Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Tuesday, January 19th. Want to see the agenda for yourself? We have the technology.
We discuss quarterly reports on sustainability, equity, and community budgeting; healthy streets with a callback to the 12/19 episode, and waste management with a callback to the 1/2 episode; along with a quick First Amendment Check. We get into the difference between policy and process, the difference between governance and politics, and how decisions get made in the City. And we’re making an exception to our podcast’s “no shenanigans” policy just for today.
At the end of the episode, Ariah Shugat returns with an update on her project getting phones and power to homeless folks, and an ask for our listeners.
Two quick process notes: we record a few days before the Council meeting, which means there’s always a chance something new will make it to the agenda between the time of recording and the actual meeting. Also, we got some factchecking from our listeners from our section on township island annexations. We couldn’t fit it into the episode, so here they are: Regarding township island annexations, Ann Arbor actually does not currently have any mechanism to require annexation when a township islands is sold. Annexation does not necessarily happen with sale, unless the new property owner wants to connect to city utility services, then they have to annex. Also, the agenda item we discussed wasn’t about annexing new islands, it was just zoning for parcels that had already been annexed. The City does not currently have any new petitions for City initiated annexation in progress.
Warning: there are some swears in this episode, but we promise it’s just because we’re really big fans of the First Amendment.
Transcript
MK: Hi and welcome to this episode of Ann Arbor. A F a podcast for folks trying to figure out what’s going on in Ann Arbor we discuss current events and local politics and policy governance and other civic good times. I’m Molly Kleinman. And my pronouns are she, her
MH: I’m Michele Hughes my pronouns are she, her
JL: And Im Jessica Letaw, and my pronouns are she, her
MK: Where your co hosts to help you get informed and get involved. It’s your city today we are talking about the next city council meeting coming up tuesday january 19 will be touching on equity and sustainability streets and sidewalks and a quick First Amendment check at the end of the episode, we’re also going to return to our issue that from our last deeper dive with an update on her project getting phones and power to homeless folks and then ask for Ann Arbor. A F podcast listeners. A quick process note: we’re recording this. A few days before the Council meeting, there’s always a chance that something new will make it to the agenda, between now and the meeting next week. We also got some corrections on our discussion of Township island annexation. In our last episode, and those are in the show notes for this week and going forward. We’re going to have. We’re going to try to have corrections and some listener responses in our future episodes. Now feels like a really great moment to shift some focus from national politics to local politics. We’re about to have a president who is competent and boring.
And there’s still a lot of stuff. We’re going to have to push him on but hopefully we’ll have a little bit of breathing room to start thinking about ways we can make change closer to home. So let’s jump in.
JL: Alright, so taking a look at this meeting’s agenda. I’m interested in the Council business. But what I’m going to spend time on today is actually communications from the city administrator. There are a few reports that I think are really interesting and a nice way of highlighting. Other ways of getting involved with what the city does that a lot of us care about that doesn’t necessarily involve getting directly engaged with council with politics, things like that.So the three reports that are of particular interest to me are the city of the Office of Sustainability and innovations their quarterly report is being delivered to the city. There’s also an equity report being delivered and I’m unclear. Is this annual is this quarterly. I believe it’s quarterly, but I’m not 100% certain and then the last one is a city budget priorities survey results. That was the this is the summary report of three resident surveys that were conducted in 2018 and 2020 I think these are really interesting because again it doesn’t pertain directly to Council business but because it comes up in a Council agenda. This is kind of where it percolates up to our consciousness. It can be hard to track work as it moves through the city or the status of anything. So anytime that there’s a periodic report like an annual report or a quarterly report I seize on it like a thirsty person for water. Because I’m like oh thank god. This is a moment where I can understand what’s going on the Office of Sustainability and innovations OSI their quarterly report is fairly straightforward. One of the things that I was really glad to see in it is land acknowledgement. I think that this is something that the city is moving towards but OSI has kind of taken the lead. Excuse me. On how to do this properly and thoroughly. So I’m really glad to see that in there are some interesting updates on solar programs on energy benchmarking on the University of Michigan’s carbon neutrality report, which has since been released, since this report was created the thing that stood out to me i one of the reasons that I moved to Ann Arbor and love it here is because we really are a tree town like this is a beautiful green city. And there’s a new initiative called the 10,000 trees initiative where they are. The city is supporting individuals and organizations with planting 10,000 new trees on private property. So that’s pretty cool. And that’s the kind of thing that you get when you read these random reports. The equity report, I have to say I read this and felt disappointed and the report itself is perfectly professional, there’s a lot of information in there but it feels aimless five. I think about five of the seven pages of the report are just a straightforward report out of the Housing Commission, and then there’s a couple of call outs on human resource work and then something about parks. And what this feels like to me is what it is, which is a reflection of the city’s lack of a really specific focus on equity racial equity income equity. However, we wanted to find it. The city has good intentions, but not a cohesive vision and this report reflects that. So, you know, in this podcast. One of the things that we do is say, here’s something that’s happening. And here’s your opportunity for action. So I thought about that for myself. What is my opportunity for action ? And I’m going to be writing to my council members and requesting the establishment of an equity commission. I feel like we don’t have focus equity work in the city. We’re kind of leaving it up to individuals and individual departments. To kind of define what equity is how they achieve it, and whether they’ve accomplished it and I don’t think we’re going to make meaningful systemic change if we continue to approach it with that piecemeal attitude. When you say mission.
