by P.D. Lesko

The AnnArborChronicle.com recently called out AnnArbor.com politics reporter Ryan Stanton for accepting an AP reporting award for a news piece that misinterpreted available data. In the same piece, the news blog also called out former AA.com Kontent King Tony Dearing for being ethically challenged. It’s uncommon for news sites to slam the competition. However, the piece critical of Stanton’s reporting and Dearing’s ethics was not the first time the AnnArborChronicle.com has lambasted AnnArbor.com. While news sites don’t often criticize each other openly, they do routinely check facts and help voters determine if pols are lying through their teeth, pandering and/or talking out of both sides of their mouths. That, alas is something AnnArbor.com and AnnArborChronicle.com don’t do with any regularity. However, on occasion, there are slip-ups and readers can actually read what most inside baseball players in the Ann Arbor political scene already know: John Hieftje and his Council pals will say just about anything to get re-elected.

Recently, AnnArborChronicle.com caught incumbent Ward 2 Council member Tony Derezinski talking out of both sides of his mouth and wrote it up. This is from a July 18, 2012 post:

For Petersen and Derezinski, the evolution of candidate remarks moderated by Henry revealed a difference of opinion between the two about inclusiveness and the adequacy of outward- and inward-bound communication. Derezinski was keen to stress the importance of being active in the local Democratic Party (to contrast himself with Petersen who has not been active in the local party) and the importance of electing Democratic candidates to the city council. That view appeared inconsistent with the one Derezinski had expressed at a local League of Women Voters forum held earlier in the week. At the LWV forum, he’d said that he’d be in favor of getting rid of the partisan aspect of Ann Arbor city elections – and conduct local elections in a non-partisan way like the vast majority of other Michigan cities do.

AnnArborChronicle.com also snapped Derezinski’s political tighty whities about his campaign website:

In addition to that, he said, just about every councilmember has a website that tries to convey information. [Elected in 2008, Derezinski's website was launched just this year, on Feb. 19, 2012. Petersen had taken out nominating petitions on Feb. 2. When asked by The Chronicle in a telephone interview, Petersen recalled that she had discussed her intention to seek a seat on the council with Ward 3 councilmember Christopher Taylor in late December or January. Derezinski's inaugural post reads in part: "Look for lots of new content in the coming weeks! ... The City Council section will include matters that are being discussed and decided in the various Commissions and Committees and other entities I serve on ..." As of July 18, that section as well as a section on Ward 2 includes only placeholders: "More information coming soon."]

Of course, A2Politico had snapped Tony D.’s political waistband months ago in a March 26, 2012 post that looked at the candidate’s new and improved web site. The site was just as scantily populated with content then as it was months later, when the AnnArborChronicle.com decided to pile on.

Second Ward Council member Tony Derezinski (left) looks tan, even a bit sun-burned these days. It’s a sure sign that the two-term incumbent has been hoofing it around Ward 2 going door-to-door in an effort to beat back Democratic challenger Sally Hart Petersen. If one judges by the number of signs put up on Ward 2 lawns, Petersen is giving Derezinski a run for his seat; there are those political insiders who posit Petersen is even poised to unseat Derezinski. Derezinski, a drone loyal to Borg Queen John Hieftje and his Hive Mind Council Collective, is touting “40 years of experience” in politics. Petersen, on the other hand, is running a campaign that dubs her “A Fresh Voice for Ward 2.” It’s clever marketing-speak for “I’m running against a candidate who’s, well, past his shelf-life expiration date,” something like a block of cheese mold has invaded. Petersen’s tagline screams: “Attention Ann Arbor voters, it’s time for a new SKU on City Council. It’s time to pull Tony D. out of the political dairy cooler.”

Derezinski, meanwhile, is screaming that Sally Hart Petersen isn’t a “real Democrat”; she’s soy Dem. She may look like a Dem. She may talk like a Dem, but look closely and she’s fake Dem, or so Tony D. does his best to infer, imply and insinuate. Sprinkle her into the mix, Derezinski has told voters, and only Dog knows what Sally P. will do to the “Democratic” recipe on Ann Arbor City Council.

