Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Monday, April 18th. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including road bonds, water and sewer rates, and something that may or may not be housing.
Links we referenced:
- NACA resolution, where the whereases are chef’s kiss
White paper on middle-income needs analysis and NACA championship - Our annual survey is up! Let us know what you like and what you want more of.
- Nominate us for Best Local Podcast of Washtenaw (You can nominate us up to once per day per device. We wouldn’t be sad if you set an alarm to remind yourself. Not that that’s what we do or anything.)
Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter and Facebook. And hey, if you wanted to ko-fi us a few dollars to help us with hosting, we wouldn’t say no. Support the show (https://ko-fi.com/annarboraf)
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!
00:03
Molly: Today we’re talking about the next City Council meeting coming up this Monday April 18. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including road bonds, water and sewer rates, and something that may or may not be housing, 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.
We record this on the weekend and this weekend that we are recording there are so many holidays going on. And I just thought it was kind of amazing, some of these holidays often happen at the same time, and some of them really don’t. But for all of our listeners who might be celebrating something this weekend, we want to wish you Ramadan Mubarak!
Chag pesach sameach!
Subho noboborsho!
Happy Vaisakhi !
and Happy Easter!
Alright, on to the actual agenda. I’ve got one quick thing on the consent agenda, which is CA seven, a resolution to approve the purchase of vehicles from signature Ford. Every time I see a vehicle purchase on the consent agenda, I always click on it. Because I want to see what it is and sometimes I feel like it’s worth bringing to the pod and sometimes I don’t. This one I thought was interesting because it’s the purchase of several electric pickup trucks specifically to test out functionality and usefulness at a range of different kinds of tasks, including towing, and to see how different approaches to charging and charging infrastructure could work for fully electric pickup trucks for the city. And what I thought was interesting about this is that it’s six pickup trucks, one of them has an extended battery life and that one’s going to be the towing pickup truck. Some of them are send-home vehicles so supervisors often will have a vehicle from the city that they bring home with them at the end of the day. So those are going to be charged I guess during the day, while they’re on site and then some of them are going to be charged while they’re on city property overnight. And I wanted to bring this up because electrifying the fleet is one of those things that is often treated as really low hanging fruit when we’re talking about how to reduce emissions at an institutional level or an organizational level. It’s like “well, We can electrify the fleet, we can stop using greenhouse gas emitting vehicles and that will be a big savings for us,” and I think this resolution helps to demonstrate how it’s not actually that easy. It takes time, it’s expensive, these vehicles are expensive. It requires a careful process. You can’t just all in one fell swoop replace all of your vehicles, because the way you power them is so different it requires different infrastructure and we still have to figure out how that’s going to work. It also, of course, continues when we’re electrifying the fleet with more cars or trucks it’s also continuing to entrench the car centric nature of our built environment. There are places around the world where city vehicles are e-bikes, or routes are done on foot, depending on what we know what the work is, and I would love to see us get to that point where some of the vehicles that we’re putting on the streets are electric bicycles, as opposed to electric F 150s.
03:21
Jess: Which is not necessarily electrifying but decarbonizing.
03:26
Molly: Yeah, a much bigger shift than just the same giant ass truck but with a different energy source, so that was what I wanted to talk about with this one.
03:37
Jess: I also want to highlight that every time she says electrifying the fleet, she says electriflying. This is now canon. Change your spellchecks; it is now electriflying.
03:58
Molly: [laughs] Electriflication.
04:02
Jess: All right. DC-1 is the resolution for the city of Ann Arbor to sponsor information on the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, or NACA, mortgages to city employees and residents. This resolution is a series of directions from Council to the city administrator to look into this organization NACA – again, I’ll repeat the name, because I’m not going to do it again: it’s the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America – NACA. So, to look into this organization and its programs, and if they are determined to be relevant and useful, to “support communications to Ann Arbor employees and its residents” about the organization and its programs, to “facilitate messaging” to city union representatives, and allow NACA workshops on city properties, pending a safe determination to do so re COVID.
