A2Politico: Ann Arbor Politics Grilled To Perfection

August 23, 2010

The Politics of Backdoor Privatization: Ann Arbor Residents To Pay $100,000 Each to Serve On All Volunteer Fire/Police Departments

Filed under: Mayor Hieftje, city council, city services, infrastructure — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 11:18 am
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This piece, below my comments, comes from Salon. I thought Alyssa Battistoni’s perspective was refreshing, and her look at backdoor privatization captures exactly what is going on in Ann Arbor. Here, in Lake Woebegone-on-the-Huron, where all the men have Ph.D.s, all the woman have Ph.D.s, but are doing “research” on their books at home while raising their children, all of whom are above average, backdoor taxation and backdoor privatization of services are on the rise. Of course, AnnArbor.com’s Simple Simon reporting of Hizzoner’s wild logic that fewer police and firefighters are needed because our city’s “crime rate” has dropped, and firefighters need to hook up to a hydrant less and less has done wonders to assure the plebes that Rome will never burn, or that Alaric will never breach the 100 percent organic, free range city walls and sack the Temple of the Three Judicial Dieties. 

As we all know, those foolish enough to question the fairytales about police and fire safety told by the elected leaders of our city are misleading the public shamelessly, and looking to spark needless alarm amongst the oldsters who, yes, might need to dial 911—if they could find the eleven on their phones, that is. Here’s what we might overhear in the Executive Wash Room at City Hall: the reporters and editors at the New York Times and WSJ are all Tea-Baggers who’ve never even done a shred of work at a single quality news publication!  

Heck, John Hieftje and Roger Fraser are just a single AnnArbor.com government news story away from being able to claim that their systematic decimation of our police and fire coverage has actually resulted in less crime and fewer fires. Yes, fair people of Ann Arbor, if we got rid of our police and fire departments, Ann Arbor, could be just a heartbeat away from winning awards as the only town in the entire United States where there are absolutely no reports of crime made to sworn officers, or reports of fire emergencies made to trained firefighters. As the Police-Court Tin Can goes further and further over-budget with more and more 10-0 votes to allocate General Fund money to the Black Hole of a project by elected leaders, look for City Council to propose the Ann Arbor all volunteer police and fire departments.

A “study” on the switch to all-volunteer police and fire departments prepared by city staff, and given three thumbs up by Roger Fraser, will provide the usual quality research to Council and the public. The report will outline that in Madison, Seattle, Portland, Oz and Wonderland, volunteer police and fire fighters are required to buy their own fire trucks and police cruisers, and volunteers pay their respective cities $100,000 per year each. Volunteer police and firefighters will be appointed by Mayor and Council from among members of PAC, the Housing, Planning and Environmental Commissions. Katherine Talcott, who was hired part-time to administer the Percent for the Art Program, then hired full-time to administer the same program—with her salary being paid from the city’s water-sewer slush fund, will be appointed the Police/Fire Chief. Her appointment will be made just as soon as German (con) artist Herbert Dreiseitl gets an installation for a new fountain for anyone, anywhere completed. 

The Downtown Development Authority (DDA) will be tapped for $2 million dollars per year to pay for the extra management of the Ann Arbor all volunteer police and fire departments. 

Former members of the Downtown Development Authority will go before Council seated in shopping carts, talk about their objections to the back-room dealings that resulted in, well, things they can’t really elaborate on because, well, they might like to be appointed to another board or committee in the future. 

Enjoy the Salon piece. I did.  

 

 

 

It has come to this: Parents are now being asked to send their children to school with their own toilet paper. And not just toilet paper, but all sorts of basic items that schools themselves used to provide for kids. It’s all part of a disturbing trend, highlighted by the New York Times last week, of cash-strapped public schools — their budgets eviscerated by state cutbacks — shifting more and more financial responsibility onto parents.

Privatization meant transferring responsibility for entire programs or functions to the private sector. But with the drastic budget cuts that states have been forced to make, responsibility for public services and programs is literally being forced into private hands one roll of toilet paper at a time. We’ve entered the era of backdoor privatization.