The irony is this: Tony D. calling Sally P. (right) a fake Dem is like Gimme Lean calling beef a “meat substitute.” While Derezinski has a paper trail a mile wide of supporting Republican candidates, including Republican Randy Richardville, and taking campaign donations from big wigs in the Michigan Republican Party, Sally Hart Petersen isn’t a local Dem darling of Michigan GOPsters. Tony D. says Petersen is “uninvolved,” in the Ann Arbor Democratic scene. While that may be true, it’s not necessarily a drawback. The former Chair of the AA Dems, Conan Smith, came out in support of Governor Rick Snyder’s nationally criticized Emergency Manager law, saying “we absolutely need it,” in February 2011. Smith, a County Commish, has also steadfastly refused to return taxpayer money an audit revealed he was given in error.

Democrat Derezinski’s 2008 campaign finance forms document donations from then Chair of the Michigan Republican Party Ron Weiser ($500), his wife, Eileen ($500), and Mark Boonstra (now Chair of the Washtenaw County Republican Committee). Dem Rene Greff, co-owner of Arbor Brewing Company, donated to Derezinski in 2008, and went on to donate almost $4,000 to Snyder in 2010. University of Michigan Musical Society Director Ken Fischer also donated to Derezinski in 2008 and to Snyder ($300) in 2010.

Despite having attendance and engagement issues, Derezinski has said he wants to run for mayor in 2014. However, Derezinski is trapped under much of the same political baggage that cost former Ward 2 City Council member Stephen Rapundalo his seat.

For example, months after a 40-year friend sent a letter to the editor of the Ann Arbor News that referred to Derezinski as “a man of great integrity with a strong moral compass,” it was revealed that Derezinski had been misusing email during open Council meetings to make fun of constituents, give out awards for pandering to the public, allegedly violate the Open Meetings Act, and rig votes, according to reporting by the Ann Arbor News. Ann Arbor taxpayers were forced to pay to settle a subsequent lawsuit related to the email scandal.

Derezinski voted to spend $50 million to build the new city hall. He also voted to construct the Fifth Avenue underground parking garage.

In 2010, Derezinski told the Michigan Daily he favored a city income tax. In April 2011, Derezinski told the Ann Arbor Observer that he thought it was “more than fair” for taxpayers to pay a city income tax.

Derezinski has consistently supported the diversion of over $2.2 million in tax dollars (including money from the road millage and utilities) for Public Art. He has also consistently refused to vote to reduce the amount of money given over to the Percent for Art program.

The failed Fuller Road parkland for parking project enjoyed the full support of both Rapundalo and Derezinski. It has been estimated that officials wasted over $4 million dollars in fees to consultants, architects, etc… on an attempt to build a parking garage for the University of Michigan on a river-front parcel of parkland.

Derezinski has consistently voted in favor of cuts to both police and fire staffing levels, as had Rapundalo.

Rapundalo and Derezinski voted to approve the wildly unpopular pedestrian crossing ordinance.

Derezinski, like Rapundalo, pushed to outsource operations of Huron Hills Golf Course, enraging Ward 2 residents who formed a neighborhood group, printed up signs and pressured Council into dropping the plans to hand over operations to the company of a man whom Hieftje had conveniently appointed to the Golf Courses Advisory Task Force.

Rapundalo and Derezinski spent almost 12 months and thousands of dollars of staff time on a failed effort to ban cell phone use while driving.

Judging from the comments posted to AnnArbor.com in response to 2012 coverage of the Derezinski-Petersen match-up, Tony D. is in need of some serious PR help.

In response to a recent letter in support of a candidate in the Ward 1 City Council race, a reader responded:

Sumi should win by a landslide. Mr Sturgis is out of his league. At least we wont have a council member who bends at the whims of the mayor. Go Sumi, youd be a refreshing change instead of the good ole boys network like Tony D who i hope gets a drubbing by Sally Hrt-Petersen. There needs to be a major overhaul at city council.

Oh, snap.

In 2004, John Hieftje appointed a Blue Ribbon Panel to study potential changes to the city’s employee pension system. Among the recommendations, was the restructuring of the Board of Trustees to remove city managers and employees. In essence, city employees control the Board, and according to the report from the Blue Ribbon Panel, “Of the nine current members of the Retirement Board, a majority are direct beneficiaries of the Retirement System. The Committee acknowledges that the essence of pure independence cannot truly be attained by citizens who are not beneficiaries of the Retirement System either, since they also have stakes in funding the Retirement System through the payment of taxes.”

