A2Politico: Ann Arbor Politics Grilled To Perfection

August 27, 2010

The Politics of Culture: Ann Arbor Launches the National Pilot Fish Fry Festival

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I like Constance Crump’s thoughtful writing. I particularly like writers who, with a simple question, can get me all tangled up in trying to figure out the answer. I first read Crump’s blog post a few days ago. Initially, I didn’t get hooked. Who cares if Austin has music, Sundance has film, Aspen has comedy and the Bay Area has, well, I don’t know how Crump zeroed in on the single festival she chose? Then, Connie Crump Cicked the ball through the uprights when she wrote, “Ann Arbor has football as our signature event, culture-vulture yearnings to the contrary…what brings most people here on a most consistent basis is football.”

Football is our signature event? Our. Signature. Event. Football is the signature event of the University of Michigan. To say football is our signature event is, well, some very co-dependent reasoning. It’s kind of like saying: My neighbor’s a doctor, so medicine is my forte. Before you slacker profs. employed to teach 9 hours per week, 8 months per year—when you’re not on sabbatical or spring break—get your leather briefcases in a bunch, I’ll make sure to give lip service and say what Crump didn’t. Graduation, not sports, is the signature event at colleges and universities. Allegedly.

Now, I’m going to let those of you who aren’t among the inside Scrabble players in higher education in on a dirty little secret: fewer and fewer colleges students are graduating. That’s right, after spending an average of $11,000 per year on tuition, room and board, close to half of America’s 18,000,000 undergraduate college students never reach the promised land. If you really want to ferret out a possible explanation for why Americans ages 15-24 read, on average, one book per year, or seven minutes per day, look at graduation rates. Then, consider student-athletes. At some schools, non-white athletes have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than earning an undergraduate degree. Before you feel smug, because, obviously, those colleges are all nestled in states that backed coach Jefferson Davis, hold on to your maize and blue butt-warmer. At the University of Michigan, 83 percent of students graduate, and on average, 73 percent of athletes do. A look at the school’s football program should sober you right up. In that program, 58 percent of the white student-athletes graduate, but just 38 percent of the black players do, according to data from Black Issues in Higher Education.

So it is a big deal that only 38 percent of black football players at U of M graduate? Hell yes it is. According to data from the 2000 Census, someone with a bachelor’s degree earns nearly $1 million more over his or her lifetime than a high school graduate. Census Bureau data show a college graduate can expect to earn $2.1 million working full-time between ages 25 and 64, which demographers call a typical work-life period. A master’s degree-holder is projected to earn $2.5 million, while someone with a professional degree, such as a doctor or lawyer, could make even more — $4.4 million. In contrast, a high school graduate can expect to make $1.2 million during the working years. 

Could it be different? You bet. At Boise State University, 24 percent of students graduate, and 54 percent of student athletes graduate. In that school’s football program, 57 of black athletes graduate, and 47 percent of white football players do.

In the higher ed biz, that’s called the “graduation gap,” and excepting Boise State’s record, black student-athletes generally graduate less often than their white teammates. Every time the geeky editors The Chronicle of Higher Education or, (please, God, no) Black Issues in Education feel the need to kick-up some sand at the beach, they publish features about athlete graduation rates in higher education.

Those of you wearing your rose-colored glasses, and who are under the impression that many of the student-athletes who don’t graduate end up turning pro, here’s what The Christian Science Monitor has to say about that:

21% of Division I male athletes want to turn pro.

1% of college athletes go on to play at the professional level.

Football at the University of Michigan, Crump’s so-called “signature event” of Ann Arbor, is about exploitation and big money for the patricians who can afford the tickets, transportation, housing, and who make money off of the people who come to town for the football games, etc.., and not the Saturday afternoon gladiators who play the game. The next time you get invited by Dr. Coleman to one of her comfy lairs at the various stadia, where she hosts donors, politicos and other bigwigs like you, casually bring up the subject of graduation rates of the black athletes. Then run. Fast. Because the burly, yet erudite Deans of the School of Student-Athlete Tutoring will be chasing you. You see, U of M football generates piles of cash for the university and the town on the backs of oodles of black athletes, 62 percent of whom will never enjoy the lifetime earnings income boost an undergraduate degree provides. In her piece, Crump quotes Mary A. Kerr, president of the Ann Arbor Area Convention and Visitors Bureau: ”It [U of M football] brings in $80 million for eight home games a year. 60 percent (of people who attend) come from outside of Washtenaw County.”

So why doesn’t Ann Arbor have a nationally-recognized festival all its own? Partially, I think, it has to do with this mentality that the University of Michigan is us. And the fact that there are way too many politicos in office who would kill to get an invite to Coleman’s private viewing box, blaxploitation be damned. The University has never been us, and never will be. The University is the shark, circling, swimming, feeding, hunting for great land deals, like our parkland for U of M’s Fuller Road parking garage. Thus, Ann Arbor serves as a Pilot fish of a town, swimming into the shark’s mouth to clean the predator’s teeth. The Stadium bridges fiasco rests squarely on the shoulders of the current mayor and Council as they approved staff-generated Capital Improvement Plans that did not include the replacement of the crumbling bridge. When City Administrator Roger Fraser went to our university neighbor to ask if, perhaps, U of M could chip in on the Stadium Bridge replacement tab—after all tens of thousands visitors travel over the bridge on their way to football and basketball games—the answer was a resounding “No.” Pilot fish, you see, get little in return for their efforts. Pilot fish should be happy they don’t get eaten, right?

Outside Magazine did a feature recently about the 25 best cities to live in, and in Michigan the magazine editors chose Grand Rapids. The editors wrote: “Where do you end up when you want a community with incredible access to the outdoors, affordable homes, and solid jobs?” Here’s how they described GR:

Michigan’s second-largest city will surprise you. For starters, the regional economy is both more diverse and more robust than Detroit’s—and includes everything from furniture (Herman Miller and Steelcase) to health and beauty (Amway) to footwear (Wolverine Worldwide). Plus, despite the state’s overall woes and high unemployment, G.R. is, dare we say, thriving. In the past few years, it’s gained a riverfront luxury hotel, a medical school, and the world’s first LEED-certified museum. What’s more, the county recently set aside 1,500 acres for a downtown park, and Grand Rapids’ newly established ArtPrize competition—the largest art contest in the world by prize money—resulted in 1,200 works of public art on display throughout downtown.

Connie Crump recognizes that Grand Rapids hit gold with ArtPrize: 

Sadly, Hash Bash and the Naked Mile compete with Tree Town athletics and arts events for regional and national attention. Thankfully, both are endangered or extinct. Plenty of other local festivals fill the calendar but none have taken the crown as ArtPrize has done for Grand Rapids. After only one year, ArtPrize has established an indelible community identity for the city.

Compare how GR put together its ArtPrize competition with how Ann Arbor launched its Percent for the Arts Program, and chose its first project and artist. About GR Crump writes, “Total community involvement was the key to success for ArtPrize in Grand Rapids last year, says the program’s executive director, Bill Holsinger-Robinson. Having a $250,000 first prize and a total $449,000 purse doesn’t hurt, either, he adds.” At just about the same time GR was putting together its ArtPrize competition, Ann Arbor was appointing a group of insiders to the Public Art Commission, people who would have no problem with a Task Force comprised of hand-picked Municipal Center “stakeholders,” recommending the first project be awarded to a German artist. The city’s web site explains away the hiring of the German artist this way: 

Because the water-related project had to be designed in time to be incorporated into the basic infrastructure of the building, the Public Art Task Force decided to commission one artist to begin working on a design immediately. It recommended Herbert Dreiseitl.

Thus, Ann Arbor used a selection process that enraged local artists and shut out, rather than encouraged the participation of large numbers of artists and citizens. Meanwhile, Grand Rapids devised ArtPrize with a process that was described by the program’s executive director, Bill Holsinger-Robinson thusly, “A lot of what we did last year was based upon one-on-one outreach, really — and a lot of trying to stay out of the public’s way and (let them) determine how they were going to participate. Even though art was the focus of the event, the community played on the main stage. We make everything as accessible to participate in as many ways as possible.”

Grand Rapids is becoming a cutting edge community, and Ann Arbor is becoming Little Southfield, a bugie bedroom berg.

Yet, here in A2, our Pilot fish Mayor and Council act as though they could show those Grand Rapids Gramublicans a thing or two about how a cool, cutting edge city works. [Please note: Versions of this same clever strategy  are currently being used to try to privatize Huron Hills Golf Course, and to dispose of public land next to the Library downtown.]

First, John Hieftje creates and hand picks a National Festival Task Force from among Hizzoner’s political pals, donors, present political appointees or, better still, his basketball buddies.

Next, Council quickly rubber stamps all of the appointments.

Second Ward Council member, Stephen Rapundalo, when running for re-election in 2011, will refer to the rubber-stamping of mayoral appointments as an example of “efficiency in city government” which he “spearheaded.” Ann Arbor CFO Tom Crawford will be quoted by Rapundalo as swearing to Zeus that rubber stamping board and commission appointments saves someone, anyone, everyone, really, $15 million dollars. Rapunds will boast (modestly) that the $15 million in savings is, well, “a conservative estimate. It’s probably more, like a brazilian million.” Fourth Ward Council member Marcia Higgins, in her campaign for re-election, will claim to have spearheaded the same rubber stamping initiative, and to have saved the same brazilian million dollars. For good measure, she’ll claim to be safeguarding the money by keeping it in her purse. Third Ward Councilman Steve Kunselman, in his bid for re-election in 2011, will rail ad infinitum against rubber stamping and promise to end it. Someday. Soon. Really. Fifth Ward Councilman, Mike Anglin, will present a resolution to end rubber stamping—only to lack a second. First Ward Council member Sabra Briere will explain in such a way that only the reporter from the AnnArborChronicle.com can understand, why she couldn’t second Anglin’s resolution to end rubber stamping of mayoral appointments. “I was possibly, probably, rarely in favor of Anglin’s proposal,” Briere will email later to confused constituents to whom she’d spoken in support of the resolution.  

Next, the National Festival Task Force will meet monthly, and the city staff assigned to “help” the group will decide exactly what kind of festival Ann Arbor should have. This will be done without ever having to bother with a single public hearing. Yet evidence of more efficiency in government, Stephen Rapundalo/Marcia Higgins will claim on their campaign literature. CFO Crawford will tell the eager local press that public hearings cost the city exactly $15 million dollars per year, or at least he thinks they do. Could be more. Could be less. “I’m just not sure I understand the definition of the word ‘cost,’” Crawford will explain.

Then, once festival plans have been finalized, the National Festival Task Force will be replaced by the Ann Arbor National Festival Commission. (For an appointment to this commission, please see above and start practicing your jump shot or starting saving your money). A National Festival Administrator will be hired full-time, and the Administrator’s salary, benefits, private school tuition for up to three children, retirement, vacation, car and clothing allowances would be paid out of the Economic Development Fund, Water and Sewer Fund, with a dash of cash from the Fleet Fund.

Four years later, the Ann Arbor National Festival Commission will announce to a stunned public who’d forgotten there was a National Festival Commission, that the first annual Ann Arbor National Pilot Fish Fry Festival is scheduled to be held on Whitsuntide in the spacious party room at Arbor Brewing Company, with entertainment provided by the members of the Downtown Development Authority, who are renowned for their ability to tell stories, sing, dance and play jokes on taxpayers.

Connie Crump may wonder why Ann Arbor has no national festival to call its own, but in reality the answer is as plain as the fried Pilot fish on her plate.

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August 25, 2010

The Politics of Punks: The “Keep Ann Arbor Clean Campaign”

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I paddle my kayak regularly from Bandemer Park, the site of a Punk Week gathering that made big news in this town of ours. I wasn’t there the afternoon the Ann Arbor Police Department car responded and the officer found himself out-numbered. Of course, given the fact that there are only 5-7 officers patrolling the entire town on a given day, with a single patrol car cruising Charlie Sector (the part of town in which Bandemer is located), the officer inside the patrol car would have expected to be out-numbered. That’s why the officer called for back-up. There was chicken on the grill and swimming going on at Bandemer. Someone was, perhaps, even swimming without the benefit of a bathing machine. The delicate Victorian sensibilities of some passerby at Bandemer that afternoon were offended. Evidently, the police showed up because some local prude had dimed out the Punk Week rabble gathered at the park.

Here’s the Ann Arbor definition of Punk Week:

That’s when a 25-year-old woman puts in her earbuds, turns up her iPod, and pays AATA to haul her from Ypsilanti to Ann Arbor to some low-paying job for some high-earning bugie business owner who lives in Pittsfield Township.

Oh, sorry. Our punk should not be living in Ypsilanti. She should be living in some ramshackle Ann Arbor rental house owned by Dan Pampreen with 15 other Gen Y punks. The house will have been last inspected by City inspectors when Old Hickory was president. (Being super-tight with Fifth Ward Council member Carsten Hohnke has to have some perks, doesn’t it?) Our punk will be hopping on one leg, dying to rent “work force” housing brought to her by local developocrat Alex de Perry or the develop-beard Avalon Housing that will be, they promise, swear to Dog, the shit (not to be confused with shitty). After all, if they’re not working for Google billionaire Sergey Brin for $40K per year, or waiting tables for $30,000 per year at some downtown restaurant owned by Downtown Development Authority authority Roger Hewitt, or the fine folks at Main Street Ventures, what the hell good is a Gen Y punk? Heck, what good is anyone who’s not white (or who talks white really well), upper-middle class, and who feels virtuous that they’re over-filling their single-stream recycling container every single week?

Wake up and smell the idea that Ann Arbor is an urban center distinct from Detroit (or so goes the fantasy). That, after all, is the goal of the present batch of politicos in office. That’s why we desperately need a convention center. Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo  is the MichBio CEO about town, and he does natter on about the fact that there’s no place is this God forsaken berg to host a conference with 500 attendees. Really? I think what he means is that there is no Ann Arbor taxpayer-direct subsidized place to put on a conference with 500 attendees. No matter that the Michigan League has ample space to host a meeting with 500 attendees and then some. 

In a post from December 2009, I wrote: 

As expected, the conference center proposal from Valiant Partners closely follows the proposal that was secretly circulated and pitched by City Administrator Roger Fraser to City Council members in January 2009 at the City Council’s retreat. 

The proposal includes two letters of recommendation from University of Michigan deans. The first is Dr. James O. Woolliscroft, MD, Dean. Is it me, or does his letter of “endorsement” sound like it was written while sitting under a naked bulb with water boarding apparatus nearby? The two sentence (seriously, two sentence) letter says, “A conference center that will allow Ann Arbor to host large events is desirable, and I support efforts to make this reality.” Replace “conference center” with bawdy house, and we have a space to meet Dr. Woolliscroft’s needs, n’est pas? The other “endorser” was the Dean David C. Munson, Jr., Dean of Engineering. “We have a strong need for a space for plenary sessions with 500 participants and break-out sessions of 75 participants,” writes the Dean of Engineering. Oh, it should be “centrally” located, as well. Yo, Dr. Munson, the Second Floor Ballroom at the Michigan League holds 500 nicely. In fact this handy room capacity document shows that the Michigan League has all the space for which Dr. Munson says Ann Arbor has a “strong need.” Thus, why he “strongly endorses the need for a conference center” remains a mystery….or not.

We need more conference attendees in Ann Arbor, not Gen Y punks. Wait, what about brainy Gen Y punks who attend conferences? Well, all the brainy Gen Y punk grad students are at the Modern Language Association conference in ______________ (fill in the name of a fun, large, metropolitan area that Ann Arbor will never be able to compete with). They’re wearing impossibly small glasses, fretting about post-deconstructionism, and attending guerilla workshops on what to do when your thesis advisor repeatedly hits on you (Hint: sexual harassment charges are tiresome and bad for one’s academic career, that is the academic career of the individual who levies the charges).

The not-so-brainy comments at AnnArbor.com from the site’s devoted readers who live in Howell, Brighton, Dexter, Chelsea, Saline and out-of-state were full of reasons why punks are unwelcome in Ann Arbor. Punks smell. Punks do drugs. Punks listen to music in public. Punks swim naked. Punks grill chicken without a permit. Punks look unkept. Punks are dirty. Punks are not gainfully employed. Punks are, well, punks. I’m really not sorry to have to burst the bubble of so many small-minded individuals at once, but the above complaints apply to just as many tenured faculty at the University of Michigan as they do to the Gen Y attendees of the impromtu Punk Week festivities. There’s a physics prof at U of M with a wicked reputation amongst the librarian folk as an individual not to be trifled with unless one has a completely stuffed up nose. 

The Bandemer Park Punk Week dust up was proof positive that Ann Arbor is becoming a community the likes of which we last saw in that Ira Levin book. Ann Arbor is no more a Midwestern bastion of progressive liberality, where creative thought and actions are embraced, than is Pyongyang. The AAPD has launched an internal investigation thanks to a complaint filed shortly after eight people were arrested for “resisting officers” on Sunday August 15th. The police charged the people with refusing to leave the park. Maybe Ann Arbor’s mayor should just adopt the tactics of Dearborn’s segregationist hero Orville Hubbard. For decades under Hubbard’s “Keep Dearborn Clean” campaign, non-residents were barred from the city’s parks, pools and recreational facilities. Non-residents could be tossed out of parks by police in Dearborn, just as the AAPD officers tried to toss out non-residents from Bandemer Park. How would the Dearborn police identify non-residents? The same way the AAPD identified the Punk Week participants. They were the people who looked “different.” 

As usual, on AnnArbor.com, just as we saw in the old Ann Arbor News, we hear absolutely not a single peep from the Mayor and City Council members save a comment that, maybe, “permits” need to be issued the next time punks want to grill chicken and swim in the Huron. Then again, when the political shitzu hits the fan, we don’t have elected politicos in Ann Arbor. We have a head-less horseman whose job it is to scare the locals into staying inside unless they pay for a permit. The local news outlets sweetly perpetuate this myth by failing to point out that the Chief of Police answers to the Mayor and City Council. Chief Barnett Jones, after all, went before Council and assured everyone that the AAPD could handle policing with a force that has been severely reduced.

Now, drive your Volvo/Subaru/Prius to Bandemer Park, throw some $20 per pound, free-range, organic chicken on the grill, strip to your 100 percent organic cotton skivvies, hop in the river, and imagine the AAPD responding to a disturbance the size of the one at Bandemer Park times 10 or 100. Stop screaming. No one can hear you. No one wants to hear you. Repeat after John Hieftje: “Crime is down. Crime is down. Crime is down. Crime is down.”

