Transcript
Jess: Hi, and welcome to this special episode of Ann Arbor AF, a podcast for folks trying to figure out what’s going on in Ann Arbor. We discuss current events, local politics and policy, governance, and other civic good times. I’m Jess Letaw, here with my cohost Molly Kleinman; we both use she-her pronouns.
Today we are recording a special episode: a breakdown, probably in more ways than one, of the Medical Center Drive bridge decision. We’ll be talking about how folks got informed and involved, and how it went sideways anyway.
Molly, why are we doing this episode?
00:40
Molly: Why are we doing this episode? Well…we have a lot of feelings. I think a lot of people are having a lot of feelings. Partly, I think, I just wanted to bring some of that to the podcast. Also, I am someone who analyzes things as a reflex, and also as a coping mechanism; so as this decision was happening, even in the days beforehand I was doing a lot of perseverating about what was happening, and I was seeing a lot of connections to the work I do in my day job; it felt really relevant, and it felt like stuff that people weren’t otherwise going to talk about, so I was like, I want to do a special episode about this. So that we can – I can – get this out of my head.
01:29
Jess: And I said, Yep! Okay! before I even knew what it was going to be.
01:32
Molly: I do hope that it will be useful for other people as well.
01:36
Jess: So we’re bringing all of us along on the journey. We don’t know what this episode is going to be! So, welcome.
For me, I felt like I was doing a different kind of processing from you. This whole circumstance felt like it was hand in glove with our tagline: “Get informed, get involved, it’s your city!”
“Get informed” = I feel like our electeds didn’t.
“Get involved” = I feel like our activists and advocates did, in really exciting ways.
“It’s your city” = I think most of us feel like that’s true; I am not sure that the University of Michigan feels like it’s their city. I didn’t feel like they engaged this in good faith. And regardless, I feel like all of us need to get more imaginative about embodying what “it’s our city” means. So that’s part of what I wanted to talk about.
02:28
Molly: All right! So I’m going to do the quick explanation of what happened for folks who are not glued to council-meeting-Twitter.
02:37
Jess: “Previously, on Ann Arbor…”
02:40
Molly: Exactly. The TL;DR is that this bridge widening that we’ve been talking about for several weeks passed through Council without any conditions for nonmotorized safety or infrastructure; the bridge is going to get wider, all of the new space is going to be for cars, and the existing sidewalk setup is actually going to be made worse with this plan.
The reminder: the bridge needed to be repaired anyway; U of M also wanted to widen it to make more room for cars to get up to the hospital. There was an original resolution to approve a design contract; Councilmember Briggs introduced an amendment requiring that any widening that happened would have to go to good things like bike lanes or bus lanes. Some of those things, it turned out, were not feasible. The rest of them were not acceptable to U of M, so Monday’s resolution was to approve the design contract minus that previous amendment; just approving the contract, with the widening, no changes. Councilmember Briggs tried again with a new amendment this week, and it didn’t pass. But then the widening contract did.
So that’s where we are: we have this plan to widen the bridge, we got nothing from the University out of it, no concessions, none of the things that we were asking for – and that’s what happened.
There’s a lot in terms of the specifics of how we got here, who said what and who did what and why, that I truly do not know; there’s a lot that’s unclear to me. A lot of different people were saying different things to different people. We’re not going to break that down right now. What went sideways in terms of the councilmembers and their relationships to each other, why they did or did not speak to each other about this stuff ahead of time – we’re not going to try and unpack that today.
So here’s what we are going to do: we encourage people to get informed and get involved, and we have this moment where a lot of people got involved and it didn’t work. I want to talk about this one piece of it, which is which perspectives did and did not matter in the decision to widen the bridge.
So, Jess. Do you know what my job is?
05:11
Jess: I totally know what your job is! …I’m pretty sure that you talk to people about talking about policy?
