We talk about the next City Council meeting, coming up Monday, April 4th. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including ARPA, ARPA, and more ARPA.
Links we referenced:
- This week’s agenda.
- The ARPA funding resolution.
- Those infamous amendments.
- Derrick Miller’s letter on how Ann Arbor’s Community Action Network and Ukraine are linked.
- Bill Lopez’s iconic Twitter thread reinterpreting Oscars fashion as public health graphs.
Podkeeping:
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
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!
Today we’re talking about the next City Council meeting coming up Monday April 4 will be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including ARPA, ARPA, and more ARPA, and offer some ways for you to get involved. A quick process note: we record this a few days before the Council meeting, which means there will likely be some changes to the agenda between now and then.
Another quick note. You may notice I sound a little bit rough today. I’m coming back from a cold, so Molly’s going to take the brunt of the episode today, and I will just pop in with my croaking from time to time as needed.
All right, let’s do this.
00:40
Molly: Thanks for doing this with us Jess, or with me, I guess, even though your voice is not at its top but yeah, let’s dive right in. So we’re really mostly talking about ARPA today, and ARPA stands for the American Rescue Plan Act. We have talked about ARPA a few different ways, a few different times, this is the money from the Federal Government that went to municipalities as pandemic relief really specifically to address the impact of the pandemic. Ann Arbor received little over $24 million. And this is now the moment when Council is going to vote on how we are spending this money.
So I’m going to back it up and talk through how we got here, because I think it’s helpful to think through the whole process now that we’re at the end. Ann Arbor got $24 million then staff, partly in conjunction, I think, with conversations with Council members, made a list of possibilities of what we could potentially spend these ARPA funds on, and there are limitations from the government in terms of what this money is and is not for. One-time infrastructure spending is good, things directly addressing the pandemic, like people who are harmed by the pandemic good. Some other things are discouraged or not permitted in the rescue plan, so this was not just free money. They made a list based on what the possibilities were in terms of what our priorities have been and what we know about issues that we’ve had locally, then there was public engagement, this was the survey that we encouraged you all to complete that had the dots and you could allocate different amounts of dollars to the things that you chose and also rank order them in priority. We talked a bit about the outcome of the public engagement, that was the next step, there was a memo that said, “this is what everyone said.” And then that included recommendations about how to appropriate funds based on that outcome and the recommendations were not always perfectly aligned with the public engagement, so we talked about Vision Zero which did not score highly in the public engagement, but which we know is a priority for the city, and so there was a recommendation to allocate $2 million to that and that is in fact what’s in the resolution, which is now this final step. Council will vote to allocate this money and there’s an additional piece now like another final step, which is that there are a few proposed amendments that are also on the table for Monday. Staff prepared this resolution based on all of these things, and now some Council members are saying wait wait wait wait wait wait don’t I don’t actually want you to spend it in this way, we should move it around in these ways. And so we’re going to talk through, we’re actually mostly going to talk through the amendments today, and not the application itself, because at this point we’ve talked about the memo. There aren’t a lot of surprises in this resolution. Things that we care about like unarmed response is recommended to be funded at $3.5 million. We talked about Vision Zero. There’s some other things we’re going to get to. This resolution is more or less what we might have expected. Why are we talking about it today? It’s a bunch of money, like $24 million is real money, this was a point where a lot of us did get involved and, so now we want to see how did it turn out? But also because of these proposed amendments which are pretty yikes honestly, when we have concerns about the amendments there’s one more possibility of a way to get involved to, put in one more call of support for some of these things that we hope will get funded.
04:37
Jess: And they just want to offer a little bit more kind of refinement to that which is of the four instead. Of the four amendments that we’re about to talk about, two of them are refinements of the funding that’s in there, so of these dollars don’t reallocate them, but please make sure you dedicate some tax. Those tweaks we’re essentially in favor of because there’s no redirection. It’s the reductions that are challenging, so we’re going to talk about that a bit.
