Transcript
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!
Molly: Today we’re talking about the next City Council meeting coming up Monday February 7. We will be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including transit oriented zoning, deer, and that damn bridge, and we’ll offer some ways for you to get involved. A quick process note, we record this a few days before the Council meeting, which means there will probably be some changes to the agenda between now and then.
Jess: Speaking of the agenda, we’re also going to not talk about the agenda a little bit today, I think. We each have a wee bit of a rant that we wanted to share with the listeners; but we’re going to start with the agenda.
The first thing that I wanted to start with were Mayor Communications right at the top of the agenda, specifically MC-1 and MC-3, Commission nominations. I am super excited to see that the Renters Commissioners are being nominated this week! So fun to see those come forward.
The reason that there’s two items on the agenda is that the second one is to allow permission for what’s called non registered electors, which are folks who are not registered to vote within the city of Ann Arbor. In general, folks who serve on commissions are required to be registered voters within the city of Ann Arbor for a lot of good, and maybe medium, reasons; but there’s a stipulation in the City Charter saying, if you have permission from Council, you can make an exception to that. I think ICPOC has an exception to that, and now the Renters Commission does, which is great because we’ve got some folks from Ypsilanti in there. So delighted to see that. The Renters Commission was formed by resolution at Council in September of 2021.
Apparently it’s taken a few months to do outreach getting applications. I took a look through the names; some I know, some I don’t; it feels like a good balance of genders and backgrounds.
I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop their bylaws, and I’m really hoping that they see their way to removing the non voting landlord seats. I don’t know if that has to be done through Council as a resolution or if that’s something that they can do through bylaws; but anyway, good job, Renters Commission! Excited to see you guys move forward and say renter things.
Molly: Awesome. Alright, so the next thing is actually on the agenda, we don’t have any memos this week, is DC-1: Resolution on Deer Management to Resume Funding for Vegetation Studies and Consider Resuming Funding for Regular Population Management.
So the reason we’re talking about this agenda item, it’s not sort of the kind of topic we go into very often, is that I’ve heard a lot from people, and I think maybe Jess has as well, the question, “what is the deal with the deer.” There are yard signs, there are bumper stickers, there are people on both sides who feel very, very strongly about the deer, specifically whether we should be culling the deer population, for reasons of both safety and ecosystem, or whether we should be not culling the deer population.
Historically, in Ann Arbor culling the deer population has meant killing deer. We bring in sharpshooters into the parks and they kill some deer and that helps control the population. And there are people who think we should definitely do that, and maybe even do more of it, and there are people who think we should not. The question sort of got sidestepped in 2020. During pandemic belt tightening the funding for the cull was reallocated to other higher priorities, which I think made a lot of sense at the time.
Jess: I’m actually going to disagree with you; it wasn’t necessarily higher priorities, but other priorities.
Molly: Other priorities, fair enough. It was reallocated. But that was only going to be a temporary dodge. The thing about the deer is that no matter what Council decides, there are people who are going to be very unhappy about it, but neither Jess nor I have any particular dog or deer or wolf in this fight.
Jess: I can’t not say this… It’s not near or dear to our hearts.
Just throw the tomato now. It’s fine. Do NOT encourage this in any way.
Molly: It was amazing. Thank you. And now we’re done talking about deer.
Jess: Let’s talk about land.
Yes, all right. Next thing on the agenda that we’re talking about is a Councilmember resolution with a very grand title; it’s a resolution to provide a report on the 68 parcels of land in the proposed TC-1 zoning district, including ownership evaluation information.
What this resolution is asking for, in English, is for staff to pull together a report on the owners of 68 parcels of land (and Twitter, I hear you that you’re sad that it wasn’t 69; we are all 12, and I’m here for it!) but 68 parcels of land contained within what’s called the transportation oriented zoning district, also known as TC-1; to evaluate how much that land value is going to increase based on the zoning change; and to write that up as a report due to Council by the end of next month.
This came about because last week Planning Commission unanimously approved TC-1 as a new zoning designation. (I say unanimous; one Commissioner did recuse themselves from the vote, based on a professional conflict of interest, so it was however many like eight yeas, and one *crickets*.) But anyway, there’s been a ton of conversation about this; a ton of community engagement; now unanimous approval, and it’s going to be coming to Council soon for approval.
