Episode 53: City Council Meeting: 5 May 2022


Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Thursday, May 5th. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including budget, tax collection, and spending…a.k.a.: money, money, and money.

Links we referenced:

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!

00:32

Molly: Today we’re talking about the next City Council meeting coming up on Thursday may 5 which had me really confused when I was looking for the agenda today. we’ll be talking touching on a few interesting agenda items, including budget tax collection and spending so money, money and money, 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. First up, we have a feature that we’re going to be adding to our episodes between now and the election, which is a quick little election update. So we want to be able to highlight some ways for people to get involved as as the election is coming up, make sure everyone’s ready and has the timeline in their heads, because a lot of what we’re going to be focusing on is actually the primary, which is an August. As we think of ways for people to get. involved, we are going to make it a point to make sure that some of them are what we are calling introvert approved.

01:28

Jess: Introvert approved!

01:30

Molly: Think there’s this idea that campaigning and volunteering for a campaign means you have to talk to strangers all the time. And that is a really valuable way to volunteer but it’s not the only one, and so we’re going to make sure we think about and talk about some of the other possible ways that you can help. help with that help the candidates that you care about. get elected, this year.

01:51

Jess: And if you do have to talk to strangers, maybe ways to make it a little bit less painful.

01:55

Molly: yeah I have to say I was not. I was terrified by the whole idea of having to talk to strangers, the first time I volunteered on an election was the Obama campaign in 2008. And I had this idea I was like I have to do it, we really need to beat the Republicans. I will I’ll go in once a week I’ll I’ll see if maybe they’ll let me like stuff envelopes or do anything else, and you know I show up at the office. And they were like no, we need you to make phone calls this is what we need you to do, and so I was, like all right fine I’ll do it, I don’t think I’m going to like it, but this is really important, and. I started making phone calls and it turns out that most of the people who are going to be mean are not going to be mean they’re just going to hang up or they’re not going to answer, and that the people you do get to talk to. Will like tell you about their hopes and dreams and fears about their lives and what’s happening in the world and it’s actually kind of amazing. And I I didn’t know it was going to be like that and I got super into it and I ended up phone banking like multiple times a week and door knocking every weekend and that was really a big That was a big entry point for me into. participating in politics, and it was national politics, but you know locally.

03:08

Jess: For sure. I don’t know if people would look at us and know this, but both of us are introverts; I think you would be introvert plus and I might be introvert lite? Anyway, both of us approach campaigns and how we contribute to them in really particular ways, informed in large part by how we think about how we interact with people; and we wanted to bring that to you listeners because we thought there might be a few introverts among you as well.

03:34

Molly: I mean, so I have to admit I think I’m actually a shy extrovert. So I do I do get that energy, and I think that’s part of why I ended up loving it but getting over that terror of talking to strangers was very real for me like it was hard. Ah, so yeah that’s the getting involved part, we will do a ballot a full ballot explainer episode like we did last year, where we’ll talk through everything that’s on the ballot. But, in general, we are going to be focusing on the down ballot stuff there’s like statewide races and judge races and we’re mostly focused super duper local so what that means for this year, and especially for August. Is that there will be open Council seats and all five wards plus the mayor. county Commission seats, some of the State house and Senate races are contested in the primary and some are not, and it will depend on where you live, and then there’s going to be a transit millage for the AAATA. So that’s what’s on what we’re going to be voting on Jess can you talk about all the details.

04:33

Jess: The mechanics! Yeah.

So! Part of the reason that we’re talking about elections now is, you may or may not know that there is a primary election in August. You may or may not have known that this was an election year to start with! A lot of folks peg their election expectations around presidential election years, which is years divisible by four. But halfway in between those are what’s called midterm election years, which is what we’re in. Then there’s typically a partisan primary in August; you pick what party you’re going to vote for the folks that are running in those races. Then in November, that’s when you say, ”I want the Democrat,” “I want the Republican,” “I want the Green Party,” “I want this dude who’s not party affiliated but seems like they have some pretty good ideas.”