MH: Say when you say committed. I mean, do you mean a volunteer Commission like the transportation or planning commission. Are you talking about like a staff position or something like that. So I know that it has a racial equity office with a racial equity officer, whose job it is to oversee things that they have they’ve passed racial equity ordinance to make sure that all the things are, you know, in compliance with their racial equity vision.
JL: You’re exactly right. And I think part of what I’m saying is that I’d like to see Ann Arbor to step up to the commitment that Washtenaw county has already been making that office and those funds were as a result of an equity audit that the county did. And I don’t know if that was a volunteer commission or if that was conducted by their board of Commissioners, my suspicion without having done the homework is that it was done by the Board of Commissioners and staff.
In this instance, I’m talking about a volunteer Commission that is staffed because I think part of what we need isn’t just policy direction. We also need community information about what we don’t have and what we’d like to see. So I’m going to think about it a little bit more but when this new Council came in, I made a wish list for myself of all of the like big, big policy pieces that I’d love to see implemented in a cohesive racial equity vision was a part of that. So I think that this report is kind of giving me my next step in how I’d like to see that evolve.
MH: I also remember that the county at one point they passed a resolution declaring racism, a public health crisis and made a bunch of promises about what they were going to do about that and then Ann Arbor got excited about that. And they passed a declaration saying that saying, you know, saying that racism is a public health crisis and then didn’t make any promises. So
JL: Anything.
MH: We know there’s a public health crisis, we’re not gonna do anything about it. It felt extra insulting. We know that
JL: Yeah, and
MH: Absolutely not doing anything about it.
JL: Affirmative Action. Exactly. One of the things that I feel like a cohesive racial equity vision could give us and we’re seeing this at the county is that if you don’t have a cohesive vision, everybody’s vague notion of what equity means gives us a reason to say yes or no to things that we like or don’t like based on how we feel and it’s not really an objective framework on which to evaluate policy decisions budget decisions, you know, strategic directions for the city. What I’d like to do is take it out of the objective of the subjective realm and into exactly what you said. Michelle about the county they define the need they establish the office they funded it and they continue to actively and aggressively fund and support that work in our needs to step up to Washington County, especially as the county’s largest municipality and that we haven’t done so that we didn’t lead just hurts my heart, but that we haven’t you know stepped up to that work since then. I think that we’re behind and a lot of ways. So I’d love to see an improvement.
The last report out from the city administrator Peter is on the city budget priority survey. So as I mentioned, there were two surveys and 2013 and 2020 essentially asking residents of Ann Arbor about their experience in the city. Do you like living here? Do you not like living here. What do you like, what don’t you like and with a focus on budget decisions. What would you like us to see, what would you like to see us spending more on, what do you think we’re spending appropriately on and what do you think we’re not spending enough on the reason that I wanted to call out this report, two of them. One is that of the top 15 priorities. Identified by over half of the agreed upon. I guess I’ll say by over half of the respondents of those 15 six have to do with housing. I think that’s phenomenal I continue to feel like Ann Arbor is building this momentum. Towards housing support at all levels that is unprecedented for our city. I’m excited to see it at the budget. I was excited to see our millage pass last year. I’m excited to see this move forward. I also love this report because it is so thorough and so dry and it is the perfect example of why we elect people because we shouldn’t have to read every word of every report to feel comfortable that our city is being led. So the fact that this was a staff report.Produced and given to the city administrator, that is delivered to counsel for their review and analysis. To me, this feels like the government is working exactly like it should. And like a thing. It was fun to read and if anybody wants to get into it will include a link to the show notes. I highly encourage it.
But this is an example to me of governance working well so that you don’t necessarily have to scrutinize everything yeah, so those were my observations from Council this week. Awesome.
MH: I think
MK: The next thing I’ll go ahead and Michelle.
MH: I was going to talk about worth. There’s a couple of public hearings that are happening at this next meeting about some reasonings and we actually talked about both of those reasonings on a previous episode on our December 19 episode, I believe that was called episode three and
so that was when we talked about them when they came up to the city council for first reading it past them and now we’re talking now they come back now. They’re coming for a second reading, which is the time when there’s a public hearing. So anyone who wants to talk about these things, gets three minutes to talk about it. You don’t have to sign up in advance. You just gotta talk about things. So the first one is Lockwood development that was originally proposed in a different location but the neighbors there didn’t like it. And I’m convinced the City Council voted no on it. That’s a proposal for a couple of hundred units of senior housing of which about half of it is subsidized affordable housing. So, yeah, that’s the Lockwood thing and
the other thing that’s on the agenda is Packard rezoning which is happening on Packard Avenue, where there’s a huge parking lot. Next to the tiny little mini mall and I think the mini mall is actually a little bit under utilized. I don’t think all the slots are taken. So they’re talking about tearing down both the parking and the mini mall and building a Multi storey apartment building. I think for for something. Sorry, I forgot to double check these things.