Molly: And to be clear, this was approval of applying TC-1 to these 68 parcels right? We already have TC-1 as a concept we already approved.
Jess: Correct. And I don’t think that’s actually applying it to the parcels; I think it’s applying it to those specific corridors, the Transportation corridors and then the parcels are either contiguous to or affected by that zoning.
Molly: Corridors, okay, but it’s just a second like it’s not these corridors area around State and Eisenhower, and not all of State or all of Eisenhower right it’s…
Jess: Correct to end it’s not all over the city they’re part of the community conversation over the last couple of years about the transit oriented zoning designation was, should we define it by corridor, or type, or by you know traffic volume type, or something like that? So basically are we saying a corridor looks like X, and anything that looks like X gets the zoning. The community expressed concerns about creating this new zoning district everywhere, so the solution proposed and that is on its way to being adopted,is instead of doing it everywhere it’s being proposed, specifically (as Molly said) at State and Eisenhower and there are there are 68 parcels of land that are affected by this designation right now.
Did that answer your question? Yes? I think I saw the nodding, but I just wanted to check in.
Based on the language of the resolution, it seems like there is a concern that there will be some “”winners” from the zoning designation. But to me this feels like a tactical reaction to something that’s probably a more strategic concern. If what we care about is equitable wealth increases,
that’s difficult – to impossible – to manage through zoning. We live in a country whose primary mode of wealth generation (when it’s not your parents giving you money) is owning land; specifically owning homes, but owning land, and so, if you don’t want people to benefit from changes to land, the answer is not, Don’t make changes. The better answer is, give people a lot more access to a lot more avenues of wealth creation. Whether that’s jobs, whether that’s universal basic income – that can look like a lot of different things, many of which are not regulated at the local level.
I kind of wanted to draw in the show “The Expanse” to this. Because it’s difficult for me to not talk about that show.
Molly: It’s a really good show!
Jess: It’s a really good show! If you like science fiction in space, and coffee, you would probably like the show. I love it because it is a universe populated by complicated politics, complicated characters, and powerful women. I don’t mean powerful in the sense like everybody’s got a tank; I mean powerful in the sense that they know themselves, they know how to leverage relationships and systems in order to be able to make big, galactic-level change. It’s exciting! It’s fun! It’s cool! (It’s also very fraught! There’s a lot of explosions! …that part doesn’t apply to the transit oriented zoning. No explosions.)
But there is a lot of talk of actions around revolution (let me just be clear, there are NO spoilers in what I’m about to say) but for those of you who are watching “The Expanse” or considering it.
I want to point out that there are two revolutionaries that are held up kind of in dialogue with each other. No lessons given, no morals made, but the viewer and the reader of the series is kind of given the opportunity to to consider, well, if I’m doing a revolution, how would I do it?
One of them, Camina Drummer, represents this feeling of: “I am going to help the people that I’m here to help and I don’t care who it helps collaterally. Like if it helps people that I’m not super fan of, I don’t care. If it helps my people, that’s what I’m here for.”
Marco Inaros (and again there’s NO spoilers here, these are really, really clear character traits given very early on) has this feeling of, “I am going to hurt my enemies, and I don’t care if I hurt the people I care about; as long as I hurt my enemies, I will have accomplished my goal.”
Honestly, this feels the same way. This resolution isn’t about tending to folks that we care about; it’s about hurting the folks that we don’t. Which is: landowners, which is: developers, which is – you know, whatever the proxy is for the bad guy in the situation. So I have some reservations about this
To me, a much more interesting question, not specific to this resolution but specific to the transit oriented zoning is, who is benefiting? Is it transit riders? Is it renters? Is it hourly wage workers or young parents, just like in general?
Another issue I have with this specific resolution is: an elected official requesting public resources like staff time doing research into specific property owners feels icky.
Molly: It feels icky because it is icky, that’s not just a feeling.
