ANN ARBOR POLITICS!
this is still a surface parking lot [flickr user Dennis Sparks]

City Council Endorsements, 2020 Comment Count

Brian July 17th, 2020 at 3:31 PM

Election is August 4.

tl;dr: vote for Lisa Disch in Ward 1, Linh Song in Ward 2, Travis Radina in Ward 3, Jen Eyer in Ward 4, and Erica Briggs in Ward 5. Vote Eli Savit for prosecutor.

The dog caught the car in the last election. After a 20+ year streak of mayorally-aligned, generally-realistic city councils the last election saw a wave of outright NIMBYs take a majority. You can criticize that 20-year period for not doing enough to move the city forward, but it seems like a primary reason the voting swung against them last time around was minor adjustments to make water rates more equitable. So… yeah.

Anyway: I thought it would be bad, and it's been bad. The mayor highlighted a number of irresponsible actions the new majority, henceforth known as the antis since they vote against almost everything, has taken in the brief time they've had:

We believe that the conservative Council majority threatens to push Ann Arbor in the wrong direction. Some of their unwise actions include:
• Firing nationally-respected City Administrator without cause, resulting in $275K payout
• Voting “No” on affordable housing
• Rejecting “Safe Routes to Schools” grant for new sidewalks
• Ignoring the explicit advice of city traffic engineers
• Suing the City of Ann Arbor (Ward 1 incumbent)
• Voting to reallocate $2.3M+/yr of millage money dedicated to climate action, affordable housing, pedestrian safety
• Wasting $1M by blocking $4.2M re-purchase of the Old Y-Lot, bought later for $5.2M

This is an incomplete assessment of the damage the NIMBY majority has done. I'm going to highlight a couple of other events that demonstrate how disingenuous and/or incompetent the anti party is.

[After THE JUMP: either the most boring post of the year or the most fascinating]

Water rates fail. About those rates: the antis ran on overturning a proposed water rate structure that shifted more of the burden to single family homeowners. This was either ignorant or dishonest since state law dictates that utility costs must be proportionate to the costs of service. Ann Arbor paid subject matter experts to figure out what the water rates should be and were bound by that report. Not following it would be an invitation to get sued.

After the council majority shifted the city paid for a second opinion. Despite hand-selecting a consultant, that report came back saying that the first report was right.

mbugwr7wa5l21

Jack Eaton floated defying state law and then the antis tried to drop the matter without anyone noticing. They did not change the water rates. There was no way they could, but they lied to the city and blew 50k on a futile attempt to do so.

More cops as crime declines. The most recent budget process saw Jack Eaton and Jane Lumm fighting tooth and nail to add two police officers to the AAPD. Doubly galling because Eaton has cynically tried to woo the local activist community despite opposing every single thing that could make Ann Arbor less segregated. Triply galling because the money spent on unnecessary police came from new housing that Eaton and Lumm fight tooth and nail against. Eaton recently scrubbed this from his campaign website:

EcWrksyXsAM9Ihw

Eaton has been advocating for more cops since at least 2013. Recent 11-0 votes against approving a new police contract cannot wipe away the fact that Eaton, Lumm, and Bannister—the three incumbent Antis running—have supported increasing police presence in a town that has seen crime rates plummet over the last decade. At best, that's wasteful.

At best.

Firing the city administrator without cause. The Antis fired Howard Lazarus, the city administrator, because they were collectively throwing a fit that their majority didn't allow them to do anything and everything they wanted. Christopher Taylor, the mayor, still had veto power and used it a few times—largely to prevent about 2% of the general fund from being re-allocated away from pedestrian safety and affordable housing initiatives. This infuriated the Antis, and so they fired the city administrator and then said they "needed better leadership" from the mayor.

Lumm in particular has a deep-seated and frankly incomprehensible antipathy to Lazarus. When Kai Petainen FOIAed Eaton's emails the resulting document very little of import from Eaton himself. It did catch a number of emails from Lumm to Eaton that highlighted Lumm's thin skin and tendency to rage about Lazarus. If you want to go through the entire 3600 page pdf, here it is.

If you'd like me to boil it down for you, here is an email from Lazarus. He is responding to an anti party initiative to give the council the ability to vote down changes to road configurations that were previously the purview of city traffic engineers:

MPT Lumm:

I am requesting that you defer this resolution until the April 15th meeting to provide time for us to work collaboratively on the language, as I disagree with much of its tone and content.  I believe as written it may improperly inject Council into engineering safety decisions.  If you still desire to have this introduced as presented at Monday’s Council meeting, I will object and ask the Council defer until we have an opportunity to review it in greater detail. 

I understand your perspective, especially as it relates to the Earhart proposal, but that project is not time-sensitive. Provided the opportunity and courtesy for review and discussion, I believe we can come up with a resolution that is more positive and workable.

Please let me know before the 4:30 cut-off for the agenda tomorrow.  Thank you for your consideration.

Howard S. Lazarus

(The Earhart proposal was testing out a roundabout at an intersection with a high rate of crashes. It was a bollards-and-paint reconfiguration that would have cost low five figures, and could have been reversed if it proved ineffective.)