05:06
Molly: So that’s the ARPA resolution, this is actually the last thing on the agenda for the meeting, but it was the biggest and most important, and given that Jess’ voice might go out entirely at any moment, we wanted to get it up front. We’re going to dig into these amendments in order, starting with Amendment one, which is to fund street repairs in lieu of basic income from ARPA funds. Right now there is $1.6 million in the resolution allocated to a universal basic income pilot or demonstration project and we’re going to talk in just a moment about what that is. This amendment, which has four co-sponsors, most of whom also voted for cars over people on the East Medical Center Dr bridge, so this is starting to feel to me like a little bit of a pattern. It would, instead of putting this towards guaranteed basic income they would put these ARPA funds towards road repairs and road repairs were not, you might recall, they were not in the public engagement process, in part, because apparently, it’s not something that the Federal Government is recommending you spend this money on. So, like. This is, I was pretty upset about this, and I think a lot of people have been pretty upset about this amendment. The thing about road repairs is that they’re basically a black hole. The roads will never all be in good condition, no matter how much money we throw at them. Our roads are in very bad condition, many of them in part because we’ve deferred maintenance, in part because we keep building more roads than we can afford and Michigan is particularly notorious as a state for doing this. There are also so many other sources of funds that you can use to repair a road. The city administrator has been talking about putting out a bond issue to fund road repairs, at around $15 million dollars, I think, so this we’re talking about like one tenth of what we would be getting from this bond issue that’s not to mention things like the gas taxes and all of these sources, all of this money that we can’t spend on anything but roads. And this amendment would take money from some of the poorest people in our city, who have been hardest hit by the pandemic and put that in roads also. And I find it shocking, like it is rare that I am speechless about something and I’m a little bit speechless about this.
07:49
Jess: This is a bad take. This is a real bad take.
07:53
Molly: So I’m going to talk a little bit about universal basic income, this is something you may be familiar with. I’m going to quote the National League of Cities, “universal basic income or UB is a cash payment granted to all members of the community on a regular basis, regardless of employment status or income level it is meant to be individual, unconditional, universal, and frequent.” So there are countries in the world where everyone who lives there has a guaranteed basic income and it’s universal, it goes to everyone. Pilots or demonstration projects are not universal, that U part doesn’t really apply, but these are guaranteed income. We’re going to give it as a guaranteed income program or a guaranteed basic income program specifically targeting low and sometimes low and middle income neighborhoods, sometimes just low income neighborhoods, selecting residents in a variety of different potential ways, including randomly, in order to just give them this money. There are lots of debates about basic income programs, but in other places that have done pilots, they have quote “measurably improved participants’ job prospects and financial stability and overall well being” according to a recent study of a program’s first year. One of the higher profile programs was in Stockton, California. In the United States, these pilots are mostly coming from cities. Even though, ideally, they would come from a larger chunk of government, like the state or the federal government and they could be funded by progressive taxation, so that the money from the wealthiest people could be redirected to the poorest people. But the federal government is far away from doing something like that so we’re doing it, so cities are doing it. And there’s even an organization called Mayors for Universal Basic Income. In Stockton, the outcomes reported included that 80% of the money that families received were spent on basic needs, like food and utilities, and the participants went from part to full time employment at twice the rate of people who did not receive this basic income. Having some financial stability is really, really important for maintaining financial stability. When people are constantly chasing after a next paycheck, when bills are constantly overdue and power is being shut off or you don’t have access to a vehicle, it’s hard to, the whole idea of pulling yourself out of poverty is impossible. Poverty is extremely expensive. Because of all of the overdraft fees and overdue fees, we make it so that it is much more expensive when you can’t afford to pay things on time than when you can and so having a guaranteed basic income helps solve that problem. Ann Arbor’s is based on Stockton’s, so the idea is that the city would select 100 families, based on financial need, and give them $500 a month for up to three years. There are partners already lined up for the city, including the United Way and the Ann Arbor area Community Foundation. I’ll also say that this had strong Community support in the public engagement process that the city did, a lot of folks were in favor of doing something that’s guaranteed income for some of our hardest hit city residents. I’m pausing for a moment Jess did you want to add anything.