Jess: Okay, great. So it’s objectively icky. It also feels like a slippery slope to something dangerous. The resolution itself notes that the information is publicly available; so, okay, fine…do that research on your own time. And then use that information to determine whether policy action is needed. But this intermediary action is kind of not okay. I don’t ever want us to use policy to go after specific people; I want us to talk about how our policy is benefiting groups. And that is not what this gets at.
Erica Briggs is one of the two councilmembers for Ward 5, one of my councilmembers, and she’s also (we’ll talk about this a little bit later) liaison to the Transportation Commission.
Erica puts out weekly or biweekly newsletter on policy and general community issues that I enjoy (Erica, thanks for your newsletter! It’s always informative). She talks about this resolution, and one of the things that she says is:
“There are important reasons that we do not consider who owns a property when making rezoning decisions. If Council and staff were to investigate who owns a property before determining whether to grant or prevent zoning action, it could lead to discriminatory or preferential actions.” I think that that’s important language to pay attention to; not just punishment, but discrimination is that what this is getting at.
City planning staff provided a memo in response to, I think it was Councilmember Briggs asking some clarifying questions around this resolution. And they indicate that increasing density along transit corridors is a top priority and it’s called out in several of the city’s master plan elements, including Vision Zero, including A2Zero, including our nonmotorized transportation plan.
Increasing development density furthers most if not all of the goals and the community and the land use and access themes of our sustainability framework elements; so what we’re saying is, this action accomplishes a bunch of our goals.
I wanted to say one more thing about this. We’ve talked just the tiniest bit on this podcast about an idea called Concierge Council, which is when elected officials respond to constituent requests kind of on a one off basis, like Oh, I heard from X that you know something feels really confusing or painful or awful to them; I’m going to introduce a resolution on that – whether or not it has anything to do with a broader community concern or problem. So that’s Concierge Council; it’s typically characterized by…I’m going to say, wasting staff time. This feels like the flip side of that; this feels like Attack Council. Where we’re not serving specific constituents; we’re going after specific constituents – and both are a big “no thanks” for me. So, to DC-3: no thanks.
Molly: Okay.
Jess: Speaking of no thanks, Molly…
Molly: You want to talk about here we go. DC-3. I’m reading you the whole title it’s very many parts because it’s like a nesting doll of things. Resolution to amend R dash 21 dash 395: approving a professional services agreement with DLZ Michigan Inc for engineering design services for the East medical Center Dr bridge rehabilitation and widening project.
This damn bridge again. You have heard me talk about this bridge. I’m gonna let JESS like do the catch up, because I have been talking about it so much that I am now struggling to keep it concise and then we’ll get into it.
Jess: I have a few issues like that, where people ask me a short question and, like one encyclopedia entry later they’re like look I had to go to the bathroom for like half an hour.
Molly: I’m the GIF of that guy with the board and the arrows and the strings and the waving the arms, like that’s the point that i’ve gotten to with this bridge. So Jess…
Jess: OK, so the issue on the table started, I’m going to say, relatively straightforward.
Late last fall, the state of Michigan cited this bridge as requiring repair. The bridge and road are city right of ways that front the University hospital. The University and city are planning to cost-share the repair.
So far, so good.
While we’re in there, the U is requesting the bridge also be widened.
This is when the community hijinks began.
The request came to Council in the form of a resolution to approve the design contract, which Molly referenced in the title above, for the engineers who are going to draw and write up the plans for this project.
At the Council table, the resolution was amended to require that any new space from the widening be dedicated to multimodal use; specifically bikes, buses, and pedestrians. And then it was referred to Transportation Commission for review and discussion at the end of last year.
So far, what we’re looking at is a process working as it should.
This was a complicated issue and they asked for the folks who really have skin in this game, Transportation Commission, to do a more in-depth analysis of what’s being asked.
TC, which Molly currently is chair of, did review and discuss. They ended up not approving the designs as submitted by the U, so it’s now back to Council for a vote and discussion about whether or not to keep that amendment, which we’ll talk more about in a moment.
The specific decision up for discussion today is, there’s a resolution to remove the multimodal amendment and say yes to the widening of the bridge with the current – and Molly has added a note to my note – “BAD” design plans.
Molly, did I catch it?