MK: It’s only three. It’s pretty low. I think low profile it fits in well.
MH: Okay. With the name. Yes, we’re talking about a three three storey apartment building with retail on the first ground on the first floor. Wait, am I right about that.
MK: I’m sorry I get ground. There’s ground floor retail it’s 2111 Packard. You got the first part, right, it’s mostly empty parking the so the mini mall is on one thing the parking lot is owned parking and the reasoning is to to change the parking lot zoning to match the mini mall zoning and then they can use that entire space to put in housing.
MH: Yeah, so then this. So what’s on the agenda this time is just the rezoning of the parking to the other thing we’re going to probably see site plans coming back later on when the actual building has been built, but those are two things that are on those are two public hearings that are on the agenda city council. Usually when people speak at these things city council usually only hears people saying no. So if you come in there and you say something neutral or positive about a building that’s that’ll really raised some eyebrows. Um, because I think city council. It’s a skewed view is unusually thinks that projects are less supported than they actually are.
JL: If you’ve been listening to this podcast for more than five minutes. You know that we are in favor of housing people over cars. So we are definitely in favor of this rezoning
MK: Yep.
MH: All right now. Molly You got some stuff to say to us next
MK: I have a lot of things to say. So I’m going to start with a pretty quick small one, which is something from two resolutions from the consent agenda ca five and ca six and they’re both about sidewalk gap elimination stuff. And these particular resolutions are just about moving money around. So I’m not going to take too much time on them. But last fall and arbor voters passed a millage to fund new sidewalk installations filling of sidewalk apps. The way we talked about this in the past episode not going to dive into it too much, but the. The thing to note here really is just that they’re the plan is to borrow money. From the existing sidewalk app fund to cover sidewalk apps that the city has already installed. But where they haven’t made this assessment to the property owner and because of the millage was passed the city is not going to assess any more property owners for sidewalk apps. So even though these projects were budgeted as though someone else was going to be paying for a chunk. They’re saying, No, we’re just going to borrow against that millage money which we don’t have yet. And then we’ll pay it back. Once we get once the millage money actually starts rolling in. And that’s what these are about the resolutions also make clear that staff is still figuring out how the process is actually going to work to use that millage money. So once we have that. And once we know what those plans are. I’m definitely going to want to talk about them more. But now is not the time. So the next thing I wanted to talk about is so that Jesse, you mentioned your sort of wish list when the new Council came in. This was the very, very top of my list. This was the one thing I really cared about and the name of this resolution doesn’t really get to what it is. So this is we’re talking about DC three resolution to resend the community engagement and approval processes for city related improvement projects, this is specifically about lane reductions on city roads prior to April. The city of Ann Arbor had a policy in place that whenever there was a resurfacing process we’re servicing project happening on a road that by default. Engineers needed to consider whether it would be possible to install bike lanes and potentially reconfigure lanes take away parking to put in bike lanes and during the time that we have that policy. We got a lot of new bike lanes in the city, but in April of 2019 the past Council majority decided that city council should have authority over lane reductions they did not take authority over lane creation road expansion, but City Council wanted to have veto power basically over any bike lane installation that was going to happen anywhere in the city any road diets that are going to happen anywhere in the city. And not surprisingly, when City Council took that authority for itself. We got a lot fewer road diets some some long standing plans that had been in place for road surfacing re project road resurfacing projects Council rejected these bike lanes things that community members were expecting neighbors were expecting. Because of general opposition to not general opposition to road diets their own opposition to row diets and bike lanes and some neighbor opposition to grow diets and by glands. So what I really wanted to see happen was the new city council majority giving Authority back to staff to say if staff thinks we should put a bike lane here, we should listen to them and put the bike lane in and it will enable these things to happen more quickly and it will enable more changes to the way is our roads are structured until like to let that happen faster. So I’m really thrilled to see this on the agenda. I’m really thrilled to see that they’re doing this now in the winter so that when we get to spring resurfacing season, we can start installing more bike lanes again and having more lane reductions. And one piece of this that I wanted to to really dig into. So I think frequently when we’ve talked about, especially the past council and there’s this feeling that the past Council does not trust the expertise of staff and refuses to rely on the expertise of staff. And so we’ve spent a lot of time saying we have experts on staff. Listen to the experts delegate to the experts. These shouldn’t be decisions made on city council members feelings. These should be made based on data and you know expert advice. But there’s this other sort of parallel history when it comes specifically to traffic engineering and road design, which is that when we let traffic engineers make those decisions in the absence of policy guidance. You can get things like freeways running through the middle of cities, you can get things like intersections that are designed purely to increase the number of cars that get through what’s called the level of service without consideration for the needs of other road users. So we’re not saying we should have engineering happen in the absence of policy advising, what we’re saying is that the policies are already in place. The city of Ann Arbor has this a to zero plan about reducing carbon emissions, we have our vision zero plan, which is about reducing serious road deaths and road injuries. So the policy guidance is already there for motorized transportation plan.