The partisan primary matters so much in Ann Arbor, because we are not a one party town, but we largely vote like we are. We are majority, majority, majority Democrat when it comes to polling behavior. Which means for us, fundamentally, our races are decided in the primary; especially races for which there end up being no Republican contenders and for our local stuff, which is City Council, Mayor, and the Ann Arbor seats on the Washtenaw County Board Commission seats. This is something that I try to highlight in a lot of my conversations, that partisan primaries in a city like Ann Arbor are THE deciders for our hyperlocal races, so it’s important to pay attention to them.

As Molly said, there’s a Council seat in all five Wards that are up, and midterm election years are when in Ann Arbor our mayors are elected. So, no matter where you live in Ann Arbor, these elections affect who represents you, every single person! The partisan primary this year is August 2; or, as you may know it, the day before my sister and also Molly’s birthdays (very important). The voting is on Election Day, but because we now have absentee voting and – thanks, Michigan! – no-reason absentee voting, you can actually start voting several weeks before, up to and including June 23. Starting June 23, you can vote by mail or at the city clerk’s office. By mail you’d probably want to do up to maybe the week before, and then after that you probably want to deliver your ballot to the city clerk’s office. When it comes to voting in person, you can vote at the city clerk’s office up to the day before Election Day; then on Election Day you go find your polling place, you cast a vote, you get a sticker (stickers: very important). If you’re not sure whether and where you’re registered to vote, you can check that on the Secretary of State’s website; we’ll drop a link to that in the show notes.

Molly, did I miss anything that people need to know?

07:26

Molly: I think that’s the big stuff so we’re going to rather than doing just one election episode we’re going to sprinkle this throughout the episodes that we record through the spring and summer so that you’re always getting a little taste of election stuff. As we as we gear up and we wanted to kick it off. In their first the first episode of May, although technically it’s not me yet. yeah.

07:47

Jess: Yeah! Put the elections, both of them coming up this year, on your calendar: first Tuesday in August and second Tuesday November. Be ready to shout at people on your ballots!

All right, I want to talk about the agenda. We had a couple of consent agenda items that we wanted to say a couple of things about. 

I’m going to start with CA-10, which is the “Resolution to Assess Certain Delinquent Municipal Utility Charges as a Tax and Ordering Collection Thereof.” There’s almost nothing special about this; it’s a standard action where certain overdue bills are switched from being considered as bills to being added to the property tax and assessed that way. This is supported by the city charter; in terms of timing, it looks like the city is getting ahead of the July tax roll. 

I wanted to talk about it because the agenda item talks about resources for folks behind on their utilities. My hope is I’m speaking this into existence, or it already exists: my hope is that it’s a robust process for connecting those people to those resources. For example, in the resolution, one of the resources that they name is the Barrier Busters Program, which has processes and resources for helping folks get caught up on their bills, but it really needs a social services advocate to work with residents to complete the process. So is that connection made? Is the city connecting you to the social services person that’s connecting you to Barrier Busters and walking you through? That’s my question.

09:25

Molly: So I know actually a tiny bit about the barrier busters program, which is that it’s mostly administered through various nonprofits and agencies in the city, I think, with the idea that those organizations are equipped to provide some of that support to people who need it. So that’s part of it.

09:42

Jess: That’s fine. I’m coming at this from, I saw this and called a couple of people who I know have had trouble in the past; I said, I don’t need to know anything about your circumstance, but I know that you participated in Barrier Busters, and I’m curious about your experience? The two people that I talked to said that they found it difficult. So I am delighted that Ann Arbor is well-resourced enough that we do have these resources available; and, overall, the total dollar amount is relatively low. Looking at the parcels for the bills that are being assessed, a lot of them are not individuals; they’re a bunch of addresses in Briarwood Mall that owe money; one of the biggest bills, maybe the biggest bill of the city – sorry, guys, I’m going to out you – is a fraternity; and there’s a number of other business addresses in there. I don’t think that this all comes down to vulnerable individuals, but some of it does, right? We know that. There is nothing that will make you poorer than being poor and then getting behind on something; it is really hard to get caught up on that, and then the million other things that you get behind on.  So I just have some anxiety that we are a well-resourced community, we clearly have resources available; I hope that those resources are well connected to the people who need them. That’s all I wanted to say.