Molly: Yeah you got it so ah. The thing about the multimodal plans is that when transportation Commission had two meetings where we talked about this and, at the second one, we heard from staff that a high occupancy vehicle lane or bus rapid transit lane on the bridge is not feasible because those are meant to be parts of much longer corridors and we’re talking about really a very short bridge. So those are not options and the other multimodal pieces, the walking and the biking pieces, did not get incorporated into the designs in any way, because the university doesn’t want them, so this resolution is to take out that, the multimodal piece, and then approve the widening.
Why are we talking about it today? Because the design is still bad. In this plan, all of the widening space goes to private cars. We have talked at length about why widening things are bad so I’m just going to sort of focus in on the fact that this project as currently written would violate the city’s climate goals and our safety goals. Part of the issue is that the University has said they’ve just said it, we plan to bring many more cars here, we’re going to build more parking, we’re going to build more hospital, and we’re inviting lots more cars into this space. And like they can do that, but we don’t have to be helping them, we should not be helping them. They’re saying they want more car traffic and they’re going to build for more car traffic and they want the city to go along with that, and we have absolutely no reason to do that.
Jess: No reason to do so, and a really good reason not to, which is in our own carbon neutrality plan, A2Zero, one of the primary focus goals on that is to reduce vehicle miles traveled – so, driving in single occupancy vehicle cars is the biggest culprit in that – by 50% in the next eight years. That’s a 2030 goal. You guys, that is major behavior change! Every step we take going in the opposite direction makes it harder.
Molly: It’s an ambitious goal. And this project is in direct opposition to trying to achieve that goal, when what we could be doing is widening that bridge for protected bike lanes and expande sidewalks so that we’re actually making it more comfortable for more people to make the choice to bike or walk or take the bus to the hospital area, which yes, some of that traffic is patients, but a ton of that traffic is staff. And a ton of the traffic moving through that space is students who are just passing through from central campus to North campus and have nothing to do with the hospital. There are so yeah this is where the hands begin to wave and I get mad again.
There are things we could have done to make it better, because the intersection right now is crappy like it’s bad, as is it’s bad and repairing the bridge and keeping it exactly the same as it currently is, that would not be my first choice. I don’t think that would have been transportation commission’s first choice. Widening the bridge to make it better would have been amazing, that’s not what’s happening.
Jess: Yeah. I have to call out – in over a year doing this podcast, I don’t think I’ve ever brought up Councilmember Erica Briggs’ newsletter and today I’m going to do it twice. But, frankly, it was kind of fire today! So I deeply enjoyed the newsletter – she had a comment on this resolution. As a Councilmember and also Council liaison to the Transportation Commission, I really pay attention to her observations about the process. So the newsletter, she says:
“I reject the premise that we should approve a substandard project design that is in conflict with our transportation and climate action plans, as well as the University’s carbon neutrality plan. Our priority needs to be on rehabilitating this bridge, which is in poor condition. If the University wishes to widen the bridge, then it needs to fund a project that improves conditions for all users in an area that is known to be both dangerous and uncomfortable to navigate. I will be offering amendments to this resolution on Monday night.”
Molly: Yes, yes Erica! like exactly this, she said it all, Nice and clear. This is great. So there will be some amendments to this resolution on Monday, and it may be that those amendments get us to something better, the problem is that thus far, U of M has not budged on any of the requests that we’ve made for improving the experience for pedestrians and bikes, for making space for transit. They only want to make space for cars and they only want to pay to widen the bridge as much as they need for cars and then they’re done. So i’m excited to see these amendments.
In the meantime, this would be a good thing to write to City Council about because my sense is that there is a lot of wrangling going on, and I am not currently going to make a prediction about the outcome, this is, this is an opportunity to really potentially move the needle by taking a few minutes to write to Council.
There are a few different things you can ask for and I’ll give you a list of those, but the really key thing, the most important thing is that the plan as it is right now is unacceptable. And if the U of M does not relent on any of these things that we’re asking for, and they try to get us to move forward with a widening plan as it currently exists, Council has to reject the widening and move forward with just the repair, which they’re prepared to do and the U of M is going to pay for half of that repair, no matter what. So we don’t have to worry about them taking all their money and going home, we can just repair the bridge with 50% of that coming from you and stop there. That was what was in the city’s original plan before they came with this widening request.