MH: About to have the new comprehensive transportation plan update
MK: That’s right. So what we’re saying we talked about this is engineering guided by policy which city council has already set and which this which the population of Ann Arbor has already said, we like. And another piece about that too, though, is that I’m running a highway through the middle of a city is still a policy decision, especially when those highways are destroying black neighborhoods, which is what has happened historically not here in Ann Arbor, necessarily, but certainly in Detroit. Those are, those are still policy decisions, even if we catch them in purely engineering terms. So, so I’m really excited about these changes, Jessica, Michelle. I don’t know if you had anything else to add to this to this piece of it.
MH: Yeah, I guess, like, you know, it just seemed weird to me when they took that veto power on themselves, because like yeah, they if they want it. I felt like if they wanted to set a different policy that prioritized cars, instead of bike lanes, like they should have just set that policy and let staff do their thing. And if they because if they wanted, because the City Council wanted to, you know, they were asking for specific details about the project. And it’s like, well, you guys aren’t engineers, you don’t, you’re not like sitting here working on this stuff, full time as your full time job like this should be, you know, the City Council should be the people who set policy and then let the people who, you know, but the once the policy decisions have been made. There’s no more like City Council decisions to be made. That’s just engineering stuff.
MK: Exactly, and this was also this policy was also the reason why it took so long to get healthy streets installed in Ann Arbor and added multiple additional layers to the approval process because first city council said yes, make a plan to do this. But then once the plan was made, instead of being able to just implement it City staff had to come back to council and say now. Okay, you need to approve every single road where we are taking a lane away from cars.
MH: And I postponed, some of those votes and stuff like that.
MK: Then they postponed those votes, and then we didn’t actually get healthy streets until the end of the summer. When. Yeah, so that was sort of a perfect example, a sort of microcosm of of how I’m taking this taking this authority away from staff was very effective at slowing things down and not so effective at getting our streets configured the way most people want them, which is safer and slower for bikes and for people
MH: There were three road diets that were specifically voted on and city council allowed one of them and blocked the other two and one of the ones that they blocked was one of the more what would have been one of the more impactful things from what I read from the report, it would, you know, they said well we the engineers, we believe that you know, there’s this many crashes per year. And if we implement this change, there will be this much smaller number of crashes per year and city council decided not to allow that to happen. And, you know, we don’t see their report of what their policy. You know what their priorities were when they did that.
MK: Right.
JL: Talk a lot about who gets to make what decision right and at what time. And to me, this is, as you said, Molly, the perfect microcosm of who decides what when one of the reasons that we like Council setting policy, but not process right so strategy, but not tactics. Is that it allows for more equitable engagement at all points of the process when Council when our elected get involved in staff level decisions. What that means is that they’re kind of obligated to listen to constituent feedback at any point that they get that which means people that have more political connection more political awareness of what’s going on, have more power at every point in the process. As opposed to staff who are trained on equitable outreach, who are trained on income inclusive community engagement and who are doing their best to hear from as many people and as many types of people as live in Ann Arbor Constituent work is not the same as community engagement work there’s there’s room for both But it’s better. It’s so much better for our elected to engage at policy instead of process and for staff to engage at process instead of policy because we tend to get not only do we get a little bit closer to what we want, but we have a smoother, more predictable typically faster less expensive process. So I just wanted to call out say in a lot more words what minority side which is this is a great microcosm of who gets to make one decision.
MK: Yes, I think that’s, that’s exactly right. So I’m, I’m really excited to see this change and I’m hopeful that it will pass. I’m not making a prediction, but I’m hopeful and then
MH: It’s me some talked about healthy streets and so I thought that. Yeah.
MK: Yeah, I didn’t have
MH: That next for healthy streets now.
MK: That’s right.
MH: You were about to do it anyway. And I introduced you jump in, and introduce each other. Here we go. Hey everyone, its Molly hello again.
MK: So I’m now I want to talk about DC five which is the resolution to direct the city administrator to proceed with the design of a healthy streets deployment for spring of 2021 and two appropriate $40,000 from the general fund balance. This is going to require eight votes. So the thin majority that the current Council has they’re going to have to bring a couple of folks over to if they, if this is going to get approved, but the
MH: Bring one folk over
MK: One folk over
MK: Thank you. Great. And I think we might actually get that because I think the co sponsors are sort of a it’s to the extent that we’re bipartisan on council, it’s a sort of by Council party partisan group of sponsors. So the, the, but the point with this is that we want to do healthy streets again the Transportation Commission which disclosing I am on recommended
MH: That tell us again what what healthy streets is
MK: Oh, right. Oh, sure. Um, I think, Michelle was muted when she said that, but she asked me to say what healthy streets, is yes. So, um, how the streets was the project, the program that the city implemented in spring, summer, fall of 2020 in response to the coven 19 pandemic car traffic was way, way, way down, people were trying to get outside to get exercise get sunshine, but there were these recommendations to say six feet apart, at least, and so the hell the streets program was an attempt to create more space for walking and biking on our streets by using car lanes that were mostly being really underutilized, especially in the early months of the pandemic. So those installations went up. I think mostly in August. We talked about them in. I believe the December 19 episode, we talked a bit more about healthy streets. So this is about whether we want to do it again. And in 2021 and you know I think back in 2020 we sort of hoped we would only need to do it once, but the pandemic is still with us. It’s going to be with us a while longer. And so we’re talking about doing it again in 2021. So this resolution is just about allocating a little bit of money for planning last time healthy streets that you know the planning had to happen pretty quickly. There were some bumps, not everything went smoothly. There were issues, especially with how some of the implementations looked and the communication around those implementations people didn’t always understand that they were seeing a bike lane that often looked like construction. And so the idea here is to be really intentional about planning so that we can do it again and do it better and 2021. And so this is to actually fund that work because how the streets happened without much funding last time. So we’re trying to be intentional and funded this time. And so that’s what this. That’s what this resolution is about. There will be more resolutions, although if DC three passes and staff can make decisions about lane reductions without council approval. This won’t have to come back to Council as many times as it did the first time around. I think maybe just one or two more. They’ll, you know, they’ll instruct staff to do healthy streets and they’ll give them some parameters for healthy streets and then staff will be able to go and do it. I will also add that the Transportation Commission is going to be voting this week on creating a healthy streets committee within the Transportation Commission to provide feedback and especially some public engagement opportunities and support so that we can be sure we’re hearing from more people in the community about what we would want to see from healthy streets. So, that is going to get formed and we’re going to be looking for public engagement and public participation in that. And so I will definitely share more about that. Once that happens, we haven’t actually voted on it yet.