Because Hieftje and Council members have ignored the report, the city’s taxpayers face unfunded retiree pension and future retiree health obligations of over $250,000,000. The cost of not acting has resulted in cuts to public safety, health, senior and children’s programs in order to pay for the ever-increasing costs of retiree health care.

When former City Administrator Roger Fraser retired recently, after just 9 years of service, he went to work for the State of Michigan in a job that pays six-figures, and Ann Arbor taxpayers are paying him a pension worth over $60,000 per year. Fraser is not alone in “retiring” from city work into a job that pays six-figures, then collecting a pension and health care benefits from the city. A2Politico posted an investigative piece in May 2011 that identified six former Ann Arbor city managers who “retired” into new jobs, some paying six figures, and who are collecting pension and health care benefits from the City at the expense of taxpayers.

On April 17, 2011, John Hieftje told AnnArbor.com that his administration had not dealt with the employee pension problem because, “….it would cost several million dollars up front, and the city isn’t in a hiring mode so it doesn’t make sense. As for the composition of the board, he said changing that would require a voter-approved amendment to the city charter.”

Peter Cappelli had this to say about Hieftje’s excuse: ”That explanation makes no sense.” Cappelli is the Chairman of the Center for the Study of Human Resources, as well as the Chairman of the Council on Employee Relations at the Wharton School of Business in Pennsylvania. “It makes the most sense to restructure when there is a lull in hiring.”

On June 7, 2011, it was announced that City Council was going to modify the pension benefits for non-unionized employees. The suggested changes, again, ignored those recommended by the Blue Ribbon Panel. The suggested changes increase the time an employee must work to vest—to 10 years. However, the proposed changes do not up the age at which employees may retires.

“Allowing employees to retire at, say, 55, is the heart of the problem,” explains Cappelli. “Elected officials and businesses that are serious about dealing with this issue are moving away from years of service, and reshaping their plans to require employees to retire at a certain age, say 60 or 65.”

The changes proposed by Ann Arbor’s City Council are, in essence, window-dressing, an election boost to long-time Council members on the Council’s Labor Committee, such as Hieftje, Fourth Ward Council member Marcia Higgins and Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo. For the past six years, Hieftje, Higgins and Rapundalo have recommended Council approve contracts, award pension increases, and ignored an unfunded pension liability that has grown to one-quarter of a billion dollars in just 36 months.

While announcing the pension “reforms,” again Hieftje claimed to AnnArbor.com that, “some might wonder why the city didn’t take steps to make changes five years ago, but he said the city hasn’t been in a hiring mode.”

Had AnnArbor.com’s reporter Ryan Stanton checked Hieftje’s assertion that changes to the pension system had not been made five years ago because “the city hasn’t been in a hiring mode,” Stanton would have found out that Ann Arbor’s Mayor had, once again, used AnnArbor.com to mislead the public.

In all probability, Hieftje is attempting to cover up the fact that under his administration the pension fiasco has been allowed to grow into an financial disaster that is forcing cuts to citizen services in order to pay down the unfunded retiree pension and health care obligations. As the Wharton School’s Cappelli points out, the currently proposed changes do little to address the main source of the unfunded pension obligations currently facing Ann Arbor taxpayers, nor will the Mayor’s proposed changes have a significant financial impact on the $250,000,000 in unfunded pension liability facing taxpayers.

“The city hasn’t been in a hiring mode,” Hieftje has repeatedly claimed as an explanation as to why  city officials have not addressed the employee pension problem. His claim is huckster propaganda.

Between January 1, 2006 and December 31, 2010 Ann Arbor hired 139 full-time permanent and 806 temporary employees, according to HR records provided to A2Politico.com in response to a FOIA request. Over the past 16 months, Ann Arbor has hired full-time employees to work in the Housing Commission, two city attorneys, doubled the staff at the Downtown Development Authority, and made full-time hires in Wastewater Treatment Services, Human Resources, IT, Project Management, Parks & Recreation and Systems Planning.

In short, during the period in which Hiefje and AnnArbor.com have repeatedly claimed the city “has not been in a hiring mode,” Ann Arbor continued to hire full-time permanent employees. FOIAed records show that the use of temporary employees by the City of Ann Arbor has exploded. City officials have repeatedly claimed that the city’s “workforce” has been trimmed significantly since 2006. Records clearly show that what Ann Arbor officials did was to replace full-time permanent workers with permatemps paid lower wages and no benefits.

Human Resource documents provided by city officials show in 2006 Ann Arbor hired just eight temporary employees and hired 48 full-time regular employees. In 2010, Ann Arbor hired over 200 temporary employees (excluding election workers), and 10 full-time regular employees. Between 2008-2010, the majority of temps hired were women, and the majority of full-time regular hires were men.

Using permatemps is a hiring practice condemned by labor relations specialists and national union leaders. It is a practice that is particularly troubling in a city which requires employers to adhere to a living wage ordinance. According to a piece about the living wage ordinance posted to AnnArborChronicle.com in June 2010:

The living wage ordinance applies to the wages that must be paid by companies who have contracts with the city worth more than $10,000. It does not apply to entities with contracts under $10,000. In the spring of 2008, the city amended the ordinance so that it also did not apply to entities that are funded out of the city’s community events budget, like the Ann Arbor Summer Festival.

The city’s widespread practice of using permatemps could, one expert suggests, open up the City of Ann Arbor to a Microsoft-sized class action lawsuit. Elizabeth Salasko is the Associate General Counsel at the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Salasko was previously partner and chair of the tax and exempt organizations group at the Princeton law firm of Smith, Stratton, Wise, Heher & Brennan. Prior to earning her law degree, she was a Certified Public Accountant in the Washington, DC office of an international public accounting firm. Ms. Salasko writes:

Recent court cases dramatically highlight the legal and financial risks of improperly classifying and treating temporary staff. In a well-publicized class-action case, a federal court approved a $97 million settlement between Microsoft Corp. and a group of so-called “permatemps” who were mischaracterized as “temporary” workers and denied valuable employee benefits and pension benefits over the course of several years. The legal damage award utterly wiped out any financial or administrative benefits that Microsoft might have realized in structuring as “temporary” its relationship with the affected employees.

This week’s A2Politico Weekly Whopper goes to Mayor John Hieftje, Ryan Stanton and AnnArbor.com

The Street Repair Millage is up for renewal in 2011, and the city staff want to ask for a tax increase to have the City pay for sidewalk repair, something Ann Arbor did for many years using, yes, the City’s own money. Then, John Hieftje’s administration got the bright idea that Ann Arbor citizens could just pay to replace their own sidewalks. That was five years ago. Since then, thousands of sidewalk slabs have been replaced costing homeowners, on average $125 per slab. Not to put too fine a point on it, but City Council and city staff are scared that voters will refuse to renew the Street Repair Millage. How scared? Scared enough to try to bamboozle residents into thinking that paying higher taxes to have sidewalk repair rolled into the Street Repair Millage “seems to make sense from a monetary standpoint,” according to Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo. Rapundalo, you may recall, as Chair of the Ann Arbor City Council Labor Committee, has for many years thought it “made sense” to give unionized employees over-sized benefit packages, to not require insurance co-pays from city employees, to allow city staffers to enjoy meals out costing thousands of dollars on the taxpayer dime, to give car allowances to city managers with desk jobs, and to have taxpayers fund health benefits for retirees working at jobs elsewhere that pay them six-figure salaries.

So what have city officials been doing with the millions in additional Street Repair tax dollars? Using less and less of the money to pave, repair and rebuild our city’s crumbling roads. City staffer Homayoon Pirooz pitched the idea of raising taxes to cover the cost of sidewalk repair to City Council. Pirooz is the same city staffer who told AnnArbor.com that federal TIGER II grant money for the replacement of the Stadium Bridges would be:

1.  coming slowly because Ann Arbor had to deal with state and federal authorities (he said that three days after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to end the TIGER II grant program.)

2.  definitely coming in May 2011 (no word yet from Hieftje, Representative John Dingell, or Pirooz on where the $13 million in federal grant money is, alas.)

3.  dispersed in “stages” (a claim a U.S. Department of Transportation staffer called “absolutely incorrect.”)

Now, Homayoon Pirooz is pitching the idea that the “responsibility for sidewalks” should be assumed by the city—as long as taxpayers are willing to pay higher taxes to have the city do it. Pirooz, for whom English is not a native language, may have had some confusion over the definition of the “responsibility.” He seems to have adopted the deadbeat parent version of the word “responsibility” as in: “I take care of my kids. I just don’t pay child support.”

The City of Ann Arbor is sitting on $28 million dollars in its Street Repair Fund. Meanwhile, citizens are, according to data compiled by the Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association (MITA), driving on the third worst roads in the state.

On June 14, 2011, AnnArbor.com’s reporter, Ryan Stanton, included two handy graphs (below) from, one has to assume, city officials, to accompany his piece in which he helps Homayoon Pirooz get the word out to frazzled drivers everywhere that Ann Arbor is ready to “take responsibility” for sidewalk repair—but not to pay for it out of existing revenues. The graphs, which carry the logo of the city, but no other attribution, had nothing to do with sidewalks. Instead the graphs represented information about the condition of the city’s roads, and the miles of roads that are repaired each year. According to information from city officials, just 21 miles of roads in Ann Arbor are in poor condition. According to the two graphs, Ann Arbor city staffers are doing a fantastic job improving the city’s roads, even while repaving fewer than seven miles of roads each year over the past seven years.

According to the information Stanton presented in his article, city staffers have done a spectacular job of significantly reducing the number of miles of Ann Arbor roads rated in “poor” condition over the past half a dozen years.

Too bad the claims aren’t true, and Stanton didn’t bother to check the archives of AnnArbor.com for previous reporting done by the news site.

Had Stanton checked the archives of his employer’s own web site, he would have come across a November 9, 2009 piece by Amalie Nash (who left AnnArbor.com to work at the Detroit Free Press). In that piece, Nash writes, “Washtenaw County was fourth in the state for miles of poor roads at 977 miles with a poor rating. Among Michigan counties, it was 14th in overall percentage of poor roads at 43% of its total 5,773 miles of federal aid roads. Ann Arbor ranked third out of nearly 1,800 municipalities in the state with 189 miles in poor condition. Overall, 55% of Ann Arbor’s 342 miles of federal-aid qualified roads were deemed poor, the report shows.”

In November 2009, then, AnnArbor.com reported that 189 miles of roads in Ann Arbor were found to be in poor condition. According to the graph that accompanied Stanton’s June 14, 2011 piece, between 2009 and 2010, Ann Arbor resurfaced 11.5 miles of streets, including both major and local streets. That would, of course, mean that there remain at least 178 miles of roads in poor condition, perhaps more if roads that were in only fair condition deteriorated further. Yet, Ryan Stanton and AnnArbor.com included information from city officials that purports only 21 miles of roads in Ann Arbor are in poor condition. Both graphs  from Stanton’s piece appear below.

It is clear that the information in the graph concerning the miles of roads in poor condition, information supplied to Stanton by city officials, is inaccurate and misleading. The Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association released data in November of 2009 that show Ann Arbor as having the third worst roads out of 1,800 Michigan municipalities, some 189 miles of roads found to be in “poor” condition. Roads in poor condition require reconstruction, as opposed to resurfacing. According to officials from MITA roads in “poor” condition cost seven times more to repair than roads in fair condition.

“City officials who allow roads to deteriorate to poor condition when money is available for repair are needlessly increasing the cost of repairs,” said a representative of MITA. “It’s obviously best to keep streets, roads and bridges in good condition, whenever possible.”

Not only are city staffers not caring for the city’s roads, despite the additional Road Repair Millage, city officials are attempting to deceive the public concerning the condition of the city’s roads. That fewer than a dozen miles of roads have been resurfaced in the past two years, is explained away by “increased asphalt prices.” That doesn’t, however, explain why $28 million dollars (tip o’ the keyboard to Karen Sidney) have been accumulated in the Street Repair Fund while city streets deteriorated to the point where 1,797 other cities in Michigan could honestly claim to have roads in better condition than those of Ann Arbor—many cities that do not ask citizens to pay an additional tax.

The Weekly Whopper goes to Ryan Stanton, AnnArbor.com, as well as Sue McCormick, Public Services Administrator, who oversees street resurfacing, repair and replacement. The wildly exaggerated and inaccurate information concerning the condition of our city streets came from McCormick’s staff. Ryan Stanton (tip o’the keyboard to Ed Vielmetti) and AnnArbor.com editors, of course, did not verify the accuracy of the information before posting it.

On April 14, 2011, AnnArbor.com reported that John Hieftje said, “Ann Arbor has more police officers than most think. In addition to the 124 sworn officers in the Ann Arbor Police Department, he said the University of Michigan has 54 officers and they’re available to assist the city in emergency situations.”

An official with the University of Michigan DPS said this is response to Hieftje’s claim: “Oh, gawd.” The official then went on to explain that, “It’s about jurisdiction.”

Either Ann Arbor’s Mayor doesn’t understand how jurisdiction works, or he is hoping residents of Ann Arbor don’t. The concept of jurisdiction is actually simple: it’s about geography, more precisely, the geographic area over which authority extends— the area in which an entity has the right to exercise its authority over people.

The University of Michigan DPS officers have no jurisdiction outside of the University’s campus. They can’t issue citations, for instance, for infractions of city ordinances. Conversely, Ann Arbor police officers can’t issue citations for violations of University of Michigan Regents’ Ordinance. This is why on football Saturdays, you see U of M DPS officers paired with City of Ann Arbor police. Michigan Stadium rests on property owned by the University of Michigan, but the stadium is bounded by city property. The officers, in pairs, cover both jurisdictions.

There is a county-wide mutual aide agreement that calls for the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University Departments of Public Safety to help in times of emergency, but Hieftje’s claim that the University of Michigan could send all 54 of its officers was quickly contradicted by a DPS official.

The DPS official pointed out that, “We have a whole city we’re policing ourselves. We have 10,000 students on campus, three hospitals and 1,000,000 visitors per year. We can augment, but there are calls we’d be responding to on our own campus.”

In 2010, A2Politico revealed that the AAPD has only 7-8 officers on patrol during the day across the 27 square miles of the city—in cars that are staffed mostly by lone officers. The U of M DPS official declined to say how many of the University’s patrol officers were on duty at any given time, but did explain that “the University of Michigan campus is broken into four zones, and those zones are patrolled by mostly single-staffed cars.”

Hieftje likes to tell people in Ann Arbor who are nervous about the fact that he and City Council have allowed the City Administrator to reduce the number of police staff (sworn officers and non-police support staff) by more than 100 individuals, leaving Ann Arbor with fewer police officers on patrol on any given afternoon than it takes to field a soccer team, that Ann Arbor has two police departments—as if the University’s officers and the city’s officers were interchangeable.

Ann Arbor has 124 sworn officers, down from 210 sworn officers in 2000. In comparison, the city of Dearborn, with 100,000 residents, employs over 200 sworn officers and 124 firefighters.

While the DPS officers will stop and give help to, say, a stranded motorist off of the U of M campus, they will not be the primary responding agency anywhere except within their own jurisdiction. The University of Michigan’s DPS has no legal jurisdiction off campus, and Hieftje’s assertion that the university’s DPS could muster its entire complement of sworn officers—leave it’s own jurisdiction unprotected— it’s simply untrue, according to a U of M DPS spokesman.

The DPS spokesman also pointed out that of those 54 officers employed by U of M, 10 of them work in administration, including the Chief, two Deputy Chiefs, heads of patrol operations, criminal investigations, communications, training and events.

This week’s A2Politico Weekly Whopper goes to Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje.

Newspaper executives routinely exaggerate circulation numbers. They fib about pass along rates (how many people handle a single copy of a newspaper). Newspapers have a well deserved reputation of less than honest reporting when it comes to their own financial and circulation numbers.

To counter this decades-long problem in the publishing industry, according to a piece published in Media Week, a pair of very powerful U.S. print media buyers who control, between them, over $2 billion dollars in annual print advertising money, recently made a demand of some of the highest circulation newspapers in the United States: guarantee your circulation. The Wall Street Journal already guarantees its circulation, and in response to the demand, both The New York Times and USA Today capitulated. AnnArbor.com doesn’t guarantee circulation. The print rate card contains no circulation numbers, and contains the claim that AnnArbor.com “reaches” 69 percent of all adults in Washtenaw County (275,617 individuals, according to the U.S. Census Bureau data).

They tell you. You believe them and, if you’re an advertiser, pay your money. It would appear that’s how many things work at AnnArbor.com. They tell you. You’re supposed to believe them.

