopefully, there will start to be some public engagement work happening around what we want, when we talk about safety. In our community there will be opportunities to engage around what we want to ask for, and we will of course do our best to keep you all apprised when those opportunities start to emerge.
Jess: I mean, I would say the to do’s are go follow CROS on social media, and take a minute to read the report. It is a little bit long, about nine pages, but fairly understandable. If this is work that you care about, looking at the source documents, looking at the primary resources is really helpful for you, so we’ll drop links to all that in the show notes.
Molly: Thank you.
14:25
Molly: Moving on to another memo that was attached to this agenda, and this one was around pedestrian safety improvements around schools. I think this came out of a question that one Council Member had asked and the city administrator decided that it was actually relevant for the entire Council to see what they found. So this memo is a report about what pedestrian safety improvements the city has made within a quarter mile of schools, since 2017. It’s pretty interesting; the city has done some stuff in the last several years, a lot of new schools own signs, a lot of crosswalk improvements near the schools. But mostly the reason I want to talk about this memo is because I have rants and feelings about things that aren’t exactly in the memo.
All right, so just what do you know about walk zones? Like when I say walk zone, what does that mean to you?
Jess: I’m laughing because my first response is, parents getting salty. Especially parents who have littles. They feel like the walk zones are too big.
Molly: Yes, so the walk zone is the distance from a school in which the school district is not providing a school bus to get kids to school and home. So it’s the distance that the schools are saying kids should be walked or walking themselves to school if they live. In Ann Arbor, it’s one and a half miles, and the one and a half mile walk zone is for all the schools. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a lower elementary where the oldest kids at that school are seven or eight, or if you’re talking about a high school, the walk zone is a one and a half miles citywide.
This report is looking at improvements within a quarter mile of schools. I think that’s how the city is thinking about school-related safety improvements. There’s a map in this memo that is very interesting; it’s got these little highlighted bubbles, where you can see, this is a quarter mile radius around all of these schools.
But if the walk zone is one and a half miles, we should be treating the entire walk zone as a school zone, if not for speed limits, at least for like these are areas where people are going to be walking where kids are going to be walking, we want to make sure they’re safe. So this, I think, is one of many disconnects between the city and the public schools, that the city is only looking at this from a quarter mile.
Then there’s also a lot of issues with this one and a half mile walk zone, which is that it doesn’t consider obstacles within that one and a half miles. I live a half a mile from one of my kids’ elementary schools and between us and that school is Packard. My kids can’t walk across Packard by themselves. It’s mostly uncontrolled crosswalks; they can go somewhat out of their way to get to a crosswalk like a traffic light crosswalk, but I see cars run that light all the time. A car just got totaled there a few weeks ago. The one and a half mile walk zone has existed for a long time, but it’s been fungible; the schools have made a lot of exceptions and run buses from places that were closer. But this past year during the pandemic when everyone was already, like parents are struggling, the schools decided to get super hard-nosed about that one and a half mile walk zone, so kids who used to be able to rely on a bus no longer came. And the messaging about that had all this language about like safe routes to school! and, Mission accomplished! and kids can get to school safely on foot within these zones! We’re done! We’re done now.
Um.
Which is it? It’s just very, very obviously not true, and so that’s one that this is where a lot of my frustration comes from. Schools don’t have control over what the city does for street safety; that’s out of their hands, and I recognize that. And the city has been doing some stuff around schools to make things better, but there’s still a really big gap between where we are and what it would actually look like for every kid in this city to be able to get safely to school from one and a half miles away. On the roads that we have, it looks like we’re just so far from there, and so the schools are claiming we’re already there, which then takes the pressure off of the city to get us there. So this is where I start to get all hand wavy and flailing.
Jess: Listeners, the hands are being waved!
You know, it’s interesting listening to you talk about this. As a human who does not have small humans in the school system, I look at all of this from the outside, and it feels confusing and loud and I know it feels awful a lot of the time, because I know parent friends who are struggling with decisions or communications from the school system. So that’s the bulk of my exposure to this, but what I’m hearing from what you’re talking about is – not a lie, but not a totally honest engagement around the problem.