11:28
Jess: The thing I wanted to add is that we rarely see, especially at a city level, programs directly aimed at targeting poverty. We definitely see it in the nonprofit sector a lot, and there is some support from the city and the county through coordinated funding and through various specific program support. But as a city, we really don’t take aim at poverty. If we’re talking about reducing the wealth gap, doing that financially is the most direct way to do that, and we really don’t engage in that. So when I saw this in the community engagement, I was so excited to have the option to vote for it. Getting at reducing a wealth gap, this wealth and equity gap we have, especially in Ann Arbor – we can do it through housing, we can do it through transportation; we can, we should. We can do it through employment. But getting at it through direct financial assistance is one of the fastest and most direct ways to let families make their own decisions about how they can best lift themselves out of poverty. So I was excited to see it, and I was, like Molly, shocked almost to the point of speechlessness (I mean technically I’m there anyway) that anyone would want to redirect to funds that we really don’t do right now, like we really don’t address poverty directly in this way. This isn’t enough to eradicate poverty in Ann Arbor, but it is a way to work on it in a way that we do not have any other funds; which isn’t true of roads. This is me agreeing with Molly using different words.
13:17
Molly: That’s exactly right it directs addresses poverty directly and powerfully, and as we know already because other people have gotten there first we know it’s effective as well. So that’s the basic income pilot and why we love it and now let’s talk about the other half of this resolution, this amendment, which would take money away from that and put it towards road repairs. So just looking at it from a transportation lens, purely thinking in the context of our transportation system. The people who would qualify for this income pilot are statistically much less likely to own or have access to cars. When it comes to transportation equity, so not equity more broadly, specifically transportation equity, these are the people who are disproportionately harmed by our current system that prioritizes car travel above transit, biking, or walking. So, to take money from UBI and put it into road repairs means that we would be taking money from some of our poorest residents and using it to benefit wealthier residents and also non-residents who drive. If we wanted to do something transportation related with this money that still addressed issues of equity, we could be making available more free and subsidized transit passes, we could be targeting funds to improve pedestrian infrastructure in neglected neighborhoods in the city. I’m not saying that transportation infrastructure is equitably distributed in the city and if we wanted to focus on transportation, we could do it in a way that was still thinking about our poorest residents, and this does not do that.
I have heard it mentioned that road repairs, full stop road repairs are an equity issue. That is false. Have roads been repaired equitably in the city? No. It is definitely the case that there are poor neighborhoods in the city. And in those neighborhoods you are more likely to find lots of streets with potholes. I live in one of those neighborhoods. I deal with some of those streets. It’s absolutely inequitable. But taking this money and putting it into the quote “road repairs” pot does not address equity. Our whole transportation system is inequitable. The thing that is inequitable about it is cars. Pouring more money into car infrastructure is not equitable. I keep saying this word over and over, “equity” “equitable”. But I gotta hammer on it a little bit because it’s such an appalling framing, that fixing the roads is addressing inequity in some way.
16:26
Jess: The equity argument is one that the sponsoring Councilmembers have brought up in casual conversation; it’s not in the amendment language itself, rightfully so. I think what they cite is the road conditions; what they don’t cite is how are our decisions to improve transportation infrastructure around the city equity driven, and is there a framework for that city staff are aware of how to prioritize infrastructure and services based on communities and neighborhoods that have historically have had less access to it. This language does not do that.
17:09
Molly: No, no, and furthermore. I understand that citywide lots of people care about the roads. Lots of people are complaining about the roads, but if you are worried about paying your rent or feeding your kids you do not give a shit if there is a pothole on your street. And these are the, these are the level of worries that we would be addressing with a basic income pilot, really fundamental basic needs and roads are not on that list. And that’s why this amendment is upsetting.
Now, it is our understanding based on something of an outcry that the cosponsors are no longer planning to bring it to the table on Monday. And if no one brings it to the table it won’t be proposed, it won’t be voted on and the basic income pilot will stay. That said, I don’t think it would hurt for them to hear from more people about why they support a basic income pilot and, you know I think that’s kind of it honestly. Yeah we all know, our roads suck and it would be nice if they were better but there’s so many other sources of funding for that. And so, yes, this would be an opportunity to let folks know basic income, this is good, I want to help the people who have been hit hardest by this pandemic. And who most need a hand to get out of it.