JL: I wanted to say one thing about that so Molly’s on the Transportation Commission I’m on the DDA board and while both of us are here firmly not in our official capacities. At least we know a little bit about the work that’s going on at those tables and I wanted to say just one thing about the DDA perspective from that work. Which is that the downtown portion of the healthy streets projects we very explicitly approached it as a pilot. Which is it, are there things that we can learn from the healthy streets work that we can carry forward into other sidewalk and street projects that we already intended to do. So I’m pleased to say that a lot of what we learned was about how to create safer and more robust bike infrastructure in a way that may allow us to kind of ramp up that infrastructure in the downtown, a little bit faster and a little bit better than we had initially thought so healthy streets isn’t just a pandemic response, although that’s where it started. It has more implications in that which is one of the reasons why it’s exciting to see a little bit more intentionality and planning being wrapped around this. If I could, I’m going to take a second for a joke to tamales point about everybody is kind of everybody is a democrat in Ann Arbor, which is not true. We are to party town, but we are typically represented by one party at the Council table which is democrats, but I heard somebody described Ann Arbor politics, one time is if you look at politics anywhere else. It’s a garden, whereas in Ann Arbor. We’re just species of tomato. That’s a little bit. True. So, all right carry on with actual business.
MH: I’m not on any fancy committees, but everywhere.
JL: That is your own committee.
MH: And I’m real excited for healthy streets to come back also great. Awesome.
MK: So I think the next item on the agenda is actually you Michelle, we’re going to talk about the WR MA Yes, which I didn’t know what that stands for. It’s the
MH: national, regional Resource Management Authority and it’s a, so it’s an authority. Okay, so the proposal proposed so okay I’m sorry, I should have written down some notes about how we’re going to talk about this, we actually talked about it in a previous episode.But so, the situation is that our material recovery facility for recycling has been closed for a really long time. And during that time, the city was trying to come up with some schemes to get it open. And I think one of the schemes, they came up with was this was not regional Resource Management Authority, which is supposed to be a collaboration between Ann Arbor and other municipalities throughout the county to work on trash solid waste, you know, recycling kind of thing so that we can get economies of scale work together on things. And make it happen. But the sort of that the authority was actually formed articles of incorporation were drawn up and it came up to city council. The question of do we joined the authority. Now that we helped create and helped write the bylaws of. And at the time, labor was very concerned about it. Because Ann Arbor has some very specific protections for labor that other municipalities in the county don’t have. And so they were worried that if we get ourselves involved in an authority. Are we going to lose the decision making power that protects labor in Ann Arbor, we can end up with outsourcing and arbor has an arbor currently has a resolution in place, saying that we do not intend to outsource residential trash, things like that and will instead use our apps me unionized sanitation workers and they’re worried that we might lose that protection of that resolution. If it was a countywide authority, making that decision. We also have we call it a living wage ordinance so anytime the city council FM the city contracts with a company, they have to pay at least a living wage. To their employees, no matter what else is going on and living wage is calculated by some particular calculations about rent and, you know, food and how much that costs.But you know i don’t think i don’t think the neighboring municipalities have that. And so we’re worried that if the city were to, you know, contract using this authority, instead of making contracts itself that we might lose the protections of the living wage ordinance and then labour was concerned about the voting structure of the authority itself because the way it was set up or originally was to have each municipality have one vote on the authority which would mean that even if Ann Arbor was the biggest, most populous most you know largest user of solid waste services. We could still get outvoted by the other communities that we don’t trust to have our same level of support for labor so this came so that this came up last year so city council voted it down at the behest of labor.