From the white paper attached to the resolution, which I’ll talk about more in a moment, “NACA, with reduced rate mortgages, and zero down payment and closing costs for those below the area median income, provides a potentially critical option for wealth accumulation by low and lower-middle-income Ann Arbor area residents, which has not been traditionally available.” So that’s what’s on the table.
Where did this come from: Ward Three resident Brian Chambers wrote a white paper analyzing Ann Arbor’s middle-income needs that culminates with a call to action for the area’s largest employers and Labor organizers to sponsor NACA, including Ann Arbor City, Washtenaw County, the University of Michigan, and the Huron Valley Area Labor Federation.
For what it’s worth – and you guys know that we stan super niche stuff – the absolute best part of this resolution is the whereases. They are a home run! If you want a concise summary about why housing, in Ann Arbor specifically and Washtenaw County in general, is an urgent issue that needs addressing, just steep yourself in these whereases. They are alarming, but delicious. I’ll drop the link in the show notes.
06:04
Molly: Can you give us a couple of examples of what’s in there?
06:06
Jess: Yeah, definitely. It talks about housing access as a means of economic segregation, economic segregation as a means of racial segregation – as both a means and an end of racial segregation – and about differential opportunity access as pertains to home homeownership rates. It goes all in on the challenges of housing, the challenges of homeownership access, and specifically how that plays out in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County. These are things that we talked about a lot of times, but if it’s to say – this is one that I struggle with: statistics?
06:47
Molly: Statistical Electricflication.
06:49
Jess: Statistic! That’s where it comes in; Statistical electriflication. It distills a lot of the things that we might talk about at a national level down to their county- and city-level statistics. It’s useful to me, it’s very motivating. Those are some good whereases; good job, Council sponsors.
But I am talking about this resolution because I don’t want to talk about it.
The reason is, I look at housing and homeownership as two really distinct areas. They are different areas of thought, they have different needs, they have different reasons for and points of advocacy. Speaking for myself, I care about housing. I care about people being able to live in the community that you want for yourself, for your kids, for your life. Homeownership is not housing. It’s not about access to community and opportunity; it’s about individual and family wealth generation. While I will stipulate that that is a valuable area of work, thought, and advocacy, it isn’t mine and it probably never will be.
This episode is not long enough to be a therapy session for all of the reasons why I make this distinction. But I want to explain two reasons. As folks are listening to and hearing about NACA, and if this resolution succeeds (and it likely will), you will probably be hearing more about it from the City and possibly from other institutions and organizations, I would like for you to be thinking too about: is this an area that you’re interested to learn more about? That you’re interested to be advocating more for? And if it’s sitting in a weird place for you, maybe give you some of my language and see if any of this is useful.
So. Two reasons why I’m not talking about this.
Homeownership does not engage the fact that housing in any community is essentially finite; housing you can own is even more scarce; and the way that cities and financial institutions make it possible to own housing or generate wealth at all is more restricted still. So, homeownership work essentially broadens access to a non-renewable resource. Something else that we know is that increasing competition for a finite and desirable resource, like housing, is not typically a recipe for driving those prices down. Specifically, one of the issues that I see reading through the resolution and reading through the white paper is that, for the Ann Arbor area, NACA mortgages are capped at around around $450,000. This is in the area of reasonableness. When Brian Chambers was doing the research for this white paper, the median home price that he quotes is from Zillow November 2021 which indicates Ann Arbor’s median home price at around $450,000. So this comports. However, it is now April; it’s almost six months later; and the median home price is already close to $480,000, and growing. So it’s not to say that not the mortgages won’t work for the area; and maybe they continue to adjust the mortgage amount up based on how the market changes? I don’t know. What I’m saying is that this program is going to have a limited effectiveness in helping prospective home buyers be competitive in this market.
Again, be that as it may, that’s fine. Go forward. I think we need to do everything that we can to expand housing to access; and while this is not that, it is a drop in a different bucket, so go for it.