18:48
Jess: CityCouncil@a2gov.org.
18:50
Molly: yeah.
18:50
Jess: Let folks know.
18:51
Molly: Yes, okay. That’s Amendment one, moving on to amendment two, Jess this one’s yours.
18:58
Jess: Dibbs. Yes. All right, this one is to include resident support services funding in the property acquisition for affordable housing. Within the ARPA funding recommendations is $3.5 million designated for acquiring land for affordable housing. This amendment would expand the potential use of this line item to include $500,000 specifically dedicated to supportive services. This amendment has four co-sponsors, including one of the Council liaisons to the housing and human services advisory board, so it feels well-supported and well-informed.
Part of the reason I wanted to talk about this is because we’re having more conversations around affordable housing locally. I wanted to use this as an opportunity for a teaching point. When we talk about funding for affordable housing, I think most of us are like, “That is money that goes to housing that is affordable!” and that’s the extent to which we think of it. That’s great, if that’s the case; good on us! But let’s pinch and zoom in a little bit.
There is a question of what do we need to fund:
- are we supporting physically maintaining existing housing?
- are we building new?
- are we providing services for people that live there? Because housing workers and advocates know that providing health care, mental health care, transportation options, and other supportive services are key to not just getting people housed but keeping people that way.
The challenge is that funding sources for housing are often really restrictive, to say: this set of dollars can only be allowed to be used for one of those purposes or two of those purposes. And we saw that, too, with the affordable housing millage that passed a couple of years ago (good job, by the way, Ann Arbor, well done again on Proposal C). But there was a really active conversation at Council prior to that about restricting the dollars that were collected through that millage, the percentage of those dollars that could be dedicated towards supportive services. I get that, in a way. They want to make sure that this is in service of creating new housing, and that’s absolutely urgent. I had some reservations about politically curtailing the services dollars, because people in housing know best how their funding needs to be spent But OK, that’s fine. This amendment expands the possible uses of these dollars, not just to land acquisition, but also providing services to folks who already live in housing that exists, so if I were to give this amendment a Yelp review I’d say four stars! I don’t know how Yelp works. But anyway. I like this amendment.
21:35
Molly: We like this, it is a good one, awesome. So they’re not all bad. This next one also is not bad.
21:42
Jess: Not bad.
21:43
Molly: This one’s yours too.
21:44
Jess: Amendment three is to include arts-based trauma programs as part of funding for the arts allocation of the ARPA funds. This is really similar to the last one, so the only reason that I’m including it is for the sake of completeness; we were talking of three of the four amendments, and I thought you might be curious, so this is the fourth amendment. Within the recommendations is a $500,000 allocation for the arts; this amendment directs that $200,000 of that goes specifically to trauma-informed recovery programs, pandemic recovery programs noting that such arts programs have additional benefit for youth and black, indigenous and other people of color, so this is a tweak, not a change. Great! Fine. More Yelp stars. Well done.
22:27
Molly: And we talked about this last time, but there were a very small number of very loud people asking that ARPA funds go to quote unquote the arts and it was not particularly popular. There was a big push to get people to give dots to the arts in the public engagement. It still didn’t get that many, things like basic income scored much higher. But I think, in part because of how loud they were, they’re getting half a million dollars. That’s not being targeted for road funding, interestingly, so this just makes some adjustments to how that would be spent. Cool, all right.
Last one, amendment four to reduce the ARPA allocation for unarmed emergency response and increase our funding for housing the homeless. We’ve talked a lot about emergency response or unarmed emergency response. We think this is great, we need it. It was very successful in the public engagement and very highly rated by a lot of people so there is demand for this program. What this amendment would do is take around a little over $900,000 of the $3.5 million currently allocated for unarmed response and move it over to what’s called coordinated funding support, which is designated funding for agencies and programs that provide support to people who are experiencing homelessness. Coordinated funding support is currently getting $1.8 million in the existing allocations so there’s money for that already, this would take almost a million dollars from unarmed response and move it over there, however, it says that it would pull from the marijuana excise tax revenue that was received by the city in fiscal year 22. It’s basically like “later after we do this, someday.” Not, “now on this agenda will have another resolution that would take money from marijuana excise tax and move it over to the unarmed response program.”
