For more than five years, Ann Arbor residents have had to deal with a mismanaged and heavy- handed city sidewalk program which forced them to pay for repairing sidewalks along their property.   City officials estimate property owners spent more than $7 million to repair sidewalks during the five year program that shifted the cost of maintaining city-owned sidewalks onto taxpayers.  Now the city is offering to take over the responsibility for sidewalk repairs if voters approve an increased millage this November.

The city is doing its best to make voters believe approving this millage means they will never have to pay for sidewalk repairs. Like the increased parks millage that was supposed to pay for better parks maintenance, but instead helped pay for a new police/courts building, the sidewalk millage is false advertising.

First of all, the $563,000 the increased millage is supposed to raise per year won’t fix many sidewalk slabs, especially with the city’s higher costs, including an estimated $170,000 or more per year in administrative costs alone.

In a 2007 mailer sent to residents urging them to repair the sidewalks in front of their homes, city officials estimated a higher replacement cost of $170 for a 4′ slab should the city do the work, compared to a $120 a slab if residents hired the contractor.  The city also added an administrative charge of $225 per property.  When pitching the tax increase to residents, the city claimed that 16,000 properties had repaired 55,000 slabs and spent a total of $7,000,000.  If you do the math, that works out to $127 per slab if the homeowner did the work.

If every dollar of the proposed sidewalk repair millage went to paying contractors to replace slabs, it would buy fewer than 2,400 slabs per year, or just 21.8 percent of of the slabs repaired when residents were forced to make the repairs themselves.

What we know from Ann Arbor City government is that every dollar from millages doesn’t go toward the intended purpose of the millage. There is the ever-growing administrative service charges used to skim money from millages. In May 2011, a member of the city’s Parks Advisory Commission alleged that money from the parks maintenance millage was being diverted through such “accounting trickery.” FOIAed financial documents revealed that, indeed, Ann Arbor’s “green mayor” has been allowing money to be diverted from the six-year parks millage in the form of jacked up internal service charges.

Second, the increased tax does not have to be spent for sidewalks.  The increased tax goes into the Streets Millage Fund.  The proposed resolution just adds sidewalks to the list of things that can be paid from the Streets Millage Fund, which now has a balance, according to the most recent audited financial statements, of about $30 million (the city’s CFO claims the surplus is closer to $15 million dollars).  This just gives elected officials and city staffers more “flexibility” to spend tax dollars.  For example, if the city wants to redo a street and sidewalks to encourage transit-oriented development, they can now get the street and sidewalk money from the millage, not just the street money.

Furthermore, the city already has alternative transportation money that could be used to repair sidewalks and fill in sidewalk gaps. It’s called the Alternative Transportation Fund, and is funded with 5 percent of the gas and weight tax money the City gets from the State.

There is already money to fix the sidewalks, but Hieftje and the current Council Majority have elected to spend it on other things, such as consultants and fantasy train studies, such as the Ann Arbor Connector Feasibility Study. In Fiscal Year 2011 60 percent of Eli Cooper’s time was charged to the alternative transportation fund. Cooper is the transportation program manager, and one of the most highly paid city staffers.

In order to divert money that should have been used for sidewalk repair, five years ago John Hieftje “championed” the move to shift the cost of sidewalk repair onto taxpayers. Instead of repairing sidewalks, city officials chose to use money from the alternative transportation fund to pay for a city manager to sit around and make transportation plans, such as those for the Fuller Road Parking Garage, and to pay for train “feasibility studies.” Now, Hieftje, Taylor and Briere have come out in favor of once again shifting the cost of sidewalk repair onto taxpayers in the form of a five-year millage.

As Second Ward Council candidate Jane Lumm pointed out in her recent debate against incumbent Stephen Rapundalo, much of the additional tax will be eaten up by administrative costs for the sidewalk program, costs which the city estimates at $150,000 per year.  The city administrator’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget message said the city would pursue adding a sidewalk replacement program to the streets millage and discuss moving the costs of administering the sidewalk replacement program out of the Metro Expansion Fund into the Street Repair & Resurfacing Millage.  Finding a new “bucket” for the sidewalk administration costs is essential, because officials approved a budget that moved $212,000 in General Fund expenses to the Metro Expansion Fund in the Fiscal Year 2012 budget.

Finally, voting for this tax increase does not mean taxpayers are off the hook for sidewalk repairs.  It only means they may be off the hook for the 5 years of the millage.  The resolution approving adding this Charter amendment to the November ballot calls for the City Attorney to bring an ordinance change to council if the amendment passes.  The ordinance change would make the city responsible for sidewalk repair, but only for the duration of the millage.

The increased Parks Millage taught the public that Ann Arbor City Council did not always follow through on its promises once the money was in hand. The current mayor and Council have, through accounting trickery, skimmed millions of dollars from the parks millage to pay, you guessed it, administrative costs. A member of the city’s Parks Advisory Commission (PAC) made this public in a May 2011 piece posted to A2Politico. In that piece, a member of PAC said via email, “The PAC member said via email: “When people are lied to, it makes them less likely to trust government. These people who run for local office and say they are ‘green’ and ‘pro park,’ are attacking the very open space I believe voters want protected and were told their millage money was going to pay for. Who would vote for a millage that uses almost one-third of the money to fund ‘internal charges?’ No one! No one should. This is an under-handed attack on our parks that began as soon as the millage was passed and hasn’t stopped.”

The promise to take taxpayers off the hook for sidewalk repairs for five years is a promise made by a mayor and City Council members who routinely break their promises. The Council Majority can choose to ignore this promise, and make no change to city ordinances. Council can change the ordinance, but include a loophole that allows the city to evade the promise just like they did with the Charter change that was supposed to protect parks from being disposed of without a public vote. The Fuller Road parking garage being proposed for the University of Michigan targets riverside parkland, and Eli Cooper, the city’s transportation program manager, whose generous salary is paid out of the Alternative Transportation Fund, told a Council member that no environmental impact study is required before building a 900-car parking garage next to the Huron River.

The best way, perhaps, to judge the reliability of City Council and city staffers when it comes to collecting and then using tax dollars comes from the charts, below. The first chart shows the miles of roads that have been resurfaced since 2000 in Ann Arbor. The second chart shows the amount of tax money parked in the Street Repair Millage Fund that city staffers, and several Council members (First Ward Council member Sabra Briere, Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo, Third Ward Council member Christopher Taylor and John Hieftje) have told the public they think should be renewed at a higher rate—a tax increase.

by P.D. Lesko

City staff, John Hieftje, his City Council pals, the Board members of the Downtown Development Authority and even the members of the Board of the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority want taxpayers to renew the city’s Street Repair Millage for another five years. To get you to do it, city staffers and politicos are trying to lure you into supporting the tax by including sidewalk repair, financed by a proposed five-year tax increase. Of course, city officials could have been footing the bill for sidewalk repair over the past five years during which residents paid to replace some 55,000 slabs—an estimated total outlay of $7.9 million dollars. Hieftje and Council have been diverting Alternative Transportation money—money that was used for years to repair sidewalks—for “studies” related to their unfunded train fantasies.

Now, they propose to replace sidewalks when necessary—if voters will just renew the Street Repair millage and the tax increase.

City Council is not stopping at using sidewalks for bait in their effort to get voters to re-up a Street Repair millage that hasn’t been used to repair any significant number of the 179 miles of Ann Arbor streets rated poor by a state agency, or the Stadium Bridges. Now, City Council member Sabra Briere (pictured right) has prepared a resolution (Public Art Ordinance Amendment) to exempt both Street Repair millage money and General Fund money from being used by the Percent for Art Program. The message is clear: renew the Street Repair millage and the money will be protected and go toward repairing streets.

There’s just one problem: Briere’s resolution resembles another one that was proposed and passed back in 2006. That year, City Council passed a resolution shortly before residents were “asked to approve a increase in the parks tax. The council passed a resolution saying parks funding would grow at the same rate as the city’s general fund if voters approved the millage,” according to reporting from the former Ann Arbor News.

In 2006 the Ann Arbor City Council proposed a new Parks Millage of 1.1 mills. The new tax was expected to generate slightly less than $5 million annually. The increased tax was approved by the voters in November of 2006. Hieftje and Council quickly diverted millage money to fund police patrols. The local chapter of the Sierra Club confronted Ann Arbor’s “green” mayor for bleeding dedicated millage money from parks. The misuse of the millage money was reversed, but only partially.

That promise to protect parks millage money laid out in the 2006 resolution was broken soon thereafter. In May 2011 a member of the Parks Advisory Commission complained that since 2006 millions of dollars of the Park Maintenance Millage money have been diverted to purchase new vehicles and fund administrative bloat through the use of inflated internal services charges.

In short, several of the same politicos who have voted time and again to skim money from dedicated millages to fund administrative overhead, vehicle and software purchases, capital projects and services having nothing to do with the millages, are once again trying very hard to appear trustworthy—in a an effort to get taxpayers to once again fund a millage.

Briere’s resolution seeks to protect General Fund money from diversion to the Percent for Art Fund. This is a somewhat symbolic inclusion. Between 2007-2011 very little money from the General Fund (the fund that pays for services such as police and fire) was diverted to the Percent for the Art Fund, only about $50,000 of the $2.2 million total diverted. Money for the Percent for the Art Program isn’t pouring in from the General Fund.

Briere’s resolution also seeks to protect Street Repair money from use by the Percent for Art Program. To date, about $593,000 in Street Repaid fund money has been diverted to the Percent for Art Program. However, one needs to examine the timing of Briere’s resolution, and remember that Ann Arbor taxpayers have approved a host of dedicated millages, such as the Parks Maintenance Millage, which her proposed amendment omits.

First Ward Council member Briere’s Public Art Ordinance Amendment is much the same as John Hieftje’s 2008 proposed Charter amendment to “protect” public parkland from sale without a public vote.

Hieftje’s resolution focused on the sale of parkland, but excluded leasing from the amendment. As a consequence, he and a majority of Council members have exploited that loophole to try to push through a lease deal to allow the University of Michigan to build a 900 car parking garage on Fuller Road parkland. Under the proposed deal, the Fuller Road parcel owned by the public, valued at $4-$10 million dollars, would be leased for decades to the University for less than $45,000 per year, a deal the local chapter of the Sierra Club has condemned as a de facto sale.

At the moment, according to the City’s most recent audit, the Street Repair Fund has a $30 million dollar surplus. City staff, John Hieftje and his City Council pals, the Board members of the Downtown Development Authority and even the members of the Board of the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority have plans to direct use of the Street Repair Fund money, most of which have nothing to do with fixing the nearest street or road near you. There are big, expensive plans afoot to improve the “gateways” into Ann Arbor, including Washtenaw Avenue and State Street. Several City Council members and political appointees on various boards and commissions favor using public tax money to fund private development along the corridors. The suggested tax increment financing (TIF) scheme would skim millions from the Ann Arbor Public Schools.

Then, there’s the Stadium Bridge. While running for re-election, John Hieftje, Fourth Ward Council member Margie Teall, Fifth Ward Council member Carsten Hohnke and First Ward Council member Sandi Smith all told AnnArbor.com that repairs to the Stadium Bridge “were scheduled” to begin “no later” that March 2010. To date, repairs have not yet begun.

In fact, according to data from city officials, in all of 2010, the city repaired fewer than 6 miles of roads. In 2008 the city resurfaced just 4 miles of roads and streets. 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 179 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.

Between 2007 and 2010, Ann Arbor resurfaced fewer than 17 miles of roads, or only about 10 percent of the 179 miles of roads rated poor by MITA in 2009, all the while building up a huge surplus of tax dollars. Third Ward Council Stephen Kunselman recently called the diversion of Street Repair fund money to finance art illegal. It may well be illegal. So might diverting $1.37 million from the city’s utilities, a method of funding art that triggered a successful class action suit in Seattle, Washington three years before John Hieftje sponsored his Percent for Art Ordinance in 2007.

The current mayor and council have broken promises regarding the use and allocation of millage money. In 2006, they made empty promises regarding use and protection of the Park Maintenance fund money. Between 2007-2010 our current mayor and council have not hesitated, with the noted exception of Fifth Ward Council member Mike Anglin, to vote to divert money from the General Fund to finance pet projects—then voted to cut services.

As I’ve written before, whether the voters should renew the Street Repair Millage boils down to an issue of trust. The current mayor and City Council majority have repeatedly broken promises regarding the use and allocation of dedicated millage money. They have allowed the streets to crumble while hoarding tens of millions of dollars that should have been used for street and bridge repair. In 2006, they made empty promises related to the Park Maintenance Millage in order to entice voters into approving the additional tax.

After more police and firefighters were recently given pink slips, and six women were attacked in the space of a single week, John Hieftje was quoted by AnnArbor.com as fretting that our city doesn’t have enough public art. Sabra Briere’s Public Art Ordinance Amendmentmay or may not pass. Regardless of whether it does, voters should turn down the Street Repair Millage in November, and send a clear message to our elected officials and their political appointees that their recent votes in favor of non-essential capital projects such as the Fifth Avenue Underground Parking Garage, service cuts, and profligate spending in general, need to stop.

by P.D. Lesko

Ann Arbor residents pay some of the highest per capita property taxes in the state, including a street repair millage that is up for renewal in November. Ann Arbor has the third worst roads in the entire state, and a Street Repair Millage Fund with a $14-$28 million dollar surplus, depending on whom you ask. City staff recently claimed that only 7 percent of Ann Arbor’s roads are rated “poor,” and when AnnArbor.com posted a piece repeating the claim, those who commented did little more than laugh at the shoddy reporting and the absurdity of the claim made by city staff.

One wonders, though, if so few of the roads need repair, why is a special millage to repair the roads even necessary? Don’t dwell on the logic. You could hurt yourself.

The Stadium Bridge is still a disaster area. While running for re-election in 2010, John Hieftje, Fourth Ward Council member Margie Teall, First Ward Council member Sandi Smith, and Fifth Ward Council member Carsten Hohnke, assured voters that repairs “were scheduled” to begin “no later” than March. Hohnke told AnnArbor.com that city staff “had been instructed by Council to begin repairs no later than March 2011.”

March has come and gone. In the meantime, the Street Repair Millage Fund has accrued a $14-$28 million dollar surplus.

Only $800,000 of the $13.8 million in TIGER II federal grant money promised for the Stadium Bridge project, and which Hieftje told AnnArbor.com would be made available by mid-summer, has been handed over.  Hieftje, Governor Rick Snyder, U.S. Representative John Dingell, State Representative Jeff Irwin and State Senator Rebekah Warren have made no public statement concerning the missing federal TIGER II grant money or what, if anything, any of them are doing to get Department of Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood to obligate (disperse) the remaining $13 million dollars.

Cities in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Ohio among several others received TIGER II grant money for their bridge projects months ago, thanks to aggressive lobbying by governors, state and U.S. representatives to convince LaHood to obligate promised funds.

John Hieftje had led people to believe that Ann Arbor’s financial picture is better than, say, Flint’s and Detroit’s because of the “reorganization” of city government that saves “$10 million or more” per year. However, the the city spends more on staff salaries and benefits for 300 fewer employees than worked for the city in 2001.

The truth? Ann Arbor has fared relatively well financially, because taxpayers have provided, literally, billions of dollars via property taxes, fines, fees and parking charges to elected officials who have proven themselves time and again as dishonest, incompetent and feckless. Between 2001 and 2010, property tax revenue has increased substantially, from $54.1 million per year to $81.9 million per year.  Between 1999 and 2010, the city’s combined debt load and underfunded pension obligations have risen from $119,000,000 to nearly $500,000,000. Third Ward Council member Christopher Taylor, who is either being deliberately deceptive, or is simply a nitwit, sent an error-riddled missive to AnnArbor.com in which he claimed the city’s debt load was $246,000,000. Taylor, a lawyer who specializes in entertainment law, neglected to include the amounts owed toward the underfunded retiree pension and health care obligations, another $250,000,000. AnnArbor.com neglected to fact check Taylor’s claims and once again ended up with egg on its electronic face.

The Ann Arbor Transportation Authority (AATA) wants to branch out and provide service county-wide. The Board of Directors wants to use your property tax money to give subsidized bus rides to people who live in Chelsea, Dexter and surrounding townships, where residents pay property tax rates that are a fraction of those Ann Arbor residents pay per $100,000. About 30 percent of the AATA’s annual budget comes from a perpetual millage of about 2 mills collected from Ann Arbor taxpayers. The full court press is on hard and heavy to find the $450,000,000 needed to build a handful of bus stations to service out-county bergs. Local business bigwigs Bob Guenzel, who retired as the Washtenaw County administrator and left behind a $30,000,000 budget gap, and Jesse Bernstein have been tasked with finding a way to finance the pie-in-the-sky expansion. Considering it’s impossible to get from one side of the city to the other on the bus in less than one hour, it’s almost laughable to charge AATA Board members with finding almost half a billion dollars to expand the infrequent and slow service elsewhere on the Ann Arbor taxpayer dime.

One of the scenarios being examined by Bernstein and Guenzel to fund the half a billion dollar expansion project? A tax hike, county-wide millage, or worse yet, a tax-increment financing scheme that would skim money from the county’s public schools.

Meanwhile, on Fuller Road, politicos who constantly mewl and puke about the city’s money woes are poised to practically give away a river-front parcel of land valued at between $4-$10 million dollars to the University of Michigan. These same politicos have voted to spend millions on consultants for the parking garage project, design work, sewer work, and will soon use city and federal money to put in a round-about at the corner where Geddes crosses in front of the Main hospital. Money for Fuller Road spending was siphoned from the General Fund via a now-drained and closed Economic Development Fund—a fund that was set up to do little more than hide the fact that money that could have been used for services, such as police and fire, was being diverted to pay the costs of the parking garage project Council has not even voted to approve.

If only the Stadium Bridges and the city’s roads could be repaired as quickly as the $1.2 million in work that was started days after it was approved on the sewer upgrades that just happened to be necessary on Fuller Road right where certain members of Council desperately want to see a parking garage for the University of Michigan built. The city’s Art Commission is already figuring out how to spend $250,000 in taxpayer money on art for U of M’s parking garage. Never mind that, sigh, Council has never voted to support the project.

Over the past half a dozen years, the current members of Ann Arbor’s City Council have voted to spend imprudently, almost wildly, as if money were no object. At the same time they have voted in support of service cuts, and as was revealed by FOIAed documents, allowed city managers and staff to reward themselves with millions of dollars in perks such as car allowances paid to employes with desk jobs, $1.1 million for cell phones, extravagant meals out, and travel to four diamond hotels and resorts all over the country.

The President of a local community bank who sits on Ann Arbor’s economic development corporation board, has studied the city’s budget and audited financial statements. He has been hammering Hieftje, et. al. over their claims of poverty while sitting on a boatload of money that belongs to taxpayers. Stephen Ranzini, president of University Bank, has called the idea that Ann Arbor needs to cut services a “financial ruse.”

On May 19, 2011, as Council was preparing to vote on the 2011-2012 budget, Ranzini went before Council and spoke. AnnArborChronicle.com quoted Ranzini as saying:

Ranzini said the city had a $29 million net increase in assets in FY 2010 – which the private sector would call a “profit.” He also said the city had $103 million in unrestricted funds, based on the city’s audited statements. He was referring to the city’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) [emphasis added]:

$103,726,801 is unrestricted and may be used to meet the government’s ongoing obligations to citizens and creditors, subject to the purpose of the fund in which they are located. This balance is comprised of $43,955,179 in governmental activities and $59,771,622 in business-type activities. [page 10]

“Governmental activities” include general fund activities such as police and fire protection and parks and recreation. “Business-type activities” include funds like water, sewer, and solid waste.

In light of the increase in assets and the amount of unrestricted funds, Ranzini questioned the need to cut police and fire staffing.

Ranzini pointed out that, “Persisting with the fiction of the various buckets enables claims of poverty, which are easily seen through by those with financial budgeting experience.”

Bottom line? Bank president Ranzini believes that the current administration’s claims of poverty are fictional. The money is there to preserve services. The political will to deliver services to the public, alas, is what is missing.

One can only imagine what a thorn in the side Ranzini must be to Hieftje and the city managers who work tirelessly to make the public believe that a city with a $103,000,000 surplus, and an $81.9 million dollar pot of property tax revenue, needs to toss police and fire fighters out on their ears, raise taxes and cut services in order to make ends meet. In truth, the cuts have been made to finance non-essential capital projects that the city could ill-afford while leaving the $103,000,000 surplus untouched. As Ranzini says over and over in his comments posted on AnnArbor.com, “drain the buckets.”

The question of whether to approve the Street Repair Millage, including a tax increase to pay for the repair of city sidewalks, will appear on the November 2011 ballot. The best reasoning I’ve seen to turn down the millage comes from Jack Eaton, a labor attorney who ran for City Council in 2010, and who, while campaigning, suggested that the Stadium Bridge repairs should have been started long ago using a portion of the Street Repair Fund surplus. Eaton says:

….I will vote against both the street millage and the sidewalk millage. We have somewhere between $14 and $28 million in our street repair fund. Until we see a plan for the use of those funds that demonstrates a responsible strategy for repairing our roads (rather than making traffic circles and making the entryways into town more appealing), I will not vote to renew and increase those funds.

The accumulated funds should cover road repairs for the next couple of years. After that, we can vote to renew the millage.

The current city government is not repairing the streets, or keeping police and fire fighters on the job so that the public is safe, and not even telling the truth. For the past several years, the public has been misled by several current elected officials, as well as the former city administrator, Roger Fraser, who’ve falsely claimed over and over that service cuts are partially the result of falling property tax revenues. The opposite is true: property tax revenues rose every year between 2001 and 2010.

What this upcoming millage renewal boils down to is this: trust.

John Hieftje and the current Council Majority have proven they simply cannot be trusted to be responsible with the money we give them. After more police and firefighters were recently given pink slips, and six women were attacked in the space of a single week, John Hieftje was quoted by AnnArbor.com as fretting that our city doesn’t have enough public art.

As Eaton points out, the current Capital Improvements Plan, in which city staffers lay out infrastructure repair plans for Council’s approval, outlines no strategy for repairing/rebuilding the bulk of the city’s roads 179 miles of roads that have been rated poor. This Street Repair Millage with sidewalk repair built in bait-and-switch would raise taxes, ostensibly for sidewalk repair, yet co-mingle that money in the same fund with the street repair funds, funds that have been diverted to projects such as the Fuller Road Parking garage project. These repeated diversions of money from the city’s General Fund and from its dedicated millages, such as the Park Maintenance Millage (Hieftje and Council used park maintenance millage money to fund police services) is underhanded, sneaky government—government that can’t be trusted to actually use additional tax money for its intended purpose.

John Hieftje supports the millage renewal complete with a tax hike. Christopher Taylor supports the millage renewal that raises taxes. First Ward Council member Sabra Briere, in her most recent constituent e-mail newsletter, came out in favor of raising taxes in order to repair sidewalks. None of them will tell you this: The city already has alternative transportation money that could be used to repair sidewalks and fill in sidewalk gaps. It’s called the Alternative Transportation Fund, and is funded with 5 percent of the gas and weight tax money the City gets from the State.

There is already money to fix the sidewalks, but Hieftje and the current Council Majority have elected to spend it on other things, such as consultants and fantasy train studies, such as the Ann Arbor Connector Feasibility Study. In Fiscal Year 2011 60 percent of Eli Cooper’s time was charged to the alternative transportation fund. Cooper is the transportation program manager, and one of the most highly paid city staffers.

In order to divert money that should have been used for sidewalk repair, five years ago John Hieftje “championed” the move to shift the cost of sidewalk repair onto taxpayers. Instead of repairing sidewalks, city officials chose to use money from the alternative transportation fund to pay for a city manager to sit around and make transportation plans, such as those for the Fuller Road Parking Garage, and to pay for train “feasibility studies.” