A2Politico: Ann Arbor Politics Grilled To Perfection

August 5, 2010

The Politics of the Pen: A2P Changes Format

Filed under: on blogging — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 3:54 pm
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For over a year now, I’ve been writing A2Politico and having a grand time doing it. I’ve enjoyed the generally civil and always spirited debate and that A2P is a home for those of a variety of political opinions. As I was fond of saying as I campaigned, being the grand poobah of Ann Arbor was not a career move for me. I have a job, and as our company grows and demands more of my time, I have to make decisions about how best to spend it. A2Politico has, on several occasions, scooped the local newspaper and provided the local press with fodder for their lightbulb moments. The most recent was James Leonard’s somewhat retrograde revelation, some eight months after I broke the story, that former Council member Leigh Greden and his merry band of blackmailers had emailed mid-Council meeting and shaped a strategy to extort Prince John into pulling back on his promise to veto the Police-Court facility. The whole scenario made one pine for Aliénor d’Aquitaine. 

Leonard writes in the AnnArborChronicle.com, “Emails [between council members] came out that show [mayor John Hieftje] was possibly intimidated into withholding his veto by the majority on city council who composed an email saying if you veto this, we will make it so that you can’t get anything passed,” Lesko told The Ann Arbor Observer in a June interview. “It’s like blackmail, right? Extortion? Which is the word we’re using nowadays?”

Except, of course, the June 2010 interview was seven months after I posted a Whisper about the email exchange, and pieced together the timeline that Leonard diligently copied and passed off as his own work. He did get quotes from Hieftje and Greden, both of whom stressed, while crossing their fingers and hopping on one leg, that Greden’s email was never sent or received. Leonard writes, “However, a look at the actual email makes it clear that the draft cited by Greden in his recent interview was not of text to be sent by email to the mayor. Instead, it was a draft of talking points for a meeting that Greden wrote should take place between councilmembers and the mayor: “Here’s what I propose. We schedule a mtng with him this week. We say the following: …”

Of course the email was never sent to Hieftje. It was a game plan. What fool emails his game plan to the opposition?

Like clockwork, AnnArbor.com and Ryan Stanton picked up Leonard’s revelation of my eight-month-old blog post. It was a classic case of the blind leading the blind—straight into a journalistic ditch. Tires spinning, Stanton’s piece is a copy of a copy of a copy. Welcome to what passes for newsflash investigative reporting in our town. Sy Newhouse is laughing at the people of Ann Arbor every time he pulls out a Ben Franklin to buy a roll of Tums.

Thus, we circle back to A2Politico. I got a call today from a developer who tried to buy the Georgetown Mall. Yep. He and his backers were ready to pay cash for the property and back taxes once it went into foreclosure (which it did, in April, 2010). The new developers were looking to put in an Asian Community Center and shops. However, rather than sell the land for cash and back taxes, since Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County are so flush with dough (yours), they’d prefer taxpayers pay to tear down the buildings at the Georgetown Mall for the current developer. Won’t that be nice for the Baron of Blight, Craig E. Schubiner? Public money will be used to improve the property that he has allowed to deteriorate.

We shouldn’t feel as though Schubiner is stalking Ann Arbor. He’s done the same thing to other communities. Check out this piece from the May 2010 Detroit News that outlines what Schubiner did in Bloomfield Township. It makes the Georgetown fiasco look like unwanted touching. He’s a serial blighter. Just as the Bloomfield Township supervisors could have looked at the Georgetown fiasco in Ann Arbor (Fourth Ward Council member Margie Teall doesn’t like to use the word, fiasco. She prefers something more neutral, such as the Georgetown Mall oopsy-doodle.) Ann Arbor City Council could have taken a gander at Schubiner’s previous development disaster movies and predicted the plot-line for the Georgetown Mall.

A2Politico is, by now, a popular blog with a large devoted following. It even has knock-offs, such as Arborblahg, anonymously written, peppered with profanity and even with a little unintentional parallelism now and again. A local journalist described that blog’s writing to me as, well, bad. I don’t know. Sometimes the blogger is clever, but then again 100 monkeys can crank out Shakespeare, right? Knock-offs are for people who can’t afford the original or without enough good taste the recognize the difference between kick ass prose, and writing that strains so hard to kiss ass that you just want to help the writer pucker up and get it over with already. Kids who copy from the smart kids are nothing new. Kids who copy from the kids who copy from the smart kids are the ones, my friend the psychologist tells me, seldom have an original neurosis in their head.

Attention knock-off artists: A2Politico will continue on, but with a new format. A trio of writers will take over the blog. All will post anonymously. I’ll have the option of posting, if I like, but will do so only sporadically.  Those who want to send whispers and tips, should continue to do so using the link provided. Comments, as always, are welcome. Copycats are welcome, as well, as are knock-off artists, and local journalists for whom original thinking is more challenging than it should be. 

The new format will be September 1st.

Popularity: 35% [?]

May 10, 2010

The Politics of the DDA: Time to Clean House

Filed under: DDA, money — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 10:17 pm
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Rene Greff and Jennifer Santi Hall are spilling the beans about the down and dirty inner-workings of the Downtown Development Authority to Ann Arborites, and anyone else who would care to know. At the most recent DDA meeting, at which Russ Collins, Leah Gunn, Roger Hewitt, Mayor John Hieftje, Joan Lowenstein, John Splitt, and City Council Member Sandi Smith supported siphoning off $2 million to prop up the city’s leaky bucket of a budget, Santi Hall alleged “secret” back room wheeling and dealing. She is quoted in a May 5, 2010 post to Ann Arbor.com as saying:

DDA board members and Ann Arbor City Council members who worked out the framework for the $2 million transfer behind closed doors during the last year. Hall said the meetings of the working group should have been open to the public, but even some DDA board members were kept away from sitting in on the discussions. ”I don’t support this type of conduct,” Hall said. “I find it sneaky, and underhanded, and corrupt, and possibly illegal, and in violation of the public trust in our government. Obviously not everyone is in agreement with me on this or things would have happened in a different way. But at the very least you should be able to understand why I’m so angry today.”

Not to be overly cynical, but I have to wonder if Hall was present at the January 20, 2009 meeting called by First Ward Council member Sandi Smith. It was revealed in FOIAed emails that Smith had invited everyone on Council over to the DDA office to discuss what should be built atop the underground parking garage planned for the Library lot. This was, of course, seven months before July 2009, when City Council actually issued the RFP to solicit proposals from developers interested in building atop the Fifth Avenue parcel. There was no public notice of the January 20, 2009 meeting, nor were minutes kept. Just City Council and DDA Board members alone in a room deciding what should be built on land owned by the public. If Jennifer Hall was at that meeting, her outrage at the behavior of her colleagues and City Council members over being excluded from meetings concerning the ultimate disposition of the $2 million dollars requested by the city from the DDA, seems somewhat staged. Then again, if she wasn’t at the January 20, 2009 meeting called by Smith, the outrage seems somewhat puzzling. 

The DDA only posted its annual budget to its web site in 2008. While running against Sandi Smith for the First Ward City Council seat (Jennifer Santi Hall was Smith’s campaign manager), I questioned why the DDA’s financial information wasn’t readily available online, and why the noon-time meetings weren’t televised. In the midst of that election season, the annual budget was posted to the group’s web site in .pdf format. DDA meetings have only just begun being televised. These were two very important steps toward transparency, and I’m delighted I helped bring them about. However, surely Santi Hall knew that the DDA Board members cut a $10 million dollar back-room deal with former Council members Leigh Greden and Christopher Easthope in exchange for Main Street beat cops for a decade (a promise that the City Council broke after taking the DDA’s money), according to Rene Greff, in an October 2009 interview she did for A2Politico.

Thus, the current ruckus over how, when and by whom it was decided that the DDA would hand over $2 million dollars to the city with no strings attached demonstrates quite amply that the politicization of the group as evidenced by changes to its mission in the DDA’s 2003-2033 early renewal, has worked against its initial mission, tending to Ann Arbor’s downtown. The DDA’s renewal includes the following objective areas:

Identity
Infrastructure
Transportation
Business Encouragement
Housing
Development Partnerships
Community Services
Sustainability

All are laudable goals, of course, but most involve influencing or changing the course of the city’s public policy. That’s the job of our elected officials. In other towns, including Royal Oak, the budgets of their DDA’s must be approved by elected officials. Ours is not. In fact, First Ward Council member Sandi Smith has argued that the City Council has no business sticking its collective nose in DDA parking policy, and members of the DDA Board have argued that the entity is autonomous. Jennifer Hall, in her interview with A2Politico said that: “I wish Council provided the kind of oversight, check and balance that an independent agency such as the DDA (or AATA or any other authority) should have.  But they don’t always do that.  They don’t really look into our bylaws and make sure that we aren’t abusing our power.” 

The DDA Board is abusing its power. The Board recently voted to expand its own state-mandated boundary so as to be able to give a $500,000 tax dollar giveaway to the Near North project, located outside the long-established DDA boundary. Then there is the recent $2 million dollar giveaway to the city of Ann Arbor. County officials are investigating the legality of that transfer, because it involves tax capture money that would, otherwise, go into Washtenaw County coffers. The DDA Board recently cost the taxpayers $500,000 when the project manager it chose to oversee the construction of the underground parking garage awarded a $22 million dollar contract to its own subsidiary. The Christman subsidiary bid was $500,000 higher than the lowest bidder. This prompted an editorial in the AnnArbor.com titled “Concrete deal for DDA underground parking structure a bad deal for taxpayers.” In that editorial, Tony Dearing writes:

“It looks bad and raises serious questions when a company managing construction of a major public project rejects a lower bid from a competitor and awards the work to its subsidiary….We have spoken to many experts who find it hard to believe that a public entity would allow such an outcome, but this now appears to be a done deal. Because of the DDA’s autonomy on this project, we are not aware of any other entity that has the ability to step in after the fact and give this questionable bid award the level of review or scrutiny that the DDA failed to provide.”

But there is an entity that can step in: City Council. Just as the group recently dismissed the entire Housing Commission Board, the City Council could vote to dismiss the entire DDA Board, and direct the newly appointed replacements to suspend the Christman contract, and give the questionable bid award the scrutiny the previous DDA Board obviously failed to provide.

Though this is the obvious solution to the DDA’s failure to act in the best interests of the taxpayers whose money they have access to through the TIF capture, it won’t happen as long as the incumbent remains in office. Why? Because over the past half a dozen years, the DDA Board has been stacked with friends, donors and political pals. It’s tough to tell a group of people whose combined donations during your last campaign totaled close to 25 percent of the donations you took in, that their services are no longer needed because, well, they cost the taxpayers half a million dollars. 

That’s why Mayoral appointments of friends, political pals and donors to city boards and commissions has to end. In addition, there are members of city boards and commissions who have overstayed their welcome. 

For instance, County Commissioner Leah Gunn has served far too many terms on the DDA, having been appointed when George H.W. Bush was president. The quality of her recent work shows why she is no longer an asset, and a look at the Mayor’s 2008 campaign finance forms will make clear exactly why he will never replace her. She has donated thousands in in-kind goods, services and monetary donations to his campaigns over the past half a dozen years.

To justify the $2.28 million dollar purchase of additional parking kiosks, Gunn went before the DDA Board and gave the jolly explanation that they should pony up the money for the detestable and over-priced kiosks because, “We have found that everybody likes them.” How she knew that for a fact remains a mystery, as the DDA conducted no user study, and Gunn’s colleagues neglected to stop for a moment before writing the check to enquire just how she came to that blowsy conclusion. Then, on May 8, 2010, she was quoted in AnnArbor.com as saying that a proposal to use DDA money to return the Beat Cops to Main Street:  ”…needs…a lot of homework done. There’s a lot of data that needs to be collected and a great deal of discussion that needs to be held.”