24:50
Jess: Just to dumb that language down even further, the amendment suggests that this is a zero-sum game; that unarmed response will receive the same amount of funding, even if these funds are redirected from the allocation.
25:05
Molly: Right right they’re saying we just want to move which pots of money it’s coming from we’re not actually taking money away from unarmed response, however, that marijuana excise tax money has already been allocated and spent. And also. There is no resolution on the agenda to make that switch happen and in situations like that. You can’t trust that that’s ever going to happen. This looks to me like a pretty obvious bait and switch where they want to take some money from unarmed response now and say they’ll give it back later and then later, there will be some reason why they can’t. I do not trust this resolution, I think it is a backdoor attempt to underfund unarmed response. And I hope that it does not pass, and this would be another thing that you might like to call in or email in and say “Hey I support unarmed response, we really, really need it in this city, please do not take any of the ARPA funds away from it.”
One thing that’s interesting to me that I’m just noticing, as we talk through these four amendments, is the way some of them try to move money from one specific thing to a different specific thing. But why those two things? Why do we want to fund the roads with UBI money, why do we want to fund housing for the homeless with unarmed response money? Why not the arts money or the solar panels money which could come from somewhere else? That’s another one of those things so it’s like solar panels on city on properties, that’s great. Solar panels are great. We want to be a green city. There are lots of other funding sources that we could access, furthermore, still solar panels will eventually pay for themselves, but anyway. Those aren’t the things being targeted. I don’t know why, I cannot read people’s minds, but I just think it’s the kind of thing worth noting what’s being targeted to have money taken from it and what’s being targeted to have money moved to it and who is doing that and why.
27:14
Jess: I have to say, on the UBI/roads, I was reminded of the proposed budget amendment last year that would have transferred tens of thousands of dollars from the proposed study on the racialized origins of single family zoning to the Center of the City to Center of the city budget, slush funds, I don’t know what they wanted to use it for; but that felt so wildly out of whack to me, to do something that really digs into our city’s racialized history in a way that we don’t have yet, and we don’t have funds set aside for that, to an initiative that has no demonstrated equity attached to it. There’s no discussion of the equity and balance in thing A and thing B. Equity is a challenging and nuanced thing to talk about; to be able to say my thing is more equitable than your thing requires pulling in a lot of information, and you know judgment making. But these two felt pretty clear.
28:27
Molly: Oh yeah I mean, these two were very stark. All right, we’ve now gotten through all four amendments to the ARPA funding allocation and we can move on to everything else that is on the agenda.
28:42
Jess: There are a couple of fun things, and when I say fun, I mean it’s nice to see Council doing things that we’re excited about, that we support, and that we want to encourage people to write in and say thank you. I know from a lot of second hand stories, most of what Council hears his complaints and abuse. For sure, our elected officials are the way that we as constituents express what we’d like to see in our city; but doing that in an affirmative way is nice too, and another way of building relationships.
So, to that end, on the agenda Public Hearing 1 and B-1, which means the second reading is a rezoning of 350 South office from D-1 to – Molly, what is it?
29:26
Molly: A pud! No. it’s a P U D.
29:32
Jess: Like the Sesame Street of zoning.
29:36
Molly: This episode is brought to you by the letters P, U, and D.
29:42
Jess: So 350 South Fifth, colloquially known as the Y Lot, this is the second reading for this, which means that this is the one that Council will vote on.
The Housing Commission is working to develop a significant number of affordable housing units on the site in the form of apartments, and they’re getting the zoning in order to be able to do so as efficiently and inexpensively as possible in advance of bringing on a developer partner and build team to make the project happen. I’m just talking about it because this is, and is going to be, a big good step in the right direction on making downtown more affordable and more economically diverse. So: thanks, Council; and thank you, Ann Arbor for pushing this. You absolutely pushed for this. Please, please do take a minute to email Council and thank them for making this happen. Again, that’s CityCouncil@a2gov.org.