On the surface, these stop-gap measures don’t seem unreasonable. After all, it’s hardly new for parents in well-off school districts to chip in for supplies, music classes and even teacher’s salaries in an effort to minimize the effect of school budget cuts on their children. What is new, though, is the extent to which families are being asked to contribute basic items. This may be too much to ask of parents who are struggling to pay their own bills — especially since they’ve already paid taxes that are supposed to support the public school system.

Nor is backdoor privatization a phenomenon limited to local schools.

Public university systems are increasingly emulating private universities by turning to wealthy alumni for donations — even as tuition rises because some legislators see hiking it as a way to raise money for their fungible state budget items.

Missouri, Georgia, and Arizona have been forced to slash their transit budgets and services, leaving hundreds of thousands without a way to get to their jobs, or to a doctor, or school. This has forced thousands of people to revert to private modes of transportation.

Many states have also cut funding for fire and police departments, resulting in slower emergency response times and diminished crime investigation. Fire department cuts have exacerbated the trend in wildfire-prone areas (among those who can afford it) of hiring private firefighting companies to protect homes, heralding a return to the 19th-century practice in which private firefighting companies raced each other to put out blazes and collect their reward.

Some towns have even started to shut off street lights to save money on electricity bills.

This backdoor privatization diminishes the quantity and quality of the services available to the general public while nurturing the growth of a parallel profit-making infrastructure for those who can afford supplementary services.

Presumably, such budget cuts are temporary, a product of the recession. But it’s not hard to imagine a future in which, say, ever-strapped state and local governments decide to follow the private sector’s lead in taking advantage of new “efficiencies.” In fact, some schools are already refraining from hiring needed teachers despite receiving federal dollars to help tide them over for the year. And even temporary cuts can do a lot of damage: Public transportation reductions, for example, can force people to give up jobs that require them to commute to work.

Certainly, some budget cuts are necessary in difficult economic times. But when we decide it’s better to turn off street lights and shut down bus lines than to raise taxes on the rich, reduce charitable tax deductions, or create a value-added tax, we are deciding that the quality and availability of the public goods should be determined by the amount individuals can pay — and not the amount a rich nation can afford. It’s a choice that undermines not only our claim that we value “ordinary Americans” as equals but also our ability to produce the healthy, educated, productive population on which our future prosperity depends.

The best-case scenario is that the impact of these cuts will help people understand just what their tax dollars are paying for and spur greater consciousness about the relationship between public spending and public goods. Now that shortages of teachers and books are spreading to suburbia, we’ll decide that shortfalls in education funding are unacceptable after all.

The worst-case scenario, though, is that reduced public spending on essential goods and services will continue to hollow out our infrastructure and reduce our capacity to meet the needs of most Americans. And that rather than have a real conversation about which public goods we consider essential and what we’re willing to do to pay for them, we’ll gradually starve core programs until working- and middle-class Americans grow accustomed to a lower standard of living while better-off Americans pay out of pocket for benefits that everyone once enjoyed.

Here’s hoping for a wake-up call.

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April 5, 2010

The Politics of Perks: Residency Must Have Its Privileges

Filed under: best of A2Politico, boards and commissions, city services, taxes — Tags: , , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 12:28 pm
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When I was a kid, at the beginning of every summer vacation kids in Dearborn, Michigan got a free pool pass, a tag that was sewn on to the proud owner’s swimsuit. Today, Dearborn (population 97,700) has eight outdoor pools and a summer family pool pass costs $90 for residents. Ann Arbor has four public pools (one of which was targeted for closure), and a family pass for residents this year will cost $250. Dearborn has a single public golf course, and on a weekend 18 holes with a cart will cost a resident $28.00. At the Leslie Golf Course in Ann Arbor, 18 holes and a cart cost $38.00, with no break for residents. Dearborn is the 10th largest city in Michigan, and Ann Arbor is the 5th largest. Dearborn has 37,000 residences, and that’s pretty darn close to Ann Arbor’s 45,000 residences. Finally, both Ann Arbor and Dearborn host the University of Michigan and other non-profits (in Dearborn it’s the gigantic Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village). 