I was told by AAPD police officials that our police department simply won’t ever be able to respond to any kind of a large disturbance. Of course, voters re-elected a mayor who assured them that if crime ever goes up (as if crime is a generic noun) he’ll look into beefing up the police force. Will that be before or after you or someone you know gets assaulted, I wonder? Well, if the Bandemer Park fiasco demonstrates one thing quite clearly it should be that it won’t be a little old crime spree that obviates the need for more than 5-7 patrol officers on duty during any given day.

As for the Gen Y punks, professionals, plebes and poseurs, they need to get a clue and realize that the new urbanista Boomers in Ann Arbor—this Mayor and Council—don’t welcome change or Gen Y with open arms. Our little slice of Ira Levinville craves and obsesses about well-behaved, well-mannered, well-heeled “young professionals,” who will bend over, smile and support the well-connected, well-mannered (at least to your face, mostly), much better-heeled business owners, local developers, and local politicos.

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August 23, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy the Salon piece. I did.  

 

 

 

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

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

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

Nor is backdoor privatization a phenomenon limited to local schools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s hoping for a wake-up call.

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August 16, 2010

A2Politico Grillin’ The Media: AA.com Gets the Dunce Cap

Filed under: education, journalism — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 8:00 am
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David Jesse is a solid writer. His recent coverage of the Ann Arbor Public School pay frenzy has all of the facts, including a link to to the biggest problem with his piece. There is a link to a spreadsheet that shows quite clearly that there are teachers in the Ann Arbor Public School District who reeled in more than $100K in salary. Before you wring your hands, think about this: the spreadsheet Jesse links to doesn’t have a single name on it. Teachers were identified as “Teacher.” So some “Teacher” in the Ann Arbor Public School District is living large on the public dime. Heck, too many of them are living large, right? Right. This is wrong, right? Before answering, break out your mixology book, whip up a Teacher’s Pet, and let’s have a little chat about your salary envy issues. Here’s another news flash: What the smart kids are talking about when they pass notes about teacher pay is quite different from the focus of David Jesse’s recent piece. 

First off, let’s put Jesse’s latest teacher pay frenzy piece into some perspective. 

The public school district takes in almost exactly the same amount from each tax dollar that the city takes in from each tax dollar (28 cents). So where is the news headline that exposes that City Attorney Stephen Postema was given a contract by City Council that allows him to moonlight, and earn well over that horrifying $100K threshold? Where are the headlines from the AA.com news hounds that City Administrator Roger Fraser is sitting on a contract that gives him a golden parachute worth $100K? Should he be dismissed from his job? Where’s the spreadsheet that shows how much is being paid to each and every city employee? 

Headline: Ann Arbor teachers pulling down $100K. Sigh. Where’s the journalistic beef?

You know what? There are plenty of people living large in Ann Arbor on the public dime. Out of the 700 or so city employees, you can bet your school marm costume that more of them them are living large on the public dime than people employed by the AAPS. Michael Finney’s $250K CEO’s salary over at Ann Arbor SPARK has never been splashed across the headlines at AA.com. Neither has the fact that the LDFA that funds Ann Arbor SPARK has been skimming millions from our public schools. How is funding the LDFA and giving away school dollars for corporate welfare impacting education in Ann Arbor? Of course, nosing into the pay of Michael Finney, and asking pointed questions about the LDFA would make life tough for AnnArbor.com VP Laurel Champion, who sits on the Board at Ann Arbor SPARK. 

Next, let’s ask the obvious question: Might there be people teaching in the public schools worth their salt, as it were? How do we know? I’m going to use the M-word: merit. Merit is what the brainy kids are talking about, not teacher pay. In the July/August 2010 issue of The Atlantic, David Brooks writes in a piece titled “Teachers are Fair Game,”

Today, aided by the realization that teacher quality is what matters most, a new cadre of reformers have come on the scene, many of them bred within the ranks of Teach for America. These are stubborn, data-driven types with a low tolerance for bullshit. The reform environment they find themselves in is both softhearted and hardheaded. They put big emphasis on the teaching relationship, but are absolutely Patton-esque when it comes to dismantling anything that interferes with that relationship. This includes union rules that protect bad and mediocre teachers, teacher contracts that prevent us from determining which educators are good and which need help, and state and federal laws that either impede reform or dump money into the ancien régime.

That’s really why David Jesse’s whole over-blown and over-commented on exposé about teacher pay in Ann Arbor is deeply flawed. Here’s what we really need to know: who are the teachers earning over $100K, and why aren’t there mechanisms in place to accurately evaluate whether all teachers in the AAPS deserve to teach our children. Writing about the fact that teachers earn over $100K is bullshit, as Brooks writes, above. Worse still, like a remake of an already bad film, the Ann Arbor News ran a similar teacher pay piece (David Jesse, in fact, is regurgitating his own reporting from 2007), and that story linked to a similar salary spreadsheet. However, that 2007 spreadsheet was worth its weight in gold stars, because it named names. If you have kids in the public schools, go through the list and you’ll see the results of ancien régime union contracts that reward longevity. One of the worst teachers one of my tots ever had is being paid over $70K per year. 

I wrote this in a December 2009 post, when the WISD was trawling for a millage “enhancement” — a gravy train that voters refused to approve.

Washtenaw County school districts alone get half a billion dollars from the state and taxpayers each year to educate 47,000 students. Watkins’s nod to TQM buzzwords such as efficiency and effectiveness are the last thing that we need to focus on. Trying to making a bureaucracy efficient and effective is like herding cats. Equity? How can we address issues of equity without a way to measure whether we’re spending our money wisely?

What needs to be overhauled in Michigan (nationally, actually) are the K-12 teacher compensation, retention and evaluation systems. Overhauling how education is funded, and how the money is handed out is an exercise in futility until there are systems in place to make sure that what taxpayers are spending billions of dollars on yearly is well worth the investment. Does an above average paycheck and better benefits automatically mean we get the “best” teachers in the classroom? Does tenure just guarantee that those one-third of teachers who should really have other jobs, according to the U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan, simply stay put and work their way up the “step” scale toward the top? In Ann Arbor, the top of the step pay scale is currently $87,000 per year. I would advocate for a pay scale for K-12 teachers that topped out at $150,000 per year if there were efficient and effective ways to gauge teacher competency and merit. I agree with Duncan that there are, at any given time, one-third of teachers who just should not be in the classroom, but they are, and in Ann Arbor it’s costing us $43,000,000 every year, because each teacher costs about $120,000 in salary and benefits.

Frankly, if you’re hyperventilating about teacher pay, have another Teacher’s Pet and think for a moment about this: newly elected 18th District State Senator Rebekah Warren was supported by the Michigan Education Association. Warren voted against the state’s Race to the Top (RTTT) legislation she explains on her campaign web site because, “They allow state takeovers of struggling school districts; they also decreased the negotiating room for local school districts with their employees by unilaterally instituting cost increases for teacher retirement programs, which puts pressure on salaries at the local level.”

Representative Pam Byrnes, who received $14,890 in contributions from the MEA between 2004-2009, voted in favor of the RTTT legislation, incurring the wrath of the MEA. During that same period, Rebekah Warren received $2,200 from the MEA, but after Warren’s refusal to support the RTTT legislation, she and not Byrnes, earned the MEA’s 2010 endorsement. On July 26, 2010, the MEA gave Warren a helping hand by posting on the MEA Votes section of their web site about the GLEP postcard (I wrote about the GLEP postcard here.)

From the MEA Votes web site:

A couple particularly sickening highlights [from the GLEP postcard]:

- The latest attack piece on Warren takes her to task for missing 54 out of the thousands of votes held during her term in office. The reason for her missing most of those votes — her honeymoon. That’s pretty low.

- Her opponent, Pam Byrnes, has actually missed more votes in this most recent term than Warren! Warren has only missed three votes out of 1,209, while Byrnes has missed 20!

MEA president Iris Salters sent out a January 2010 memo to MEA affiliate presidents (and one presumes legislators, including Byrnes and Warren whom the MEA had given support) that, “MEA’s final decision is that we cannot recommend to our local association presidents that they sign memorandums of understanding that commit their members to implementing the state’s incomplete and flawed Race to the Top plan.”

The ancien régime had spoken. Any politico who ignored the MEA did so, obviously, at their own peril. However, as David Brooks argues, we need to put emphasis on the teaching relationship, and dismantle anything that interferes with that relationship. “This includes union rules that protect bad and mediocre teachers, teacher contracts that prevent us from determining which educators are good and which need help.”

AA.com’s simple-minded piece was meant to whip up those who visit the AnnArbor.com site into an ignorant frenzy about teacher pay (there is lots of revenue from page views when the folks from Chelsea, Brighton, Howell, and Dexter get whipped up into a frenzy about the AAPS pay policies). The RTTT legislation, the MEA’s efforts to torpedo the RTTT legislation, and Obama’s desire to introduce education reforms that, as David Brooks writes, make teachers fair game, make Jesse’s recent regurgitated reporting little more the same rubbernecking at the same teacher pile-up the Ann Arbor News ”exposed” in 2007.

Instead of education reporting that encourages rubbernecking, I want to read about whether the people currently running for the Ann Arbor School Board favor reforms that will help all of us rest easy so that when teachers employed by the AAPS earn $100K, we’ll know that they richly deserve that pay.

Popularity: 24% [?]