The other reason that I’m not talking about this: one of the reasons that people get so hell-bent on homeownership is that, in this country, it’s the primary means towards building wealth, especially for those of us who are not one percenters, and that includes intergenerational wealth, anything that you’re able to pass along to your kids or other members of your family. (I will also note that, as long as homeowners continue to be prioritized in civic engagement and municipal processes, homeownership also explicitly means building power.) If our country, our lending institutions, and our national values supported more paths to wealth generation – assuming this is even your goal! All of this has ASTERISK – CAPITALISM in big bold letters down at the bottom! So assuming this is your goal, which isn’t necessarily the case – if we brought in more paths to wealth generation, that would take a lot of pressure off of home ownership and let it be what it should be, which is just another possible life option for the people who have the privilege and desire to choose it
I think the last thing I’ll add – a surprise number three (surprised myself as well) gets to the heart of why I don’t want to talk about this: housing is, and should be, a human right. But in this country it’s a commodity, not a guarantee, and homeownership sits at the heart of that commodification.
So, this resolution: fine. Do it. Support it. I am not really sure that I see the value of this as a resolution; I’m not sure why we’re championing this municipally, as opposed to through nonprofit and community collaboration – especially considering our local United Way [of Washtenaw County] already promotes NACA locally! But – whatever. Do you, Council. This is just not my lane.
12:32
Molly: So Jess I know we’ve talked a bit about this distinction and how you are just like super not… homeownership does not feel like your space. It’s something you’re actively not interested in. And I’m still learning about how you make these distinctions, and one thing that really struck me that I saw recently was this idea that homeownership is essentially rent control for people who can afford to buy into it.
12:58
Jess: There’s a lot of other factors aside from cost that prevents people from being able to access it, but yes.
13:06
Molly: Right. So, like my monthly mortgage payment has not gone up in the however many, 10, 11 years that I’ve owned my house, as rent has gone way up in the city and as it’s going to continue to do so, and so, when we think about who some of these homeownership programs are sometimes targeted at, in a state where rent control is illegal. If homeownership is a way to stabilize housing costs that feels like a potential benefit that’s outside of this commodity space that you’re talking about. I’m curious if that fits into how you think about this at all.
13:44
Jess: To me, it feels a little bit to the side. I care about what it takes for somebody to be able to be in a community; but ownership is really antithetical to a lot of my core values and fundamentally, existentially, the way that I understand the world and the universe. We talked at the top of the episode about the fact that this weekend is an amazing confluence of celebrations of faith traditions. I don’t identify with any of those faith traditions; if anything, I identify most closely with Buddhism, which has a strong ethos of nonattachment. I share a lot of that, so this is a really personal thing when I say that homeownership – I hear this phrase sometimes and I’m just going to borrow it with gratitude to the people from whom I hear this on a regular basis – homeownership is not my ministry. I am not saying that this is not a thing to work on. I hear what you’re saying about rent control; that brings me back to the IRS subsidy that folks get when they are able and willing and going to buy a house. Renters have no access to any of these mechanisms to be able to afford housing. So for a desirable community like Ann Arbor, it is even harder for people like me to be able to access housing.
And that is what I care about: housing access. I do not care about ownership access. Fundamentally, I don’t care about wealth generation, I do care about expanding those paths, what that can look like; I do care about what it means to build power. But I don’t necessarily agree that the tools that we are being given by the systems we have are the ones that we should be working on. I think that’s what it comes down to; I do not agree with the fundamental assumptions.
15:35
Molly: got it and yeah I mean I think a lot about how in terms of the way we incentivize homeownership, in the various tax structures that make it so that renters are paying so many other things, on top of what Homeowners have to pay just to live in the place where they live.
15:54
Jess: You know, we have in the past done deeper dives on specific issues, and conversations with people in and around the community on specific issues. Maybe we could do a deeper dive conversation with – me! – on why I am a renter as an act of political protest. I still need to clarify my thoughts around that (heads up, therapist, I am coming your way!). But I do feel really strongly about participating in my community as a renter and continuing to enable access to our communities – civically, culturally, whatever that is – to all of us. There’s so much to do in all of those spaces, I just don’t have enough minutes in my life to think about homeownership.