Another part of my perspective in this is, my partner drove buses for Ann Arbor public schools for a while and I learned a whole lot about bus logistics that year, many things I did not want to know, but a lot of things have been interesting and useful actually in the discussion of citywide transportation. One of the things that I feel like I’m seeing here is that the public schools aren’t having an honest conversation about what they’re talking about. The 1.5 mile walk zone to me feels like this is the absolute maximum that we’re going to be able to get out of our bus contract, given what we know about current labor conditions, so we can’t fudge that. So we’re going to work around it, but instead of acknowledging that and kind of taking pedestrian safety on earnestly and urgently, what they’re saying is we can’t move this bus thing, which is legitimately like a tricky logistical thing to manage, and saying we did it! which means you can’t actually work on the problem you said a minute ago about. Saying, Mission accomplished! is that it does take the pressure off of doing the work, and so I wish there was a more kind of honest acknowledgement of the 1.5 mile thing, where it came from – the fact that it’s the same at high school and elementary school just by itself means that we need better education around what’s defining that zone. And if it’s logistics, if it’s, you know, the bus bus contract purchase – just say it. And then let’s figure it out. What do we do in response?
So I hear your frustration, I see your hand waving and empathy from this side of the bus stop.
Molly: Yeah. I appreciate that!
There’s a couple more details around this.
One is that we call it a walk zone, but in practice it’s a drive zone. Parents are driving their kids to school because one and a half miles is too far for any number of reasons, even if it’s just time and not safety. So tons of kids are getting driven to school, which makes things much even less pleasant and less safe for the kids who are walking. But what this memo gave me was a lot of ideas about what I’d love to see for us to do better, as like seeing this really as a jumping off point.
So you know there’s this really interesting map in there that just highlights the quarter mile zone. So what would a map look like if we were considering the whole one and a half mile walk zone? This map highlights that there were like 2.8 miles of sidewalk gaps near schools that have been filled, so this map highlights where the gaps were filled. I would love to see a map that’s highlighting the gaps that still exist around schools, because I think that’s going to give us a much clearer vision for where we need to get to. I want the names of the schools on this map. The map does not name the schools. Because there are, I think, a lot of equity considerations that we have to make around school safety and which schools are getting the radar speed beacon signs and which schools are just getting like a “School Zone” sign, which is the thing we did the most of. I want to be able to make those kinds of comparisons. Again, a lot of this is going to be outside of the hands of the schools but very much within the control of the city.
Jess: This was a criticism that we had of the municipal sidewalk snow removal report as well, is that everything was rendered kind of flatly in dollars and time and linear feet and miles, and not in historically disinvested neighborhoods, in poor communities, in renter rich communities, things like that. We really need this equity overlay in order to be able to prioritize and be able to make better and more justice-centered decisions.
Molly: My hope is that we can use this memo as the beginning of yet more work. Certainly with my Transportation Commission hat on, I can think about ways we might be able to do that. Through the like you know one path to do that.
So we have now gotten through the memos!
Jess: About the agenda, Molly!
Molly: Let’s talk about the things that are actually going to be talked about!
24:20
Jess: All right. I am going to start with a banger! I am stepping into an ordinance to amend sections pertaining to stormwater management, soil erosion and site plans of the code of the city of Ann Arbor. Are you on the edge of your seat? Because I totally am. I’m not hand wavy yet, but it’s coming soon.
All right. I’m going to start by banging a drum that I bang on a regular basis, which is that good governance is boring. If your eyes glaze over, I’m not going to say that it’s necessarily that somebody is doing something right, but there’s a reasonable chance. Good governance also takes the form of the right work happening at the right places. So, for example, policy direction and strategy is provided by Council with the mechanics being worked out by staff, and not the other way around. Definitely not Council tinkering in staff mechanics and definitely not staff trying to do more ambitious policy interpretation, because a direction given has been too big.
So I just want to go on record as saying in this agenda Public Hearing 1, B-1, this ordinance belongs in these sections. Just start to finish, an example of good governance. I’m going to tell you why I’m stoked about a change to this particular part of the code and I’m going to start with a question to Molly, which is, What do you know about site plan review, either in general or Ann Arbor in particular?
Molly: So I know that it is some part of the process between deciding to build a thing and building the thing you have to make a plan for the site for the location and then that plan has to be approved. By someone or many someones.
Jess: Great! You get two Ann Arbor AF points and now we’re going to put that verbatim on the City website. Good job.