05:20
Molly: That is a great way to talk about my job. Yes. One part of it is, I talk to grad students about talking about policy. We teach mostly science and engineering graduate students of various flavors about policy and policy-making. Sometimes, those are students who want to work in policy; often, it’s that they’re in a field that’s really policy-relevant and they want to learn how to use their expertise to inform and influence policy. The example that I always use is our nuclear engineering students. We pretty much always have a couple of nuclear engineers. They come to our program because they’re really frustrated; they’re like, listen, nuclear energy is super safe, there’s no greenhouse gas emissions, it’s great and the public just doesn’t understand, and I want you to teach me how to communicate at the public better so that I can convince them that they’re wrong and I’m right. And we have to help them understand that maybe the public has some pretty legitimate reasons for not trusting nuclear energy! Maybe they’re not concerned about greenhouse gas emissions, but they’re concerned about nuclear waste; there’s all of these perspectives that you need to be able to consider beyond your little bundle of expertise. So the lesson that we’re trying to teach these engineers, to all of our students, is that there is knowledge that the public has that so-called experts don’t have. The public has wisdom and expertise and our scientists and our engineer and our policymaker students need to learn that and remember that, and I would say that so do our councilmembers.
All right, Jess, are you with me so far?
07:26
Jess: I am, and this is resonant with my corner of organizing and advocacy in housing. There’s a lot of tension between people who live in neighborhoods, people who want to change neighborhoods, and people who plan neighborhoods; there’s usually not a whole lot of overlap between those three groups. The way that I’m thinking about it lately is that there’s lived experience as a way of knowing; then there’s expertise as a way of knowing, professional or academic expertise. And then there’s wisdom, which is being able to apply what you know to the situation at hand. Wisdom is like that elusive diamond that we’re often chasing. That’s how I help myself remember, and hopefully bring others along in remembering, how we value how people show up at the table. That’s what what you’re saying reminds me of; that there are different ways of knowing; no one is better, no one’s worse, we just need to know how to listen.
08:27
Molly: Yeah. That’s exactly right. In a lot of the teaching that we do, we use cases. There’s one case that we use to teach this concept that I could not stop thinking about as the bridge debate was unfolding, and this is where I’m throwing you all kind of a big curveball. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the Flint water crisis.
I’m going to say right at the start that there are a lot of ways in which the Flint water crisis is not like this bridge decision. There was no criminal malfeasance. This was not rooted in deep racist, anti-democratic shit that was happening throughout the state. I’m not. That’s not where I’m going with this.
But there’s a specific detail of what happened in Flint that there were all kinds of echoes that I saw this week. So I’m going to dive into the case a little bit.
This is Michigan, so I don’t need to give you a detailed history of the Flint water crisis. The very short version is that in 2014, under an emergency manager appointed by former governor Rick Snyder, Flint’s municipal water switched from pumping water from the Detroit system to using the Flint River and doing water treatment locally. Several things went wrong, including inadequate filtration and testing; and, most famously, a failure to add anti-corrosive agents, so that, over time, the water corroded lead pipes and exposed thousands of city residents, including children, to high levels of lead. (There’s no safe level of lead exposure.) It also caused an outbreak of Legionnaires Disease, which killed 12 people and sickened at least 87, and was denied for multiple years that that even happened.
A lot of Flint residents were opposed to the switch beforehand. They could see and smell the river with their own eyes and their own noses. They saw the decades of industrial pollution that were dumped into the river. This just seemed very obviously like a bad idea.
All right. I’m going to ask you to read a quote. There’s this great book called Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis by Benjamin Pauli. He did extensive interviews with the Flint activists and the other residents who fought for clean water. I want you to hear how he describes the preparations for the switch to the Flint River.
10:56
Jess: Benjamin Pauli says:
In the lead-up to the switch, authorities at the state and local levels sought to assuage popular fears by repeatedly reassuring residents that the treated river water met all federal guidelines and was comparable to Detroit water in quality. Representatives of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) told residents that they “shouldn’t notice any difference” beyond an increase in the “hardness” of the water… City officials painted a similarly heartening picture. During the inauguration of the new water supply, Mayor Walling acknowledged that there had been “a lot of questions from our customers,” but insisted that “the water quality speaks for itself.” Addressing the public in the days after the switch, City Spokesperson Jason Lorenz reinforced the message that the water was “of great quality.” These were the first in what would become a long line of assurances over the next year and a half that the water was not only safe but eminently drinkable.
12:08
Molly: So, Jess, what stands out to you in this paragraph?
12:12
Jess: The reference to third party credibility. “Don’t take our word for it! Look, the grownups say this is totally fine!”