Seriously? With six police officers patrolling all of Ann Arbor on any given morning she thinks returning the Beat Cops to Main Street needs lots of data collected and a great deal of discussion? As you can imagine, she found support from Mayor Hieftje. He called the proposal to fund beat cops on Main Street “premature,” and said “beat cops might not be the best way to police downtown.” I’m not sure what he thinks might be the best way to police downtown, but at the moment whatever it is it involves cutting more police to fund a parking garage on Fuller Road for his friends at the University of Michigan, and to pay for cost over-runs on the price-”guaranteed” Police-Court facilty. Those cost over-runs have cropped up in the 2010-2011 proposed budget. Suddenly, the “guaranteed” cost of that capital project is, well, is fungible, as they like to say on Council.

Every Main Street business owner whom I’ve spoken to wants that police protection back. In October of 2009, just three months after Council adopted a budget that cut Beat Cops from downtown, the Chief of Police went down to the Main Street Area Association and offered to return the Beat Cops in a pay-for-policing offer. I wrote about that here. Was Chief Barnett Jones just trying to up sell our Main Street Merchants police coverage like so many matching handbags, police protection they didn’t need? I doubt it. Here’s a better question: Should the appointed officials on the DDA Board be deciding whether Ann Arbor’s downtown needs police protection? Absolutely not.

City Administrator Roger Fraser suggested in December of 2009 that we dissolve the DDA in order to return some $2.4 million dollars per year to our city’s General Fund. If elected, I want to actively pursue Roger Fraser’s suggestion. Until then, I think it’s time for the DDA to immediately make as much of its financial information available online as possible. That information should include previous year’s budgets going back to 2000, parking data, monthly budget statements, quarterly budget statements, audits, and the DDA’s check register. 

Appointed officials have no business dictating police coverage, wasting half a million dollars of taxpayers’ money through lack of oversight of a contractor, extending their own boundary as they see fit so as to facilitate tax giveaways to private developers partnered conveniently with local non-profits. Appointed officials and elected officials on the DDA Board have no business holding “work sessions” so that their decisions can be formulated out of the public eye, and away from the coverage of the local press. Our DDA’s appointed officials have no business setting transportation policy, housing policy, or spending parking/tax dollars on private developments. Subverting the Open Meetings Act simply makes the public more wary and mistrustful of whatever good deeds such an entity could (and does) accomplish.

Be that as it may, public money must be controlled by elected officials, not appointed ones. It’s time to clean house at the DDA through Mayoral appointments made not as recompense for political support, but rather for the good of the downtown and in support of our local merchants. I agree with Roger Fraser that we have to reassess whether the entity should exist in its current form, or dissolve the DDA and form an Advisory Commission with absolutely no access to public money. We’ll lose the TIF capture, but that money will go back to the city’s coffers, county’s coffers, schools and libraries, institutions that service the entire community.

Finally, and most importantly, the contract between the city and the DDA that established the DDA as the entity that oversees our parking program should be bid out competitively. Until we make parking revenue neutral, alternative/mass transportation programs and initiatives in Ann Arbor will remain political step-children dragged out every election season to be used as bullet points on political web sites. 

Ann Arbor taxpayers deserve accountability, and in the case of the DDA, and every other board and commission in Ann Arbor, the City Charter provides City Council with the mechanism to make sure the members of boards and commissions are held accountable. Whether Mayor and Council will continue to appoint friends, donors and political pals to our city’s boards and commissions, or choose to give the taxpayers in the fifth largest city in Michigan the accountability they deserve is another matter that will be decided August 3rd.

Popularity: 54% [?]

April 25, 2010

The Politics of Propositions: When Every Scheme Sounds Like a Winner

Filed under: boards and commissions, developers — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 12:11 am
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When Google rode into town promising to create 1,000 jobs by 2011, Mayor and Council responded to the racy proposition by taking over $2 million dollars from the city’s already stretched General Fund and creating a new fund called the Economic Development Fund. It should have been called the Rob Peter to Give Away Money to Paul Fund. With the magical appearance of money in the Economic Development Fund, Council took taxpayer money and paid to give Google 400 parking spaces. That crazy arrangement is due to expire in December 2010. I call it crazy for any number of reasons not the least among which is that Google created about 20 percent of the total jobs the company promised, yet still took (and was given) 100 percent of the free parking spaces promised. For every one job created by Google, Ann Arbor taxpayers funded two (yes, two) parking spaces. 

Now, money from the Economic Development Fund aka the General Fund is being used on the Fuller Parking Garage project. Our tax dollars are being used to pay a consultant to design a parking garage for the University of Michigan. 

In Ann Arbor, our current Mayor and Council simply don’t evaluate business propositions with any modicum of business sense. They will entertain just about any proposition, and give away more money than is practicable in order to smooth the way for the smooth-talking types who come before Council and want their way with the group. The current rumor that it’s tough for those Willy Loman types, developers who ride into town, architectural plans in their travel bags, is pure nonsense and bunkum—developers Newcombe Clark and Jeff Helminski included. Clark recently launched a bid to unseat Fifth Ward Council member Carsten Hohnke because Hohnke sent a note to be read by Fifth Ward Council colleague Mike Anglin that made it clear that Hohnke did not favor Clark’s Moravian project. 

One has to wonder why Newcombe didn’t run for Mayor. It was Mayor Hieftje, after all, who sank any chance Clark and partner Jeff Helminski had for their Planned Unit Development (PUD) petition to be approved. Hieftje voted against the PUD petition, while Carsten merely sent a note to the meeting and missed the vote. For that matter, why doesn’t Clark move to Ward Three and take on Council member Chris Taylor? Taylor voted for the PUD, but in taking out Taylor, Clark could live la vida loca and spend his days making the life of the other Third Ward Council member, Steve Kunselman, a towering inferno. 

It’s my supposition that sometime during the years when Helminski and Clark accumulated their multiple small parcels in the Germantown neighborhood, someone, somewhere, led the two to believe that the P.U.D. was in the B.A.G. All they would have to do was jump through a few hoops at the Planning Commission (which eventually recommended that the Moravian PUD be approved) then, on the Commission’s recommendation, Council would approve the PUD, just as they did for the Near North project. It’s no secret that there are those on Council who believe that the neighborhoods adjoining downtown are fair game for denser development, despite what the residents, zoning laws and various city master plans might say. However, there arose a Third Ward Council member in August of 2009 who knew not Joseph, Jeff or Newcombe. Steve Kunselman voted against the PUD. I can only venture a guess and that former Third Ward Council member Leigh Greden would have heeded the advice of former Second Ward Council member Joan Lowenstein, when she stood before Council and told members not to give in to the “sulkers,” and approve the Moravian PUD. 

Since 2000, some 41 development projects have been approved by City Council, developments totaling close to 4,000,000 square feet of new development in our city. Those projects include the 2003 City Council approval of a 633,000 square foot fantasy-land at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, called the Broadway Village PUD Site Plan. The Broadway Village was supposed to include 7 buildings, 196 units of residential space, and over 760 parking spaces. It’s currently a 7.3 acre eyesore that has enjoyed seven years worth of site plan extensions thanks, one imagines, to the political donations and connections of developer Peter Allen. There are other communities that pull site plan permissions after six months if the developer hasn’t secured funding and broken ground. I have to imagine that Allen, the Broadway Village developer, will petition Council in October of 2010 for another extension. I also have to imagine that funding for the project will not be any more forthcoming in October of 2010 than it was in 2003, when the project was first approved. 

It makes no sense to allow Peter Allen to squat at the corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane as he waits for the banks to see the light and finance his development, or at least make sure he gets his developer’s fees before the project goes belly-up, and Ann Arbor is left holding the bag.

So, why can’t developers get their projects built in Ann Arbor? Well, for starters, since 2000 our Mayor and City Council have fallen over and again for the same story: nice project, grandiose financing scheme. Over and again, planning staff have advised the Planning Commission that the individual projects were viable, and Planning Commission has advised Council to say yes to the proposition. Over and again, the developers were unable to begin construction. Not once, not twice, but 40 times since 2000. In fact, the number of development projects that have been approved since 2000 exponentially outnumbers the number of projects turned down by City Council, including as the Moravian.

In going door-to-door, I’ve heard over and again from voters that they want to see the zoning laws applied fairly and uniformly. They want to see PUD projects in near downtown neighborhoods discouraged, and density concentrated within the boundaries of the Downtown Development Authority. After all, one voter pointed out, that’s how the Greenbelt millage was sold.

Well, no. That’s not how the Greenbelt millage was sold.

In 2003, not a single piece of Greenbelt millage campaign literature linked the Greenbelt campaign to increasing density within the city of Ann Arbor. Chapter 42 of the City Charter that deals with the implementation of the Greenbelt millage says nothing about downtown density as a reason to repurpose the then land acquisition millage money. Elected officials, Greenbelt Advisory Committee members and city staff have “repurposed” the intention behind the Greenbelt millage passage to suit their political belief that we must increase density in downtown Ann Arbor. However, the Greenbelt millage was sold and presented to voters this way: 

From Chapter 42 of the Charter: Uncoordinated development in the areas around Ann Arbor has affected and may continue to adversely affect the quality of life in Ann Arbor leading to fragmented open space and wildlife habitat; loss of productive farmland and forestland; destruction of rural beauty which is part of the natural historic character of the Ann Arbor community; decline in water quality and the loss of wetlands; increased auto dependency, fuel consumption, traffic congestion and air pollution; relocation of jobs to peripheral area; excessive public costs for roads and utility infrastructure, new and extensions, to dispersed development.

Now, almost 10 years and $22 million dollars later, a map of the Greenbelt millage purchases shows 1,782 acres “saved” from development.

Greenbelt

What should be obvious from the map is that the total amount of land acquired within the boundary is miniscule. The 30 year 0.5 mill tax for and acquisition is anticipated to raise between $80 million and $100 million dollars from Ann Arbor taxpayers. Even doubling or tripling the number of acres will not substantially increase the total land mass, or create anything close to a “green belt” around Ann Arbor. What we will have done is to have preserved multiple small parcels of open space and farmland in outlying townships. Meanwhile, the opportunity for a Greenway languishes, brought back from the dead every two years, like Lazarus, by politicos who pledge to support a Greenway for the city.  

While the Mayor claimed in a January 2010 AnnArbor.com post this is a “golden” time to swoop in and pay less than the $12,000 per acre on average that has been paid for the rights purchased, Ginny Trocchio one of two people who manage the Greenbelt millage program, was quoted in an April 14, 2010 AnnArborChronicle.com post as refuting the notion. Trocchio is quoted thusly, “The market has changed dramatically since the millage passed. Land values have dropped sharply, but landowner expectations remain higher than the actual market price— that’s an issue in trying to negotiate deals.” The dilemma makes sense, in fact. Chances are good that land rich, cash poor landowners need money now more than ever. 

The most recent example of this propensity to accept propositions sits at 2502-2568 Packard. The 91,700 fantasy-land was to be called Georgetown Commons. Even with the TIF (tax increment financing) sweetheart deal from Council that would have given tax dollars to the developer, the Titanic development scheme sank after hitting the icebergs of financing, debt and unpaid taxes. The property is valued at $4.6 million, based on its 2010 state equalized value. Developer Craig Schubiner paid $6.1 million for it in 2001, according to city documents.

After creating a 6.4 acre disaster by letting Craig Schubiner talk them into a TIF financing package, City Council created the Georgetown Mall Citizen’s Committee which held a meeting at 6 p.m. April 22nd in a 6th floor conference room at City Hall. Citizens will come together and figure out how to clean up the mess created by Council’s short-lived love affair with the Georgetown Commons developer. 

So what’s the answer to this decade-long string of failed development? It’s simple: no more tax increment financing (TIF) giveaways to private developers, no more public-private partnerships where our tax money is used to subsidize private development projects, or mitigate the risks, as First Ward Council member Sandi Smith once said, of private development in Ann Arbor. Those public-private partnerships are breeding grounds for what President Obama’s chief economic advisor Dr. Lawrence Summers, referred to as “crony capitalism.” The public good is subverted for the sake of private gain. Public policy is replaced with back room dealing. An excellent example of crony capitalism is the convention center RFP process, a sham procedure designed to give us a predetermined outcome. A few politicos, including the Mayor, City Administrator and former Chamber of Commerce leader decided quietly among themselves as early as 2008 that Ann Arbor’s downtown needed a convention center. 

As elected officials, and as a community, we’re going to have to apply significantly more business acumen, vision and skepticism when developers come forward with plans such as the Broadway Village and Georgetown Commons. Yes, it’s a great bullet point for a political résumé to bring in and break ground at such a project, but when the projects fail, as those two have, our community as a whole suffers tremendously. The closed Georgetown Mall has spurred an increase in crime in the neighborhood around the area.

If Ann Arbor is to become a community in which development investments are approved, financed and built (a critical three-step process), we’re going to have to reshape the way in which projects are taken through the planning process, and by whom. We’ll have to carefully analyze and study the successes and the failures of the past decade to identify patterns, people and issues where Ann Arbor’s staff, appointed and elected officials can do a better job helping those who want to invest in our community do so equitably and, ultimately, in the best interests of the taxpayers.

Popularity: 44% [?]

March 26, 2010

The Politics of The Party Line: Out With The Old. In With The True.

Filed under: Mayor Hieftje, city council, city services, money, parks, police, taxes — Tags: , , , , — A2 Politico @ 8:12 am
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Be prepared to hear this mantra from certain candidates over the next four months: “We [the city of Ann Arbor] have lost millions of dollars in revenue due to state cuts, the university’s purchase of the Pfizer facility, and massive local property devaluations. As a result, the city must reduce services.” 

As I wrote on January 26, 2010, in “The Politics of Cooking the Books: Ann Arbor as a French Restaurant,” Third Ward Council member Leigh Greden ran his unsuccessful re-election campaign based on the premise presented above. Without talking about the actual numbers, though, it’s easy to hear that explanation of why “the city must reduce services,” and simply accept the inevitable: paying more and getting less is just what happens when Pfizer up and closes, and the city loses “millions of dollars in revenue due to state cuts.”

The city’s General Fund is a train wreck.

Property tax revenues are tumbling down like the walls of Jericho.

Housing prices are falling.

Ok. That last one is true. However, overall city revenues are up, up, up. Take a look at the chart below. All the information is from CAFR statements posted to the city’s web site:

Year Property Tax Revenue State Shared Revenues Business-type Activities Total Revenue Total Expenses Total Debt Service
2002 58,095,088 21,877,296 46,978,051 155,479,402 135,016,056 1,029,598
2006 62,017,866 12,604,477 73,539,483 176,649,150 144,522,183 1,539,263
2009 69,994,107 11,102,183 68,882,686 190,244,281 184,811,290 3,229,523

You’ll note that between 2002 and 2009 property tax revenues rose. Now, look right to the “Business-type activites” column. First, you’re thinking, “what are ‘business type activities’ that bring revenue to the city?” Good question, I’m glad you asked. Those activities include: water, sewer, parking, Farmer’s Market, golf courses, airport, stormwater management. and solid waste (i.e. trash and recycling) removal. 

As I wrote in the January 26th entry: 

Now, those of you who are on a tight budget, perhaps, Krogering more often than you used to, and bypassing Plum Market and Whole Foods, look at the total expenses line. As revenues rose, expenses rose, as well, despite the drop in state revenue sharing. In other words, those in charge of the city’s budget, City Administrator Roger Fraser, City CFO Tom Crawford, not to mention Mayor and City Council who are supposed to oversee the work of city staff, went merrily along and lived large, larger and, by 2009, largest. In other words, the more revenues that could be squeezed out of taxpayers through back-door taxation (raising the rates for those business-type activities), the more Mayor and Council allowed city staff to spend.

It’s really that simple. In business terms, under the current Mayor and City Council’s direction, they allowed the city staff to take the city backwards financially, to raise revenues significantly, and to spend, spend, spend.

Now, let’s throw in the debt service, which has more than tripled, since 2002. It’s clear that by allowing expenses to rise at the same pace as revenues, (referred to as “spending every dime you earn and then some,”) our city had no real money to make debt payments out of revenues. 

What would you do at your house? Would you build an underground parking garage and incur more debt? Would you build a new city hall and incur more debt? Would you rein in expenses related to running government, and defer non-essential capital improvements? 

Voters have a choice this election season, and it’s a simple one: voters can choose to elect candidates with the education, decades of real-world experience in financial management, and the skills to rein in spending, reduce debt and the back-bone to ask staff to budget so that services are funded first, or accept the political fairytale that the Stadium Bridges were allowed to deteriorate and fall down because Pfizer moved, and the State of Michigan gave Ann Arbor $1.5 million dollars less in revenue sharing between 2006 and 2009. 

Our elected leaders are choosing to reduce services at the urging of city staff, as opposed to urging city staff to rein in spending on the cost of operating our city government. In just 4 years, operating expenses in our city rose by $34 million dollars, or 35 percent. At a recent neighborhood gathering, I asked if anyone owned a business, and one woman raised her hand. I asked her what would happen to a business whose overhead rose 5 percent in one year. The woman, a long-time owner of a downtown landmark eatery, replied that such a rise would be cause for immediate action. I then asked what would happen to a business whose overhead rose 35 percent in four years. She answered without hesitation: the business would be at significant risk of going under. 

In this election season, we’re going to hear that our city is facing a crisis, that Ann Arbor stands at the edge of a precipice into which many cities in our state have fallen. Our city is facing a crisis, a fiscal and management crisis created over the past decade by elected officials who neglected to apply even the most basic fiscal controls, or adhere to even most basic principals of sound management as they went about shaping policies and spending the billions in tax revenues generated by charging us some of the highest per capita property taxes in our state, then by hiking our fees for services such as solid waste, sewer and water. Ann Arbor isn’t experiencing serial budget “gaps” because we’ve lost less than 1 percent from our annual revenues from reduced state profit sharing, or even because Pfizer left town and took its tax revenues with it. 

What’s the real reason our “city must reduce services?” Quite simply, our elected officials have not fulfilled the single most important task charged them by our city’s Charter: they have not held the City Administrator Roger Fraser accountable. Instead, at the urging of a small group consisting of the Mayor and four Council members, year-after-year they voted to reward our City Administrator with generous salary and benefit increases even as he allowed overhead costs to skyrocket out of control. Between 2004 and 2009, Roger Fraser was given a total 35 percent increase in his compensation package. In 2009, the City Administrator was rewarded with the option of cashing out 150 hours of vacation time worth around $7,500. Mayor and Council have rewarded our City Administrator as if the name of our town were AIG instead of Ann Arbor. Now, they are choosing to bridge budget “gaps” by “reducing” city services and rationalizing the cuts as necessity born of a “revenue shortage.”

I’m sure we’ll hear some candidates this election season tell us Ann Arbor is at the edge of a precipice, and that politicos with “experience” can keep Ann Arbor from falling over the edge like Flint, Troy, Kalamazoo and (the perennial scare-fest favorite) Detroit. Audited financial statements linked to above show quite clearly to those with the skill to read and understand them that Ann Arbor is not at the edge of a precipice, but rather that our city has more than enough money to fund services—more than enough money to support our parks, pools, and senior centers, and fill our numerous potholes. Ann Arbor has more than enough money to provide citizens with the services which we should be able to expect in exchange for the taxes we are asked to pay.

Our city is not at the edge of a precipice; we’re at the end of an era. Come August we’ll have a chance to vote to end out-of-control staff spending that has gone virtually unquestioned and unmonitored by Mayor and Council. We’ll have an opportunity to begin a new era in which Mayor and Council perform the single most important and the most basic task the Charter requires them to do: hold the City Administrator accountable for the performance of his job as the chief executive of our town. 

Popularity: 47% [?]

March 24, 2010

The Politics of Singing and Dancing: Eli Cooper’s $14 Million Dollar Variety Show

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By now, if you haven’t already read it, SEMCOG announced that there is no money for commuter train service between Ann Arbor and Detroit. The transportation cognoscenti around town have been saying this for the past 16 months. So why no cash for the commuter line? According to a March 19, 2010 piece in Crain’s Business Weekly, “A $100 million federal transportation funding earmark for the project was made in 2005, but studies show the route’s cost-per-rider ratio of more than $70 remains too high for SEMCOG to qualify for the money.”

Read that last sentence again. The cost-per-rider ratio of a commuter train between Ann Arbor and Detroit is more than $70. Put another way, it would be cheaper to hop on a Southwest Air flight, to well, any one of a dozen destinations. There are just not enough people who would ride a commuter to make the cost-per-rider costs reasonable enough for the project to qualify for available federal funding. 

According to Crain’s, “The hope has been that the demonstration line would encourage additional ridership, and linking the route to a proposed regional mass transit system of bus and train routes would boost usage and bring down the cost so that SEMCOG can get the federal funding.”

The result? No new target date for the daily service has been set. 

The only trains that will run will be operated by the company that has been running an east-west train service between Ann Arbor and Detroit for 40 years: Amtrak. Heck, you can hop on the Ann Arbor-Detroit Amtrak train today, if you like. It will take about an hour to get to the Detroit train station, located at 11 West Baltimore Avenue, near the Cass Corridor, and about a mile from the Wayne State University campus and the DIA.

Since the demise of commuter rail, the new idea is “special” trains. For instance, there will be a special train between Ann Arbor and Detroit for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. If you’ve never been, go, but drive your car, because the train station is, literally, miles from the parade route.  There’s always loads of free on-street parking within one block of the parade. Hit Lucy & Ethels diner, located at 400 Bagley Street, for lunch after the festivities.

We’ll see you there.

There will also be “special” trains for University of Michigan football games. In other words, Amtrak will schedule service to coincide with Michigan’s home football games. We need a new train station for that? I think not. We need to be exponentially more concerned with how AATA is going to haul the people who take the trains to the games to Michigan Stadium from the Amtrak station. At the moment, Michigan Stadium is not a choice on the AATA Trip Planner page, and “Stadiums” is not an option in the drop down menu. Those are easily remedied issues, of course.

However, there are other more complicated issues associated with “special” trains bringing people to U of M football games: AATA. Buses in our city currently run infrequently on the weekends, and Saturday service ends early. Unless every Michigan fan who takes the “special” train to Ann Arbor and then takes an AATA bus to the Stadium is charged enough to cover the actual operating expenses incurred by AATA for the service, Ann Arbor taxpayers who pay the AATA’s millage, will be subsidizing the University of Michigan as it earns tens of million of dollars in football revenues each Saturday. 

One solution would be for U of M to assess a transportation fee on the tickets it sells to football games and give that money to AATA. It’s either that, or the University of Michigan should use its own buses to transport its football fans to and from its stadium and the train station on Depot Street. I would argue that it’s a stretch to ask taxpayers to provide train service to the football games of one university in the entire state of Michigan. 

At the March 16th Park Advisory Commission (PAC) meeting, a commission member asked the city’s Transportation Program Director, Eli Cooper, a very important question: Is the Fuller Transportation Station a transportation center or a parking structure? “I believe it’s a little of both,” Cooper said. Cooper went on to explain that “the project began as a transportation center then turned into a parking structure to meet the short-term need—while at the same time proving to potential partners, such as the federal government, that Ann Arbor is serious about commuter rail.”

Seriously? Public servants serious about representing the best interests of their constituents don’t allow city staff to throw away tax money, give away parkland, or cut police and fire service to build the University of Michigan a parking garage for its “short-term need.” Because that’s the “short-term need” to which Cooper is referring—the University of Michigan’s growing need for more parking for its employees.

So, why are our elected officials still allowing city staff to steam down the tracks and spend money on the “multi-phase” Fuller Transportation Station? The “joint” venture with the University of Michigan looks suspiciously like the scrawny kid (Ann Arbor) being taken for $14 million dollars in lunch money by the neighborhood smooth talker (U of M). The latest plans for the transportation station shown at the PAC meeting include exactly one edifice: a parking garage to be used by the University of Michigan.