AnnArbor.com took a public relations shellacking after executives there got rid of 14 staffers, mostly people in the newsroom, leaving the site with only about one-third of the staff that was employed by the Ann Arbor News before it closed. The public explanation, posted to the site two weeks after the fact, was a repetition/expansion of the one AA.com’s Kontent King Tony Dearing had posted in a comment thread on his site two weeks earlier.

Tony Dearing, VP Laurel Champion and CEO Matt Kraner told the public that, in essence, AnnArbor.com was making cuts so as to better focus on hard news and local news.

The fact that the three Musketeers in charge did not assign a reporter to do a write-up about the cuts is completely out of step with what industry standards dictate, and what has been done at other news companies large and small. Yes, it would be embarrassing to explain for publication why layoffs were necessary. However, the lack of transparency is disturbing. AnnArbor.com’s executives behaved as though hiding information that is customarily openly reported is what’s done. The opposite, of course, is true.

Newspapers rely on the public trust.

AnnArbor.com’s disingenuous response in (or lack thereof) concerning the company’s own obvious challenges breached the public’s trust in a serious way. That may have dawned on Dearing, Champion and Kraner, and prompted the three of them to issue a joint statement apologizing for handling the announcement of the layoffs badly. Someone who has worked with Tony Dearing wrote on another blog in response to a post about the layoffs/cuts, that Dearing is a “spinmeister.”

The apology was pure spin, not a news story. It was 1,500 words of contrition and zero hard news.

AnnArbor.com is dealing with the public relations fallout precipitated by the layoffs with an advertising campaign.

The ad campaign’s tagline is this: “35 staff journalists. 407 years of experience.”

It’s clever, and I like the message.

The only problem is that AnnArbor.com doesn’t have 35 staff journalists. It doesn’t have 30 staff journalists, or even 25 staff journalists.

After the layoffs, AnnArbor.com was left with 21 newsroom staffers listed on its masthead/staff directory, including Dearing, who writes editorials, but does not cover a regular beat, and Steve Pepple, who oversees production of the print product and does news compilations now and again. That leaves AnnArbor.com with 19 staff journalists listed on the masthead, along with two photographers/videographers.

So where’d they get “35 staff journalists?” On April 12, 2011 I sent the following email to David Martel, who is the Marketing Director at AnnArbor.com:

Mr. Martel,

Someone sent me a photo of an advertising campaign AnnArbor.com is running. The tagline is: “35 staff journalists. 407 years of experience.”

However, can you help me understand where the 35 number comes from, please? On the masthead/staff directory, there are 21 staff journalists (including Steve P. and Tony D., neither of whom cover a regular beat, as it were). That leaves 19 staff journalists listed as staff journalists. Does the 35 include freelancers and/or part-timers? Paid community contributors? Is the staff directory out of date or incomplete?

Thanks.

No answer.

Anyone in publishing (or the IRS) will tell you that freelancers are not on staff (though part-timers may be, of course). If the “35 staff journalists” includes part-time staffers, why aren’t the part-timers listed in the staff directory?

As an aside, I chanced across a media blog that explored the idea that contributors who produce content free of charge for use on sites such as AnnArbor.com could be nabbed by the IRS and charged taxes on the “donations” of intellectual property. It’s an interesting thought. After all, how can the content produced by unpaid writers be worth nothing when AnnArbor.com collects ad revenue by “selling” the materials? Media companies like AnnArbor.com package, license and sell what citizen journalists provide free of charge. How many contributors would AnnArbor.com have if the individuals had to pay income taxes to write for the news site?

AnnArbor.com inflated the number of “staff journalists” by 65 percent. Obviously, the trio in charge are trying desperately to calm the collective “community” jitters caused by the layoffs and defection of a trio of experienced staffers to the Detroit Free Press. With a small reporting staff, can AnnArbor.com cover the city’s news stories, investigate, follow up? It’s a real question, a valid concern expressed by the site’s readers over and again since the layoffs.

It’s mind-boggling that Tony Dearing, Laurel Champion and Matt Kraner answered with an advertising campaign built on misinformation. In fact, one might argue that the ad, which includes a deceptive statement, and is being used to sell the site to consumers, breaks Michigan’s Truth in Advertising law.

This week’s A2Politico Weekly Whopper Goes to AnnArbor.com and its Marketing Director David Martel.