So some things you might ask for would be requiring protected bike and pedestrian facilities on both sides of the bridge with sufficient space for both bikes and pedestrians. On both sides. One way to do that would be to widen the bridge even more, and the U of M could get their lane, which I still don’t like, but we could get really improved facilities for everybody else. Bridges are really hard to change, whatever we do with this bridge we’re going to be stuck with it for a long time.
Jess: I just want to point out that you’re Camina-ing the bridge, you’re not Marco-ing the bridge. You’re not like, “No cars forever!” You’re like, “Look. As long as bikes and pedestrians benefit, you can have your frickin’ car.”
Molly: Yes, it’s true. I you know, in principle I love to yell that we should ban cars, but in practice I understand how politics works and I’m willing to support a compromise that would get me something that I want. There’s another big thing that we want with this project, which is a connector to the border to border trail, which goes under the bridge and an underpass that would connect to it. The border to border trail is a really important piece of bike and pedestrian infrastructure, but it’s piecemeal right now, and this would be a really important connection point. And there’s right now there’s a plan to like build a platform where the trail could go, but it would be, we could actually maybe get the trail in there sooner. And that would also be great, and it would potentially help reduce bike and pedestrian traffic on the bridge. However, I always have to say anytime you’re taking pedestrians off of grade, moving them from the street and making them go up over or around or under that’s car infrastructure and that’s not preferred. But not getting it at all would still be worse so again compromise.
Another one would be if they put in that extra lane, and they do use it for cars to say eventually when Ann Arbor is ready for what’s called signal priority, which I explained last week it’s this idea that buses and and traffic lights can communicate and the light can stay green so buses can move more quickly through a corridor. And sometimes you put in a queue jump lane, so that the bus can jump the line at a red light and you could use that lane that’s one thing we did hear from AAATA that might someday be a useful application of an additional lane on that bridge would be a bus queue jump, so to say when when a AAATA is ready, this is going to become a queue jump lane. This alone is not enough, I don’t think and I still believe that once you give space to cars, it becomes really difficult to get it back, and also, it would mean accepting that the intersection is going to get worse before maybe someday possibly being less worse, so I don’t love it. But again, like, there are some things we could use that space for that would be beneficial. If we weren’t in the bridge none, we would get none of those benefits, and so I think it’s worth potentially asking for some of these things. Depending on how big you want your asks to be you’ve got these options, but no matter what, if we don’t get anything they have to say no to the widening.
The other thing about this is that we’re still, this is still a conversation about the contract for design services so we’re still pretty far from like the actual building of the bridge, but this is when this conversation is supposed to happen, like we’re having this discussion at the right time. This is where we make this decision, but also just this is still the design contracts that’s where we are with this damn bridge.
Jess: I mean, I hear what you’re saying, but like you’re saying, right now is the time to have this conversation; like we’re defining the scope of the contract. I went back to our conversation about this from, I think it was December 18 or something like that; and I noted in that episode (because I’m smart and look forward to things) that even six months down the line would be too late to have this conversation. And that’s feeling very true! Like pretty much you can always amend a contract, but it’s difficult; and especially given how hard the University is fighting any language around widening being dedicated to multimodal uses even potentially, conditionally, in the future, maybe, someday, I don’t know – they want none of that language in there, so yeah, now is definitely the time to have the conversation. It does feel weird to fight this hard when there’s not even lines on the page; but words are the easiest thing to change, so I think we’re having the right conversation at the right time. I appreciate the work that you and Transportation Commission are doing; I appreciate the work that our advocates out in the Community, folks who bike and walk and especially folks who are in this area all the time; they’ve been really critical of the widening because that area is already – dangerous is a good word, but uncomfortable is a better one. I was there a bunch last year, my partner had a bunch of health issues that put us at the hospital a lot. That road, that intersection, those sidewalks are not great (and I have extensive critiques of the bike parking over there – that’s for another conversation!) But anyway. All of that to say, we’re having the right conversation at the right time.