At the March 16th PAC meeting, Eli Cooper explained exactly why he needs $14 million dollars the city doesn’t have to build a train station that we don’t need, and for which SEMCOG has made clear commuter trains will never stop. Cooper was quoted in the AnnArborChronicle.com as telling the city’s PAC members that:

…Amtrak anticipates doubling its ridership in the next 25 years. That’s not including potential commuter or high-speed rail. Right now, the Ann Arbor station, located on Depot Street, has 75 long-term parking spots. Their current location won’t accommodate future growth, Cooper said. He noted that the Ann Arbor station is the second busiest one on the Chicago-Detroit route – only downtown Chicago is busier. The Fuller Road Station is also intended to be an alternative for driving to the Detroit Metro airport, Cooper said. And though the Fuller Road Station didn’t get chosen in the latest round of federal funding, the project was approved, he noted – the feds just ran out of money. 

First of all, Cooper’s explanation directly contradicts the March 19, 2010 Crain’s Business Weekly coverage that cited the cost-per-rider ratio as the reason the Ann Arbor to Detroit commuter project was turned down for federal funds. Next, in January 2010, the federal government awarded $40 million dollars to Amtrak to renovate two of their stations on the Detroit-Chicago route. Read about the allocations here. The Ann Arbor station was not selected; stations in Battle Creek, Dearborn and Troy will get money for the kind of expansions that Eli Cooper, Mayor and City Council are demanding that Ann Arbor taxpayers foot the bill for. The $40 million dollar federal allocation includes building a new train station, as well—just not in Ann Arbor, but rather near the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.

Evidently, the federal government is not prepared to spend money for a new train station in Ann Arbor despite Cooper’s assertion that Amtrak needs one “because Amtrak anticipates doubling ridership in the next 25 years.” Perhaps this is because there are people in the federal government who are perfectly aware that Cooper’s assertions are patently absurd. In Michigan, specifically, on the Detroit-Chicago route, Amtrak officials do not expect ridership will double. Amtrak has not experienced ridership growth over the past three years. In fact, between 2007 and 2009, ridership of the Wolverine Service route between Detroit and Chicago dropped by 7.1 percent, according to ridership and revenue data from Amtrak provided to Trains Magazine and which the magazine published on November 20, 2009. Revenues on the Wolverine route dropped 7.8 percent ($1.4 million dollars) during the same period. Between 2008-2009, Amtrak lost 1.6 million riders costing the company a total of $140,000,000 in revenue.

So I ask, once again, why are Ann Arbor taxpayers being asked to pay the University of Michigan to build a parking garage on public-owned land that overlooks the Huron River? According to Eli Cooper it’s a multi-million dollar gamble to prove we’re “serious” about a commuter line between Detroit and Ann Arbor.

Let me tell you what I’m serious about: holding city staff accountable for their work and the taxpayer money they want to spend. The city needs to withdraw from the “joint” partnership immediately, and refund all of the money taken from the General Fund for the Phase I concept plan. I’m serious about putting an immediate stop to the use of any more taxpayer money for the construction of a 1,020 car parking garage for the University of Michigan on valuable river-front property owned by the people of Ann Arbor. 

On November 5, 2009, former Third Ward Council member Leigh Greden, Mayor John Hieftje and Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo presented Council with the Resolution to Approve Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the City of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan for the Development of the Fuller Road Station. See a video of the Council’s discussion of the MOU here. You will hear U of M’s spokesman Jim Kosteva tell Council that the parking garage for the University of Michigan is a “city-owned project.” The one-sided MOU was prepared by Eli Cooper, reviewed by Sue F. McCormick, Public Services Administrator and  Jayne Miller, Community Services Administrator, and approved by Roger W. Fraser, City Administrator. 

Our city officials landed none of the money they went before Council and said could be landed for commuter rail. Michigan received none of the $8 billion dollars in federal stimulus money for high speed rail between Detroit and Chicago. Does that mean we never will? Of course not. Does it mean we should give away parkland and spend millions to build U of M a parking garage to “prove” we’re “serious” about commuter rail? Wisconsin was awarded $810 million to upgrade and refurbish train stations and install safety equipment on the Madison-to-Milwaukee leg of a line that stretches from Minneapolis to Chicago. Elected officials in neither Madison nor Milwaukee spent a dime proving that their cities were “serious,” about rail prior to receiving the federal funds.

The Fuller Transportation is not a collaboration between Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan; it’s a giveaway of public land and public money to an entity that has already amassed over 1,700 acres of land in our city, and pays just a fraction of what it should for the city services it receives now. The MOU is a poorly negotiated, one-sided agreement supported by Greden, Hieftje and Rapundalo, and then unanimously approved by Council.

The MOU should have never been approved at all. Now that it’s clear that those citizen activists who said many months ago that there was no money to operate a commuter train were absolutely correct, it’s time for Council to step up and represent the best interests of the people of Ann Arbor. Those interests are in no way best represented by participating in a one-sided arrangement that seeks to give away our prime river front land and our money to our university neighbor.

If this is a “city-owned” project, as U of M’s Jim Kosteva said at the November 5, 2009 City Council meeting, City Council, by refusing to approve further funding and construction will, effectively, kill it.

Popularity: 49% [?]

February 4, 2010

The Politics of Financial Football: Throwing The Hail Mary Pass in the First Quarter

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On February 2, 2010, the day I declared to run for mayor, AnnArbor.com posted this piece: “Roger Fraser tells Ann Arbor City Council to set aside politics to make budget decisions.” The City Administrator is quoted in the piece as saying to Mayor and Council: 

“I understand that these are politically difficult things to talk about,” Fraser said. “I understand that we have elections every year. I understand that six of you are up for election this year. But I also understand that we’ve got some major issues that need to be resolved in terms of our budget, and something’s got to give.”

Well, yes. Something’s got to give. Rather, someone’s got to give: the taxpayer. Roger Fraser is pushing to have Council members put a city income tax on the ballot. At the January 19, 2010 Budget Committee meeting, Fraser suggested to the members of the Committee, First Ward’s Sabra Briere, Fifth Ward’s Mike Anglin, Second Ward’s Stephen Rapundalo, Fourth Ward’s Marcia Higgins and Third Ward’s Christopher Taylor, that they had an obligation to float the question of a city income tax. 

The Mayor, in attendance, thus making the meeting a quorum, and subject to Open Meetings Act requirements, had this interesting tidbit to add. Whether the question was floated on the August primary ballot or on the November general election ballot would have little impact on how soon any city income tax could be implemented. Well, yes. That’s true. However, we know that in Ann Arbor, mayor and council races are decided in August, in the primary, not in the November general election. 

Former Third Ward council member Leigh Greden, who ran opposed, and Second Ward’s Stephen Rapundalo who ran unopposed, tempted the tax gods by coming out in favor of a city income tax during the 2009 primary season. This video comes from AnnArbor.com, and was shot before the August 4, 2009 primary. Note that Roger Fraser says there are 75,000 people who commute into Ann Arbor daily. On January 31, 2010, the Mayor was quoted in AnnArbor.com as saying, “…Ann Arbor has an estimated 70,000 daily commuters.” These numbers come from the July 2009 Plante Moran Income Tx Feasibility Study. In that study, on page 26, the authors document that there are 20,000 commuters who come to work at U of M. The study then concludes there are 54,000 additional people who commute into the City. There is, however, no source for where that number comes from. Furthermore, the study concludes between 2011 and 2015, Ann Arbor will add 4,000 jobs for people to commute to. Between 2006 and 2009, Ann Arbor added a total of 600 jobs. 

 

Roger Fraser estimates that a city income tax could “could raise $7.6 million a year in additional revenue for the city,” according to AnnArbor.com. Of course, there was a July 2009 study to support the idea of putting a city income tax to a vote. In that study by Plante & Moran, the authors write, “Using growth rate assumptions made by City personnel, we projected revenue that would be generated from the current property tax system over the next five years….The analysis has been developed using the best available information concerning financial and demographic trends and conditions. As mentioned above, each model was developed using certain key assumptions and should not be evaluated without a thorough understanding of those assumptions. The assumptions and the accompanying rationale are documented in later sections of this report….”

Here’s where we all need to sit up and pay very close attention: “All assumptions are the responsibility of the City of Ann Arbors’ management based on their best judgment at the time of the study. It is possible that the forecasted results may not be achieved because events and circumstances frequently do not occur as expected.”

In other words, Roger Fraser’s revenue estimate is not even an estimate. It’s a prognostication in the grand tradition of prognosticators. Plante and Moran predict that the assumptions of growth made by city staff, and on which the study is based, “frequently do not occur as predicted.”

If that doesn’t give you a cold grue, it should. The Plante and Moran study begins with a caveat that explains, quite clearly, that a city income tax is not the panacea for the budget woes of Ann Arbor. In fact, the move to a city income tax could end up providing Ann Arbor less revenue than the current property tax model. And there we’d be, still, facing the alternatives the City Administrator often presents to the people of Ann Arbor through City Council: freeze to death or burn to death. Sell parkland, raise taxes, cut services, or increase water and sewer fees.

Mayor Hieftje took himself off of the Budget Committee. Margie Teall stepped down, as well. However, their decision to try to distance themselves from the disaster that it the city’s fiscal situation is a day late and several million dollars short.

It’s quite clear that for the past several years, the Budget Committee on which they sat, and Council, simply followed the direction of the City Administrator and CFO without question and without performing the due diligence required. For instance, the City Charter mandates monthly statements be delivered to the Budget Committee that summarize the City’s financial position. They were never requested or delivered. Yet, the Mayor and his hand-picked Budget Committee crafted policy, recommended program and service cuts, and made recommendations for the expenditure of over $1.5 billion in tax dollars and fees over the past five years without ever knowing exactly how much money the City had in any given month.

Thanks to the urging of Third Ward’s Steve Kunselman, city staff will be producing monthly reports. According to the AnnArborchronicle.com, this is what long-time Budget Committee Chair, Fourth Ward’s Marcia Higgins, had to say when it was suggested that the monthly reports be delivered directly to all Council members. 

“In discussing how the monthly report should be disseminated, Roger Fraser suggested that it be sent directly to all councilmembers. However, Marcia Higgins (Ward 4) weighed in in favor of first having the budget committee review it before disseminating it to other councilmembers. She reasoned that the rest of the council might not understand what they were looking at, and that budget committee members would then be in a position to help others on council.”

Is it any wonder Roger Fraser is pushing, shoving and trying to drop-kick a city income tax? At this same meeting, he suggested that City Council survey voter attitudes – such as the survey conducted by AATA concerning that group’s fantasy of a county-wide millage. The City Administrator called allocating money for such a survey “due diligence.” 

Due diligence? I call it a waste of time and taxpayer money. Those are marketing surveys designed to find out how to best phrase the ballot question so that the voters will support the measure.

There are three steps that must be taken before we can ever entertain the notion of a city income tax: 

1.  As I wrote in an earlier entry (“The Politics of Cooking the Books: Ann Arbor as a French Restaurant”), total city revenues are up significantly since 2006. So are total expenses. It’s time to examine every possible opportunity for savings. Overhead is the place to begin. The cost of running City Hall has risen 35 percent since 2006. That is a rate of increase that far outpaces both inflation and the cost of living combined. Over-spending must be checked immediately. There is no moratorium, for instance, on meals out and travel for city staff, while at the same time those same staff bring scenarios to Council and the public to raise revenue by selling parkland and cutting services. 

2.  All City Council members must be given extensive training in reading and understanding financial statements. It’s no sin to be incapable of understanding a cash flow analysis, and such training would benefit not only the Council members, but the public they serve, as well. It is a sin to vote on the allocation of funds without having first examined and understood the financial situation of the City. All Council members have to know the right questions to ask in order to have the ability to oversee city staff in their use of the tax dollars given them. 