Why does it cost 2.5 times more for Ann Arbor residents to buy a summer pool pass than it does for Dearborn residents? Why, for that matter, does the 10th largest city in Michigan have twice as many public pools as the fifth largest city, with its substantially higher per capita property taxes? The answer, of course, is that in Dearborn services and recreational facilities for residents are a major spending priority, and have been for the last 50 years. While Ann Arbor taxpayers are forced to fund a new $47 million dollar Police-Court building, in 1996 Dearborn taxpayers were asked at the polls and agreed overwhelmingly to float a bond to finance a $46 million dollar Cultural Center  for the residents of that city. The Cultural Center includes a 1,200 seat theater, two indoor pools, a climbing wall, a senior center, fitness center and an art gallery among other amenities. It costs a resident family $564 per year to use the Cultural Center.

Being a resident of Dearborn has its privileges. Being a resident of Ann Arbor should have similar privileges, as well. To get there, it will mean changing the direction city staff want to take when spending our tax dollars. Should we follow the staff suggestions in the Capital Improvement Plan and drop $800,000 to update the terminal at ARB (Ann Arbor City Airport) so rich folks can jet in for the football games at U of M, or should we build a new public swimming pool on the south side of Ann Arbor, where there isn’t one? To me, that choice is clear: a new public pool for the residents on the south side of town. Should we pave our roads and rebuild our bridges, or follow the pie-in-the-sky, big buck-little benefit “vision” of city staff planning manager Wendy Rampson, and the misguided members of the city’s Planning Commission, who were quoted in the Press as wringing their hands because “all the entrances to town are ugly?”

The choice is clear to me: we pave our roads and rebuild our bridges. In Rome, there are triumphal arches that mark the entrances to the Eternal City. When our City Administrator conquers the budget and stops over-funding the various intra-governmental city-states, such as Solid Waste, Legal, Water & Sewer and IT, and budgets resident services first and fully, we’ll broach the subject of putting up triumphal arches at the entrances to Ann Arbor. 

Outside of City Hall last week, I ran into a city employee whom I’ve known for several years. This woman is a dynamo and incredibly bright. Standing on that corner, she threw out half a dozen fantastic ideas about how to get more use out of the city facilities we have. The encouragement of healthy living is her passion. Working for the City is her job. The whole time she was talking, I couldn’t help but think of her boss, whom I’d run into just a few moments earlier. Why on earth did this woman answer to someone as unenthusiastic and just plain off-putting as that person? I tried to imagine what it must be like for someone with as much drive and passion as she has working for someone who, it is quite clear, simply collects a paycheck. 

It should come as no surprise to anyone that morale at our City Hall is at the bottom of the fish tank. Employee morale was surveyed not once but twice several years ago (by the local Dension company), and both times the results were abysmal: people who work for the City of Ann Arbor (with the exception of those who work in the City Attorney’s Office and the Downtown Development Authority) indicated on their surveys that they were just plain demoralized. While it’s easy to shrug off the results of two city-wide employee surveys which revealed mass discontent, people who are unhappy in their jobs cost their employers money. In this case, those several hundred city employees who’d rather walk over hot coals than go to work every morning, cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year. How? Employee turnover is the first expense that results from low morale. It can cost up to 30 percent of the employee’s total base salary and benefits to conduct a hiring. Employees with low morale are prone to higher absenteeism, and have little desire to go the extra mile. Studies show that low employee morale comes out in all manner of ways, including outright theft and destruction of property; employees who are demoralized can develop drug and alcohol problems. I’m not writing these things to question the character or work ethic of Ann Arbor’s over 700 city employees. I’m writing this to acknowledge the obvious: the employee morale of those who work for the City has no where to go but up.

And up it must go.

Just to be clear, employee morale is not the purview of either the Mayor or City Council. The City Administrator sees to the day-to-day management of the City, and the day-to-day supervision of city staff. However, the ramifications of low morale appear on the agenda of Council meetings with alarming regularity. Let’s start with early retirement. I’m expecting to retire sometime after the age of 70. You probably have the same plan. The Social Security Administration would, I’m sure, like us to work until well past the age of 75. The enticement to do so is a higher monthly benefit offered albeit for the statistically shorter number of years we’ll live past the age of 75. In the City of Ann Arbor, employees with the requisite number of years worked can retire well before the age of 55. 