We love to say get informed and get involved. Now is a really good time to email your councilmembers your thoughts about this particular resolution and just let them know what you’d like to see. Now’s a good time to dream big! Ask for the nice things.
Molly: So that’s it for the agenda today, but we have a couple more sort of key things we wanted to talk about, and the first one is related to this conversation about this bridge, and that is that I am so tired. I have put, so many people have put so much time and energy into this one bridge, fighting for these core values like safety and sustainability, these things that we say. We make these lofty goals we put out these big plans. And then we have to fight for them one intersection at a time and that feels like shit. We can’t, we can’t keep doing it this way, we will burn out everyone who cares or they will leave.
We have to get to a place where we can have these kinds of policies and procedures and practices so that things like road widening and slip lanes aren’t just treated as neutral stuff we do, while at the same time, like, if you want to remove a single parking spot it’s like months and months of battle and probably you’ll lose. Passing the transportation plan and A2Zero plan, passing those things were step one. I don’t have the answer for how we get to somewhere with our policies and procedures, such that advocates on the ground can be fighting for bigger, better things and not just trying to maintain the shitty status quo. I am fighting for that bridge to stay bad that’s not how I want to spend my time. So I just I wanted to put this out there that this bridge fight is exemplary of a larger problem, and I think this is not just an Ann Arbor problem right, this is an everywhere problem but, we can’t we can’t we cannot go on like this.
Jess: There were a lot of hands there, yes.
Molly: Because I’m just so tired. And then Jess you have also a rant.
Jess: Thank you.
I do want to pause for a minute on your critique.
We talk a lot here, we criticize, and then we bring solutions or we make suggestions; we are walking walls of opinions, we always have suggestions. But I appreciate the critique that you’re making, and I do agree that fighting so hard for what feels like crumbs; or, at the very least, not going backward – it’s not it’s not who we say we are as a community; it’s not how we want to think about ourselves. But it’s definitely, practically, how it plays out. So I appreciate the criticism.
For me it’s a little bit less about process and more I had language rub a couple of weeks ago and it really kind of burrowed under my skin and I was like – Man, if only there was a place where I could talk about infrastructure peeves –
Molly: I have a podcast for that!
Jess: – full of people who listen and also have infrastructure peeves!
So, y’all, here’s what’s on my mind.
I’m thinking about municipal sidewalk maintenance. You know, we’ve had this dump of snow, the last few days; but in general, it’s winter. So the conversation about snow removal, doing it equitably, do we do it municipally or privately, you know, whatever – it’s a conversation. And the last couple of months we’ve been having a conversation about what would it take to do it municipally.
– And by the way, big ups to the listeners on Twitter! Y’all took our back-of-the-envelope math dare on how much development it would take to pay outright for municipal sidewalk snow removal. That was a fun thought exercise! Thanks for doing that.
But the thing that I keep coming back to is that we described doing it as expensive. And…I have a body reaction to that. I’m not a hand waver, like Molly is; but I get the chest heavies. I want to talk about what the logical extension of that statement means: what we’re saying, when we say that’s expensive.
In this country we rarely pay the real cost of anything. For housing – as expensive as things are, we are not paying the real price. We underprice energy; we underprice roads we absolutely underprice parking; we underprice most of the Labor that it takes to build anything.
For food, we definitely don’t pay the real cost, and most of that is Labor, too.
And for sidewalks we’re not paying the full cost of what it takes to own them.
We’ve built them, over time, and we have allocated X dollars in the budget to maintain them; and then we have said that the hard parts of maintenance belong to adjacent property owners.
What we’re saying when we say that is that sidewalks are not infrastructure; we’re saying that, basically, it’s a property amenity.
What we’re also saying when we make that budget decision is that “good enough” is defined by able-bodied people. That budget item assumes that whatever percentage of people of our community’s residents are able to use the sidewalks is good enough, and the rest of them? Oh, well, it’s expensive.
To do it right is “expensive”? That is the cost of having a sidewalk. To do it badly is ableist and a cop-out.
So, you guys – specific to sidewalk maintenance, but this is going to pop up in other conversations, too – I don’t want to dwell on why it’s hard or expensive. I really don’t. Listing the barriers, for sure; and then let’s spend the bulk of our energy and time and attention on solutions because that’s how we care for each other. That’s how we care for each other.