I did want to mention something else that made me happy about the resolution. It’s a very mechanical thing about switching dollars from one bucket to another bucket; but it does acknowledge that delinquent bills are often a product of vulnerability of some kind or another, and one of the things that the resolution clarifies is that water shutoffs are absolutely not part of the process and that this isn’t that either, so I appreciated seeing that.

11:33

Molly: That is really great because water shut off to the big problem and other communities and in the state – 

11:37

Jess: – of Michigan, yep. 

So, what is your consent agenda feeling?

11:41

Molly: Mine is CA-15. Which is a resolution to award a contract I’m not going to go into this a very long resolution title, but the key part is that it’s the construction contract for the. street resurfacing project, so this is a single contract that will fund all of the street resurfacing that happens, through. Construction season of Ann Arbor when I first moved here someone made that joke about there’s two seasons here winter and construction, and so this is the funding for. Construction season. specifically for the roads, and the only reason I wanted to bring this up is because right there and the name of the resolution. Is all of the different funding sources that are that we will be tapping in order to. fix our roads, a few weeks ago when we were talking about the arpa funds, the special funds from the Federal Government for pandemic relief. There was a proposed amendment that would have taken funding that we were the city was planning to use and ultimately decided to use for a basic income pilot. To give to some of the people who’ve been hit hardest by the pandemic and put it into the road fund to fix to fix the roads and one of the one of my big objections was that. There are already many sources of funding for the roads and then, here we are we’ve got them delete like just listed out for us so there’s the street bridge and sidewalk millage fund. there’s the local street fund, which is for traffic calming there’s the sidewalk construction millage fund, there are county road millage funds a storm water fund a sewage disposal fund a water supply system fund and then. Another water, maybe, those are the same water supply system funds so. And the all of these funds are going into road construction none of these funds can be used for a basic income pilot they can only be used for the roads or things related to the roads, like the sewage system. So I just this just felt like the perfect outline of what we were talking about when we were trying to say you can fund the roads and other ways, you cannot find basic income any other way. Meanwhile it’s also great that we’re going to be spending about $8 million and a half million dollars. fixing the roads, this year and there’s there are a lot of if you want to see the maps of what all is getting fixed up, you can get to that, through the Council agenda item. there’s some new sidewalks getting built that always makes me happy, but that’s really That was really why I wanted to talk about this. yeah we’ve.

14:10

Jess: We’ve brought the “roads and basic income” thing every episode since it happened, you and I both had some sensitivities about that; that it happened, but it was also that it felt like bad process. So I’m glad you brought this one up. 

Speaking of bringing things up again. I want to talk about DC-2, which is the “resolution for the City of Ann Arbor” – anyway, it’s the NACA one.

14:38

Molly: Here we go. 

14:40

Jess: I know, I know. 

So. If you listened to our episode last time, you know a little bit of what I’m getting ready to say. NACA is the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. They have a program enabling lending to low and low-middle income households for mortgages; they remove or reduce a lot of the barriers to make funding available and work with investors in particular ways. It is a way for people to access homeownership that might otherwise be really challenged to do so, or not able to do so at all. The resolution in particular directs the city administrator to “look into” this organization and its programs, and if it’s 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 to “allow NACA workshops” on city properties, pending a safe determination to do re: COVID.

Where did this come from: Ward three resident Brian Chambers wrote a white paper analyzing Ann Arbor’s middle-income needs that culminates in the conclusion that homeownership is the most direct, most efficient, most productive way to get at solving those issues; the call to action is for the area’s largest employers and Labor organizers to support NACA. This was brought up in the last City Council meeting and postponed, so now it’s back. 

I will refer you to our last episode for the long bit of thoughts that I had on this. Essentially what I took aim at is wanting to draw this distinction between homeownership and housing: working on one is not the same as working on the other.  I just wanted to make that really clear. And I drove that home point home a lot.

This time, I want to dunk a little bit harder on Council sponsoring a program from a specific nonprofit. If you want to explore and promote homeownership as a means of reducing wealth gaps in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County, I think that that’s a conversation worth having; although I did just come across a book yesterday by a lady named Jenny Schuetz, Fixer-Upper; it’s essentially an analysis of systemic housing issues in the country. (I can’t wait to read it! I couldn’t get my hands on it in time for this episode, but fortunately today is Independent Bookstore Day, so it is a great day to order Fixer-Upper if anybody else wants to do that too.) Jenny Schuetz (who’s my new best friend and doesn’t know how much she agrees with me), one of her chapters is that homeownership should be only one one component of a family’s wealth, and I agree with that really hard. 

My politics around wealth generation aside, 

if the city wants to promote homeownership as a larger part of its policy and strategy goes, please do it. Focusing on NACA in this way feels really inappropriate and kind of icky to me. We don’t see any other nonprofit get singled out for this kind of focus, including community cornerstones like United Way (who, by the way, already promote promote NACA locally), or the Habitat for Humanity, or nonprofits that the city already regularly contracts with, including the Community Action Network of Ann Arbor and Avalon Housing. We work with these organizations all the time, and we do not promote individual organizations for a lot of really good reasons; because government should not be in the business of promoting single businesses! And NACA, while a nonprofit, is also a business. Lending municipal energy and by extension, municipal credence to a single nonprofit and one single program to me feels distorted and really misguided.

18:51

Molly: It makes total sense.

18:53

Jess: Yeah. If we want to work on homeownership, let’s work on homeownership. Really not a fan of this NACA resolution, and if it ended up not passing, I would be okay with it. If it ends up passing, it’s just a series of directions to the City Administrator, it’s not anything about what would get implemented out of it; so I have medium feelings, but not huge feelings. I don’t love it, but – what did we say, Molly, last time? – we’re aggressively fine.

19:23

Molly: aggressively fine, yes.

19:24

Jess: So, it’s fine. It’s fine.

19:27

Molly: But I don’t love it.

19:28

Jess: I really don’t love that we’re shining a light on one nonprofit and one program. I think that there are other ways to accomplish our community’s goals than that kind of action. 

Speaking of goals!

19:41

Molly: yeah the big one, so next up is pH eight so public hearing eight, which is the resolution to adopt the Ann Arbor city budget and related property tax millage rates. For fiscal year 2023, this is the. This is step one of Part one of two of adopting the budget for next year, so this is the public hearing the actual vote will happen at the next City Council meeting, they are required by I think the Charter, maybe it’s the state, even to pass the budget. Within in May and so we’re on time to do that so we’re talking about the budget, you may recall that last year we talked a lot more about the budget and. I thought we thought that we would be talking more about the budget in general, because we keep saying the budgets are moral documents and that a lot of the issues that we come up. Against throughout the year if there’s a specific purchase that we don’t like. Like tasers for the police department. Those actually the votes on those specific spending, things are not really the opportunity to fight back the opportunity was months earlier when the budget was being decided upon, and you know let’s not budget for tasers next year as one example. here’s the thing turns out following and participating in the budget process is really hard and it’s harder than we thought it was going to be. And so we’re struggling with it and in we knew we needed to talk about the budget this year and this episode, but we’ve like it we’ve. lost us at this point, and so I think we wanted to just sort of work through that a little bit with you all, and part of it. Is that at this point we’ve been doing the show for like a year and a half we have learned a ton there are a lot of things about how the city operates that I understand. Pretty deeply where when we started doing this, I maybe didn’t understand them at all. And I would have thought that the budget would be one of those things where we would be a lot more confident at this point it’s the second time now like second time around with the budget, we would know what to tell you, and we would know what’s going on and we just don’t. And part of it was bandwidth this year we didn’t track it as closely, we didn’t try to track it as closely. The city did something different, this year last year there were a bunch of hearings. about different areas of the budget, and this year there were not hearings and said there were just videos that were made available publicly and to counsel to watch. But when something’s not on the calendar it’s often harder to track or remember that you need to do it so like we didn’t watch any of those videos and we didn’t tell you all to watch those videos.