3.  It’s time for a Mayor who will send Ann Arbor City Administrator Roger Fraser, and CFO Tom Crawford back to sharpen their pencils and to prepare two scenarios: under the auspices of the first, they cut 10 percent of the city’s expenses. Under the second, they cut 20 percent of the city’s expenses.

There’s only one rule: not a single city service may be impacted adversely by the cuts.

Popularity: 30% [?]

February 2, 2010

The Politics of Falling From Grace: An Interview With DDA Board Member Jennifer Santi Hall

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Jennifer Santi Hall was never convinced Ann Arbor needed an underground parking garage and more parking. As a board member of the current Downtown Development Authority, her opinion is akin to heresy. 

 

Santi Hall has spent the past seven years serving on various city boards and commissions. After Mayor Hieftje’s 2008 re-election, she wrote a glowing blog entry about Mayor Hieftje’s work as an environmentalist. The post appears on the Great Lakes Law blog, authored by Hall’s husband, Noah Hall. Detractors, in fact, refer to Jennifer Hall as John Hieftje in a skirt for her perceived unquestioning support of his initiatives. Hall writes in the August 2008 blog entry, “In 2003, he led a successful campaign for a dedicated millage to create a greenbelt of farmland and open space around Ann Arbor, including significant portions of the Huron River watershed. Leader of the Huron Valley Chapter of the Sierra Club, Doug Cowherd, will tell you he easily spent 1,000 hours crafting the greenbelt resolution and championed the cause well before Hieftje came on board.

 

Then, came the February 2009 letter of intent to file suit against the city. The  lawsuit aimed at derailing the Library Lot underground parking lot project was filed by the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center. The Law Center is headed by Jennifer Santi Hall’s husband, Noah. According to an entry about the lawsuit posted to the AnnArborChronicle.com, on August 13, 2009, “the complaint alleges violations of the Michigan Environmental Protection Act, the Michigan Open Meetings Act, as well as nuisance and trespass violations.”

 

Then came a public accusation made by Mayor Hieftje at the May 2009 DDA Board retreat that Jennifer Santi Hall had “a cloud hanging over her head” thanks to the lawsuit. The cloud over her head was interfering with the ability of a joint City Council-DDA committee moving forward with negotiations between the DDA and the city. City Council members refused to work with Hall, and the Mayor was disinclined to force the issue.

 

In an October 2009 A2Politico interview with former DDA Board member Rene Greff, Greff said, “At our annual Board retreat, I pressed the Mayor until he finally admitted publically what I had been saying for months, that the reason they were stalling on putting together their committee was that “some members of Council”  didn’t want to negotiate with Jennifer and me.”

 

There are some who are betting that Jennifer Santi Hall’s political career in Ann Arbor is over so long as Mayor Hieftje remains in office. A2Poltico caught up with Jennifer Santi Hall and asked her about her time on the DDA Board, the pending lawsuit, why she doesn’t support the Library Lot underground parking garage, and whether she will lose her seat on the Board of the Downtown Development Authority this summer, when her term ends.

 

1.  When Kim Groome left Ann Arbor, and the First Ward City Council seat became open, you were in the running for appointment to that seat. After all, you had been Chair of the Planning Commission, a Board Mayor Hieftje uses as a stepping stone for those whom he’d like to see on City Council. I’ve heard Groome’s vacant First Ward Council seat was promised to you, and that at the last moment, a friend of Council member Christopher Easthope’s was appointed instead. A very short time later, Mayor Hieftje appointed you to the Greenbelt Advisory Commission and then, almost a year to the day after you were passed over for that First Ward Council seat appointment, you were appointed by the Mayor to the DDA. Forgive me, but it looks suspiciously as if those two Board appointments were rewards for you having taken “one for the team,” when Chris Easthope’s college friend was appointed to the City Council seat promised you. Comments? 

 

First, a couple of clarifications to your statement above.  I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say that the Planning Commission has been used by Mayor Hieftje as a “stepping stone for those he’s like to see on City Council.”  In the 7 years I’ve been serving on city boards and commission, I can only recall two planning commissioners who have run for Council – Eric Lipson (ran against Marcia Higgins in 4th Ward, not endorsed by Mayor Hieftje) and Steve Kunselman (don’t recall if he was endorsed by the Mayor in 2006, not endorsed in 2009).    

 

Another clarification, I was appointed to the Greenbelt Advisory Commission upon its creation in May of 2004; Kim Groome left Council sometime in July or August of 2005. 


If the Mayor thought he was giving me a seat on the DDA board as a reward for “taking one for the team,”  he certainly didn’t let me in on his thought process.

 

As the end of my 3 year term on Planning Commission approached in spring of 2006, I scheduled a meeting with Mayor Heiftje.  I told him that I didn’t want to be presumptuous in thinking he would offer me a second term on Planning Commission, but in case he was thinking of reappointing me, I wanted to let him know that I wasn’t interested.  I was pregnant and then later a nursing mom during my term on Planning Commission and my husband and I were thinking about another child for our family, and I just couldn’t envision surviving the late night meetings during another pregnancy and infancy.  I was quite surprised when the Mayor asked if I would be interested in a citizen seat on the DDA.  He told me my background and also my experience on Planning Commission would make me a good fit for that board.

 

I don’t believe that I was ever “promised” the seat vacated by Kim Groome, but it is true that Leigh Greden (former Third Ward Council member) encouraged me to put my name in the running for the vacant seat and then gave me some advice about how to prepare and present myself during the process. Up to a point, I believe he was actively lobbying his colleagues to appoint me.  I don’t know all of what happened behind the scenes except that there were some on Council who didn’t want to see Tim Colenback appointed (who was really the Ward 1 favorite).  I had never met Tim and knew little of his background and involvement in city issues. Thanks to our mutual friend Jeff Irwin, Tim and I got to know each other better during the appointment process.  I wish that I had been introduced to Tim before I put my name forward for the seat —I certainly would have made a different decision.  I think Tim would have made (or someday will be) a great Councilperson.

 

I am actually quite happy that I was not appointed to that seat.  My time serving on city boards gave me great experience with policy issues, but I wasn’t as involved in the city politics.  Looking back, it’s clear that the council majority wanted someone that would simply go along with their agenda, and that’s not what the voters of the 1st ward wanted and not what I would have done.

 

2. You were appointed to the DDA in 2006, and former Board member Rene Greff told A2Politico that she holds great stock in your abilities as a Board member. One of the reasons Greff got booted was her outspoken defense of the DDA as an independent Board, both procedurally and financially. Some say the DDA Board must submit to the will of City Council. Others disagree because the DDA is an entity established and supported by City Charter, just as is the City Council. What is your view of the relationship between Council and the DDA? Who’s the alpha dog, as it were, or are there two packs at work here?


The Ann Arbor DDA was created in 1982, under the authority of the State of Michigan Act 197 (passed in 1975).  The State wanted to give municipalities a tool for downtown urban renewal—a way to combat the economic decline and structural demise that was affecting downtowns all across America. In creating the DDA in Ann Arbor, the City Council recognized the extreme importance that a downtown district has to the whole city’s vitality.  The downtown belongs to the entire Ann Arbor community and as such would benefit from a designated stream of resources to protect and nurture it. I was excited by an opportunity to serve on the DDA because I fundamentally believe in the general purpose of DDAs and the mission of the Ann Arbor DDA.  I am a true lover of downtown urban areas.  I like the excitement, the crowd of people, the entertainment, and cultural offerings.  Having all these things located close together means that they are very accessible to everyone. Vibrant downtowns are an important component to my environmental ethic —I believe a density of residents, employment, and activity is the only sustainable way to construct a city and to make transportation between work, home and play not dependent on an automobile.

 

I totally agree with Rene that the DDA should be an independent authority.  City Councils must make decisions about many areas of the city and appropriate resources across all types of competing community interests.  The DDA exists with a board independent from City Council expressly to protect the DDA area from having to compete with the rest of those interests.  That being said, I don’t believe the DDA has unchecked authority.  It is created by the City, overseen by the City, and can be dissolved if the City Council so desires.

 

The DDA has money (from the tax capture and from parking revenues) and the Council has the statutory oversight of our appointments, changes to our bylaws, approval of our budget.  Further, any infrastructure work we want to do in the downtown requires their approval because the city owns all the property (roads, parking structures, alleys, etc).  So the politics begins.  Some politics have a purpose, those games I understand.  Some other politics make no sense.

 

I wish Council provided the kind of oversight, check and balance that an independent agency such as the DDA (or AATA or any other authority) should have.  But they don’t always do that.  They don’t really look into our bylaws and make sure that we aren’t abusing our power.  They just won’t approve them (DDA sent bylaw changes to Council about 2 years ago and they were never placed on a Council agenda for approval) because some board members want them changed and certain council members don’t want those board members to have something they want. 


If the City Council wants unquestioned access to the DDAs resources, then it should disband the DDA.  It has the ability to do so, but if you were to look closely at the numbers, you would see that it would not make financial sense for the city to do so.  The DDA’s TIF capture comes from not only the City but also the County, AAPS, AADL, and WCC.  The DDA has given the City more than its share of TIF capture back in grants and other expenditures (like rent for the parking meters – the original source of the $2million question). 


3.  Mayor and a group of Council members including Leigh Greden, Margie Teall, Marcia Higgins, as well as Ann Arbor’s CFO Tom Crawford, have been pressing the DDA over the past 24 months for larger financial contributions to the City’s sagging General Fund. The DDA Board agreed, for instance, to pay $500,000 per year toward the cost of the bonds issued to build the new Court house. A past DDA member described this to me as an outrageous misuse of DDA funds. You voted in favor of the DDA-city bond repayment obligation, but against the underground parking garage project. Why should taxpayers care if Council demands millions from the DDA to put into the General Fund? It’s the city’s money, anyway, right?


I truly believe in the purpose and mission of DDAs.  The DDA exists to protect and nurture a communal resource.  If the City continually uses politics to coerce resources out of the DDA, I think our whole community loses.  I believe there are 3 big reasons why our community should care how the DDA spends its resources (and why we should care if those resources are given to the City’s General Fund).  

 1.  TIF money doesn’t just come from the City of Ann Arbor;  

 2.  Parking system revenues should be used for transportation; and

3. It’s disingenuous to have a DDA and then take the resources for other purposes.

 

All DDAs across the state are structured and financed differently.  In the case of Ann Arbor’s DDA, some of the funds come from the TIF captured by the DDA and some (a much larger amount) of funds come from parking revenues.  The DDA has maintained separate purposes for these funds – parking revenues support transportation (including operation and maintenance of the parking system and support for alternative transportation efforts like getDowntown and goPasses) and TIF funds are used for other work of the DDA (alley improvements, Fifth/Division, LED lighting, energy grants, and projects like the municipal center).  


The question presents 3 different and distinct issues regarding the use of DDA funds.  First, there’s the financial support the DDA gave to the municipal center project came from TIF funds.  The DDA was asked by the City for a certain amount of money (something like $8 million) and we decided it would be easier for us to contribute the money on a yearly basis (rather than in a lump sum cash payment) and so it made sense for us to pay the yearly bond payments.  I supported the DDA’s contribution to this project because I felt that was a good investment in the downtown.  It was very important to me to keep City Hall and city workforce downtown.  And the urban streetscape improvement the building addition makes to Fifth Ave. was really important to me as well.  I think public investment in downtown municipal buildings (city halls, librarys, court buildings, etc) is incredibly important to a vibrant, functional downtown.  I also supported the green elements the City added to the building. 