It came back a couple of weeks ago to say, hey, maybe we can join the authority. After all, and labor was still suspicious. And so it was taken off of the agenda couple weeks ago so that they can address the concerns of labor. And I don’t know if that’s been done but the things that I’ve heard since then, from just talking to people and I that things like the solid waste authority wouldn’t have the ability to make contracts itself, it would still have to be the individual municipalities, making the contract and so that wouldn’t invalidate our living wage Jordan and set all and it wouldn’t invalidate our resolution about not outsourcing and things like that so and then if the city were to delegate authority, you know, in the future. To the solid Waste authority that it would have to do so by making a contract with the authority and then that contract would pass on our living wage ordinance and so forth to the authority, who would then have to you know, obey our living wage ordinance, with its subcontractors. So I think labor is going to be less concerned about at this time I’m if I, if what I’m hearing is correct, but you know, I’m just asking around and I was asking around earlier this week before people had really had a chance to delve into it and talk about stuff. Another thing is that the city has since entered into its own. So like, you know, kind of the, the liaison Detroit. Really good at pronouncing French the reason that the authority was created was to kind of open the recycling meanest material recovery facility back up again. But City Council managed to do that on their own. We came up with the funding, we got the Murph back open and so, kind of, you know, are we going to have the same reason to have the authority that we did. I don’t know. So the authority itself doesn’t have. It’s like the only money it’s taking in is a $5,000 annual membership fee from each municipality. So it’s not like it’s going to be this big thing with lots of staff doing lots of work.
Any additional money, it would take would have to come through contracts that the cities and municipalities make with it. And if its main reason for being kind of went away. Maybe it won’t do much on its own. I don’t know.
JL: To that point, Michelle. I’m glad to hear that labor’s concerns will hopefully have been a bit allayed by how Council has evolved to the deal on this. I don’t know a lot about our waste management beyond our recycling program and the fact that that’s just been really bumpy for the last five or 10 years I believe right now we’re shipping our recycling to Toledo, or to Ohio and that there is questionable disposition about a lot of the materials. So that’s concerning and I’m excited to hear the Murph is coming back online. So I’m curious. This is a completely rhetorical question, but just the kind of thing. We try to model for our listeners that it’s okay to not know everything. And so one of my open questions is this authority, something that Ann Arbor is participating in but really brings greater benefit to the townships and to the surrounding me to municipalities and it does for us. We have a large enough municipal body that we can answer a lot of these questions and take care of a lot of these things ourselves but it’s possible. That the authority does more for that group than it does for you know the big kid in the sandbox. So that’s my open question that literally no one is in charge of answering, but
MK: And I don’t think you’re putting a value judgment on that right
JL: No, not you know
MK: Should Ann Arbor do a thing that benefits or neighbors or not. I think you’re that’s, yeah. You’re just asking. Yeah.
JL: That’s shakeout yeah so
MH: Even though the Murph has open, pal. Like, even though Ann Arbor paid for the Murph to open. It’s not like it’s an arborist Murphy. No one else is allowed to use it. Right, everyone up like other municipalities just pay to use it as as needed.
MK: Is Murph. Is that an acronym. It’s material recovery facility. So thanks.
JL: Also a very nice human, but yes.
MH: He is a person called Murphy.
JL: Yeah, so that’s all I was saying is that, you know, we’ve concentrated on the labor and wage aspects of the authority and all I’m saying is that I suspect that it serves a larger function. And even though I don’t know what that is. I’m curious about. I’m curious about it and who is serving so
MH: I was going to try to get in touch with someone from the from the ecology center to talk about this, but I did not get a chance to talk to labor people
JL: Very good. Alright, thanks, Michelle.
MK: Oh, I think it’s Michelle again for the next one to right
MK: So, yeah. Okay, I wrote down on the I wrote down on my list here. First Amendment shenanigans.
MH: So here on the show we kind of try to avoid talking about shenanigans. There are a lot of shenanigans that happen at the city council meetings meetings and we’re kind of protecting you from them. The meetings can last from like 7pm until like 2am I’ve stayed up till two or three in the morning to listen to the city council meetings and a lot of the time that they’re talking. It’s to reiterate points that they’ve made before it’s to call each other names to talk about their bruised egos and um, it’s a hoot to watch, but it’s not it’s not effective governance right and just really quick. I want to say on that.
JL: invite our listeners into a little bit of the sausage making of this podcast. We talked a lot about the difference between governance and politics right so what what are the mechanics of running a city and what is kind of the art of doing it, and we have made a very conscious decision to focus on the mechanics, because the art is so subject to interpretation and there’s a lot of valid discussion about politics about the issues in politics, like there’s a lot of it there. But if you’re new to local politics. If you’re new to trying to figure out what on earth does a city actually do, and how do I get involved. We really explicitly decided we’re going to stay on the governance side and help you understand, but this is something that all three of us felt strongly enough on that. It’s not just a governance issue and we wanted to kind of help everybody understand the context a little bit more so much right interruption.
MH: Right. Yes. The shenanigans at this point have have been raised to the level of that
JL: They needed to governance. Yeah. Right. Right.
MH: Um, so I think this. There were a couple different things going on that kick kick this off. There was an and what this is. I’ll get to for one thing, there’s City Council members say mean things to each other at the Council table. They take things personally and they’re mad at each other. Some city council members have brought up the idea that the that a lot of the stuff that gets said at the Council table doesn’t need to be said and doesn’t need to be said in that forum, at least, and that that takes up a lot of time and when city council is staying up till three o’clock in the morning, making policy decisions that makes it hard and inaccessible for people to stay on top of stuff. And then maybe city council should work to finish their meetings earlier and some, some of the more long winded city council members have taken great umbrage to this.