So…NACA. There it is.
16:33
Molly: awesome okay. got it.
16:36
Jess: What do you have, Molly?
16:37
Molly: My next one is DS 1 which is this resolution authorizing a 2022 Michigan transportation fund bonds, not to exceed $15 million. So this is a $15 million bond issue to fund road repairs in the city of in arbor.
16:57
Jess: Where did this come from?
16:59
Molly: A few different places. This was one of the things that our new city administrator Milton Dohoney recommended earlier this year as a part of a general, I think of it as like a general whipping the city into shape. We talked I think about this memo where we needed a lobbyist and there are all these different things we needed to do and issuing a bond to fund road repairs was one of them. A few months ago, there was news that City Council had set this goal to bring more of the city streets up to good or very good condition and we were not meeting that goal at all, we were lagging way behind that goal. I am of the opinion that it was an unreasonable goal to begin with. However, the fact remains that we have a lot of streets in poor condition in the city. According to the resolution, 22% of major streets and 39% of local streets are in poor, very poor, or in a failed condition. On a scale of one to 10 the average rating of the major streets in the city are 5.66 which is fair and for the local streets it’s 4.74, which is also fair but less fair. So we have a lot of roads that need work. In general it’s cheaper to repair roads when they’re in better condition, this is true for lots and lots of things, the longer you defer maintenance, the more expensive it is when you eventually get around to it. Here, what that means for roads is if they’re in very bad condition they may need to be entirely rebuilt like scrape the whole thing down, do all the base layers, all of it, whereas if they are in better condition, you can repair the bad places and replace sections, without having to do a total rebuild of the road. So that’s one piece of it, is that the sooner we can get to these repairs, the cheaper they will be. Construction costs are rising very quickly right now, and that seems to be a trend that’s going to be going on for a while. So the idea for a bond issue to repair roads is that as long as the interest on the bond is lower than the rate that construction costs are rising it ends up being a good deal. Because you’re saving money in the long run, and it seems that that’s the situation we’re in right now with this, that’s what the city administrator has determined. Issuing a bond would actually be a way for the city to save money on road repairs and get more road repairs done sooner, which as we know, as we’ve discussed on previous episodes, is a high priority for a lot of people. It’s a little funny that I’m here on this episode, when just on our last episode…
19:35
Jess: Right on the heels!
19:37
Molly: I was talking about how terrible I thought it was that we might spend ARPA money on the roads, so that’s the American rescue plan act funds, which was specifically earmarked for pandemic relief of various kinds. The thing on the table was to take money from a basic income pilot, putting money into the hands of some of the poorest people in the city, and instead using it to repair the roads. I called roads something like “resource vampires” or “money black holes” and they are that I still believe that that is true. The fact remains that we have a lot of roads and many of them are in bad shape and the longer we defer maintenance, the more costly it will be to fix them, and a bond issue is an appropriate way to fund that road work.
20:23
Jess: One of the reasons that we beat up so hard on that amendment is that the basic income pilot had low to no other funding sources to be able to carry it out, whereas roads have a variety of different funding sources; so one of the reasons that we’re talking about this is to be able to point to this and say, hey look, this is actually an appropriate funding source for this work that the community has said is a priority.
20:48
Molly: Right and that we couldn’t have done a bond issue to do a basic income pilot. That was like taking money from people and putting it into potholes. But for this bond issue there’s money we get from a bunch of funding sources to cover road repairs over the years, and if we fund it through these bonds, we will still be able to pay it off. Because again the bond issue interest rates are lower than the rising cost of construction, so over the course of the bond we will end up saving money. So even though you know the roads are not my favorite, you know roads repairs are not my favorite use of resources, I recognize that this is a situation where we need to do it. I will also point out, because I am me, that the more biking and walking we have our community doing the less wear and tear there will be on our roads. And shrinking road space for cars and expanding it for pedestrians and bicyclists can reduce our overall maintenance needs over time, so I would love to see another piece of this work be, “how can we reduce wear and tear on our roads by reducing car use?” That will stretch this bond even farther. That is, of course, not a part of the discussion right now, but I’m just going to sprinkle it in because that’s what I do.
