A2Politico: Ann Arbor Politics Grilled To Perfection

Ann Arbor is bleeding money.

Since 2006, the cost of running our city government has increased $33 million dollars, or 35 percent. We have fewer police and firefighters than we did in 2005, but pay $13 million dollars per year more than we did in 2005 for the dregs of the emergency services Mayor Hieftje and Roger Fraser haven’t “streamlined” yet. We’re stocking up on water buckets at our house. We’ll toss water at the fire until the two fire boys in the truck get here.

There are some people who have been trying to get this message out to the general public for several years now. Want some insider baseball? Of course you do. Why else are you frittering away time on this blog, right?

The once-derided political “conspiracy theorists” in Ann Arbor have the cred now, and the politicians are scrambling to pick up the broken shards of their integrity before the summer campaigning season is upon us. The AnnArborChronicle.com photo of political activist Karen Sidney chatting it up with State Senate wanna-be Pam Byrnes says it all. In a May of 2009 piece, the Ann Arbor News political writer Judy McGovern described Sydney as “a regular critic of City Council.” Read: crackpot complainer.

Photo by David Askins, AnnArborChronicle.com

One short month later, in June 2009, thanks to a FOIA of Council emails, readers of the Ann Arbor News discovered that there was a conspiracy. There were vote-rigging, scripted debates, time spent on Facebook and planning judicial campaigns in the middle of City Council meetings.

Unfortunately some people never learn. Our local politicos are trying to defend their integrity by using the same old strategies they used before Ann Arborites read in June and July 2009 in front page stories in the Ann Arbor News about emails between Council members during open meetings that were, well, less than professional and, a pending lawsuit alleges, illegal under the auspices of the Michigan Open Meetings Act. Our Mayor and Council members are rationalizing, dissembling, and ignoring mounting citizen concerns and criticisms of the process under the auspices of which the Library Lot RFP proposals have been evaluated. That’s always the best way to inspire confidence. Even the newspaper weighed in with an editorial in which the writer hoped the RFP process would be “open and honest.” 

It is a serious allegation to say that city officials colluded with a developer. It is equally serious to allege that city officials conducted a sham RFP process to develop the Library Lot parcel in order to cover up the collusion. First Ward Council member Sabra Briere recently circulated an email containing “clarifying information” to a select group of people hoping, of course, the email would be forwarded. In that email, she makes allegations that well before there was talk of issuing an RFP to solicit proposals to built atop the 1.2 acre Library Lot parcel,  Mayor Hieftje, former Chamber of Commerce Jesse Bernstein and City Administrator Roger Fraser, settled on the idea that Ann Arbor needed a convention center. 

Here’s a sad truth: she compounded the problem for citizens concerned about the transparency and honesty of the RFP process, not to mention the propensity of our elected officials to sneak around. Briere chose the worst possible medium for disseminating her allegations—an email sent to 120 people. There are 96,000 registered voters in Ann Arbor. She disseminated her “clarifying” information in such a way that allows those whose actions and motives she questions, to continue on, unfettered. The email leaves Briere free to throw up her hands and say, “But I told everyone what I knew!”

Feeling used and manipulated  yet? 

Briere did little except launch an email shitzu storm. Elected officials with integrity, and who believe they have allegations of wrong-doing, launch investigations. Yes, it would have been Briere’s word against the words of the Mayor, Bernstein and Fraser. However, that’s why the FBI has been showing up in towns across the U.S. (including cities in Michigan) to objectively investigate allegations of corruption in local government. This is from the FBI web site:

Does the FBI investigate graft and corruption in local government and in state and local police departments?

Yes. The FBI uses applicable federal laws, including the Hobbs Act, to investigate violations by public officials in federal, state, and local governments. A public official is any person elected, appointed, employed, or otherwise has a duty to maintain honest and faithful public service. Most violations occur when the official asks, demands, solicits, accepts, receives, or agrees to receive something of value in return for influence in the performance of an official act. The categories of public corruption investigated by the FBI include legislative, judicial, regulatory, contractual, and law enforcement.

There’s even a list of hotlines on the FBI web site that citizens can call to discuss their concerns about allegations of corruption on the part of local politicos. 

People who have commented on the post in which I simply reproduced Briere’s email seem to have taken exception to the fact that I couldn’t seem to find the good in Briere’s release of the “information.”

Is it me? What information? 

You can read Briere’s email here. She also shared it with AnnArbor.com. So far, none of those whom Briere fingers in her email have come forward to refute her claims. My guess is that none of them will. Why should they? They don’t have to say a word, and the train will just steam on down the track. 

It would have been infinitely better for everyone if City Council member Sabra Briere had brought up her issues at a public City Council meeting. Those about whom she writes in her email would have, I’m sure, had something to say about the allegations had they been made during an open meeting. Then, the public and law enforcement agencies would have had a videotaped record. 

Right now, what we have is an email from Briere sent to a limited group of about 120 people on her email list alleging, well, that Chamber of Commerce President Jesse Bernstein was upset because he thought the Valiant Group’s proposal should be fast-tracked. Briere writes, “At our meeting, Bernstein said he felt betrayed. He said that Valiant’s proposal for a conference center was a consensus project, and that it was not fair that Valiant should have to jump through all of these hoops.” Jesse Bernstein is free to feel betrayed about anything. Heck, he can feel betrayed because Lady Gaga won’t write a song for him and perform at his next birthday party, or because the democratic process slows down those with the belief that they know what’s best for everyone else. I think the term for people who find the democratic process way too inconvenient is “French aristocrat,” but I’ll have to check with one of my therapist friends. The real term may be something like “delusions of grandeur.”

Briere then alleges a June 14th meeting with Mayor Hieftje about which she writes, the Mayor “…loaned me a copy of a proposal titled ‘Ann Arbor Town Center’ from Valiant Partners LLD, dated May, 2009.  On its cover was a green and white sticky note stating ‘Thanks, John.  This is pretty interesting.  Sandi.’”

Well, boychics, Briere ain’t got bubkas, so say the nice ladies at the Maj games going on around town. How my mother phrased it was slightly more prosaic: “She ain’t got diddly squat.” What we have, again, is Council member Briere’s word in an email against the Mayor’s, and no green and white sticky note, or copy of the proposal he gave to her.

Had she kept the proposal the Mayor gave her, and gone to the Press with it, or showed up at the next City Council meeting with it and asked just what in the name of Boss Tweed was going on with circulating such a proposal to City Council members from a group for a development project two months before the actual RFP was issued, we would be having a much different discussion in our city at this moment. One comment from my original post on the subject of Briere’s “clarifying” email was: “While I wish Council Member Briere had disclosed this information sooner, I believe the article focuses too much attention on that delay rather than on the content of her message. While it is perplexing why she might have held this information so long, it is wildly outrageous that others may have engaged in assisting one of the RFP developers over the last couple of years….Please provide more coverage of the misdeeds of those who seem to have made up their minds on building a conference center before releasing the RFP.”

Alas, timing is everything in this situation. It’s Briere’s delay that is the issue because the delay allowed those who were sneaking around behind the public’s back to keep doing so without being exposed or challenged by a member of the governing body on which they all sit. The public can come and speak before Council until we’re blue in the face (and regularly do), but it’s another matter entirely to have a member of City Council go on the record, in public, with the concerns that Briere chose to circulate via email to the people who will donate to her next campaign, or potentially vote for her in her next election.

It’s Sabra Briere’s delay and the way in which she “leaked” out her “clarifying information” that weakens the effectiveness of any coverage of the misdeeds of those who seem to have their minds made up on building a conference center before releasing the RFP.

I pieced together chain of repeated contact between RFP Advisory Committee members and the Valiant Group’s partners from FOIAed emails. The post is circumstantial evidence that city officials worked diligently to help the Valiant Group prepare its proposal, because it was the Valiant Group’s proposal City Administrator Roger Fraser, Chamber of Commerce former president Jesse Bernstein and Mayor John Hieftje wanted to have built—perhaps the three even promised the partners of the Valiant Group that their proposal would be built. LocalAnnArbor blogger Vivienne Armentrout has written on the RFP subject, and has provided what amounts to more circumstantial evidence that the RFP process was rigged. Armentrout writes about the Valiant Group as having had the “inside track.”

Sabra Briere, as her email shows quite clearly, had access to the people involved, and information circulated, that no regular citizen had. She chose to keep quiet because, one might posit, in June she was concerned with protecting her own political  hide. Why? Because the deadline for filing petitions to run in the August 2009 City Council race was June 22, 2009. Briere ran unopposed from the Mayor’s camp. He showed her the proposal she mentions in her email on June 14, 2009. 

So why send her “clarifying information” email in January 2010, an email that hangs Hieftje, Smith, Fraser and Bernstein (currently on the AATA Board) out to dry? My guess is that either Briere is entertaining the notion of running for Mayor, or that it has finally become clear to her that playing along with the Council majority will get her little, politically. Perhaps she has realized that she has alienated a growing section of her political base. Thus, Sabra Briere has, once again, become the Council member “concerned” enough about possible collusion, and alleged back-room deals to “expose” them. Sabra Briere wants her peeps to know she is not a part of the “Council cabal,” as former DDA Board member Rene Greff described Mayor Hieftje, Margie Teall, Fourth Ward Council member Marcia Higgins and Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo in an interview with A2Politico.

I have to wonder if Sabra Briere shared her the information in her “clarifying information” email with any Council members other than Stephen Rapundalo in January 2010, some seven months after she was shown the Valiant Group’s proposal with a note that, purportedly, shows that Sandi Smith had been shown the proposal, as well. Did she talk to Third Ward’s Steve Kunselman or Ward Five’s Mike Anglin about the information in her “clarifying information” email?  

Did Sabra Briere take her concerns to City Attorney Stephen Postema and ask for a written opinion on the legality of the Mayor showing around the Valiant Group’s Proposal to Council members months prior to issuance of the public RFP, and months before she could, potentially, be expected to vote on a proposal from the same group?

Sabra Briere’s “clarifying information” email did little for me except bring up a slew of discomforting questions. Furthermore, unless those named in her email are challenged directly during an open Council meeting by Council members with the cajones to do it, we can all look forward to business as usual: Mayor and Council will continue to run hell bent for leather to commit taxpayers to several more major multi-million dollar construction projects our city call ill-afford before August comes and, perhaps, people go to the polls with a “throw the bums out” mentality.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Related Grilled Entrées

• The Politics of Financial Football: Throwing The Hail Mary Pass in the First Quarter
• The Politics of Cooking the Books: Ann Arbor As A French Restaurant
• The Politics of Captain Renault: Sabra Briere Is “Shocked” About Secret Backroom Dealing (With A Poll)
• The Politics of Thuggery: City Administrator Negotiates With Firefighters’ Union Like Don Vito Corleone