22:24

Jess: That was part of it, and a part of it, for me – I followed along with a bunch of the budget work sessions last year; and more than half of the value of following along was the dialogue that happened after. Councilmembers had an opportunity to ask the staff members, typically the department head, about specific line items in their budget or changes year over year. I felt like I got so much context and color from those conversations. Part of me didn’t bother with watching the budget presentations this year, because I was like – I don’t actually know if I will understand what I’m looking at without that dialogue.

23:01

Molly: yeah that’s totally part of it, so you know I think just maybe we’ve changed our minds, a little bit maybe about. The importance of of acting and intervening on the budget itself right, I think, maybe what we’ve what one of the things that I think i’ve learned is that. The priority setting often happens, separate from the budget itself, and that that is really the thing to be pushing on and working on just as over here nodding, do you have more you on.

23:32

Jess: I’m resisting chiming in really quickly because I don’t know if I know what my “lessons learned” are; I’m still very deep in the confusion state. 

Where I’ll echo your thoughts a little bit: where I started in following the agenda was watching the purchases and thinking: Oh, we should have opinions on these individual purchase decisions. But once something shows up on the consent agenda – it’s not that it’s a done deal, it’s not a rubber stamp – but that is an expression of a really long process, the final expression of a really long process; by the time they’re ready to write the check, many decisions have been made ahead of that. So I rolled it up to the budget, I was like: Okay, let’s work on the budget; being a part of making those decisions is how you affect the individual purchases. …but we still see stuff show up all the time that makes us feel kind of cringy; and yet we know this is a part of a budget that everybody’s agreed on since last year. I was telling Molly in our preparation conversation for this episode before we started recording, I get real hesitant when the impetus to do something gets governed by – wait, do it bigger; wait, do it bigger; and/or wait, do something else. That really gives me pause.

24:52

Molly: Like you were saying, like you, can’t you can’t fix X until you fix why. You can’t why until you fix Z and then yeah there’s this feeling of, there’s always something bigger you need to fix in order to get to the problem you are trying to fix.

25:06

Jess: Right, and I think that’s kind of why I’m in my confusion state, because I actually do believe that and where I’m at is: I think our policy and strategy documents aren’t totally in service of our values in the future that we want to see yet. We have left ourselves enough latitude that we are buying electric pickup trucks (Molly did a really nice job telling us in the last episode why this doesn’t necessarily hit all of our goals or fulfill all of our values). So I do think, actually, that we have additional work to do on our strategy and policy documents, because not only the budget is a moral document, but it is also an expression of the priorities that we’ve set in things like the policy agenda, A2Zero, and Vision Zero. 

I think we’ve got room to get a lot more specific and ambitious about what we’re asking for; and until then, maybe asking the budget to do it is not the right ask? I’m saying that with a question mark, because I’m not totally sure.

26:13

Molly: right because I mean so last year. I think sometimes we end up in this situation where the budget is not a reflection of what we say our priorities and values are and that’s where some sort of public attention can be valuable so, for example, last year. The city, adopted the moving together towards Vision Zero plan in that plan was a pretty ambitious recommendation around doing what are called quick build projects so projects that can make the roads safer. Often, for everyone, without totally rebuilding the entire road you be painted you put in some. delineators the vertical elements and you can you can improve you can slow down speeds and improve safety, but there was nothing in the budget for it and. councilmember briggs successfully brought an amendment to get some funding in there for some quick build projects and we just saw the. Draft plans for those quick build projects at transportation Commission so they’re now they’re happening if she hadn’t brought that amendment. It would have been an unfunded mandate, and so I I do think we have to be making sure that the things we say our values are represented in the budget I’m just still not totally sure how. or when.