MK: And there I mean there are lots of. There are lots of reasons why shorter council meetings are are important. I think they My sense is that they’ve been getting longer in the zoom council meeting era. They were already very long, but it’s it’s gotten I think worse, and there’s this issue of public engagement and participation. So people who want to watch council meetings, people who want to make comment at Council meetings.People who want to understand the rationale behind some of these decisions. But then there’s also things like the chilling effect on future runs for Council. If you can’t, if you have to stay up until two or three in the morning. Every other every other Monday. There’s a lot of folks who aren’t going to be able to serve on Council under those conditions and a lot of folks who whose perspectives we might really want on council. And so that’s that’s part of why this is. It’s a problem that these meetings are going so long. Right.
JL: Into the chilling effect thing. Um, you mentioned Michelle about how folks at the counsel table or sometimes unkind to each other how that plays out in the larger community is that people who treat local politics like sports, the right way. We follow along. We have our team. We have our favorites. It means that we get kind of emotionally invested in these conversations. So it’s not just about the comments at the counsel table. It’s about how that has wider echoes in our largest public conversations. And so something that is a civil but maybe unkind exchange at the Council table can turn into 1000 community hours of people being very angry at each other. So there’s there, it’s not to say that disagreement or even arguments. There, there isn’t a place for that. There absolutely is. This is a democracy and we’re always going to be messy. But Council has the responsibility to understand how their conversations with each other impact their constituents and the residents in the wider community. Right.
MH: Yeah, cuz then you know we can’t have clear headed discussions about things in the community because they say, oh, well, if you agree with that, then you must be from the evil camp and you must. You know, you must be one of those evil people who belongs to the conspiracy that I believe in.
JL: Right and Molly’s talking about the length of meetings, having a chilling effect this discourse issue has a chilling effect, too, because there are a lot of people who look at tone in local politics and they say, ah, that feels really abusive. I don’t think I have the time or the Emotional bandwidth to sign up for that. So I won’t so that that was my other concern about that is a chilling effect on potential candidates. Yeah.
MH: So that’s kind of stream number one of the things that went into this, which I’ll talk about what this is, in a minute stream number two was I think related to that some of the acrimonious feelings that people have towards the their teams with the other teams to cause people to call in to city council to make public comments, you know, these are you know general people in the community calling in to make public comments critical of city council members and then. So we had somebody a couple, a couple of city council meetings ago who called in to make to make critical comments about the way that one of the council members conducted some personal business. City Council members, including the one who was being accused of improper business shouted, that person down. This was a caller who had called in, you know, and they were shouted down by the three by three city council members. And then somebody called in at the next meeting to say they didn’t like that. And they said I take the first amendment very fucking seriously. And that caused all the city council members to have a big long discussion about how how they could stop people from using swear words at city council meetings and how they could make sure that the public commenters were behaving appropriately and that seems to me like it has first amendment implications because they’re trying this is this is literally the government trying to censor people who are trying to talk to them about about business. So,
I says, you know, well, can they do that. And so, okay, now I’m going to talk about this thing that’s actually on the City Council agenda this week which raised this from the level of shenanigans to policy. And that is that there’s a resolution on the agenda. That’s called. Wait, what does it actually officially called
MK: You mean it’s not called shenanigans.
MH: First. First Amendment shenanigans. You see a resolution requesting legal memo for public release and want to have because there was a lot of debate at the Council table about whether the city council have the authority to censor collars. And so now, some of the pro censorship city council members have sponsored resolution asking the city attorney to weigh in on the question of whether the City Council can do this and they’re asking the city attorney to write a public memo for public release. About the degree to which city council can censor public collars and I have to assume that, since this is sponsored by the pro censorship council members that they’re expecting to get an answer of yes it is okay for the for the city council to censor callers and so I called up a law professor and asked about this and you know, because I haven’t seen what the city attorney has to say yet but and we won’t until this thing is approved ,but he actually surprised me by saying yes the city council does have the authority to censor people in this. They said that this is what’s called a that city council public comment is what’s called a limited public forum. So there’s he said three categories of fora. In a public forum. That’s places like the streets, the sidewalks, the parks. There is hardly any rules about what can be said and there’s no responsibility, like the government doesn’t take responsibility for what anyone’s saying so people can say whatever they want speech is the most protected in those type of forums in a non public forum. People have no reasonable expectation of being able to speak, or even enter so like that would be places like you know, maybe the mayor’s office or something like that, like, you know, just city hall, you’re not expected to be. It’s a public, you know, it’s a public building, but you’re not expected to be able to just like walk into the transportation department and be like my road suck, you know, and that’s a non public forum and but what we have with the city council public comment section is a limited public forum. It’s there are there are rules, the rules have to be clear. They’re not allowed to place rules on viewpoint of the rules have to be viewpoint neutral.
MK: We have to be applied equally to right
MH: Right.