12:19
Molly: Right, it complies with, it meets all federal guidelines. We have these experts over here telling us that the water is safe and our plan is good. Exactly. They used scientific experts to support their decision, insisted that the water met standards, and they were basically using that to say to Flint residents that they shouldn’t trust themselves; they should trust these experts and these leaders instead. Even though, even before the switch happened Flint residents had knowledge about the river running through their city – not just general knowledge, but specific knowledge – that an emergency manager from somewhere else did not have; that people who don’t see and smell the river every day don’t have.
This is the same thing that happened with that damn bridge, Jess.
We heard from so many people who walk through that intersection, who bike through that intersection, who use that bridge or who cross through that intersection on their way to other places. All of them told us – first of all, that it’s not safe now, that there was no way adding more cars was going to make it better, and that there were things that Council could do that could make it better. There were many, many options that people brought forward; there were dozens of people who wrote in. Councilmembers who voted for the widening did not listen to those people, did not count their knowledge of the situation, it was not relevant to the decision that they made.
So. In Flint, as we know, the switch was catastrophic. A lot of Flint residents noticed right away, because their water was cloudy or rusty; it tasted and smelled wrong. A lot more people figured it out as they started developing rashes and hair loss and brittle bones. Residents raised the alarm; there were even some staff at MDEQ who were concerned about this plan. But city and state leaders continued to insist that the public was wrong, their own experts were right, and it didn’t matter. How many people showed up to public meetings with bottles of discolored water with videos of like the gross stuff that was coming out of their taps? Leaders felt that they could disregard them and they used this expertise to validate that decision.
14:51
Jess: Back to the bridge. The University’s Community Relations rep, Mike Rein, who was the city’s primary contact during this process, said something during Monday’s Council meeting that Molly and I both think distills this whole thing into one sentence.
For context, the west side of East Medical Center Drive is the side that the hospital is on and that a preponderance of public commenters say that that’s the side that they actually ride their bikes on and most people who walk they walk on that side as well because that’s where everything is.
15:22
Molly: Where they’re going. Where the hospital is.
15:24
Jess: Yes! Right. Mike Rein said: “The experts all say increased bicycle traffic on the west side is a bad idea, and the University cannot and will not support that.”
15:37
Molly: This is where I start to curse because –
15:40
Jess: – the hands are going, y’all. The hands are going –
15:43
Molly: All experts? Like – what the fuck, man?
First of all, not even the people who are legitimate experts – like we have U of M faculty who study bicycle safety and they shared that this was not a good plan. Those people are experts. The people who bike through there everyday are experts. The nurses who walk through there at shift change are experts. If you were to ask literally anyone who has been paying attention to the need for safer streets, paying attention to the pedestrian deaths crisis, if you ask them: “Is adding a car lane to an intersection better or worse for safety?” – not throughput: safety – they’re going to say it’s worse. It’s worse! We know this. So I’m talking about the wisdom of the public and the things that people know that experts don’t.
I want to be very clear that I am not talking about these randos on the Internet who say that they are doing their own research about vaccines and that, therefore, they know more than the WHO. Like – no. This is about people who have specific lived experience of something, experience that, in a perfect world, would be recognized as relevant for policymaking.
But our councilmembers concluded that all these people with direct experience using the bridge were not relevant. The nurses who walk through are not relevant. The volunteers on the Transportation Commission who invested a lot of time into understanding this project were not credible. The only people who are experts in this project were the consultants and the University’s planners. Those were the only experts that they felt they needed to listen to to come to a good decision. This is a mistake that policymakers make all the fucking time, and it’s why we work so hard to teach our students about it: so they will not grow up into these policymakers, who make this mistake that our councilmembers just made.
17:45
Jess: Speaking of Transportation Commission.
17:47
Molly: Yes.
17:49
Jess: I wanted to take a minute to speak on commissions, because I feel like understanding the function of the Commission is important to understanding part of why this decision felt so egregious.
So.