April 30, 2010

The Politics of Surpluses: Fudging the Numbers

Filed under: city services, money, taxes — Tags: , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 3:23 pm
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In the 2010-2011 proposed budget, the General Fund is projected to bring in $76.3 million in taxes and state profit sharing, and spend $77.9 million dollars, with a $1.5 million dollar deficit (provided all of the City Administrator’s proposed cuts are adopted). Over the past three years, the city’s General Fund has been pushed, pulled and manipulated inexorably toward structural deficit. The 2009 budget book has a message from the City Administrator that includes this: “For the foreseeable future we will continue to experience 1-3% revenue shortfalls with each annual budget.”

The result, of course, has been the decimation of our city’s human capital, and the ongoing deception that the loss of 239 city staff, including almost half of our firefighters and over 100 employees (civilian and sworn officers in our police department) has saved taxpayers money. In campaign literature we’ve read time and again that this “streamlining” has saved taxpayers $10 million dollars per year. It’s a cruel deception, not only to those who were dismissed from their jobs for no reason other than sheer managerial incompetence, but also to taxpayers who trusted that they were being told the truth.

In a February 9, 2010 presentation before Council, the City Administrator claimed that the “streamlining” of city government had saved taxpayers $25 million dollars since 2002. Below you’ll find the nifty chart he used to illustrate this fairytale.

Layoffs

Why is it a fairytale? Because the city’s income tax returns don’t corroborate Mr. Fraser’s claims of saving $25 million dollars on employee wages and benefits since 2002. 

Here’s a graph with information from Ann Arbor’s income tax returns filed between 2000 and 2009:

Fiscal Year Number of FTE and Contract Employees Claimed Wages Claimed
2000 1,230 $49.6 million dollars
2001 # of employees not recorded on tax return $58.7 million dollars
2002 1,149 $55.9 million dollars
2003 1,102 $54.7 million dollars
2004 1,079 $54.2 million dollars
2005 1,128 $57.5 million dollars
2006 1,104 $60.3 million dollars
2007 1,069 $57.2 million dollars
2008 1,018 $55.3 million dollars
2009 1,029 $54.7 million dollars

You should, of course, have an immediate question: Where’s the purported $25 million dollar “savings” Mr. Fraser told Council has been realized by the “streamlining” of those 239 employees? It cost exactly the same amount in 2009 to compensate our city employees as it did in 2003, when Mr. Fraser was hired. The next question is why the total number of employees declared to the IRS doesn’t match information presented to the public by Mayor Hieftje and Mr. Fraser. In December of 2009, Mr. Fraser, in a presentation to Council, told the group that as of December 2009 Ann Arbor employes 756 people.

One of most frequent questions I get from voters is where our I’ll find the money to fund core services, such as police and fire. The short answer is that the money is already there. Finding it is not a difficult task. One simply needs the financial skills to know where to look. Ann Arbor also needs leaders who will no longer allow city staff to fudge numbers and data to support their requests for funding and their claims of competence. Something else has been happening, something even more disturbing than the false claims of savings and the patently absurd claim that our services have not been systematically reduced. 

First, we must keep in mind that Mr. Fraser has inaccurately projected revenue shortfalls in our General Fund since 2003, when he began his job as City Administrator. There have actually been budget surpluses in the General Fund since 2003, with the exception of 2009. This is significant, because those projected deficits have resulted in convenient opportunities for certain City Council members to “rescue” items budgeted to be “cut” thanks to the projected pretend shorfalls. This happened for several years to the Human Services funding. It would be eliminated in private meetings by the Council’s Budget Committee, then “saved” by Council members in public. In this election season, look for Council members who claim to have “rescued” the Burns Park Senior Center from the chopping block, as well as Mack Pool. Look for a Council member to “rescue” Allmendinger Park residents from the outrage of football Saturday parking—a “revenue source” proposed in the current budget to raise under $40,000. 

These phantom budget shortfalls have been used to pad political résumés of those on the very Committee (the Council Budget Committee) that oversees the city’s budget. This cycle of projecting General Fund deficits, targeting high profile programs for elimination, then Council members stepping in and “saving” the high profile programs is nothing short of remarkable in its political ingenuity. The result has been budgeting and governance by three ring circus. P.T. Barnum would have loved the showmanship.

Meanwhile, because our elected officials were not prepared to dig through the city’s audited financial statements, or well-versed enough in finance to understand the statements, over the past half a dozen years, the citizens of Ann Arbor have been bilked out of over $100 million dollars. How? The oldest game in the book: over-charging for services. 

Let’s start with water. Water flows to the lowest point, but in Ann Arbor the money poured into the coffers of the Republic of Water, Sewer & Stormwater Management runs right into a consolidated savings account. In that Utility Fund there is a $59.2 million dollar surplus, according to the most recent audited financial statement posted to the city’s web site. In essence, the City of Ann Arbor has over-charged residents $9.9 million dollars per year over the past six years for water and sewer in order to accumulate the surplus of funds—unrestricted funds—funds that are not earmarked for any purpose whatsoever. Sue McCormick, the city’s public services area administrator, has been allowed to amass a $59.2 million stash of our tax dollars. 

Yet, on April 13, 2010, Sue McCormick went to Council and announced that Ann Arbor taxpayers need to pay more for water and sewer. Why? Because Ann Arbor has, according to McCormick, the “second lowest rates” in the state.

In an April 13, 2010 AnnArbor.com post reporter Ryan Stanton writes:

“Fraser’s proposed budget for 2010-11 includes rate increases of 3.88 percent for water, 3 percent for wastewater and 2 percent for stormwater. Sue McCormick, the city’s public services area administrator, said the rate increases are needed to maintain adequate revenues and pay for capital improvements within the system. McCormick said some capital improvements already are in progress, and new projects are coming on line that also are driving the increased rates….McCormick handed out a report Monday night showing Ann Arbor’s water and sewer rates were the second lowest when compared to dozens of other communities around the state.”

It was the same kind of ridiculous rationale the City Administrator gave when “revisiting” the parking fines charged to residents. It had been a long five years since the schedule has been examined and Ann Arbor folks were paying lower fines than, say, residents of Portland and Seattle. We darn well should be paying fines lower than those paid by those residents, and it’s about time that we adopted the governmental mantra that if ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and if it is broke, spend the money and fix it as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, the surplus in the Utility Fund is just the beginning of a long-time unchecked scheme to create phantom deficits, over-charge residents for services, build up surpluses, then spend the surpluses to feed the bureaucracy—as opposed to supporting and expanding existing services.

Here is a list of the various departmental fund surpluses from the city’s most recent audited financial statement:

Water — $9.3 million

Sewer — $44.7 million

Street Repair Millage Fund Balance — $19.4 million

Stormsewer — $5.2 million

Solid Waste — $8.9 million

Fleet Surplus — $7.5 million

IT — $4 million

Project Management — $1.5 million

Central Stores — $1.6 million

Total unrestricted fund surpluses: $102,100,000

That surplus $102,000,000 belongs to the taxpayers. So what can be done? 

Our city’s budget needs to be examined closely, and Council must implement policies that keep departments from building up surpluses greater than, say, 10 percent of the department’s annual allocation. The surpluses above are the result of inflated charges the city levies on residents, as well as on its own units. The fleet department charges other departments $160 per hour for labor, and $300 per day to use a city-owned sedan. As a result, the fleet fund has a $7.5 million dollar surplus. Meanwhile, the Fire Department is sitting on fire fighting equipment and trucks that are outdated and need to be replaced now. The Street Repair Millage Fund balance is $19.4 million dollars, and the millage raises almost $9 million additional dollars each year. Meanwhile, Ann Arbor has the third worst roads in all of Michigan, and thanks to delays in repairing our roads will have to pay seven times more money to fix them than if the repairs had been made in a timely manner. 

Here’s a news flash that shouldn’t come as a surpise: No city with $102,000,000 million in fund surpluses needs to cut police, fire, privatize its golf courses, stop tending its parks, or start charging residents $3 to drop off recycling. Between 2006-2009, Ann Arbor taxpayers paid $1 billion dollars in taxes, fees and debt to our government. Since 2000, Ann Arbor taxpayers have, collectively, funded our city government to the tune of $2.5 billion dollars in taxes, fees and debt. 

The current administration has collaborated with city staff to spend every single dime of that $2.5 billion dollars—and then some. The current proposed budget is a sham and a shame. It represents neither the priorities of the taxpayers, nor an honest representation of our city’s true financial position. Council should direct the City Administrator to return to the General Fund all of the money from the total $102,000,000 million in fund surpluses, where such charge-backs are permissible under the auspices of the Charter, then re-fashion a budget that not only funds existing core services, but deflates the municipal service charge on which the budget is based by at least 20 percent in every department that currently has an accumulated fund surplus.

Popularity: 47% [?]

April 14, 2010

The Politics of Parking: Revenue Enhancement Versus Turnover, the Cage Match

Filed under: Mayor Hieftje, city council, city services, money, taxes — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 5:56 am
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At the Ward 1 meeting, the room at the Northside Community Center was bright, cheery and not nearly filled to the capacity it is when needly neighborhood residents come out twice weekly to pick up food from the pantry located there. On AnnArbor.com, reporters David Jesse and Tina Reed continued on with what I consider some of the most important reporting being done locally. It’s a series titled: “Ann Arbor’s Hidden Poor.” Jesse and Reed have been reporting on the “hidden poor” in Ann Arbor intermittently for several months now. As a rule, their pieces don’t attract the number of comments say, a piece about the real estate woes of U of M coach Rich Rodriguez would, but that could be because people are simply at a loss for words when it comes to realizing that there are, yes, poor people struggling to feed their children, keep their homes, jobs and dignity in one of the most prosperous cities in Michigan. 