The second issue is the parking garage.  The DDA is paying for most of this project out of parking revenues, although some of the aspects of the project are paid out of TIF funds.  I voted against the parking garage for a several reasons:  

1.  I don’t believe we need more parking at this time in downtown;

2.  I think we can create more parking supply by increasing our investment in alternatives and managing our parking supply differently (the DDA is already doing this and I argued that we should wait to see the results of these investments and operational changes BEFORE building more parking, especially with such a big price tag);

3. I felt that investing $50 million in more parking was a bad environmental choice – think of what $50 million could do to create modern efficient transit choices; and

4.  I didn’t support how the project was being financed.  I’m disappointed that there was not more vocal opposition to the parking structure during the year or more that the DDA was designing and discussing the options and project details.  

 

There were a few voices questioning the giant parking garage (Steve Bean, chair of the city’s environmental commission for one) but not as many as there are now that the giant hole is being dug.  The City is on the hook for the bonds—so if parking demand should change, and we rely on revenue from all these new spaces to pay for the bonds, and there’s no revenue because we have too much parking supply, then what?

 

The third issue has been dubbed the “$2 million question.”  I would call this a raid on DDA resources.  

 

A bit of abbreviated history —5 years ago the DDA took over management and operation of the on-street parking meters.  The city was looking for more money for the General Fund at this time, and negotiated a deal with the DDA (I was not on the DDA at that time) in which the DDA would operate/manage the meters (and take the revenues – coins, not fines) and pay the City a “rent” payment for the use of the meters and other parking facilities in the amount of $1 million per year for 10 years.  


 The City also negotiated an option to take $2 million per year for 5 years. It is my understanding that the City had proposed eliminating the downtown beat cops due to budget limitations and the DDA felt that this rent payment would ensure that those needed cops wouldn’t go away. Nothing about the cops was written into the agreement, however.  2009 was year five of this deal and the city took its last $2million and they are now left with five more years of a “rent” agreement with no more rent to be paid.  Rene Greff and I had been quite vocal in saying that it is unfair for the city to ask for more money for an agreement that has been fulfilled on our part. This rent money comes from parking revenues.  I am totally OK with beginning a new discussion with City Council about another mutually beneficial agreement that the city and DDA could make—something whereby the DDA pays the city money in exchange for something that benefits the downtown or DDA.   

 

This big, heated discussion of the $ 2 million has quieted down as of late and I think there are a couples of reasons for that. Leigh Greden is no longer on City Council and he was very interested in getting another $2 million yearly payment out of the DDA.  Also, I think that City Council is looking for smaller ways to find mutually beneficial agreements with the DDA (or raid the DDA bank, if you will).  For example, a month or so ago, the City directed the DDA to give them the revenue from the old Y lot.  And that’s what the DDA did (I was absent from that meeting so didn’t participate in the discussion).

 

So, getting back to your question: Why should taxpayers care if Council demands millions from the DDA to put into the General Fund? It’s the city’s money, anyway, right?  Taxpayers should care because not all the TIF money comes from the City. Some comes from the library, the schools, the county, the AATA.  These entities have given up some of their tax capture to support the DDA and are not demanding the DDA support their straining budgets.  The DDA has always maintained that parking revenues should support transportation purposes.  I have no problem with starting a new discussion about parking revenues supporting some other purpose in the city—but I absolutely do not think that parking revenues should be used to bridge a gap in the City of Ann Arbor’s General Fund.  Do people who park in Ann Arbor want to pay higher rates to support the city’s administration budget?  And lastly, if the City desperately needs the DDA’s money, then it should disband the DDA and take back the parking system and TIF capture and redistribute it as it best sees fit.  It’s disingenuous to create a DDA under State Law to do one thing, and then take the money for the City’s general fund.

 

4.  Let’s talk about the library lot underground parking garage. You voted against that project. However, it was the lawsuit filed by two downtown businesses and the Great Lake Environmental Law Center that has resulted in some intensive political backlash against you from City Council members, DDA Board members and the Mayor. Did you expect your political career to be hobbled? One would imagine you’d seen what happened to others who “dissented,” or rocked the boat.


First, let’s just be open and clear about this. My husband is currently serving as the Executive Director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the City.  The bad feelings toward me started long before the lawsuit was filed.  I started “rocking the boat” not long after I joined the DDA board.  

 

From day one, I was skeptical of the need to build more parking, and continually pushed the DDA to invest more money into alternative transportation.  I was also a huge supporter of the DDA’s Fifth and Division improvement project (it was one of the projects I was most excited to join the DDA to work on).  For some reason, there was a lot of political maneuvering on Council about this project.  I don’t really know why some on Council didn’t support the project and why others on DDA who were supportive got cold feet.  When the first vote for the project came up at DDA (maybe only a few months after I started on the board), the Mayor called me before the meeting and asked if I would support a postponement of the project.  

 

He said he supported the project, but the timing wasn’t right and that maybe we could do it cheaper.  I told him I couldn’t support a postponement.  The DDA had worked very hard on this project, it had very popular community support and if this wasn’t the right time to invest in downtown, then when would be the right time? Fortunately for the project, the move to postpone was defeated and the project moved forward at DDA. Only to be stalled for over a year at City Council.  

 

Council refused to put the project on an agenda, knowing that it had broad community support and not wanting to have to cast a vote against it at the Council table.  After some time, Rene and I strategized about how best to move this project forward.  We asked our staff to organize another public meeting to bring the project some current attention (the meeting was very well attended).  And we lobbied City Council, a lot, especially Rene.  She was great.  All this time, the DDA was working out options for building more parking and then designing plans for the library lot underground structure.  

 

So, I’m outspoken about Fifth and Division to Council and very vocal in my opposition to building more parking.  I’m already a dissenter.  The letter sent by the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center (along with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, and several local residents) to the city raising concerns about the environmental impacts of this project, the FOIA requests made by the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center for council meeting emails, and the subsequent lawsuit filed by the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center and neighboring businesses was just the icing on the cake.  I don’t really think my political career has been hobbled.  I don’t really envision that I have a political career.  I don’t know what the next phase will be for me—but it can’t happen if I compromise my goals or my principles.

 

5. With Leigh Greden gone, do you think the relationship between the DDA and Council will change in any way? If so, how?


I think it’s fair to say that Leigh supported the basic premise behind having a DDA—invest in downtown and it will remain vital and prosperous.  Many people can support that general concept and all have a different set of priorities and a different way of implementing that agenda.  I believe that Leigh primarily saw the DDA as a big piggy bank for his priorities and did not respect the priorities or the autonomy of the DDA board. 


As a member of the Council budget committee, Leigh was the most vocal Councilmember in wanting to continue the $2 million payments from the DDA to the City (something I don’t support as a “blank check” payment).  He was very instrumental in getting the DDA to contribute to the Police/Courts building.  He even came to our board meeting the day we approved the contribution.  My most frustrating interaction with him during my time on DDA was his opposition to the 5th and Division streetscape improvements.  Of course, his opposition was never made public.  Instead, for over a year, he prevented the project from being placed on a Council agenda for consideration. 


So—yes, I think the relationship between DDA and Council will change now that Leigh is no longer in office. 


6.  Mayor Hieftje has been accused of stacking the DDA Board with appointees who will rubber stamp his ideas and simply do his bidding. In your opinion, who are the voices of dissent on the DDA Board. Is it necessary to have voices of dissent on the DDA Board do you think?


One of the powers given to Ann Arbor’s Mayor is his/her ability to make appointments to boards and commissions. Not all of them, however. City Council gets to make nominations to other boards, such as the Greenbelt Advisory Commission and Environmental Commission. Ever wonder about the politics involved in creating those boards and why that authority wasn’t given to the Mayor? The Mayor selects people that he thinks will be most sympathetic to his interests.  Even so, the vast majority of people that serve of city boards and commissions are independent minded, dedicated, and put a tremendous amount of work towards serving the city.  Even when I disagree with them on a specific issue, I respect their service and work.

 

Dissent, conflict, and differences of opinions are what lead to good public policy in my opinion.  The big questions are: how loud does it become, what are the politics involved, how personal does it get, and is it effective at serving a public good?  I have witnessed several situations which lead to dissent on city boards.  

 1.  The Mayor appoints new people to a board to replace those appointed by the previous Mayor.  That’s what happened when I was appointed to the Planning Commission almost 7 years ago.  I suspect that people are feeling more homogeneity of appointments of late because the Mayor has been in office for so long that ALL of the people serving on board and commissions have been appointed by him (or re-appointed in some cases).  

 2.  The Mayor misjudges a person’s goals and support for certain issues.  Or more significantly, the person has a stronger independent voice than thought.  It’s totally understandable.  You don’t take a test of loyalty or an oath to do whatever he says when you’re offered an appointment.  

 3.  The Mayor appoints someone he knows may be a voice of dissent, but does it as a token offering to a certain interest group he wants to make favor with.  (I think Dave DeVarti’s tenure on the DDA and Eppie Potts’s appointments to the Planning Commission illustrate this point)  

 4.  The Mayor actually changes his goals or maybe not his goals, but the priority of those goals, and his appointments no longer match those interests. (I think Fred Beal and Rob Aldrich are good examples here – they were good appointments when the primary issue of the day for the Mayor was downtown density, but not so much when the big issue of the day became getting another $2million from the DDA, so he didn’t reappoint them).

 

If it’s of interest to your readers, here’s a detailed sketch of my own relationship as an appointee with the Mayor to illustrate my points above.  I have spent 7 years on 4 different boards and commissions:  1 term on Planning Commission appointed my Mayor Hieftje (appointed in 2003, confirmed by City Council on a 6-5 vote); a year or so on the Environmental Commission (filling a spot designated for a planning commissioner, I was nominated by the Planning Commission and confirmed by City Council); in my 3rd term on the Greenbelt Advisory Commission (appointed in 2004, nominated by Council); and serving in my 4th year of my first term on DDA (appointed in 2006 by Mayor Hieftje and confirmed by City Council —not sure of the vote).

 

When I was first appointed to the Planning Commission in 2003, the Mayor was looking for someone who would sympathize with neighborhoods disgruntled with development, oppose tall buildings in the downtown, and someone who would be an environmental voice on the Planning Commission.  It was thought that I would do all these things (I was recruited for the position by Doug Cowherd and Bill Hanson, who were at the time close advisors of the Mayor, because of my background with conservation planning working for The Nature Conservancy.)  The vetting process for appointments is not all that rigorous (you don’t have to submit to any tests, go through days and days of Senate-like confirmation hearings or give over your first born child), and of course, it’s hard to know exactly how someone will think or grow as they get more knowledge and experience under their belt.  

 

I do have a strong environmental ethic, but as it turns out my self-defined environmental goals support some increased density in the downtown. Funny thing is, the Mayor changed his mind about density in the downtown. Downtown density (and some issues surrounding the formation of the Greenbelt Advisory Commission) fractured the relationship between Doug, Bill and the Mayor.  The Mayor later became more closely allied to Leigh Greden (who also was a proponent of downtown density).   

 

And what happened to me?  I ended up on the Greden/Heiftje “team” partly because they saw me as an ally to their position and partly because I was “shunned” and “demonized” by others in this town for my position about downtown density and other development issues.  It’s important for me to emphasize here that I never chose any of these teams.  My beliefs have never changed—although they have grown and been refined by experience and knowledge.  And I don’t mean to say that I’ve only been a pawn in all of this political shifting.  I have strong opinions and I’m not shy about stating them and working the issues.  I’ve used and I’ve been used and that’s all part of the game.  


I believe the Mayor appointed me to the DDA because I was an advocate for downtown density, but also because I was a supporter of alternative transportation, something also promoted by the Mayor.  After a few months on the DDA, the Mayor called me and asked if I would support delaying the decision on the 5th and Division project.  He felt the timing was bad and the project cost too much money. I didn’t agree with him—5th and Division was one of the DDAs projects that I was most excited about joining the board to work on. This was a turning point in my relationship with the Mayor.  I also didn’t support the parking structure project, advocating for more than a year that we do more transit demand management and invest more in alternative transportation before we spend so much money to build more parking.  Then I vocally opposed the city taking $2 million from the DDA for no express purpose.  Then the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center and other environmental groups (with my husband as the lead attorney) started raising legal issues with the parking structure and that’s when things really changed and the true hostilities started.