So site plan review functionally serves as a stopping place for legal and safety review for proposed projects. What people in the industry know is that site plan review in general, and our brand in particular, is that it’s opaque, which means it’s expensive; the process is unpredictable; which means it’s expensive; and it’s long, which means it’s less expensive.
Totally kidding! Makes it way more expensive.
So. In July of 2020, Council directed the Planning Commission to, among other things, evaluate and make recommendations to what’s called the UDC, the Unified Development Code, the part of our city code that pertains to planning, to facilitate small and modest sized projects. That’s the goal, right? Keep it small, keep it local. All projects of all types and sizes are required to go through some kind of approval process; the basic approvals are safety and legality. So does this project conform to the legal requirements of its property and is it safe for itself and the land and people around it, those are the really just nuts and bolts basic questions. Under safety, the most common and kind of really foundational safety approval process pertains to water, specifically stormwater management. How does the new development propose to handle it’s rain? Does it sheet off to the property next door (not okay), does it infiltrate down on its own site, is it captured, is it re-used, what are we doing with the water? As it often is, water is really the central question.
Molly: I had no idea how important, like, how crucial stormwater management was to everything to do with building cities. Like I should have known because I’ve seen, you know, the sort of epic pictures of the New York City sewers from 100 years ago. But I didn’t really understand until it just keeps coming up.
Jess: I think that’s one of the privileges of living in a society that’s mostly figured its water problems out. Right? Like, our water doesn’t make us sick. And we deal with our wastewater in ways that we mostly don’t have to think about except for those times that we need, you know, a plunger or a plumber. For the most part we don’t have to think about it, so it’s a privilege to not know. That this thing that is central to life is also central to infrastructure and, administratively, is also central to approvals, I actually kind of loved the poetry of it. But there’s a lot of ink spilled over this poetry.
So. Because of the centrality of water to the approval process, looking at it as an opportunity to alleviate process hardships for small and mid-sized projects is a really natural place to start to work; I think it doesn’t make sense from the outside looking in, but if you understand that stormwater approvals are central to site plan review, then you’re like, Oh well, of course, let’s work on stormwater as a way of expediting small and modest sized projects.
So that’s how it started! How it’s going: namely, some of the changes being brought to counsel for a second reading and approval this week.
The big one, the marquee one – if we had flashing, you know, those cool 1920s bulb lights going around a thing – it would say: By-right Projects (which are the majority of projects) do not have to go to Council for approval. That’s the marquee of this ordinance. By-right projects are those that, by definition, already adhere to the legal requirements of the land and aren’t seeking a rezoning. So those projects don’t require Council approval, which is a big departure, but a very natural departure, so now, they can max out at Planning Commission approval.
That alone shortens the approval process by approximately and at least 90 days. Extremely small projects don’t even require that; as long as they pass our most basic safety and legal requirements, and again that’s at least water, sometimes traffic analysis and a number of other kinds of checks that the city goes through, those projects can be approved by staff, without even going to Commission.
Molly: What qualifies as extremely small?
Jess: Typically residential units six units or below. And there’s also some square footage requirements in there, so a project that’s below I want to say 300 square feet, but it could be five or 600 but anyway, a small number of hundred square feet do not require Planning Commission review.
Molly: So there’ll be square feet of the land itself and not square feet of the eventual structure?
Jess: It’s for project square feet so it’s not necessarily on the property. Like if it were split over two floors, right, like the hundred and 50 square feet times two, it would still be the 300 square feet.
Molly: Yes, so pretty so that’s pretty small.
Jess: It’s super small. That kind of stuff, folks in commissions and Council kind of get impatient. It’s a lot like the budget revision that we did for consent agenda for the $25,000+ contracts. Dude, that’s a lot of money! But when it comes to a city budget, that’s not a lot of money, and those agenda items were kind of sucking up a lot of time, even in consent agenda, so when they raised the threshold – Molly, did you see on today’s agenda – three consent agenda items! And one of them didn’t even have a budget thing attached to it! It’s pretty cool. This is the same kind of thing: we are raising the threshold at which a project requires attention. Administratively, factually, sensically, this really makes sense.
The short version is, if we’ve already said a project is legal, we don’t have to take two more decision bodies and five more months to say no, seriously, it’s legal. It’s cool. You can do this. So if our city code and strategic plans already support the proposed development, approval will get expedited.