22:06
Jess: The thing that this makes me think of is, our producer Scott Trudeau had highly recommended the Netflix show “Old Enough,” which is a show about toddlers being cute in cities. (It’s about toddlers running errands.) It is painfully adorable; it is so freaking cute to see those tiny little bowl cuts and the high-pitched little voices trying to remember to get the cauliflower and Nana’s flowers…oh my God.
The reason that I’m bringing this up in an infrastructure line item is, a lot of the walking that these babies do is along the side of roads, and it is showing me how Japanese infrastructure is built, specifically in these episodes. There’s no sidewalks! These seem to be, even roads for cars are considered roads for people, so the speed seems to be slower; the space allocated for pedestrians having no buffer. No lange, not parked cars, not anything but people walking right alongside traffic. It feels alarming to me; but it seems to be the norm. And I started thinking about how much cheaper our infrastructure would be, how many fewer fights – like we don’t have to talk about sidewalk gaps! We don’t have to talk about sidewalks when they crumble! We don’t have to talk about all these things! (We do need to talk about impervious surfaces; that’s a separate thing, anyway.)
What I’m saying is, if you watch a show about toddlers, it will teach you a little bit about infrastructure. I highly recommend “Old Enough” on Netflix.
23:38
Molly: It is very adorable. So yeah I think the state of Michigan got itself into a bunch of trouble issuing bonds for roads, and so I think there’s often a knee jerk reaction that funding roads with bonds is bad because it has been bad in the past. But Michigan was using bonds to build new roads, which is very bad because then you’re just increasing the future maintenance costs and you end up having to raid other budget sources to pay off these bonds. It’s a really different situation than what we’re doing here, which is purely about maintenance. Michigan keeps building more and more roads and it’s just not good, it’s already a burden that we can’t pay for. One of the reasons our roads as a state are in such bad shape is that we don’t invest in fixing the old ones, we just build new ones, and then the new ones crack and crumble and we just build more new ones and it’s a Ponzi scheme of asphalt and I don’t think that this is what’s happening here. But that story might be sort of floating around for folks and make you think like “why isn’t this bad?” This is not a situation where I’m going to say “call your city council members and encourage…” – like no.
25:01
Jess: How much you love this (no).
25:02
Molly: No, but I think this is fine, I don’t think that this is something worth objecting to because our roads really are in bad shape and that does make things hard on people biking and walking sometimes too.
25:15
Jess: I love that this episode is largely about things that you and I are aggressively fine with. Like – fine. Just do it. Okay.
25:23
Molly: aggressively fine. What else are we aggressively fine with, Jess?
25:28
Jess: I am actually aggressively fine with this last thing, too.
I wanted to bring up C-1 and C-2 on the agenda, which are amendments to the water and sewer rates sections of the city code; essentially, scheduled increases to water and sewer rates are coming.
This is not really news. Ann Arbor, four years ago, modified the way that it assessed specifically residential rates for water and sewer customers. At the time, it generated a lot of big feelings, to the point that it affected the outcome of multiple City Council races that year. So I just wanted to acknowledge that this is coming up again. I think the dust has largely settled from this. Because everything feels (and is) expensive – our rent is expensive, our mortgages are expensive, utilities are expensive – this is always painful. You see an increase and you’re like, “Oh, no!” – functionally, it’s not going to be that much; you probably won’t perceive much change in your wallet or in your bottom line. But I just wanted you to know.
26:32
Molly: Why did the city change the water rates?