Lumm's responded huffily to the above email, starting with "To be honest, I am not sure what you’re talking about," and then fired this off to Taylor:

The City Administrator, AKA the 12th man on council, just lost any chance I would support 3%.    He’s done this to me, time and time again.  I have served with 4 city administrators, and I’ve always been as difficult/opinionated as I am now, and I have NEVER been treated ANYWHERE like this, and I’m really, really tired of it.

(No idea what 3% means.)

One more from Lazarus, here supporting Ann Arbor's participation in a proposed regional waste authority (ie, having a seat at the table while a waste authority was discussed, nothing more):

MPT Lumm:

We appreciate your concerns and question about the City’s potential participating in a regional solid waste authority (SWA). FYI – our thoughts are that we change the topic of the April work session from transportation to solid waste so we can have an in-depth discussion at that time. That would allow deferral of the SWA unit the meeting after the work session. Please let me know your thoughts, and thank you for your continued support on many matters.

Howard S. Lazarus

Again Lumm fires off a snotty note after responding to Lazarus, this time to Eaton:

OK, this is the start of the file for next year’s evaluation. Will never change his ways………….

This kind of thing happens over and over in the document. And it was this evaluation that the Antis used to justify Lazarus's dismissal.

“I think the final nail in the coffin was the evaluations,” [Ramlawi] said of council members’ recent reviews of Lazarus.

An evaluation full of notes like the above, twisted into something worthy of a firing when Lazarus is being treated like garbage by the council majority. Lazarus is primarily guilty of supporting the subject matter experts the city employs to address hard problems when the new council majority treats them like idiots.

It didn't take long for Lazarus to find a job that looks like a step up as executive director of a county six times the size of Ann Arbor. A council member there:

“When I saw Howard Lazarus’ resume, it pretty much blew me away.”

Sigh.

Undermining democratic values and process. The antis put the resolution to fire the city administrator without cause on the agenda at the last possible second. They consistently pull out items from the consent agenda* to disclaim about them at length only to pass them 10-1 or even 11-0. Meetings now consistently go to 1 or 2 AM. They take potshots at the mayor with alarming consistency. Recommendations from city staff are ignored or voted down.

Two members of the planning commission were shot down on reappointments because they had the temerity to politely disagree with actions the Anti party was undertaking. The Antis then floated naming Tom Stulberg, a local landlord who sued the city over their authority to re-zone a parcel, to replace him. The conflict of interest should be obvious. Fortunately, the mayor makes appointments.

I wish I could say I was surprised that it's been this bad. I'm not. When Ward 1 incumbent Anne Bannister gives a shout out to Pat Lesko for her campaign, and this is how Pat Lesko acts in a public forum…

…you can hardly be surprised when the anti party turns the council into a circus.

*[A bunch of stuff like "renew this contract with the company that provides IT services" and "close this street for this event" that is presumed to pass without discussion in order for meetings to focus on non-trivial items.]

Flat-out lying. Bannister's latest mailer twists a blog post about "The Petty Corruption of a 'Concierge' City Council" into a supposed endorsement from one of the people who she blocked from a Planning reappointment:

Eaton has still not explained or apologized for lying about a supposed "drug house" on the west side of town that is completely fictional. Lumm is a Republican pretending to be a Democrat.

The council members endorsing Lumm, Bannister, and Eaton include the Richard Spencer fan and "snowflake" derider who attempted to DMCA an archive of his public tweets plus the "pedestrian safety advocate" who literally votes against all pedestrian safety measures. They will try to tell you that they are not a council faction while cross-endorsing each other.

image

Cumong man.

It doesn't have to be like this

So far this has been pretty depressing.

Thankfully, the city has responded after the mayoral faction was caught flat-footed last time around. I've met all of the candidates the mayor endorsed (except Travis Radina) and have been impressed with their depth of thought, professionalism, and genuine desire to help everyone in the community, not just established homeowners and out-of-town landlords. (I'm sure Radina is the same, I just haven't met him.) All have been involved with the community for years. The mayor's newsletter has details on each candidate that I won't repeat here in a post that's already running long. 

We can do better than the above. While I would vote for The Spot over anyone running on the anti party ticket, the slate below is not only an alternative to the above nonsense but a group of people who I'd be excited to have making decisions about how the city grows over the next decade. 

Changing the city does not mean wiping out single family homes en masse, which is this election cycle's lie of choice for the antis. It doesn't even mean living next to a house that's bigger than what's already legal. My neighborhood has seen a couple of massive McMansions go in over the past couple years, and I think about how nice it would be if those homes held four families who worked at the hospital or at a downtown restaurant or my kid's school. Instead it's one home out of the reach of any but the one percent.

We can change Ann Arbor so that the people who work here can live here, reducing traffic, increasing per-capita tax revenue, and slowing the gentrification of Ypsilanti. We don't have to touch single family neighborhoods to do so. There is big slice of the city that is all student rentals that could be something more than a bunch of run-down single family homes converted to have six bedrooms. We don't have to add unnecessary cops to harass the less fortunate. We don't have to waste huge amounts of time getting grants for sidewalks so kids can walk to school safely and then voting them down.

We do need a plan for what to do as the city continues to add jobs and students. The people to do that are:

Ward 1: Lisa Disch
Ward 2: Linh Song
Ward 3: Travis Radina
Ward 4: Jen Eyer
Ward 5: Erica Briggs

Pretending nothing is happening is not a plan.

Comments have been turned off for this post but if you'd like to engage with me about it you're welcome to use Twitter.