You said this a few minutes ago but I’ll just clarify, this has the greatest impact on housing developments of three to six units, on whom the impacts of an expensive and long process are disproportionate, almost to the point of being prohibitive. Like it’s really rare that we see small developments, and our development process, administratively, is largely why. So in this single one change, we’re signaling that the city is willing to meaningfully support smaller, more incremental development, and that the city is willing to meaningfully respond to smaller developers.
The ordinance does a ton of other work. There’s actually a lot packed in here; there’s defining approvals processes, and if-then decision trees. They’re all meaningful and if reading about that is your jam (raises hand), I do encourage you to read the ordinance and the attached documents. They’re interesting, they’re not too dense, and I think it will make sense to most folks. I’ll link it in the show notes. But the short version is, we’re doing a lot in this one change to rationalize by-right development and that, Molly, is a city I want to live in.
Molly: Yay! Happy birthday.
Jess: “Happy Birthday! Here’s some by-right approval bypasses.” Thanks, City!
So your action for this, should you choose to take one, would be to send one of two or both emails.
The first one: Please email Planning Commission and thank them. This was a year of work, including an unusually high number of public engagement meetings. They spent a lot of time and care on this, both the Commission and the staff. You can email planning at a2gov dot org. Let them know you care! Let them know you really appreciate what they put into this.
You can also email Council and thank them both for initiating this work and for seeing it through. Working on development is hard, it’s fraught and it’s often toxic, both politically and personally. Taking this on – it’s not nothing, and seeing it through is a really big deal. Let them know that you see it, and that you appreciate this step towards bringing our city’s actions closer in line with the state of values and that city council at a2gov dot org. Plus everybody loves a little Thank-You note.
Molly: This is awesome.
Jess: Yeah. Happy Birthday to me.
34:33
Molly: All right, so I’ve got a couple of short things next in terms of agenda items.
First is C-1. It’s a first reading of another ordinance that’s part of this criminal ordinance reform project, so we talked about this a couple weeks ago with the regulation changes around glue and criminal charges around glue. Basically, this is the city attorney doing a year long or multi-year project to review all of the city’s criminal ordinances and update and modernize them so that they align with State law so that they use gender neutral language. This week another chunk of the criminal ordinance is coming up to be updated; it includes, among other things, sex work like things around loitering, public intoxication, a lot of these these kinds of what might be considered like historically conservative “nuisance” crimes.
Rather than deal with a specific so this one or the last one, I just really wanted to say that Ann Arbor is doing a comprehensive update of all of its criminal ordinances, and that feels like a huge opportunity to push for decriminalizing many of the things that have contributed to mass incarceration in this country in this state are things that do not need to be criminalized. Like making these criminal offenses is a choice, and it’s a choice that results in harassment, having a lot of vulnerable people and incarceration of a lot of vulnerable people. And we could be not doing that. We could be choosing to not do that. And yes, in many cases there are state laws, and so we have to figure out how we’re going to navigate the city approach to things under these larger state laws, but I’m disappointed that we’re doing this whole project and we’re really only approaching it for the technical and the cosmetic updates and not for the sort of policy values and moral choices that we could be making to address these long term injustices.
Jess: I have a curiosity. This is mostly a rhetorical question.
A couple years ago Ann Arbor went through a process updating the UDC, the unified development code. The code is something that just developed over time and it can be easy for one section to get out of sync with another section; for definitions not to align; for one thing to say, a quarter of a mile, another thing to say, an eighth etc. This was a multi-year process that worked on reconciling all of those discrepancies and kind of bringing everything in line.
What that work didn’t do was make any value judgments about what was being specified. That process would happen under a comprehensive land use plan process like the Community engagement around that. So I just find myself wondering, on the policing side, what does that look like in a community process? Like I get the reconciliation of discrepancies and clarifying of language. I think that’s fine. But also I hear your criticism, Molly, and from my world, from what I know, that would be a separate process and I’m just curious what that would be. What that would look like, who drives it, can we do a comprehensive land use plan of policing? Seems cool.