In talking to a union representative who bargains on the behalf of city employees, the individual told me quite frankly that members of that union are looking to get out as quickly as possible. I asked why. The answer was what I expected. Thanks to the virtually constant and unchecked threats of layoff made by the City Administrator (unchecked and uncommented upon by our elected officials), Ann Arbor’s city employees look to retire from city service as quickly as possible.  

In 2007 and 2008, Ann Arbor did citizen surveys. The results should give us hope as to what the future could hold for all of us with a focus on good management, accountability and resident services. Despite the fact that our city staff are demoralized and could use prescriptions for anti-depressants, they received high marks from citizens for their professionalism in the course of their duties. This is remarkable when you stop to think about it. They don’t like working for our city government, in general, perhaps even detest the management strategies that have been used over the past half a dozen years, but they push themselves to serve the public. They’re working for us through the pain of demoralization. 

In those same citizen surveys, only 13 percent of residents responded that the level of services they received in exchange for the taxes they paid qualified as an excellent value. That means, in essence, a huge percentage of residents feel that they’re being cheated (tip o’ the keyboard to Angel Morn)  every year out of the services they deserve in exchange for the amount in taxes they pay. 

It doesn’t take very much to imagine the performance and productivity our city staff would deliver if their morale were significantly improved. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that improved employee morale will directly impact the percentage of citizens who feel that the level and quality of services they receive is commensurate with the amount of taxes they are expected to pay.

At the moment, city government is run and tax dollars are allocated as if it is a privilege to live in Ann Arbor.

This mindset has led to the deterioration of our infrastructure, and a multi-million dollar unhealthy reliance on additional taxation (millages) to pay for a bloated managerial bureaucracy addicted to cash surplus mad money, expensive no-bid sweetheart deals, contracts for city work given to political friends, subsidies for developers, and consultants. All the while our city budgets have been balanced on backs of hard-working city staff, by hiking fees for services exponentially, and by small but steady service reductions. 

Why does it cost 2.5 times more for Ann Arbor residents to buy a summer pool pass than it does for Dearborn residents? Why, for that matter, does the 10th largest city in Michigan have twice as many public pools as the fifth largest city, with its substantially higher per capita property taxes? It’s time to ask these questions (among many others), get answers, and shape public policy that revolves around the premise that residency in Ann Arbor must have its privileges as opposed to the current mindset that merely living here is privilege enough.

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February 5, 2010

The Politics of Neighbors: You Don’t Get What You Deserve. You Get What You Negotiate.

Filed under: Mayor Hieftje, best of A2Politico, money — Tags: , , , — A2 Politico @ 9:16 am
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This piece was originally published in February 2009 by the Ann Arbor News.

In January 2009, the Ann Arbor News reported that: “The University of Michigan wants to help the local economy, but giving the city an in-lieu-of-tax payment isn’t the way to do it, U-M President Mary Sue Coleman said.” Mayor John Hieftje responded to Coleman’s comment by assuring taxpayers: “We’re going to continue to work on that.” He’s had a decade to “work on that,” however. Other members of City Council, such as Fourth Ward’s Council member Marcia Higgins, and Margie Teall and Second Ward’s Steven Rapundalo have had almost that long to “work on that.” 

While the current administration accepts fiscal policy dictates from Dr. Coleman, Ann Arbor taxpayers pay for the bulk of municipal services provided to the University of Michigan. To be fair, U of M does pay for a fraction of some of the services it receives. For instance, in 2008 U of M paid $808,232.78 for fire protection. That amount reimbursed taxpayers for about six percent of the total $13 million dollars spent on fire protection.

Pushing nonprofits to make payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) is nothing out of the ordinary. Around the U.S., college leaders and city councils have hammered out agreements—under the auspices of so-called PILOT Programs—that provide those communities with millions in annual payments. In some communities, PILOT payments are adjusted annually for inflation. Harvard contributes yearly PILOT payments to the cities of Cambridge, Boston and Watertown. The annual $2.8 million dollar Cambridge-Harvard PILOT payment agreement has been renewed every decade since 1968. MIT has made PILOT payments to Cambridge since 1928.