30:33
Molly: Right, and one way you could write in in a positive way is to say, “I think the basic income pilot sounds wonderful and I’m really excited that you’re going to fund it and I support it and I hope that you plan to continue to fund it at the levels in this resolution.” That would be the positive way to say all the things that we talked about earlier –
30:52
Jess: – and not the incoherent rage that we occasionally approach things with!
30:55
Molly: Correct. And we have another positive thing to call in with on the next agenda item which is public hearing two and B2. We talked about this before, rezoning of 68 lots in the South State Ttreet and east, west Eisenhower parkway area to TC one. This is our first transit corridor rezoning. We talked about it when it was on the agenda last time. Things like this, they have to come through twice.
31:20
Jess: As a reminder, it wasn’t actually last time; it was the agenda before, the March 7 meeting.
31:25
Molly: Yeah, if you want to hear us talk more about TC one in general, March seventh episode. And the way rezonings like this happen is that Council passes them on a first round of voting. And then the second time they come back there’s a public hearing and anyone can call in. You don’t have to sign up ahead of time, it’s an unlimited number of spots, so this would be another opportunity to call in if you want practice calling in. Or just send an email and say yes I’m in favor of transit corridors, we need more housing and more mixed use and more density and all those things and please say yes to TC1.
And that’s all the agenda stuff for today. Jess did you want to talk about anything, oh, the survey right.
32:13
Jess: I actually have a couple of things I wanted to bring up.
There were a couple of people who really stood out to me as, I am so glad that I get to live in the same community, as these benevolent weirdos. The first one is the Community Action Network, or CAN, executive director Derrick Miller. He’s somebody who was formerly in the military, he’s been with CAN for a long, long time and became the director a couple years ago. He’s coordinating with some of his former military colleagues to go to Poland to help support Ukraine in the resistance, I think, and he sent out a letter to CAN supporters and people on the newsletter list, explaining why CAN’S mission drove him to take this action. Essentially what he’s saying is that we are all connected; my cause is your cause; and your freedom is my freedom; and I cannot not take my skills and experience in support of these people if I really care about CAN. I’m going to drop a link in the show notes to his letter about that. It’s not a call to action; Derrick’s not asking us to do anything, although he does offer some opportunities to support various relief organizations in support of Ukraine. But in terms of somebody making a clear and loving case for how to invest in the self interest of people who are not ourselves or our neighbors, I’ve rarely read a lovelier kind of manifesto, if you want to call it that, so I’m going to drop a link in the show notes to that.
The other person that I wanted to call out, God love him, is public health researcher and advocate Bill Lopez. First of all, I’m so not on Twitter that I can’t believe that I heard about this, but he posted a thread reinterpreting Oscars fashion as public health graphs. I don’t even need to sell that. So going to drop a link in the show notes. It’s just great that that happened.
34:23
Molly: It’s delightful.
34:24
Jess: The last thing that I wanted to say about the pod is that it is survey time again!
Longtime listeners will remember that we did this last spring. We so appreciated your feedback. We really did. We took a lot of it to heart in terms of what you thought we could be doing better on the podcast; we loved hearing about what you thought we were already doing well, and your favorite episodes (which are also often ours, by the way); you like the land use planning and the budget episodes, so thanks for that. And also Healthy Streets, which was a fun one to do; thanks, Molly. So please let us know again! The link, we’ll put it in the show notes, but it’s our website, annarboraf.com/survey. It’s anonymous! Tell us anything you want. We also include a couple of questions around this year’s election and what you think might be useful to you to hear or to learn, or to understand. Annarboraf.com/survey. Come tell us all your thoughts and feelings.
35:20
Molly: yeah. We like hearing what you want to know. It’s helped us as we’ve grown as podcasters. and then the last one is a reminder that you can still vote for us or nominate us technically for best local podcast of Washtenaw and there’ll be a link in show notes, you can go to the arts and entertainment section and scroll down, local podcasts is towards the middle, you can nominate us once a day. So do that if you feel like you have the energy, you’re already going to Wordle or Quordle once a day, you can go to the Best of Washtenaw once a day to vote for us, and hopefully we’ll get a nomination to be best podcast of Washtenaw.
And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor AF.
Come check out past 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 Housing for All facebook 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 Scott Trudeau. 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!