Molly: You know, I think those are really important questions. I don’t know where, for example, the Independent Community Police Oversight Commission could potentially have been playing a role in these discussions. I’m not aware of an established process, the way that the development code has all of this built-in public engagement. I’m not aware of something like that existing around the criminal legal system anywhere. But, including here and and maybe you’re right that this, you know, we need to get through this process first and then we can tackle the bigger policy issues. But we’re seeing these things come to agenda after agenda, they’re voting on some chunk of this project. It’s a lot of work and it feels to me just like such a missed opportunity.
Jess: I don’t know. I mean, I agree with you and also disagree with you at the same time. We were having this problem too, with the consent agenda budget items coming out of the police department. These are all things that have been approved, but it’s still really frustrating to see $300,000 being spent on new cruisers. But the problem isn’t that agenda item, right? The problem is the overall budget, and so I think to me that’s what I’m in search of. What’s that larger thing that we’re feeding, and can we attack that.
Molly: Yeah. I mean I absolutely agree.
And approaching these like one one resolution at a time, as these are getting voted on by Council, that is not going to have much of an impact, but the process we’re currently in, it would be great if it was doing more. And it’s probably, yeah, it’s probably too late to take a step back and readjust at this point, I don’t know; but that’s – I wish we could.
Jess: Not at all related to it, but I realized I forgot to say something about the stormwater and soil erosion thing. I wanted to make sure that I clarified, one of the things that I appreciate about the ordinance change is that nothing at all changes about the staff review and approval process or the public and community engagement that’s required for different kinds of projects. So one of the things that I appreciate, is that the same amount of public oversight is invited; just less red tape. I just wanted to say that because I thought it was a nice part of it.
Awesome! Cool. What else you got, Molly?
40:28
Molly: DC-1, resolution to improve pedestrian safety at crosswalks with reliable illumination in the short term and optimal led streetlights within five years.
That’s the name of this resolution.
Jess: It sounds nice! But you have a crappy face.
Molly: Of course, yes, it sounds lovely! Who doesn’t want to improve pedestrian safety crosswalks with reliable illumination?
What this resolution actually does is, mostly, it tells DTE to do things. So – in Ann Arbor, something like 60% of our street lights are on DTE networks, cables, whatever; and so when a streetlight is out, or we want a new streetlight in certain kinds of locations, DTE has to do it for us. And DTE has not been doing it for us. Last I heard, which was within the last year, we were looking at like a two-year at least backlog in our lighting requests from DTE. My guess is that, with the pandemic, it’s only gotten longer. So: a street light goes out, someone reports it through See Click Fix, and all the city can do is say, Add it to the long list of street lights that DTE is not fixing.
This is a problem. We know that this is a problem. But a resolution of the Ann Arbor City Council is not going to make DTE magically start fixing these streetlights. And that’s what this resolution is mostly doing. Like almost every single line item in the thing is saying that DTE is going to do a thing.
What there is, as far as I know, there is actually some coordinated work happening right now to try and address these problems that we’re having with DTE, but that work is happening at the staff level. Jess talks a lot about where the appropriate place for these things to lie; with our current situation with DTE, the appropriate place for this to lie is with staff. There’s not like any number of resolutions is going to magically shame DTE and fix our streetlights, so this is one of those classic one-sponsor resolutions where someone wants to look like they’re doing something on an issue, but they have not actually engaged with anyone else about whether this is the best way forward.
Jess: Those single-sponsor things – man, occasionally they come forward and you know it’s just kind of paperwork work that needs to be done, and I can see why it is; but most single-sponsor resolutions feel really problematic, most of them do, and this is another example.
Molly: Yeah. So, you know, maybe it will pass, maybe it won’t pass; but it’s not going to fix the problem, which is DTE.
Jess: Is there any problem if it passes? Like, if we say this, we basically can pat ourselves on the back for saying a thing? Or does a policy statement like this get in the way of anything, do you know?
Molly: I don’t know. Nothing in there jumped out at me as being actively harmful. It just mostly felt pointless to me.
Jess: The reason that I asked that question is because City Council wrote a resolution to the University of Michigan regions, I want to say last year, and it felt so ridiculous. Like it felt like spitting into the wind. There are ways for bodies to talk to one another through both official and its staff and administrative channels. But that one felt completely ridiculous. This one doesn’t feel ridiculous in the same way, but it does feel a bit like spitting into the wind.