27:31

Jess: Another thing we’ve talked about is how much of this difficulty is by design. Molly and I have a little bit of dynamic tension around this. I feel like it’s not necessarily intentional…BUT ALSO, not a lot of attention is being paid to how to bring people into this process and get them engaged. Not to say “I want you to say X or Y or Z about the budget,” but, “This is how you can give us meaningful feedback, these are the goals that we’ve set for this budget, help us fulfill the goals and what you want to see.” I don’t feel like we’re being excluded because nobody wants us in there; I feel like attention and priority is not being paid to communication about it. I feel like that’s a meaningful distinction. 

By the way, if anybody’s listening who makes decisions about these things: I wish you would prioritize communication. I wish you would spend time and resources thinking about how to render a budget more legible and more fun and interesting to engage for the community. (And not another community survey. As much as I love them.) Ways to really bring people into the conversation. Budgets can be really alienating documents; they’re hard to read, they’re hard to interpret – when you say, Does this line item line up with our values? that is a tough question to answer! – and I don’t have the answer to how that gets done; but we’re not doing it at all. And I’d love to see us do something.

28:59

Molly: And maybe maybe this is something where it really is the role of Council members and. That we didn’t you know we didn’t get to see the the work that our Council members were doing because there weren’t these working sessions, but maybe they actually are doing this work and it’s just something that’s not visible to us because you know we. We sometimes really hammer on a public engagement as being, not the thing that because of who who gets heard at public engagement usually who was able to participate, whose voice then it’s shaping a conversation it’s the same. privileged homeowning older white people most of the time so maybe we don’t you know I’m not maybe we definitely don’t need that kind of public engagement around the budget. But going from public sessions public work sessions to no public events that led up to this budget that I’m aware of. To me, felt intentional. Like That was a choice and maybe it was about the pandemic afford in says, of being more virtual. I don’t know and, of course, the city has undergone like lots of leadership upheaval in the last few years to so that what where we are right now is not necessarily an indication. Of what this process will look like in the future, but I just I’m just really still wrestling with how do, how do you get involved on this on this particular very important vote that’s coming up. And I figured we should just be transparent about –

30:36

Jess: – the struggle. So if you do get informed and get involved, let us know!

30:41

Molly: yeah give us, we would love some suggestions. Some advice. Because it does it feels important, it is important, but we are we don’t know what to tell you.

30:51

Jess: The note on our sheet for today says: “We struggling”. We are!

31:00

Molly: So that’s the public hearing if you’ve got stuff you feel strongly about, you can call in on Thursday and say you should be spending more money on widgets or whatever. There will be an opportunity for that.

31:15

Jess: I don’t know that this is relevant to this conversation, but I’ll just remind us that the city of Ann Arbor runs on a fiscal calendar of July 1 to June 30th, so this is the budget that would be implemented starting the middle of the summer.

Shall we change gears? Yeah? Change bicycle gears? 

Right! 

It is that time of year again, where we ask you to tell us things. It’s survey time! If you go to AnnArborAF.com/survey, we’ve got some questions for you on there: what you’re liking about the podcast, what you’d like to hear more of, and we also include a couple of questions about what would be useful to you and getting ready for this year’s election. As you can hear, we’re already thinking about it. So please go! Again, it’s AnnArborAF.com/survey; that’s the link that’s active in our Instagram bio, and really easy to get to on the website. Let us know what you think!

32:06

Molly: awesome in another kind of election, the nominations for best of Washtenaw are still open. We are still not yet at the point where you can vote for the finalists we are still nominating people, which means you can still nominate us for the best local podcast of Washtenaw county. you’ll we have the link in the show notes it’s in the arts and entertainment section in the survey like that there are so many things you can – 

32:30

Jess: – nominate so many things! 

32:36

Molly: You can nominate your favorite activists, you can nominate your favorite dance studio, restaurant, food truck; but while you’re there, we would love it if you would nominate Ann Arbor AF for best local podcast you can do this once a day if you have multiple devices, you can do it more than once a day. And if we make it to the finals you will continue to hear about this from us when it is time to actually vote.

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!