Nearby Boston has one of the most aggressive PILOT programs in the United States. Officials there believe that if nonprofits can afford to build or expand, they can afford to contribute generously toward municipal services. Over 50% all land in Boston is controlled by non-profits, and in 1999 Harvard agreed to pay that city $40 million dollars over the next 20 years in PILOT payments. In smaller cities, such as Urbana, Illinois, elected officials have crafted PILOT programs to counteract the erosion of their tax bases when colleges and other nonprofits purchased additional property. This is what recently happened when U of M purchased the Pfizer buildings and land, a 170-acre parcel; officials estimate that the city will lose 4-5 percent of its total tax base. The $83.7 million dollar general fund, from which our municipal services are funded, will lose $1.4 million per year in tax revenue beginning in 2010. 

Dr. Coleman suggests the Pfizer facility may create 2000 new jobs over the next ten years. However, before the city recoups any lost property tax revenue from home buyers who may move to Ann Arbor for those jobs, the purchase will allow University of Michigan to expand opportunities to increase revenue from patents and licenses that result from its research activities. 

In 2004, U of M spent $752,527,056 dollars on sponsored research expenditures, according to the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). That same year, U of M filed 149 patents, executed 73 licenses and options, and took in $10.6 million in patent revenue. That revenue places U of M solidly among the top 20 university patent revenue earners in the U.S. Thus, the Pfizer facility purchase has the potential to catapult the University of Michigan further up the AUTM’s patent revenue list, perhaps closer to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which earned $47.6 million dollars in revenue from patents and licenses in 2006. 

John F. Ryan is a Property Tax Policy consultant who helped the city of Springfield, MA craft its PILOT program in 2005. Ryan says, “Some organizations recognize the value of services they receive from the local government and are willing to pay their fair share of those costs.”

According to Mr. Ryan, Dr. Mary Sue Coleman’s response to elected officials who recently called for U of M to make payments in lieu of taxes was, well, predictable. Dr. Coleman insists, “the best way for the university to help the city and local economy is to attract new employees who will buy homes in the area and boost business near the Pfizer property.”

Mr. Ryan explains: “For their part, tax exempt entities generally resist calls to begin or increase their contributions to local jurisdictions. They often respond by enumerating the positive beneficial impact they have on the locality, including creating jobs, making local purchases and paying miscellaneous taxes and fees….” 

In Providence, Rhode Island, elected officials aggressively pursued PILOT agreements with four local universities while lobbying for legislation that would have changed the state’s tax-exemption law. Today, Providence collects $3.8 million annually from the University of Rhode Island, Brown, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

In the Midwest, according to a piece in the New York Times, the City Council in Evanston, Illinois “caused a stir when it adopted a tuition tax of $15 a quarter on students at Northwestern University and three other colleges to help pay for city services.” Northwestern officials immediately met with city council members to devise other ways the university might help defray costs associated with the municipal services it receives.

“In many cases…a nonprofit only negotiates a PILOT or some other voluntary contribution after being…faced with the prospect of some other, mandatory tax or payment levied by the local government,” says Mr. Ryan.

Strategies used by elected officials in Cambridge, Providence, Boston and even New Haven, CT, where Yale officials make annual PILOT payments of $2 million per year, demonstrate that Ann Arbor needs elected leaders who can and will craft an aggressive PILOT program. For many years, we’ve been misled into thinking that it simply cannot be done because, according to the fractured logic circulated, the University of Michigan cannot be taxed thanks to its autonomy granted by the state’s Constitution.

A PILOT program is not a tax. It would allow our city government to pursue “good neighbor” payments not just from the University of Michigan, but from other large non-profits in town, as well. For Ann Arbor taxpayers, a PILOT program could very well mean we could see some respite from shouldering the heavy financial burden of having nonprofit neighbors with big plans for everything, in particular, expansion. PILOT payments are voluntary payments, and a PILOT program could bring in $4-$6 million dollars in additional revenue to Ann Arbor. 

A little bit more….

 

 

 

The simple truth is that a PILOT can be negotiated. 