26:36
Jess: The state of Michigan has a law requiring that the cost of delivering – I think it’s only services, not goods – be proportional to the cost it takes to to deliver those goods and services. So the the top line has to be tied to the bottom line. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, in Ann Arbor, we weren’t doing that. We commissioned a consultant to evaluate our rates; the consultant made certain recommendations; we implemented those; the aforementioned big feelings happened; City Council commissioned another consultant to evaluate the changes after they were implemented; that consultant confirmed that the rates were appropriate; and that’s what we’ve got today.
27:24
Molly: So the cost to the customer has to reflect the cost of actually delivering the water to the structure. What is it about how single family homes or apartment buildings are structured and why did it have to change in this way?
27:44
Jess: One of the things that we weren’t appropriately accounting for is the amount of infrastructure it takes to deliver really any service to a single family home. I’ll include energy, water, trash, and sewer in that; cable/fiber is another one of those things; roads, that we were just talking about, is another one of those things.
I’d like you to imagine – hold in your mind, Listener, and Molly if you will – 100 people. 50 of them are living in one apartment building. Right? We’ve got one building, so essentially you’ve got one semi-large pipe going in, and then a bunch of little pipes going into people’s individual sinks and tubs and toilets. Imagine that the other 50 are living on a street. Imagine how long that street has to be to accommodate 50 single-family homes, and going from the street down the driveway and into the house to get to the individual fixtures. What we were not accounting for was that differential access to single-family homes. Magnify that up so many thousands of times; I think something like 45 or 48% of Ann Arbor’s households are single-family homes, as opposed to multifamily – whether that’s a duplex, a big apartment building, what have you – and so almost half of our water revenue was not being accounted for properly.
29:16
Molly: Right so for people in apartment buildings, it was much cheaper to get the water into their buildings, but they were paying the same we’re paying more —
Jess: they were paying more.
Molly: they were paying MORE! than single family homes.
29:25
Jess: Proportionally, yeah.
29:26
Molly: Even though it costs more to get water into those homes.
29:32
Jess: Right. I also want to address something called peak demand.
So. In addition to being able to get services to people, typically what we have to plan for is not everyday use, but what’s called peak use. We’ve heard a little bit about this the last couple of years; whenever our electrical grid fails, it happens most typically at the height of winter or the height of summer when more of us are running our heaters higher, more of us are running our air conditioners cooler. On those extra hot, extra cold days when we all run them – the grid was not built to handle that much peak, and it just says, you know what? I’m taking five. I’m peacing out. And then it’s a problem, especially when the grid stays down for a significant amount of time. It’s specifically a large problem for our most vulnerable residents.
The same is true for water. Peak use looks like watering your lawn; it looks like filling your pool; it looks like washing your car. And apartment dwellers generally, especially at their places or residence, do not engage in those activities. There might be a community pool for 300 or 500 residents, but it’s not for one, and so the peak per capita looks very different than it does for that 50 house street, that might have 25 pools; that definitely has 50 or 100 lawns, if you’ve got one front and back; so accommodating peak for single-family homes is actually significantly more challenging than it is for other types of residential customers. That’s something else to keep in mind.
31:09
Molly: Right, so I have a guess here, but we know you mentioned that there were some people with big feelings about these water rates. I’m going to guess it wasn’t everyone in Ann Arbor having these feelings, it was—
31:21
Jess: The only big feelings that I heard were single-family homeowners…mostly because renters had no idea that most of this was going on! But also because, again, the rate changes were largely happening to single-family homeowners. As part of the rate change process, there was a process of community communication and notification, right, so people got notified that their rates were going up. And, as I said, like everything that we pay for, most of it feels painful; so people had an alarm, yeah. That’s mostly who it was.
31:58
Molly: I’ve been homeowner in Ann Arbor for however many years, I have like the vaguest memory of this happening, but I have no memory of my water bill changing in any meaningful way, but we also, we don’t water our lawn, we don’t have a pool, so it sounds like it was maybe not all homeowners right, or not all single family homes, who are affected?