In the course of walking door-to-door over the past few days in the modest neighborhoods around Wines School, I saw empty houses and talked with residents who were struggling to pay their property taxes thanks to lost jobs. There was an AAPS teacher unsure whether she and her son would be in Ann Arbor next year thanks to cuts proposed in the upcoming AAPS budget. She pieces together a full-time salary from several part-time jobs. The modest neighborhood through which I walked is beloved by its residents, but the edges of the cohesion are beginning to fray.

According to Money Magazine, between 2000-2008, our city lost almost 9.25 percent of its total jobs. Unemployment rose from 7.4 percent in February of 2009, to 8.9 percent in February of 2010, according to labor force data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February of 2007, there were 8,847 people unemployed in Ann Arbor. By February of 2010, that number rose to 16,202 individuals, again according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are thousands and thousands of Ann Arbor residents struggling with job loss, job retraining, family income declines, and holding on to their dignity by a thread. 

In the 2009 Money Magazine list of the top 100 places to live in the United States, Ann Arbor didn’t crack the top 100. Interestingly, Saline (68), Tecumseh (93) and Plymouth Township (28) did. Compared to the top 10 cities that Money Magazine selected as the best places to live, Ann Arbor fell short in several categories. The median price of a house in Ann Arbor was pegged at $206,707 and the average property tax bill totaled $4,641, a full $1,000 per year higher than in number 1, 2 & 3 cities on the list. Both property crime and personal crime rates were well above those reported, on average, in the top 100 cities that made the list. Ann Arbor has significantly fewer restaurants, bars, movie theaters, libraries than the average reported by the top 100 cities. This last statistic was the most interesting. The median age of a resident in Ann Arbor was listed as 29.2 years old. Within the top 10 towns singled out by the magazine as the best places to live, the media age of residents was between 34.9 years old and 40.9 years old. 

All this being said, and with the caveat that I am a data junkie in my day job (higher education policy and publishing), it’s good to remember that magazines publish features such as these to sell advertising, single copies and subscriptions. Issues such as this 2009 list of the top 100 best places to live is meant to appeal to those looking to relocate obviously (in truth, a smaller and smaller percentage of Americans than ever before, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau).

At an early-April meeting of the First Ward Democrats, I listened as First Ward Council member and Downtown Development Authority Board member Sandi Smith told neighbors in attendance that the proposed extension of downtown parking meter enforcement until 9 p.m. had nothing to do with revenue enhancement; it was all about increasing “turnover” at downtown parking meters. The politically damaging discussion initiated in December of 2009 based squarely on the idea that extending meter enforcement hours was necessary to generate more money, has morphed into a parking “plan” that revolves around seven “strategies” not a single one of which, by some miracle, mentions increasing revenues.

The first stated “strategy”: Downtown curbside public parking should be managed to create turnover at the most convenient, commercial locations so these spaces can be more easily used by a large pool of downtown users. 

Just in case you temporarily lost your ability to see through a blizzard of a snow job, increased turnover is meant to lead to enhanced revenue generation. Furthermore, City Council foisted off the dirty job of coming up with the brightly packaged gift of increased turnover to benefit Ann Arborites who want to park at a meter, on the Downtown Development Authority, a Board of political appointees, along with Sandi Smith and Mayor Hieftje (elected officials). Keep in mind that those same two elected officials, as members of the DDA, voted to approve the DDA’s new parking plan that calls for extending parking meter enforcement hours until 9 p.m. to increase “turnover.” On April 19th, Smith and Hieftje will walk into City Hall, and on behalf of the citizens who elected them, evaluate the merits of their own plan which they already approved over at the DDA. 

Feeling taken for a ride? You should, but for heaven’s sake don’t park in downtown Ann Arbor. Several of the “strategies” put forth in the DDA’s new report focused on “managing parking” revolve around making it ever so much easier to pay the parking tickets you’ll get. How about paying right at any of the snazzy $15,000 solar-powered parking kiosks where you put your money in to park? In 2008, the city of Baltimore bought 280 of the same kiosks, but paid $8,600 per kiosk. 

In December of 2009, Smith brought forth a resolution to City Council to keep the City from dealing parking on the DDA’s turf, as it were. City Administrator Roger Fraser had proposed installing meters in city neighborhoods in the First, Fifth and Third Wards to generate revenues. Smith’s resolution proposed extending downtown meter enforcement from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., and giving the revenues from the old YMCA lot (Fifth and William) to the city. In exchange, the DDA’s monopolistic control over parking would remain intact. 

I wrote about the resolution proposed by Smith in December of 2009 here. On December 21, 2009 I wrote:

There are 1,750 curbside meters. Click here to see a map of DDA meter coverage that includes the Council/DDA fantasy projection (in green) of extending parking meters outside of the DDA area into our neighborhoods. In May of 2009, when Council members and Roger Fraser came up with the bright idea to proliferate parking meters, the Ann Arbor News editorialized that the move “smacked of desperation and poor public policy.” On January 3, 2010, AnnArbor.com editorialized that, “…expanding metered parking hours into the evening to bring in $380,000 a year (and even the DDA is skeptical that much money would be generated) is a risky proposition that could backfire. It could ultimately cost the city more in lost tax revenue if it pushes even just a few more merchants to shut down because of lost business.”

On April 19th, the DDA’s parking report (parking hikes dressed up as a favor to Ann Arbor residents tired of having low-paid restaurant workers, bartenders and diswashers take up the city’s 1,700 parking meters) will be presented to Council for its approval. The AnnArborChronicle.com reports that,

“At the DDA board’s joint transportation and operations committee meeting the previous Wednesday, March 31, 2010, committee members hashed through a number of issues related to the parking report. Those ranged from presentational issues to more substantive questions. Among the presentational issues was the question of whether to include parking rates in the body of the report or put them in an appendix. Putting actual numbers in the body of the report, suggested Newcombe Clark, would make the report immediately dated. Transportation committee chair John Mouat suggested putting the numbers in an appendix. Board chair John Splitt feared that if they did not include the numbers for rates, they would lose control of the discussion: ‘They’re real numbers, why not put them in there?’ The rates will be included in an appendix.”

Is it any wonder the parking rate information is being stashed in the index? Talk of parking rates and money, you see, is so far removed from the DDA’s report on parking so as to make the report appear innocuous, at worst. 

In talking with Main Street merchants, it’s pretty clear that they see this proposed meter enforcement extension as an attack on the viability of their businesses. Commenting on behalf of the Main Street Area Association (MSAA) Tony Lupo told the DDA Board that the MSAA had participated in the DDA’s process for soliciting feedback on the parking report. Lupo said that there was overwhelming opposition to extending the meter enforcement hours. However, he allowed that the MSAA understood the context under which extended hours were being considered—the city’s need for revenue.

On April 12th, city staff member Sue McCormick, the city’s public services area administrator, stood before Council and advised them to raise water and sewer rates because Ann Arbor’s $1.40 cost per 1,000 gallons of water and $4.02 cost per 1,000 gallons of wastewater placed the city at second lowest in the state, according to a report McCormick prepared. No matter that Ms. McCormick’s Water and Sewer Fund is already sitting on a multi-million dollar surplus, and that the current budget as proposed has multi-million dollar surpluses built into the allocations proposed for several departments under her direct control:

Stormwater Sewer System — $400,000 budgeted surplus (proposed)
Water Supply System — $2.52 million dollar budgeted surplus (proposed)
Sewage Disposal System — $2.9 million dollar budgeted surplus (proposed)

Our water rates are low, the logic goes among Ann Arbor city staff, so they need to be raised. Our parking fine structure hasn’t been revisited in five years, so went the logic of Roger Fraser and City Treasurer Matt Horning, in November of 2009, so we needed to “revisit” and raise the parking fines (after I questioned in an A2Politico entry the logic behind the need to “revisit” parking fines and the validity of the data in Fraser and Horning’s “study” presented to support their proposal, the idea was dropped). Now, parking “turnover” has suddenly become a problem, so we need to revisit the enforcement hours of metered parking. This kind of logic employed by city staff, and the DDA Board members, unchecked and unquestioned by City Council, simply leads to public policy decisions formulated and based on the supposition that the taxpayers exist to support city government above all else.

Some city has to have low parking fine rates and water charges, right? Evidently, according to our city staff, it sure as heck can’t be Ann Arbor. They need their accumulated and budgeted surpluses and additional revenue from parking.

The DDA’s sham report should be recognized for what it is: a power grab and snow job based on the purely anecdotal stories of DDA Board members like Smith who tell us because the mix of businesses as changed over the past 25 years from retail to restaurant, more blue collar workers are parking at the meters long-term for “free.” Purportedly, the idea behind extended enforcement hours is to move more people who are parking at meters long-term after 6 p.m. into the structures.

It won’t happen. Why?

Since Smith brings up parking meter use from 25 years ago (1984), I thought I might dig up a little data from the era. Data from a 1987 (Ann Arbor had 102,000 residents then) multi-day, observational study done by a University of Michigan researcher found that street occupancy hovered between 95-98 percent day and night. Furthermore, (and interestingly) the study concluded that metered parking was not impacted by the availability of off-street (garage) parking. The average stay was 42 minutes at a 2-hour meter. In 1987, the researcher concludes that:

“One of the major goals of on-street parking meters is to provide short-term parking at a short walking distance close to the final trip destination (i.e., for shopping, personal errand, etc.). As the length of stay becomes shorter, more drivers can utilize this premium limited space, which is so vital to bringing patrons to downtown. Tables 5 and 6 indicate that the average stay was of 41.5 minutes (standard diviation. Also, the median of 40.0 minutes was close in magnitude to the mean. Based on this measure, one has to conclude that the meters seem to do what they were designed for, to provide curb, short-term.” 

Translation: People will circle like vultures for on street parking even if there are 5,000,000 open spaces in the parking garages. It’s the animal instinct— flight, flight or circle for parking. Garage parking signifies a long-term commitment, like an engagement ring. People don’t use meters long-term. They park near their destination for short term periods. At least they did in 1987. Have 25 years, a different mix of businesses, and 10,000 more residents completely changed the parking behavior of people in A2?

It’s time to stop treating Ann Arbor residents like their cash cows, and accepting city staff/DDA proposed fee increases on the flawed logic that Ann Arbor simply can’t have lower charges for services, hourly parking, parking fines, and fees for services and facilities than other communities. Why can’t we? Evidently, because the City Administrator believes, and City Council supports the policy that the DDA, Sue McCormick and other city staff need not only money for operating expenses, but mad money budget surpluses—tens of millions of tax dollars stuffed into the mattresses that are the DDA, Fleet, Water & Sewer and Solid Waste Funds.

Oh, and can I please see a show of hands from those who have little trouble finding a place to park downtown at meters after 6 p.m., and who are tired of being treated like golden geese? 

Mine’s up.

Popularity: 54% [?]

April 8, 2010

The Politics of Compulsive Gambling: Shooting Snake Eyes With Public Safety

Filed under: Uncategorized, city services, fire, money, police, taxes, unions — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — A2 Politico @ 11:58 pm
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I got up, had breakfast and was at the Police Station on Fifth Avenue by 7 a.m. on the dot on Wednesday April 7th. Officer Sam James arrived from the Wheeler Center by 7:15. He showed me around the Fifth Avenue station, or at least what’s left of it as the construction and reconstruction continue apace. Chief Barnett Jones has moved on up to an office on the 6th floor of the Larcom Building. Equipment is stashed in corners, interrogation rooms are still cramped and shabby, crime scene evidence is scattered in secure rooms in city buildings throughout town. The basement is closed off, and the detectives whose offices were down there have long since vacated the Larcom Building. Patrol staff remain at the Fifth Avenue station, and that is why Officer James and I met there for my morning ride around.

In the main office area, where the front desk reception area is, we stopped in front of a large map of the city divided into four quandrants: A (Adam), B (Baker), C (Charlie), D (David). In each of those areas, Ann Arbor police divide up the work of patrolling the 27.7 miles of our city and protecting the 112,000 people who live here. On the morning shift on April 7, 2010, there were exactly seven sworn police officers patrolling our city: 1 double patrol (2 officers in a patrol unit) in the Adam section, and 5 single cars (1 officer in a patrol unit) divided among the other three sections of town. And me. Seven sworn police officers on patrol to answer calls from dispatch, write traffic citations, parking tickets, sort out domestic disturbances, and keep some 17,700 acres of area policed. Our patrol was quiet. The rain spattered the windshield as Officer James pointed out individual homes that had been broken into, or where he had responded to calls from residents. On one street in the Burns Park student section, Officer James said every single house had been broken into. Pairs of old tennis shoes dangled from the telephone wires overhead as we cruised slowly past houses with open windows and, Officer James assured me, open doors. 

There is a computer in each patrol car for which the city’s IT department charges the Police Department almost $5,000 per year (the police officers’ union had a devil of a time getting that information from the city that employs them). Officer James was adept at typing in information, and tapping at the touch screen as calls were relayed from dispatch, and he drove through the Charlie section of Ann Arbor, an area that includes the north side of the city where our family lives, as well as Arborland and everything in between. In a typical shift, Sam James will drive 60-70 miles in what amounts to a large loop. He’ll be dispatched to check out tripped home alarms, and look for speeders by flicking the radar on as cars he thinks are going well over the speed limit approach from the opposite direction.

Had something serious been called in, a situation that demands two officers to respond, and had Officer James responded first, he would have had to wait for one of the other single patrols from across town to arrive on the scene before proceeding. It used to be the norm for every patrol car on the road to have two officers assigned to it. Just a few years ago, there were double the number of patrol cars out on the road each day, as well as staffed police sub-stations around town, before the City Administrator, Mayor and Council launched their grand plan to “streamline” city government by gutting our public safety services. 

The Mayor and City Administrator recently had one of their clever semantic moments when John Hieftje turned to Roger Fraser at a City Council meeting and asked whether Ann Arbor had ever lost police officers to layoffs. Fraser, ever the straight man, indicated that Ann Arbor had never lost police officers to layoff. 

Evidently, the lost officers had simply evaporated.

Actually, many civilian employees of the Department have been lost through lay-offs. The police officer positions have been eliminated through attrition and, most recently, a $6 million dollar early retirement buy-out the City could ill afford. Ann Arbor taxpayers now pay $80,000-$100,000 per year for sworn police officers to catch dogs and write parking tickets. According to the city’s own audited financial statements, in 2002, Ann Arbor taxpayers paid $37.2 million dollars for public safety. In 2009, the budget called for taxpayers to fork over $56.7 million dollars for public safety services provided by dozens fewer police and firefighters.

The City Administrator explained in an April 8, 2010 post to AnnArbor.com, “As we talked with council about this, it was their belief and it’s my belief that we didn’t want a community that was strictly police and fire — that we cherish our parks and we cherish a lot of things that we do. We need still to do code enforcement, we still need to do good planning — we need to do a lot of those things — and so this is an effort in some ways to catch up, because safety services now represents about 52 percent of our total budget. It used to be closer to 40 percent.”

How can the amount necessary to pay for police and fire have gone from 40 percent of the General Fund to 50 percent of the General Fund. Well, first of all, the General Fund is shrinking. If the exact same amount allocated for police and fire in 2009 were allocated in 2010, it would, of course, be a larger percentage of the smaller General Fund. When Mayor and Roger Fraser simply point to percentages as the reason to target police and fire for cuts they assume City Council members will not recognize the the fallacy being presented to them. However, there is a very different reason that the cost of public safety has increased 47 percent  from $37.2 million per year in 2002 to $56.7 million dollars per year in 2009.

Here’s a clue. The $50 dollar windshield wiper.

Officer James told me that the windshield wiper on his car had been broken in the course of responding to a call. The City’s Fleet Department then charged the City’s Police Department $50 to put a single wiper on Officer James’s cruiser. When I accused him of exaggerating, he pulled up the official report (thanks to that handy $5,000 per year city IT Department-provided computer in the front seat) listing the damage to his cruiser, and the name of the Fleet Department Supervisor who’d sent along the notice of the $50 price tag for the repair. 

I found wiper blade sets for James’s cruiser priced online from $5.95 on Amazon.com, to $17.95 at the Auto Parts Warehouse.  

The City Administrator’s newest budget unveiled calls for the elimination of 20 jobs in the police department, 12 more sworn officers and 8 staff. It also calls for the elimination of 20 jobs in the fire department again, also a combination of firefighters and staff. There’s a budget “deficit.” Again. Why? According to a piece posted to AnnArbor.com, the City Administrator blames the budget woes on anything and everything except bloated overhead, such as the $5,000 per year IT Department provided computers, the $4,000 per acre per year cost to mow our parks, and the $50 wiper blade. Ryan Stanton quotes Roger Fraser as explaining:

The city’s reliance on property taxes continues to increase as other forms of revenue — such as state-shared revenue — decrease or remain flat. At the beginning of this decade, the city received more than $14 million annually from the state. By last year, that had dropped to about $10.7 million, then down to $9.1 million this year. Fraser’s budget has that going down to $8.2 million next year.

Compounding the city’s problem, Fraser said, property tax revenue is on a decline driven by a negative inflation rate, a weak real estate market resulting in lower taxable values, and the removal of the former Pfizer property from the city’s tax rolls due to its acquisition by the University of Michigan.

In addition, the city will see increased costs for retiree pensions and health care next year, Fraser said.

It’s crucial to remember that since 2003, Roger Fraser has miscalculated (inflated) General Fund deficits in every budget cycle and the City Council’s Budget Committee, which has included the Mayor and Margie Teall until just this year, didn’t challenge Fraser to present more accurate data. With the exception of 2009, when the actual numbers have come in, our General Fund has actually finished with modest surpluses. This is a very important fact that would give anyone with experience in budgeting and finance ample reason to question Mr. Fraser very closely when presented with financial data. Yesterday evening Mayor Hieftje and the City Administrator presented the 2010-2011 budget and the fait accompli is that Ann Arbor taxpayers will not be spared from service reductions this time around. 

Since when have they spared us from service reductions and fee hikes in other budget cycles? 

City Council member Sabra Briere, at the request of a First Ward constituent, forwarded that constituent’s email to Roger Fraser enquiring about the number of police officers on patrol. Here is the constituent’s email that Briere forwarded to Fraser:

Today I ran into an old friend who’s on our police force.  We had an in-depth discussion of the current situation.  The bottom line is that we’re in danger now.
 
Yesterday, afternoon shift had only six officers on patrol.  That is six to cover the whole city.  Afternoon shift (2-10) is the busiest one.  All the officers just went from call to call to call, often being told to ignore one call because a more important one had come in.  If a major crime happened, such as a bank robbery, all six of them would have gone to that scene and would not have been able to respond to anything else that happened.  On the warmer days, there is noticeably more activity for the police.  It is expected that there will be a crime wave when the good weather is here to stay.  

Here is what Mr. Fraser wrote back to Council member Briere:

Thanks, Sabra, for sharing this.  As with so many of these reports, there is a fraction of truth that attempts to justify the suppositions.  Today, we have the essentially the same number of people on patrol as we previously had.  Even several years ago, our officers have had days when they run from call to call, and yet there are also many shifts in which boredom is possible.  That is the very nature of the safety business.  The good news is that crime rates in our city continue to drop and public safety has not diminished. 

You, personally, know the arguments well.  We have very few choices as we work to balance services with declining revenues.  

Roger Fraser, of course, never mentions numbers and implies the constituent is making “suppositions” that aren’t accurate. A source within the police department gave me the following information directly from the duty rosters:

On any given morning, there are between 6-10 police officers responding to calls from the people who live in Ann Arbor. On the afternoon shift, there are between 6-10 police officers on patrol. On the midnight shift, when most serious crime happens, in Ann Arbor there are 10-12 police officers on patrol. 

The Mayor was quoted in the AnnArbor.com piece as saying since 2003 crime is down 15 percent. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics, crime in other towns the same size as Ann Arbor is down more than it is in our town. On March 5th, I wrote about that fact here with links to the statistics:

While comparing Ann Arbor  to itself is a somewhat useful exercise, an even more complete picture emerges when we compare Ann Arbor to other communities. First, when you look at the drop reported in the unofficial crime statistics released by our Police Department as compared to FBI data gathered from towns with similar populations, there’s a different and more complete story that emerges. For example, in cities with populations between 100,000 and 249,999, in 2009 arson was down 10.2 percent, whereas in Ann Arbor arson is up by 7.5 percent. Nationwide, in cities the size of Ann Arbor, robbery was down 9.3 percent, but down by 6.5 percent in our city. Rape was down 3.1 percent nation wide, but in Ann Arbor it’s down 1 percent. On the other hand, assaults and motor vehicle theft in Ann Arbor were down significantly more than in other similarly sized cities around the U.S. Wait before you breathe a sigh of relief. When we look by region, Ann Arbor’s drops in crime play out even less impressively. In the Midwest, rape dropped 7.5 percent and motor vehicle theft dropped 21.4 percent. Had Ann Arbor crime rate decreases kept pace with regional drops, we would have had fewer motor vehicle thefts than reported in 2009, and fewer burglaries. 

The University of Michigan has 55 sworn officers to patrol its 3,000 acres and 350 buildings. If Roger Fraser’s budget is approved by our City Council members as is, Ann Arbor will go down from 99 sworn officers to 87 sworn officers to patrol 17,700 acres and respond to calls from the city’s 45,000 residences. On any given day in Ann Arbor, 6-12 sworn officers patrol a city that is 27.7 miles in size, and respond to the emergency calls of some 90,000 adults, including the 29,000 of U of M’s 41,000 students who do not live in campus housing. For Roger Fraser to write to Briere that “Today, we have the essentially the same number of people on patrol as we previously had” hides an ugly reality.

Crime is down by 15 percent says the Mayor. So we can afford to lose 12 more police officers. The Michigan Theatre hasn’t burned to the ground yet, so we can afford to lose more firefighters. Hardly.

Our City Council, City Administrator and the Mayor have decimated the ranks of our police and firefighters,  and in doing so put the lives and property of 112,000 city residents on the line every day. I actually believe not a single member of City Council knows that, at times, there are only six police officers patrolling our city. I also believe not a single one of them knows that by cutting safety services, they are going to force every single resident, business owner and home owner in our town to pay higher auto, renter, home and business insurance rates which is what happens when public safety service response times go outside of federally mandated guidelines. 

To lead the way out of this year’s alleged budget “deficit” the City Administrator, once again, recommends to City Council that they cut police and fire positions. Roger Fraser wrote to Sabra Briere, “we have very few choices as we work to balance services with declining revenues.”

By feeding such tripe to Council members, and by being allowed to decimate the human capital of our city, Roger Fraser has found millions to feed to his burgeoning bureaucracy and coven of consultants. In exchange, the politicos get bullet points for their résumés and web sites such as this old chestnut you may recognize: “The reorganization of City government increased efficiency and saves more than $10 million per year…With more efficient delivery, city services have been preserved.”

Few choices? Hardly. Council members can choose to direct Roger Fraser to justify why the Fleet Department charges $50 to replace a single wiper blade on one of our police cars. At $50 per wiper blade, that would put a $30 oil change performed by the city’s Fleet Department at $400. A brake job done by the Fleet Department would cost as much as a vacation to Europe. Council could direct the Administrator to justify why it costs $5,000 per year for each police cruiser to have a computer tended to by the city’s IT Department. City Council members can choose to direct the City Administrator to reduce by half the $4,000 per acre per year the city charges itself to mow the grass in our parks. They can direct him to return to the General Fund a portion of the the Solid Waste Fund’s $10 million dollar surplus. They can ask the City Administrator why he loaned the money-losing Ann Arbor Airport over $1,000,000 dollars to build hangers for airplanes that can’t land there unless the runway is lengthened.

There are lots of choices that involve sending the City Administrator and CFO back to the drawing board to trim overhead, track down and account for what must surely be $20-$30 million dollars in fund surpluses throughout the various departments of our city, and stop using accounting methods that make it appear as though money-making entities within the city are losing money (such as our golf courses), so as to justify selling off our assets to private companies, and making money-losing entities look as though they are holding their own (such as the Airport) so as to justify additional investments of tax dollars.

That’s just for starters. Odds are there are many more choices than Roger Fraser would like to be directed to make.

Popularity: 54% [?]

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 8, 2010

The Politics Of Hide & Seek: Finding Money in Plain Sight

Filed under: money — Tags: , , , — A2 Politico @ 5:53 pm
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At the moment, because Ann Arbor City Council and Mayor have for so long rewarded the City Administrator with generous raises, lump sum payments and the ability to turn unused vacation days into big bucks, despite the fact that Ann Arbor’s budget has been sliding inexorably into structural deficit, we have a City government that is run like Italy before the unification of 1860. We have the Republic of Solid Waste complete with a Doge. There is the City State of the City Fleet, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilys (Water & Sewer). At the moment, the City Administrator Roger Fraser and CFO Tom Crawford present Mayor and Council with financial data designed to help Council members decide whether it’s better to burn to death or freeze to death. (Just for the record, I’m never one to just choose from such false alternatives.) My First Ward Council member Sabra Briere recently circulated a budget priority “survey” that let participants choose between being subjected to the Iron Maiden, the rack, or thumbscrews. Reading her “work” took me back to a bone-chilling exhibit of implements of torture I saw once while living in Rome. 

The correct answer when presented implements of torture is to choose none of them, right? 

But that Mayor and Council members would study their budget documents more closely, as well as the more easily understood CAFR statements, the city’s audited financial statements. Alas, there is a long-standing tradition among our elected officials that they simply choose from among the implements of torture presented to them as the City Administrator and CFO seek to plug the “budget gaps,” even when it ultimately turned out there were no budget gaps in the General Fund, as was the case in 2003-2008. 

Let me tell you a little secret. There are millions of dollars sitting around in the funds of the various city-states of our city government. 

But we can’t touch that money, right? Wrong. Council can pass resolutions to move money among and between the majority of the city’s funds. The exception are funds created for money generated by millages for specific purposes, such as the parks and streets millages. Of course, in 2007, Mayor and Council members did vote to take parks millage money and use it, for instance, to pay for police to patrol the parks. The local chapter of the Sierra Club went at City Council with ergonomically designed pitchforks, and forced the politicos to return the hundreds of thousands of dollars snatched from the parks millage fund. As an example of the penchant they have for moving money between funds, Council and Mayor  ”seeded” the city’s Economic Development Fund (created in 2007) with $2.1 million from the General Fund to pay for 400 parking spots for Google—400 parking spots for the 200 employees they’ve hired, as opposed to the 1,000 jobs they promised to create by 2011. 

Council may move money legally and quickly from among many other non-millage funds. It’s just that the political will is weak, and in the case of most of the current Council “majority,” basic understanding of finance is even weaker. If your Council member starts taking about “buckets,” that is fiscal malarky spoon fed to them by the City Administrator. So it would be entirely possible for Mayor and Council to order the return of tens of millions in fund surplus money to the funds from which the money was allocated, including the General Fund. 

Want a couple of examples from the FY 2011 budget and the city’s audited statements? Of course you do, because it’s almost too incredible to believe.

According to the FY 2011 budget, at the moment, there is a $10 million dollar surplus sitting in the city’s Solid Waste Fund. Yep. Just sitting there, waiting to be spent. How’d the surplus get built up? Solid waste service fees have increased 40 percent since 2006. That $10 million dollar surplus came from overcharging taxpayers. The Water and Sewer Fund is sitting on an equally large surplus, but that surplus can’t be returned to taxpayers because the system has outstanding bonds to pay off. However, Council can certainly decrease the fees charged to residents for water, sewer and storm water service until such time as the surplus is significantly reduced.

This last example is the best one. When you’re strapped for cash, and up to your neck in budget “gaps,” what’s the first thing you do? If you answered, “Spend $6 million dollars on brand new cars and trucks,” you win a new pick-up with those cool rims that spin backwards. In fiscal year (FY) 2009, the city’s Fleet Fund was appropriated $6 million dollars for new motorized bling. Coincidentally, in the same month and year, that’s almost exactly the same amount that was spent to fund the early retirement of 25 of the city’s most experienced police officers in order to “save” money. In FY 2011, the Fleet Fund is asking to spend $8 million dollars on some new, cool rides. According to the FY 2009 audit, the Fleet Fund had a $10 million fund balance, with about $8 million of the fund balance in cash and investments. That’s $10 million just sitting there waiting to be spent. 

That’s a cool $20 million dollars sitting in the treasuries of the various Ann Arbor city government city-states.

You know what I think? It’s time to return these surplus millions to the various originating funds from which they were allocated, including the General Fund. Then, more importantly, it’s time to unify the city-states under a central government through which funds are allocated much more judiciously, and with exponentially more financial savvy. Until these financial and managerial fiefdoms are disbanded, and the departmental multi-million dollar fund surpluses dealt with as equitably as possible, the bureaucracy will do whatever it is allowed to do to feed itself and protect its fund surpluses, including cutting services, raising taxes and selling parkland.

Freeze to death or burn to death? Neither, thanks.

I’d start by making a list of all of the departmental fund surpluses and crafting a plan and a resolution to lower fees so as to make sure departments don’t build up future multi-million dollar surpluses. Surpluses, such as those from the Fleet Fund, and other similar fund surpluses, should be immediately moved to the General Fund, and from there used to fund public safety services. As for the Republic of Solid Waste, I’ll work to return the multi-million dollar solid waste surplus money to the taxpayers in the form of a one-time credit (about $200 per residence). Then, we’ll figure out why solid waste expenses are up by 50 percent since 2005, but our services have been reduced. 

There’s lots to do, but there’s also lots of money to fund our services. It just takes the financial savvy to know where to look. Before Council votes to cut a single service, they need to focus on reallocating the fund surpluses that are sitting there in plain sight.

Popularity: 37% [?]

February 25, 2010

The Politics of Management: Paying More For Less

Filed under: Mayor Hieftje, city council, money — Tags: , , — A2 Politico @ 10:38 pm
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Most people who live in Ann Arbor don’t have the time or the inclination to get overly involved in the minutia of city government. People are busy spending their days getting done what they need to get done to get the bills paid. Politics isn’t a passion for many, and the thought of running for an elected office probably never crosses the minds of most folks. After all, there are about 10 million people in Michigan, but only about 1,500 mayors. There are just 40 Michigan state senators.  

I was at synagogue last Friday and overheard the spouse of a candidate for County Commissioner ask my partner why on earth I wanted to run for mayor. Good question. Why, indeed? Our roads are some of the worst in the entire state. The Stadium bridges are, literally, falling down. The budget is a constant source of heartburn to anyone with the time to read through the behemoth (a tip: you’ll get more information by studying the city’s audited financial statements). Who wants to work to clean up that kind of a mess? Me. Why? Because while there is a mess to clean up, I see that there is also incredible potential and opportunity to make Ann Arbor an even better place for all of us to call home. I am committed to living, working and raising a family here. What better reason to share my decades of management, marketing and finance experience, step up, and accept the challenge of public service? 

A police officer whom I spoke with recently made a point of telling me about the two surveys of staff morale that found our 750 city employees in desperate need of some serious pep talks, and maybe even a few anti-depressants. We have employees who feel under-appreciated, and are inclined to jump ship. They work under constant threat of layoff. Studies make clear that layoffs do not actually save money, because overall productivity decreases. The top performers who survive a layoff won’t necessarily feel obligated to soldier on. A 2000 study by Roderick Iverson and Jacqueline Pullman from the University of Melbourne, and a 2003 study by Sarah Moore, Leon Grunberg, and Edward Greenberg from the University of Colorado at Boulder, both confirmed that employees were far more likely to quit jobs in environments of repeated downsizing. The likelihood that an employee will quit actually increases the more layoffs he or she “survives,” the CU-Boulder study found.

The City Administrator Roger Fraser recently gave a presentation to Mayor and Council members in which he presented the following graph:

Layoffs

Between 2002 and 2010, Ann Arbor has reduced its work force through layoff, early retirement and attrition by about 30 people per year. This graph purports two facts.

First, that the overall reduction has resulted in $25 million dollars in “savings.”

The second fact is that the number of consultants (contracted services) and temps has remained “flat.”

No one on Council asked to have the terms “savings” and “flat” defined. Should they have? The City Administrator’s financial data should be presumed to be accurate. However, we have to remember that since 2003, Roger Fraser has inflated General Fund deficits in every budget. With the exception of 2009, when the actual numbers have come in, our General Fund has actually finished with modest surpluses. This is a very important fact that would give anyone with experience in budgeting and finance ample reason to question Mr. Fraser very closely when presented with financial data such as the data in the graph above.

How would one go about verifying Fraser’s data? The City files income tax returns just as you and I do. In those returns, are several bits of information that allow us to check Mr. Fraser’s work. 

Here’s a graph with information from the City’s income tax returns filed between 2000 and 2009:

 

Fiscal Year Number of FTE and Contract Employees Claimed Wages Claimed
2000 1,230 $49.6 million dollars
2001 # of employees not recorded on tax return $58.7 million dollars
2002 1,149 $55.9 million dollars
2003 1,102 $54.7 million dollars
2004 1,079 $54.2 million dollars
2005 1,128 $57.5 million dollars
2006 1,104 $60.3 million dollars
2007 1,069 $57.2 million dollars
2008 1,018 $55.3 million dollars
2009 1,029 $54.7 million dollars

You should, of course, have an immediate question: Where’s the purported $25 million dollar “savings” Mr. Fraser told Council has been realized by the “streamlining” of those 239 employees?  The next question is why the total number of employees declared to the IRS doesn’t match information presented to the public by Mayor Hieftje and Mr. Fraser. In December of 2009, Mr. Fraser, in a presentation to Council, told the group that as of December 2009 Ann Arbor employes 756 people.

According to the City’s IRS tax returns, Ann Arbor employs 201 fewer people than in 2000, but spending on wages has increased. In fact, in 2009 we paid about the same to employ 1,029 people as we did to employ 1,159 people in 2002.

We’re paying more for less. We’re getting less for more.

The City Administrator’s data raise many more questions than they answer, and the data are certainly not of the quality necessary to make informed decisions concerning closing projected budget gaps. Mayor and Council have a legal and fiduciary obligation to hold the City Administrator accountable in the performance of his job. Repeatedly presenting incomplete and contradicting financial data to bolster claims of savings that are suspect, at best, is cause for serious concern, close questioning and, potentially, some very frank discussions between Mayor, Council and the City Administrator.  

It is clear to me that, as any good manager knows, profitability is not achieved through a long-term strategy of layoffs. Why not?  Employee morale and productivity drop, as documented in many studies, including the two I referred to above. Over the last decade, Council members and Mayor have run for re-election based on their support of a fiscal strategy that encompassed the systematic decimation of Ann Arbor’s human capital—our police, firefighters, customer service workers, foresters, planners, even our dog catcher is gone. It’s clear from the IRS data that the cost of government has not been reduced by the layoffs, nor has there been any marked increase in the efficiency of city government; we’ve paid millions for consultants and contract workers to supplement the work of our remaining city staff.

It should be clear that further layoffs are not the answer to the fiscal problems facing our city. The answer is to reverse the damage done and rebuild our human capital.

The City’s department managers must be forced to cut out the junk food from the City’s fiscal diet. This means sharply reducing the amounts approved for contract labor and consultants. For instance, Ann Arbor employs both a landscape architect and a forester, yet Council recently approved several hundred thousand dollars worth of contracts for companies to do landscape architecture and forestry work for the City. Our City Attorney’s office has eight full-time attorneys (tip o’ the keyboard to Rick) on staff, yet that office has asked Council to approve close to $400,000 in contracts for outsourced legal work over the past 18 months. In 2009, Ann Arbor spent over $1 million dollars on consultants. 

There’s much more we can do to sort out the fiscal mess that has been created over the past half a dozen years.

The real work will start, and the real savings will be realized, when we reconfigure the City of Ann Arbor Employees’ Retirement System for future retirees—a crucial task put off for a decade, much like the reconstruction of the Stadium bridges, and a good part of the reason our city budget is crumbling, much like our streets.

So what’s it going to take to get our labor unions and non-unionized employees to buy into a complete restructuring of their retiree benefit programs? How are we going to get retirees to pay, for instance, 10 percent of their yearly $7 million dollar health insurance premiums, and to implement a change in benefits to those who retire before 65? How will we ask for an even larger contribution for health insurance premiums from early retired city employees who’re employed full-time elsewhere? How are we going to get employees to agree to accept a change to the age at which they may retire?

For starters, it’s going to new elected leadership at City Hall who is prepared to ask them to do it.

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