MH: They have to be applied equally. The other thing is that the rules are, have to be
within reason content neutral. So viewpoint neutral. It’s, you know, whether you’re going up there to say, you know, council members so and so is awesome, our council council members so and so is crappy like they can’t they can’t censor one and not sincere. The other, you know, but they can in some to some degree be content. They can not have content neutrality for something they can they can place reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on people’s content so they can say this is a public forum to discuss this thing, you know, this is a public forum where we’re going to discuss the Lockwood resounding and you can only talk about Lockwood rezoning that would be a content risk.
MK: We do have those kinds of restrictions in place already right if somebody’s house. Yeah. When, when we have public hearings for things you have to be calling in to talk about that topic and if you’re using public comment reserve time and there’s a public hearing happening. And that’s a meeting, you can’t use reserve time to talk about what’s what. There will be a public hearing for later in the meeting. You’re supposed to call in during public hearing time. So those we already do have a rule. Yeah.
MH: But, uh, the, yeah, we have some. We do have some rules like that and like, for example, the thing that you have to call in as an advanced there’s only 10 slots before the meeting. That’s, that’s a restriction that they’re allowed to make the, the fact that you only have three minutes. The fact that people are, you know, people who are talking about something that’s on the agenda have priority. That’s a reasonable time, place, and manner restriction on content. And so that is kind of set up by you know those restrictions have to be clear, and they have to be laid out and they are clear and laid out in the Council rules which were passed a few weeks ago saying you know what people were expected to do when they do public comment. And you know what the format of the meetings and so forth. Oh, another thing though is that even with those time, place, and manner restrictions those have to be applied equally as well. So like you can’t like let the people that you agree with talk about things that are off topic and let the people who you don’t agree with you know, talk about. You can’t just let them ramble on so yeah, so we’re probably going to hear that city council does have the ability to do these things to restrict people from making the First Amendment. For making some protected speech, we might so they might at some point, ask people to stop using swear words or something like that. We don’t know what it’s going to come from this they’ve been but if City Council feels that they have the authority to make these things make to make more restrictions on public speaking, then they might choose to do so currently, the Council rules say that if somebody is out of order, it’s the responsibility of the chair of the meeting I eat the mayor, usually to call that person out of order. Um, and you know some of the council members have been unhappy with the way the chair has been doing that.
MK: Which is to say that he hasn’t been doing it.
MH: Right. He’s been letting people speak for the most part. And to me, that seems like the right call like people should like I think we should be erring on the side of it’s really hard for ordinary people to get involved in this stuff. And if they choose to do so. Their goddamn hero, and we should let them talk, you know, we shouldn’t say like, okay, you can talk but you got to follow all these rules. Very specifically, it’s just throwing up more barriers in people’s faces. And if you speak one word out align. We’re gonna cut your mic off, you know,
JL: And I say, I think for me, part of the sensitivity. So there’s a First Amendment sensitivity here, right, like our council members allowed to tell us what we can and can’t say I am also incredibly frustrated that we have completely derailed the original conversation into pearl clutching we have gone from an earnest conversation on, I think it was housing was the prompt for the initial comment into our swears appropriate for public conversation that is not an interesting Council conversation for me at all. I wish that they had been as outraged as the speaker. By the policy issue at question and not gone into like a civility discourse, so that you know all three of us had a sensitivity to this resolution for different reasons. That one’s mine. We’ve Totally Gotten off topic.
MH: Yeah definitely like civility is something that can be used as like I think proponents of Seville of like talking about civility like to think that they’re making the the the forum more accessible by insisting that everyone actually civil all the time, but a lot of times, civility is also used as a cudgel you know like if if you don’t like what someone’s saying you just accuse them of being in uncivil, you know,
JL: That, that’s what you know plays into what a lot of folks refer to as tone policing right you’re not. You’re not engaging with what I’m saying it. You’re telling me how to say it, and that you’re not going to listen to me unless I say it exactly the way you want me to
MH: And fun fatone police chief I saw an article in the newspaper saying that an amendment to the city council rules is going to be coming up. Though it’s being written by some some different members of the city council member on the Rules Committee and I think it looked like it was mostly going to be governing interactions between Council members, rather than trying to police to try and get home police to each of the public
MK: So yeah, it’s not coming up quite yet. Right we’ll have a chance to talk about that more when it happens right
MH: But yeah, what’s our what’s our action this time, I’d say, contact your city council members, tell them that you think it’s okay for people to talk and tell them that you think that like whether or not the city council has the legal authority to do a bunch of tone policing that maybe they shouldn’t for the for accessibility reasons. Maybe they should have a thicker skin and allow the public to
MK: Say whatever the fuck they want
MH: Tell them specifically, that you take the first amendment.
JL: Very funny money seriously. Good job, and so on that note, thank you again for participating in this podcast. This was I think the media’s to Council agenda that we’ve gotten into since the new Council sat in November, and it was a lot of fun to go through! Thanks for listening to Ann Arbor AF. We’re your co hosts Molly Kleinman, Michelle Hughes, and myself, Jess Letaw; and thanks to producer Jarod Malestein. For questions about this podcast or ideas about future episodes, you can email us at annarborafpod@gmail.com. Get informed, then get involved. It’s your city!
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