 

I think all boards need different opinions.  A good fight makes sure that an issue is really thought about before it’s done.  Debate and conflict are what make good public policy.  Some on DDA recall a happier time when the DDA was a “consensus board.”  I don’t think that made for good public policy.  I’m glad that there are voices of dissent, on any issue, even ones I support.  But, I think the dissent needs to be philosophical or pragmatic in nature.  Arguing for politics sake just wastes everyone’s time.

 

7. Rene Greff assumes you will not be reappointed to the DDA Board when your term expires. Is her assumption correct, do you think? Have you spoken to the Mayor about this? Do you want to be reappointed to the DDA Board?


As I said above, it is really up to the Mayor to decide if he wants to reappoint me to the DDA Board.  Given the chilly feeling I get from him, it certainly seems that Rene’s assumption is a good one.  I have a seat on the DDA board that is reserved for a citizen representative (other seats are reserved for downtown business owners and employees and one seat for a downtown resident).  I think it’s important to fill the citizen seats with people who do not also have a business or residential interest in the downtown.  The DDA was created in recognition that vibrant, successful downtowns benefit the whole of Ann Arbor, and it’s funded using tax money that could otherwise have a different public purpose.   

 

It’s important to me that the citizen representatives on the DDA not only serve the mission of the DDA, but are mindful of the broader context for that mission. 

Popularity: 37% [?]

January 26, 2010

The Politics of Cooking the Books: Ann Arbor As A French Restaurant

Filed under: best of A2Politico, money — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 2:00 pm
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The city’s General Fund is a train wreck.

Property tax revenues are tumbling down like the walls of Jericho.

Housing prices are falling.

Ok. That last one is true. A2Politico being, well, A2Politico, and having a suspicious, cynical and curious nature, I went to the city’s web site, and took a look at the most recent audited financial statement. It’s a 100+ page document, and the best reading for understanding the overall picture of the city’s financial situation is in the section titled, “Management’s Discussion and Analysis.” During the last City Council races, self-proclaimed “budget expert,” Third Ward’s Leigh Greden (defeated by Stephen Kunselman in August 2009) harped on the fact that the state shared revenue is down, kind of like a wind-up doll. 

Hizzoner is also fond of pointing out the woes associated with the city getting less revenue sharing from the state. As we can see from the chart I made, state shared revenues are down. Time to take our state representatives, Pam Byrnes and Rebekah Warren not to mention our state senator, Liz Brater, out back and rough the girls up a bit, maybe break their eyelash curlers.

State shared revenues have fallen by 50 percent since 2002. What’s up with the shared revenues? Well, partially, the state isn’t collecting as much revenue to share. Partially, our state legislators are playing hardball with municipalities and not doling out the same percentage of revenues, but rather holding on to them and using that money to shore up the state’s leaky tub of a budget. We could talk about the fact that the tub is leaking because there are state legislators with gold-plated augers, who went about creating the holes, but let’s stick with Ann Arbor for the time being. Take a look at the chart below. All the information is from CAFR statements posted to the city’s web site:

Year Property Tax Revenue State Shared Revenues Business-type Activities Total Revenue Total Expenses Total Debt Service
2002 58,095,088 21,877,296 46,978,051 155,479,402 135,016,056 1,029,598
2006 62,017,866 12,604,477 73,539,483 176,649,150 144,522,183 1,539,263
2009 69,994,107 11,102,183 68,882,686 190,244,281 184,811,290 3,229,523

You’ll note that between 2002 and 2009 property tax revenues rose. Now, look right to the “Business-type activites” column. First, you’re thinking, “what the hell are ‘business type activities’ that bring revenue to the city?” Good question, I’m glad you asked. Try to keep the swearing to a minimum. Those activities include: water, sewer, parking, Farmer’s Market, golf courses, airport, stormwater management. and solid waste (i.e. trash and recycling) removal. 

On the Mayor’s website he croons: “At the root of my work as mayor is the desire to protect and improve the quality of life in my hometown. This includes holding down the city portion of taxes to make life here more affordable while at the same time delivering services as efficiently as possible.” I don’t know what kind of “root” he’s referring to, but I think it might be something like Devil’s Claw.

Now, if you’re a clever one, and I think you are, you’ll understand how the Mayor, that Demublican teller of half-truths, can claim on his web site, in his campaign literature and speeches to have “held down the city portion of taxes.” Anyone? Anyone? You, in the back? Mayor and Council have voted to raise the cost of those “business-type activities” provided to taxpayers by 65 percent since 2002. Con artists call it the Old Shell Game. Mayor Hieftje calls it, “holding down the city portion of taxes” to make Ann Arbor more affordable. Right. Here’s another fairy tale for you: Santa Claus is a jolly old fat man who lives at the North Poll with Mrs. C., Rudolph, and the elves. 

Now, those of you who are on a tight budget, perhaps, Krogering more often than you used to, and bypassing Plum Market and Whole Foods, look at the total expenses line. As revenues rose, expenses rose, as well, despite the drop in state revenue sharing. In other words, those in charge of the city’s budget, City Administrator Roger Fraser, City CFO Tom Crawford, not to mention Mayor and City Council who are supposed to oversee the work of city staff, went merrily along and lived large, larger and, by 2009, largest. In other words, the more revenues that could be squeezed out of taxpayers through back-door taxation (raising the rates for those business-type activities), the more Mayor and Council allowed city staff to spend.

It’s really that simple. In business terms, under the current Mayor and City Council’s direction, they allowed the city staff to take the city backwards financially, to raise revenues significantly, and to spend, spend, spend.

Now, let’s throw in the debt service, which has more than tripled, since 2002. It’s clear that by allowing expenses to rise at the same pace as revenues, (referred to as “spending every dime you earn and then some,”) our city had no real money to make debt payments out of revenues. 

What would you do at your house? Would you build an underground parking garage and incur more debt? Would you build a new city hall and incur more debt? Would you rein in expenses related to running government, and defer non-essential capital improvements? 

What’s the answer? First off, anyone who has ever touched a checkbook knows that it’s neigh on fiduciary negligence that no one on the Council Budget and Labor Committee over the past five years (Ward Four’s Marcia Higgins, and Margie Teall, Mayor Hieftje, and Stephen Rapundalo), ever bothered to bring to Council the issue of the unsustainable yearly rises in spending. 

Instead, city staff were allowed by the City Council Budget Committee’s inattention or sheer ignorance, to bring budget proposals to Council to cut high profile programs and services, such as human services funding, Mack Pool and the Burns Park Senior Center. Meanwhile, the cost of running city government was raging out of control. Now we have the proposal to sell parkland. City income tax or sell parkland? Burn to death or freeze to death? Those are always the only options given Ann Arbor taxpayers.

All of this leads us to Grandpa. He’s on life support. On January 25, 2010, financial services staff presented Council with a document that outlines pulling the plug on Grandpa. To pay the bills they’ve been allowed to run up, city staff have come up with the brilliant idea that we can sell our parkland. No matter that it’s the worst possible time to sell land since the Great Depression. We need to the money, Daddy. You’ll be terrified to know that in the meantime, A2P hears Hizzoner is all over town glad-handing, telling would-be voters that  ”At the root of his work as mayor is the desire to protect and improve the quality of life in my hometown. This includes holding down the city portion of taxes to make life here more affordable while at the same time delivering services as efficiently as possible.”

If the chart above should make anything clear, it’s that for the past ten years John Hieftje and City Council members have kicked back, collected paychecks, and let city staff spend every dime they could squeeze out of the city’s overburdened taxpayers. Do we want to live in a city where citizen services are provided like side dishes in a French restaurant?

Are you prepared to hear the following:

“You want solid waste service? Zat is extra, mon petite tax vache.”

City services in Ann Arbor, a city with some of the highest per capita property taxes in the state, are slowly becoming ala carte items on the bureaucrats’ menu.  

Unless we get a new head chef, and send John Hiefje packing, we can look forward to being pitched a city income tax along with the sale of parkland. Here’s a better pitch. We need to elect a mayor and council who will make the financial services staff put together a scenario that reduces city operating expenses by 20 percent without a single cut to city services. 

Can you hear the screaming? That’s Roger Fraser— upon learning his car allowance has been eliminated and his salary reduced by 10 percent, and IT Director Dan Rainey upon learning that his $ 7 million dollar IT budget has been reduced by 30 percent. We can’t hear City Attorney Stephen Postema’s screaming. His $2.5 million dollar department was outsourced.

Popularity: 44% [?]

January 6, 2010

A2Politico Grillin’ the Media: The Ann Arbor Observer and “A Leap of Faith”

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Let me preface by saying that I read the Ann Arbor Observer cover-to-cover every month. I have done so for more years than it’s anyone’s business to know. I believe the AAO sits in a unique position in our community as a monthly publication with the time and page count to delve into and investigate what can be complicated issues, particularly political issues. It’s a journalistic Grande Dame navigating the dark, dangerous alley of periodical publication. As someone commented to me recently, the issues keep getting thinner. I know the company has been forced to lay-off staff to make ends meet, and fortunately did not make a move to new digs that might have spelled financial ruin. Publisher Patricia Garcia and Editor John Hilton, who own the monthly tabloid, bought it from the Hunts, who founded it. It is my sincere hope that Hilton and Garcia will have an asset to pass on when they are ready to retire. They’ve worked hard and deserve to reap some financial reward.

Now, all that being said, the political reporting in the January 2010 issue was something I might pull from the lint trap on my dryer. David Askins gets better results from free-lance political-reporter-about-town Judy McGovern, I think, because with one sorry exception about which I wrote here, the AnnArborChronicle.com sticks to, well, chronicling information and events. I read McGovern’s piece for the January 2010 Ann Arbor Observer, titled “Leap of Faith,” and thought I saw a faint trace of lipstick on the page where Mayor Hieftje and city transportation czar Eli Cooper got big editorial smooches—instead of having to answer probing questions about some very serious transportation decisions. 

First of all, the piece skims right over the unprecedented gift of parkland by our City Council members to the University of Michigan for an 800 space parking garage. Don’t you feel generous? If the land had been sold to the University, Mayor Hieftje and Council would have been forced to bring the question before the citizens for a vote. But the Charter amendment Hieftje crafted several years ago to “protect” parkland from being sold without the permission of residents says nothing about just giving it away or leasing our parkland. Now you know why. Feeling tricked yet? You should. The omission regarding the giveaway and leasing of parkland was absolutely deliberate. McGovern skips right over the gift of the public parkland to U of M, and moves right into swallowing the explanation of elected and city officials as to why taxpayers should not only give the University of Michigan parkland, but also pay $14 million tax dollars toward building a parking garage for the university’s employees to park in. 

The $14 million contribution is from a city whose elected leaders are “struggling” to keep from closing public pools and senior centers. It’s a $14 million dollar gamble by a City Council that last year cut two dozen police, and this year pink-slipped 14 firefighters. It’s a $14 million dollar crap shoot from a City Council that has repeatedly voted to backdoor tax residents by hiking water and sewer rates. The “gamble” was described by McGovern as a “bet that parking cars is the key to improved train travel.” Eli Cooper, transportation manger for the city described the millions as a “down payment to lure additional transportation investment.” Since when do Ann Arbor taxpayers give land to the University and pay to build parking garages for the billion-dollar free-loaders on State Street? That’s not fiscal collaboration; it’s a scene devised by the Marquis de Sade, and our Mayor and Council are the firm bottoms ready to be whipped by the dominatrix at her mansion on South University.

Mayor Hieftje told McGovern no money for the project would come from the General Fund. Do you remember when he told us building the Fifth Avenue Temple to the judicial goddesses—currently $3 million over budget—would result in no cuts to services and would cost no more than the amount of the bonds borrowed by the city? Do you remember when last ran for re-election and said it was ridiculous to believe candidates who alleged that there was a cabal controlling things on Council, and that there were secret back room political deals being made by that cabal of Council members? Pardon me if I doubt Mayor Hieftje’s assurances concerning the safety of the taxpayers’ money in the general fund from his model train fetish. We’ve got our very own King John on the throne, and his Fair Fraser of Nottingham. 