In a lot of cities, including Ann Arbor, commissions are sort of about checks and balances and sort of about representation. If you vaguely remember from civics in eighth grade, the three branches of the federal government are legislative, executive, and judicial. You don’t have to remember what they did or which one is which one (although from 2016 to 2020, you probably gave yourself a PhD level education in that). Anyway, you remember that they served a function to kind of check and balance each other. Those checks and balances exist at the municipal level, too; but in terms of the day-to-day business of the city, there are three groups of people. Let’s call them (because this is how I think of them in my head) professionals, electeds, and volunteers.
The professionals are the folks who work for the City. They are subject matter experts – in planning, or engineering, or Community Engagement; they have professional experience and often have degrees or advanced degrees supporting the work that they do every day.
Electeds cover geographic areas. Ann Arbor is divided up into five pie-slice wards; each ward gets two councilmembers; and then there’s one at-large councilmember that we call the mayor. These are folks who we expect to represent our constituencies’ interests. Constituency being both their Ward, and hopefully everybody in the city.
But there’s a gap between electeds and professionals. Electeds cannot reasonably be expected to be experts in everything that they need to know to govern and serve effectively. Especially in Ann Arbor, where a councilmember earns a very part time salary, and professionals don’t necessarily have the capacity to apply their technical expertise to the on-the-ground reality of the city. Enter: commissions!
Commissions are bodies dedicated to supporting specific departments or service areas. They are comprised of volunteers who have a mix of professional or academic expertise and lived experience relevant to that specific area. For what it’s worth, there are also councilmember liaisons appointed to almost every commission. Commissions are typically where the most technical public work happens; because that’s where professional staff work with informed volunteers to form and shape policy and process. Then the councilmember liaisons help translate that in-depth work back to the Council table for the benefit of their Council colleagues. So commissions represent a really important part of how work gets done in the city.
It’s also a unique opportunity for expanding representation. At any given time, there are only 11 councilmembers in a city of about 130,000, but there are hundreds of commissioners and board members. While there are still access issues, there are a lot fewer barriers to entry, like the cost and time of a political campaign.
21:02
Molly: Thank you. I wanted to talk about the role and value of commissions, but I don’t know how to talk about this. Jess, can you explain to me why we have commissions?
Because, especially at this moment, I was like why? Why are we doing this? Transportation Commission, for this particular decision, put in a lot of time. We are all volunteers who are appointed by City Council; when we talk about who these councilmembers do and do not trust and treat as experts, I think it’s important to note that councilmembers appointed us. So we’re this group of volunteers, with a range of experiences. And we live around the city so there’s different chunks that we are more familiar with. We saw multiple presentations on this bridge project. We gave feedback. In fact I’m realizing that the worst plan, that we ended up with, was where they took sidewalk from one side to make it even narrower. to widen another side; I think that was actually in response to our concerns about the lack of safe infrastructure in the plans for pedestrians and bicyclists so they made one side wider and they didn’t give another single inch more to pedestrians and bikes – but anyway. We heard all these public comments, we’ve read them; some of us went down to the bridge and looked at it, experienced it on bikes and on foot for ourselves. And then councilmembers decided that none of that mattered for – reasons. I mean, the only reasons that I’ve heard are, frankly, insulting. I’m trying really hard not to make this episode about me or about the Commission, but this decision, that a Commission was irrelevant, is disturbing in some bigger ways. The whole point is for us to do some of that legwork so that the councilmembers can come to the table with some good advice. We gave them some very good advice! –which was to not widen the bridge without making more space for bikes or pedestrians! Councilmember Briggs, who is our liaison, voted against this plan. She kept trying to bring compromises, something that could make it better. But it didn’t work.
23:34
Jess: I appreciate what you just said about walking through the process, because that actually physically was a part of it. That goes back to what I was talking about a little bit earlier, about different ways of knowing; this represents a very specific way of knowing, which is embodying that knowing. Like: put your body in the context and see how it feels and reads for yourself. Given the noise around this decision and the consequence of it – we get stuck with bridges for longer than almost any other infrastructure than I can think of, except for water, maybe one or two other things, but a bridge is a commitment – given that, every single councilmember should have made time to travel the bridge and its connecting intersections on either side; ideally, at least once on foot and at least once by bike. Because I cannot imagine that the whole “being on the west side is infeasible” rhetoric would have held a drop of water against their own experience. That road is unsafe – nobody crosses it that doesn’t have to! Mostly the only reason people cross it is they put the bus stops on that side.I’m not the only one who felt that way. Molly’s talked about it; I made an exception to my usual Twitter boycott to scroll through the a2council hashtag from the last couple of days. Twitter user @no_face said in a tweet, directed to Councilmember Travis Radina:
Travis, I would love for you to just walk the east side of the hospital where the widened path will take people.