32:24
Jess: Here’s the thing about the noise that I heard. I am a renter who rents a single-family home; I live on a street that’s largely owner-occupied; some of my best friends are homeowners! Like it’s cool. The biggest feelings and the most hurt that I heard was in advance of this vote and the rate change implementation. I have heard almost nothing after that. That’s not to say that people haven’t felt it; but what I heard was the fear of change and the anger about change, and what I haven’t heard and haven’t seen any data around is significant adverse impacts to homeowners in Ann Arbor, especially to the point of causing pain.
33:11
Molly: got it.
33:12
Jess: Again, not to say it isn’t there. Listeners, if you have felt this pain, I validate your pain; but it might not be shared by a large number of people in our community.
33:21
Molly: I mean yeah my neighborhood is small lots, and it’s cool. Lots of people have figured out ways to not have lawns. Gravel, just letting everything grow, having a little forest in your yard.
33:38
Jess: I’ll point out, too, that the rates are tiered by use; so it’s not that you’re getting punished for owning a home, it’s that you are getting assessed for the amount of water that you use. That’s part of the point of any kind of tiered rate structure. The same is true of downtown parking, the rates are tiered; it’s more expensive to park streetside, because there’s less of it. It’s significantly less expensive to park in the structure by almost half the cost than it is to park on the street, and the point is, there is so much more structured parking. It’s never, ever full; maybe maybe for half an hour on football days and Art Fair, but that’s like six hours total during the year. Or 12. You know, not that much. The same is true for water rates: you pay for what you use; if you use less, you pay less.
34:28
Molly: So you’re not even really feeling these changes unless you’re doing things like watering the lawn.
34:32
Jess: Or filling your pool. Yep.
34:35
Molly: Who has pools in Michigan? I don’t—
34:41
Jess: I mean – I’m from Georgia. I hate being hot so much. If you have a pool, that’s fine! …you’re going to pay for the water in it (and I don’t understand how it doesn’t crack in the winter) but anyway, there’s that.
I want to give a huge thanks to former Councilmember Chuck Warpehoski. He helped us do our homework in advance of this episode, because both Molly and I were like, “Wait, what was that about?”
35:05
Molly: Like, we know that we knew about the feelings, but not so much.
35:09
Jess: – the facts, right. And he really laid it out there for us. So thanks, Chuck. We appreciate you.
All right? Did we do it? We did it!
All right. I’ll swing into podkeeping. It’s short today, I just want to remind you guys that it is that time of year again, and I mean pollen! and I also mean survey!
Our annual survey is up: annarboraf.com/survey. It’s anonymous; really all we want to know is, what are we doing that you like, and what aren’t we doing that you’d like to see? We do include a couple of questions about the fact that this is election year; Molly and I are thinking about how we can use the podcast to be useful to you as you’re getting ready for the primary and general general elections. So please, let us know! Again: annarboraf.com/survey, we would absolutely love to hear from you. From those listeners who have already responded, thank you very much! If you haven’t, just get it out of the way! Fill it out while you’re thinking about it! Thank you!
Molly, you want to do the last one?
36:05
Molly: Oh yeah. So it’s not too late to nominate us for the best local podcast of Washtenaw county. And there will be a link in show notes, and right now they’re taking nominations so you’re going to go to the arts and entertainment section and scroll down to local podcast and fill in Ann Arbor AF. And then, starting in June, if we make it into the top six, we will be asking you to vote for us to be the official best local podcast of Washington county.
36:34
Jess: And you definitely don’t have to vote for us every day between now and May 15th…but you could. If you wanted to.
36:40
Molly: You could even set an alarm on your phone that reminds you every day to vote for us, as someone I know has done.
36:48
Jess: I think I’ll take a screenshot of that alarm and put it up on our instagram so people can see. I legit have an alarm!
36:55
Molly: You could even vote in more than one place like on your computer and on your phone, which is what I do almost every day when I remember. So anyway that’s it just vote for us, and thanks for your support.
37:08
Jess: Thanks listeners.
Molly: 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!