Molly: yep.
Jess: And that’s why I don’t want to say that sidewalks are expensive. I don’t want to do – we’ve said it on this podcast before, and I had a little twitch about it, so I don’t want to do that anymore.
Molly: I think that’s totally fair yeah cuz I definitely said it and I had that moment, when I saw the the top price tag for doing all the sidewalks I was like well that’s a lot of money. I absolutely agree with you, however, that it’s not. That’s not a good reason not to do it, it’s one of multiple barriers but it’s so important. I feel like this is a very frequent meme that I see where, when business owners complain about minimum wage increases and in the responses it says, if you can’t afford to pay your staff a living wage you can’t afford to run a business. Like figure it out, because otherwise you’re just stealing from your employees in the form of their time and their bodies and their lives. So I think this is another very good example of that. I like the way you framed it that this is the cost of having sidewalks, this is the cost of being a city.
Jess: Rant done. Moving on to i’m not going to say that those weren’t positive, because I actually like critiques; critiques make me feel like we are genuinely taking on stuff that we care about.
But going on to compliments, let’s say! I’ve gotten a couple of pieces of listener feedback since last episode and I just wanted to say thank you!
To the folks at the University’s Bold Challenges workshop this week who told me that you listen to the pod and find it useful, thank you! That was really lovely to hear in the middle of my first professional outing in a large room in two years. I had a lot of anxiety and feelings about it, and so, to know that there were people on the other side of this podcast listening and caring and finding it useful – that was just really lovely.
Thank you, also, to the listener who let us know that you put us on when you can’t sleep.
I actually don’t even care whether you listen to pass the time or you’re using it to fall asleep – I do not care! From one insomniac to another, I am just glad to be part of your middle of the night coping strategy. Thank you.
In terms of community things…
The Ann Arbor Community Academy, which is sort of like Civics 101 run by the City of Ann Arbor: the applications are open! I was just taking a look to see what the deadlines are. In the past, it’s been a competitive application; this year, it’s open to everybody! So if this is something you’re interested in, I highly encourage you to apply! Applications are due February 18th, and we’ll drop the link in the show notes.
Finally, the ARPA funding community priority survey is up. This is of course the American Rescue Plan Act; these are the dollars that have been assigned to different municipalities for being able to recover from this pineapple that we’ve been in for freakin ever. Ann Arbor got assigned in the neighborhood of $24 million dollars and the survey – I actually really liked the format. It’s really interesting!
Molly: It was a really well designed thing. I really liked it a lot, it was fun.
Jess: Yep, so there’s a way – the city gives you a series of priorities and says, if you were to budget dollars, how would you do it? It also gives you an open field to be able to say, oh, I didn’t see the thing that I care about, here’s what I wish you did. So fill that out. That’s due by February 14th. So make the city your Valentine! Tell them things about dollars.
Molly: We have some things that we think that you should choose on that survey, would you like to name one or two? I mean, I think it will be very easy to spot them, they are things like affordable housing and Vision Zero and unarmed crisis response. I’m just gonna leave you with those three and let’s say maybe you drop a few dots for those ones, and then you can pick the other stuff that you care about.
Jess: Protected bike lane on Miller and Catherine! That was exciting.
Molly: yep okay also there’s something that has a name that sounds very unclear and it’s about funding for trying to get people out of poverty. [and] Universal basic income.
Jess: Universal basic income! Yeah.
Molly: I could start giving you my whole list but i’m gonna i’m stopping now i’m going to stop.
Jess: So if you haven’t already, please respond to that survey. Again, we’ll drop a link in the show notes.
Molly I think we hit the agenda and covered housekeeping? Yeah?
She’s giving me the thumbs up! Okay.
That is it for this episode of Ann Arbor AF! Thanks for sticking with us, you guys.
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 Jess Letaw and Molly Kleinman; and thanks to Scott Trudeau for stepping in this week to help produce. Theme music “I dunno” by grapes. You can reach us by email at annarborafpod@gmail.com. Get informed, then get involved. It’s your city!