There is parking on the sidewalk.
There are busy bus stops on the sidewalk.
It’s unsafe and it doesn’t lead anywhere.
You should reconsider.
25:16
Molly: That question of embodiment gets to this idea of expertise that the public has and I, you know when I’ve recruited people to the transportation Commission over the years. And I and sometimes they express concern that they don’t know enough to be valuable on the Commission, that they’re not an expert. They’re just someone who bikes everywhere and doesn’t have a car or whatever it is, and I give them this very heartfelt spiel that I’ve given all of you about the expertise of the public and the wisdom and the knowledge that you have. By being a person who moves through the city on a bike on foot on bus, and that’s what Council needs to hear about when they’re making these kinds of decisions and then our councilmembers said no, we don’t need to hear that from you.
26:13
Jess: Part of the reason that I have this urgency behind the embodiment is, councilmembers were hearing a lot of conflicting priorities, like you said. From the University consultants and planners, from the Community; they were really getting opposing messages about what that bridge needed. And so, instead of listening to anybody else, I wish they had just taken more time to listen to themselves. I didn’t hear a single person who voted for the widening that has consistent experience with that bridge and that road as a pedestrian or cyclist – and I think it showed in the decision. Because I cannot imagine anybody not in a car feeling like adding more cars to that particular piece of land is a good idea.
26:56
Molly: I don’t think, even in a car, it would be a good idea. It would just make it more stressful and increase the risk of crashes. That intersection is already a hotspot on our city’s crash map; there’s a nice glowing red spot, there’s a lot of crashes happening there. There’s no way that adding another lane of cars is going to make it better. To me, it should have been so self-evident; but, obviously, it was not. There were all these desires and demands that the University had.
I don’t know. I don’t know how to continue this conversation. I don’t entirely know how to end this conversation. I – you know, I came out of that decision asking: What was it all for? Why is there this tax on our time if we’re not going to get listened to, anyway? Why are we putting all of this energy, especially at this particular moment, two years into a pandemic, with very spotty child care, when I made this a priority and so did the other Commission members, and so did all of the other people who took the time to write to Council, to speak at a Transportation Commission meeting, to speak at the Council meeting – I was seriously asking: Why do we have commissions? Why am I doing this? I was questioning a lot.
For me, I think, with this episode, partly I just wanted to validate everyone’s feelings that: this sucks. We showed up – we did the effort! We put in the effort, and Council made the wrong decision anyway. Thank you to everyone who tried, first of all; just – we see you. And thank you. I don’t know just if there’s more that we want to do; do we want to get bigger or smaller about this? Have we exhausted ourselves and our anger?
29:20
Jess: As long as rage is productive, that well is never exhausted.
Molly and I talked a little bit before recording about why we wanted to do this episode. There were two real reasons:
We needed some therapy.
And we wanted it to be a love letter to everybody who embodies the tagline of the pod. You got informed; you got involved; you embody what it means to be the city.
There will be plenty of time in the future to talk about next steps. Molly’s already started having some really interesting thoughts about what it means to engage in more effective activism, and I do want us to talk about that. But in this moment, I just want to pause, let ourselves be mad and tired and grieving and frustrated and in solidarity.
I’m really grateful to you all. I’m grateful to Molly for her rage and tiredness. I’m grateful to me for mine. All of it matters. Even when it goes sideways, all of it matters.
30:29
Molly: Thank you. I think I needed to hear that today.
All right, well then…that’s it for this special episode of Ann Arbor AF. You can come check out our episodes and transcripts that our website, ann arboraf.com, you can listen to our multiple past –
30:49
Jess: – discussions about this damn bridge.
30:52Molly: You can 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. We’re your cohosts, Molly Kleinman and Jess Letaw. Thanks to Scott Trudeau for helping cross our t’s and dot our i’s. We hope that you will continue to get informed and get involved; it is, still, your city.