Molly: Yeah. We have about as much power over DTE as we do over the University of Michigan regents, so in that way they’re on a similar level.
Jess: This also feels a bit like the MDOT relationship.
Interesting! All right; well, do you have any action on this for this one, or just a little bit of side eye?
Molly: This is all side eye action.
Jess: Got it.
44:45
Jess: All right, well, I have another thing that’s not action, but that is a little bit happier to the heart. So the DC section, the resolutions that come from Council are typically where we stop reading the agenda. But it’s my birthday! or it was last week. So I read the whole agenda as a treat to myself right like we do, AFfers, right? This is what we do. And the first thing that I saw in the post-agenda communications was an Energy Commission resolution recognizing the Downtown Development Authority for its decarbonization and sustainability efforts. It’s super long and basically it’s a love letter to the DDA; its sustainability activities, the amount of time and energy and dollars, millions and millions of dollars, that we’ve poured into supporting nonmotorized transit, green lighting, green water management, green development – we really have been working hard, and to see that recognized by the city’s Energy Commission just felt really nice. Gotcha, Energy Commission. Thanks for that.
45:51
Jess: And then the other thing that I saw was cool was E-2, which is also an Energy Commission resolution, recommending the Ann Arbor City Council authorize a municipal utility feasibility study and initiate work towards creation of a municipal sustainability energy utility or an SEU. We talked about the SEU and some work that staff had done on it this year a couple of episodes ago, and I just kind of wanted to call this out as – we say a lot that most of the work that Council does is not at the Council table; this is a great example of that! The Energy Commission and the OSI, the Office of Sustainability and Innovation, that staff has been putting a lot of work into moving SEU work forward, and this is another piece. It’s not at the Council table yet; when and how they decide to take it up is a question. Actually, listeners, now is a great time to ask questions of Energy Commissioners, its staffer, and your Councilmembers before any decisions are on the table; so if this is the thing that you’re curious about and you’d like to learn more about, doing so while a decision is not on the table is always the best time to do it. It’s less fraught, and bonus, you’ve got a little bit more time. It’s staffed by OSI Director and just general rad human Missy Stults and her email address is m stults at a2gov dot org.
Molly: OSI… the Office of Sustainability Initiatives?
Jess: Office of Sustainability and Innovation. Which, I love that they put those two things together. Just the peanut butter and jelly of work.
47:39
Jess: The last thing that I wanted to finish out with today isn’t on the agenda, it’s a poem I read.
If you remember, in the last episode I referenced the UPS drivers’ education manual, because I was curious how on the business side and in the corporate world bike lanes are being treated, and reading the training manual was super illuminating. In general, I am curious about how policy decisions and policy decision evasions show up in normal everyday life. Just super curious.
So I closed out my 41st year by reading Eve Ewing’s book of poetry written in call and response format to a government report authored by the City of Chicago. The whole book is lovely. It’s short. If you feel like I feel that poetry is another way to engage in the revolution, I can’t recommend 1919 enough. It’s wonderful. There’s a poem in there that I just loved. I’ll read a couple of lines here and then I’ll drop a link in the show notes for you to read the whole thing. (The reason that it stuck out to me was we spend a lot of time yelling about cars on the podcast. Here’s what Eve had to say about them.)
I asked her “well what does it mean to move on earth
through the will of something with no heart inside?
well what would you do if you had more than four friends?”
they gave up the heavy vessels when we built our city.
we live as we should, now, moving in good things that let us
touch the ground and feel the shape of the earth.
bicycles and wheelchairs. ponies and rollerskates.
Molly: Ponies and roller skates.
Jess: Right, that’s how I want to move through the world.
Molly: Absolutely, what would you do if you had more than four friends?
Jess: That’s right! So go check out Eve Ewing’s poem, “upon seeing a picture of a car in a school book.” I’ll drop the link in the show notes.
Molly: And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor AF!
Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter at the a2council hashtag and Facebook in the Ann Arbor Humans Who Wonk group. And hey, if you want to send us a few dollars at ko-fi.com/annarboraf to help us with hosting, we always appreciate it.
We’re your cohosts Molly Kleinman and Jess Letaw; and thanks to producer Jack Jennings. Theme music is “I dunno” by grapes. You can reach us by email at annarborafpod@gmail.com. Get informed, then get involved. It’s your city!