Interestingly, James Kosteva, U of M’s director of stiff-arming, buddying up to, and above all pacifying Ann Arbor City Council was quoted as saying, “At Fuller we have 20,000 workers within a quarter-mile of their destinations—the medical center and Wall Street.”

According to the article “thousands” of U of M employees live along the commuter train corridor. This past summer, City Administration Roger Fraser presented a “study” to Council that claimed 70,000 people commute into Ann Arbor daily to justify putting a city income tax on the ballot. While campaigning against Leigh Greden, Third Ward’s Steve Kunselman asked where the city got its data? Kunselman then pointed out that the “study” contained no source for the figure of 70,000 commuters descending on Ann Arbor daily. McGovern didn’t bother to ask Kosteva exactly how the University had determined that “thousands” of its employees live along the proposed train corridor, or how University officials know those same people would be inclined to take a train to work. For that matter, does Madam Minerva, Dean of Prognostication at U of M, use her crystal ball to figure out who’ll be employed at U of M in the future, and where they will live?

Then there was the Mayor’s blowsy assurance that funding light-rail was “right up AATA’s alley.” Judy McGovern didn’t pause, journalistically, for a second. She might have asked the Mayor how funding trains is right up AATA’s alley when only 51 percent of Washtenaw County residents surveyed said they would support a 1 mill regional transportation tax for AATA to administer regional transportation, including light-rail. 

The only thing that’s right up AATA’s alley is Hieftje, the Grand Poobah of New Urbanism’s grandiose scheme to bring light-rail to Ann Arbor to encourage growth.

The scheme is little more than ass backwards transportation policy, and a waste of Ann Arbor’s taxpayer money. Even my tot knows that when playing the computer game Sim City, one never invests in a train system until one’s simulated city has reached a critical mass of Sim (simulated) citizens. What Hieftje and Cooper are trying to sell us are Sim employees at the University of Michigan who may or may not live along the Sim train corridor.

The Ann Arbor Observer gave us Sim coverage of the giveaway of public park land and the potential throw-away of $14 million in public tax dollars on bicycle parking and a gamble. Judy McGovern didn’t question the gamble or the leap of faith in any way. Writing with religious reverence about a prayer and a crap shoot that a parking garage will attract future funding for light-rail transportation, was a disservice to the Observer’s readers, who deserve more objective and critical coverage of such issues. What we don’t need is more Sim coverage of what may be turning into yet another very real and expensive political boondoggle.

A2 Related Poll: On October 16th, I posted a poll. If you’d like to see the results thus far and vote in the poll, visit the link: Weekend Poll: Should Mayor John Give Dame Mary Sue Parkland at Fuller Park For Her Parking Garage?

Popularity: 22% [?]

January 5, 2010

The Politics of Parking: Free Downtown Parking For Residents in Towns Large and Small Across the Country (Why Not In A2?)

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At the December 21st City Council meeting, First Ward Council member Sandi Smith introduced a resolution to extend parking meter enforcement to 10 p.m. M-Sa. in order to keep parking meters our of First and Fifth Ward neighborhoods.

Here’s the real question: Why are people people of Ann Arbor always given the option by our City Council members of burning to death or freezing to death? Extend parking meter enforcement or put meters in First and Fifth Ward neighborhoods. How about some creative leadership?

There are so many place for Council to look in the budget to find the $90,000. Heck, there are places to find $9 million dollars, if Council members would just stop eating the financial rice cereal fed to them by City Administrator Roger Fraser and City Financial Officer Tom Crawford. The last bowl of rice cereal for the Council babies came in the form of a list of 18 program and service cuts proposed by Fraser at the December budget retreat to close a $3 million dollar budget gap (interestingly almost exactly the amount over budget the new Police-Court facility happens to be at the moment). The list included the immediate layoff of 14 firefighters. You gotta ask. When it was time to trim the number of police down 175, Roger Fraser and Council members told the public early retirement was the way to go. In fact, Police Chief Barnett Jones was quoted in AnnArbor.com in July of 2009 as explaining that,  ”the early retirement plan spared the police department from lay offs that would have been far more detrimental. Communities that lay off cops have problems recruiting experienced officers in the future….”

So firefighters looking for jobs must be addled from all the heat? Communities that lay off firefighters don’t have the same problem recruiting experienced firefighters in the future? Not a single soul elected to our City Council thought to ask that question, alas. Such a question would require putting two and two together and coming up with something rotten in the State of Denmark. Early retirements to the tune of $6 million for the police and pink slips for the firefighters? What’s it gonna take for Fifth Ward’s Mike Anglin, Third Ward’s Steve Kunselman and Chris Taylor, and Ward One’s Sabra Briere to wake up and smell the fiscal bullshit? Of course, maybe the firefighters got the bum’s rush because former Ann Arbor Fire Chief Sam Hopkins couldn’t be persuaded to tell reporters that without the 14 firefighters everything would be swell. At the time of the early retirements, Police Chief Jones was quoted in that same AnnArbor.com piece as saying, “Ann Arbor is just as safe as it was before. I am tired of people saying our community is not going to be safe. We’ve got police officers here that are stepping in and filling the gap. We’ve been cutting police officers since 2000, and has crime run amok because people are leaving? No.”

The early retirement of two dozen officers was followed by a sharp rise in crime in Ann Arbor, a wave of break-ins, and FBI crime statistics that showed a sharp rise in violent crime in our city. 

With their bibs tied on firmly in place, Council members sat quietly and swallowed what they were fed. Roger Fraser even issued a dare: Unless they told Fraser otherwise at the following Council meeting, he was going to lay off firefighters. Only Third Ward’s Steve Kunselman tried to stray from Fraser’s list. Kunselman was re-strapped into his highchair by city CFO Tom Crawford and the feeding continued. The city’s $7 million dollar IT department couldn’t be cut because the department had won “awards,” Crawford said. Second Ward’s Tony Derezinski (who miraculously showed up for the budget meeting—Derezinski is quickly closing in on Marcia Higgins [her recent absences aside] for the prize of Council member with the worst attendance record at committee and Council meetings—said that outsourcing the City’s $2.5 million dollar legal department was “off the table.” Off whose table? 

With the political implosion of Third Ward Council brat Leigh Greden, Ann Arbor ’s Mayor and City Council members are being exposed as terribly inept at crafting and implementing policy. Leigh Greden was their beard for half a dozen years, and now that he’s gone, the veteran Council member group (Teall, Higgins, Rapundalo and Hietje) is foundering badly. And thus we come to Sandi Smith’s resolution to extend parking enforcement until 10 p.m. I wrote about Smith’s resolution here on December 20th.

Several Council members claimed Smith had broadsided them with the resolution, and the ensuing discussion was comical in its sheer lack of, well, intelligence. One reporter at the Council meeting tweeted that Council members were attempting to craft a resolution “on the fly.” Those are always the best bits of legislation: the ones done with little forethought, planning, or research. At one point during the discussion of her resolution, Council member Smith railed against the “micromanging” of the City’s parking policies by City Council members. The micromanagement of parking, Smith claimed, was the sole discretion of the Downtown Development Authority (DDA), on which she sits. Smith’s comment showed her to have about as much understanding of the political chain of command as a Lance Corporal complaining about the “micro-management” of her superior officers. DDA members are appointed by our elected officials who, in turn, answer to voters. 

City Council members do tend toward comical micromanagement, discussing the dimensions of trash carts and wasting the city’s time, money and staff resources on Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo’s grandstanding and useless “plastic bag ban” resolution, are classic examples. However, the oversight of boards, commissions and committees, such as the Downtown Development Authority, not to mention the questioning of resolutions brought to Council that address issues related to the DDA and parking, (particularly those sponsored or so-sponsored by Smith & Mayor Hieftje as both serve on the Board of the DDA as well as City Council) are not only appropriate, but crucial.

FOIAed emails revealed Sandi Smith called a secret meeting in January of 2009 at the DDA office and invited City Council and city staff. At that meeting, she wanted to discuss what was to the built atop the underground parking garage. A few months later, it was Sandi Smith (along with Fourth Ward’s Marcia Higgins) who brought us the famously “tailored” RFP for proposals to build atop the as-yet-unbuilt garage. Anything built on the Fifth Avenue parcel had to bring a financial return to the city, so demanded the RFP. That parking garage was never meant for the people of Ann Arbor; it’s for the use of the developer of the convention center or hotel that Council members want built atop that garage. 

So, on the one hand, we have Paul Saginaw co-founder of Zingerman’s working himself silly on programs to rally support for local business. On the other hand, we have Sandi Smith trying to force people to get up in the middle of dinner at Zingerman’s to run outside to feed the meters until 10 p.m. I ask you: who’s the more committed individual to downtown business? If you answered Sandi Smith and the DDA Board, stay after class for some electroshock therapy. While our DDA Board members and City Council propose policies to bilk the parking system and local residents to get millions to support Roger Fraser and Mayor Hieftje’s out-of-control building and construction habit, other towns with more responsible and creative leadership are rallying behind local business with programs to get residents downtown and make shopping not predicated on feeding a meter. Other cities are crafting and implementing free parking downtown parking programs for residents.

What follows is an example of what a DDA can do to actually support downtown businesses. It comes from Sausalito, California, and programs like it are spreading across the United States—in cities of all sizes. 

Read about these programs and weep. Then wipe your tears and email your Council members and Mayor Hieftje. Ask why it costs more per hour to park on street in Ann Arbor, Michigan than it does in Los Angles, California. L.A. City Council recently rolled back parking to $1.00-$1.25 per hour to foster downtown business. People with hybrid cars park for free in cities across the country, as well. Here’s a link to an NPR program on the trend.

In towns large and small across the United States, DDAs and Urban Renewal Agencies are crafting and implementing free parking programs for residents to bolster local downtown businesses. Frederick, Maryland (pop. 59,000)  has a free parking programs for residents, and Seattle is going to allow residents free parking near its light-rail stations for the next two years. In San Jose, California (pop. 948,000) residents get two hours of free parking through a downtown parking validation program. Medford Oregon’s (pop. 460,000) Urban Renewal Agency has a similar free parking program, as well.

We need to ask our elected officials (particularly Mayor Hieftje and Sandi Smith, who sit on the DDA and who led the way in raising parking rates by 40 percent this past August, and who are directly responsible for recommending parking policies to City Council—and then voting in favor of their own DDA recommendations) why Ann Arbor’s DDA doesn’t immediately craft a program for residents and downtown businesses similar to this one in Sausalito. 

 

SUPPORT YOUR DOWNTOWN SAUSALITO BUSINESSES !!!

3 Hours FREE Parking Downtown with a Residential Proximity Card !!!

A Residential Proximity Card entitles you a total of three hours free parking in the Municipal Parking Lots #1 & #3 per calendar day between the hours of 8:00 am and 6:00 pm, and unlimited parking from 6:00 pm from 8:00 am. Time accumulates for multiple visits, so be careful to park less than 3 hours total. (Please note that you will be charged at the regular hourly rate if you stay for more than 3 hours between the hours specified)

When you enter either of the parking lots, just waive your card in front of the sensor and the entrance gate will open. To exit, just waive your card again and the exit gate will open. It’s that easy. Just remember: Don’t take a ticket when you enter !!! 

Cost: Free to residents of Sausalito !!! Cards may be obtained at Municipal Parking Lot #1 (next to the ferry landing) between the hours of 9am and 8 pm weekdays or between 9am and noon on weekends. A $10.00 non-refundable fee and valid ID showing your Sausalito address is required, along with your vehicle registration.

THIS RESIDENTIAL PROXIMITY CARD IS ONLY GOOD IN THE MUNICIPAL PARKING LOTS #1 and #3. 

Popularity: 22% [?]

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