It has been asserted that Ann Arbor has no leverage to negotiate a PILOT. As someone who has spent two decades negotiating agreements with colleges and universities, as well as Fortune 100 companies, I can tell you that’s simply untrue. The truth is that negotiating with the University presents difficulties to certain Council members, and especially the Mayor: they are employees of the University. The Mayor, for instance, is employed as a temporary, part-time lecturer, his wife as a part-time accompanist at the School of Music. Exerting the necessary leverage to win a yearly $4-$6 million dollar payment from the University might very well cost them their part-time, temporary jobs, and the almost $40,000 U of M pays them each year. 

I taught at U of M many years ago after graduate school, and after several years of teaching in Italy. It was a wonderful experience that I have no desire to pursue again, and certainly not while Mayor. Ann Arbor desperately needs a PILOT program, and has needed one for a decade. Our city can have one when the roadblocks to exerting the necessary leverage needed to negotiate one are eliminated.

Popularity: 43% [?]

September 14, 2009

Greenwash Hogwash: Hizzoner's Fractional Slight of Hand

Filed under: Mayor Hieftje, political reporting, politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 12:00 pm
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From Mayor John Hieftje’s web site: “Ann Arbor is well into implementing a plan to expand the bicycle lane system by 300% in just 5 years.”

Sounds great, huh? We Ann Arborites can feel pretty good about a 300 percent increase in the bicycle lane system. We can even feel a bit….superior. After all, according to a piece in the July 2009 New York Daily News, New York City—with its billion dollar General Fund—managed a mere 48 percent increase—from 420 miles to 620 miles—in its bike lane system. Here in Ann Arbor, we’re going to outdo millionaire politico Mayor Bloomberg by a whopping 252 percent in bike lanes. Who cares if New York has an inter-city train system that makes plans for WALLY look like a 90-pound weakling. We’re expanding the “bicycle lane system by 300% in five years.” Put that in your  Park Avenue apartment and smoke it, Bloomie.

Hall in your superiority sails Horatio Blow-Your-Own-Hornblower.

Let me clue you in to the greenwash hogwash…how Mayor Hieftje does the greenwash-a-go-go to obfuscate, pad his political résumé, and keep the few natives who actually vote from getting restless. Remember the 300 percent? He conveniently neglected to tell us on what exact number the 300 percent was based. 

P.T. Barnum couldn’t have done it better: 

Ladies and Gentleman, bikers of all ages….look over here—yes, here—at this 300 percent increase. Whatever you do, don’t look at the City’s 2007 non-motorized transportation plan behind the curtain—or too closely at the voting record of the man pulling the levers of the plan.

In order to cover his political rear bumper, John Hieftje has spent close to a decade spouting percentage-speak with the regularity of Old Faithful. Thanks to Judy McGovern’s (the Ann Arbor News’s political writer) inability or lack of desire to look behind the Mayor’s percentages, and the A2 Observer’s decline into editorial territory hitherto occupied by the National Enquirer, Hieftje’s greenwashing has gone virtually unchallenged since he ascended to the Democratic Throne in 2000.

Take bike lanes, for example. Here are some whole numbers to chew on:

Boulder, Colorado (pop. 170,000) has 300 miles of bike lanes, routes, designated shoulders and paths.

Madison, Wisconsin (pop. 212,000) has 99 miles of paths, lanes and signed routes.

Columbus, Ohio (population 747,000) has 170 miles of paths, lanes and signed routes. 

Ann Arbor, Michigan (pop. 113,000) has 51.84 miles of bike lanes, shared use paths and paved shoulders.

At the moment, according to the City of Ann Arbor’s web site, there are 24 miles of in-road bike lanes. In May of 2008, Hieftje was quoted in the Ann Arbor News as saying, “Ann Arbor’s five-year, non-motorized transportation plan calls for expanding the city’s bicycle-lane system by 300 percent.” Just about a year later, it was reported that “Federal stimulus funds are going to be making it safer for cyclists in Ann Arbor. The city plans to utilize these funds to add 8 miles of bike lanes, improve 24 more miles of bike lanes and make the downtown friendlier to bicyclists and pedestrians.”

The 2007, Non-Motorized Transportation Plan reveals that Ann Arbor had just 18 miles of in-road bike paths, and that between 2004-2007 a paltry eight miles of in-road bike paths had been added. Eight miles of bike lanes brought to you over seven years by the man who had gullible voters convinced he actually rode to City Hall on a bike instead of in a BMW. It should come as no surprise, then, that after seven years of Hieftje’s greenwashing just 20 percent of Ann Arbor’s primary roads had bike paths. A look at the map of existing on-road biking facilities (Figure 4.C3, page 160, of the Non-Motorized Plan) shows a city center devoid of bike paths, and bike paths along major roads that, well, just end in the middle of traffic. 

Here’s some math: Eight miles of new in-road bike lanes in 2009 represent an increase of 30 percent in the total miles of in-road bikes lanes, and an overall increase of a mere 15.6 percent in the 51.84 miles of bike paths, shoulders and in-road lanes. Two years down, and 270/284.4 percent to go. Ann Arbor is well into something, but it’s not a plan to expand the bicycle lanes by any significant number of miles.

This all reminds me of the Mayor’s assurances last year at the October 2008 Downtown Development Authority (DDA) meeting at which he said the city was replacing the 10,500 trees lost to Emerald Ash Borer disease at a rate of 10 percent per year. Cool, right? Sails in, Horatio.

There are just a couple flies in the Mayor’s fractional ointment. According to a source in the City’s Forestry Department, the City loses 500 trees every year just as a matter of course, and aside from Dean Fund purchases, the City relies almost entirely on donations of trees by non-profits. In 2008, at the time of Hieftje’s greenwash hogwash at the DDA meeting, donations were running at a clip of 900 trees per year, resulting in a net gain of just 400 trees per year. Post economic melt-down? Tree donations aren’t at the top of many a social agency’s list. People are thinking food, Sweetie, not saplings. Tree donations are down by almost 50 percent. 

As Hieftje wears out his welcome at City Hall and weighs a run for Rebekah Warren’s seat in the State House, we’re likely to be subjected to even more of his greenwash hogwash. So, the next time our Old Faithful Mayor spouts percentage-speak, stop, sniff deeply and you’ll be sure to catch the odor of greenwash in the air.

Popularity: 2% [?]

August 21, 2009

A2 Politico Launches

Filed under: journalism, politics — Tags: , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 12:43 pm
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We lost our daily newspaper in July 23rd, and though there is alternative press (Heritage has come in with a weekly, and AnnArbor.com is promising twice weekly coverage), I think it’s a great time to launch a blog about local politics. There’s lots to talk about, and I hope this blog can engage a wide variety of people in the discussions. 

What will I cover in A2Politico?  Anything and everything related to politics in the town of Ann Arbor. People in politics, political races, political aspirations, political maneuvering, political scandals, political triumphs. I’ll write about Dems, Republicans and Independents. We’ll have regular “Whispers.” After all, much of what happens around our town, politically, happens out of sight and as a result of whispers. 

Have a “whisper” to share? Click here to send it along to me. I’ll keep the sources of all “whispers” confidential, naturally. To send one anonymously, click this link to use an email remailer that will hide your identity.

I’ll comment on the political coverage of the local press and radio. Ann Arbor’s residents have lived with a mediocre daily newspaper for many years, unfortunately. Newhouse, the company that owns the Ann Arbor News, didn’t see the News as a place to foster award-winning reporting and writing. The AA News was just as a cash cow with a great advertising base (while it lasted). As a result, Ann Arbor got a local paper with a local government reporter (Judy McGovern) whose writing is sometimes solid, but isn’t often motivating or inspiring. Mediocre writing and minimal coverage of local politics didn’t keep people from subscribing, however. The News clocked over 50,000 subscribers at one point. That’s an enviable base for any newspaper. Our course, we have the Ann Arbor Chronicle now, as well. There, the coverage of local politics goes to the sub-atomic particle level, perfect for wonks and wonkettes alike.  

Comments on my entries are welcome. Don’t be shy. Do be courteous, however. 

So, off we go with A2Politico.

If you like what you read, tell a friend, work colleague or neighbor and leave a comment. If you hate what you read, tell and friend, work colleague or neighbor and leave a comment.

If my entries leaves you feeling nothing, see your doctor, immediately.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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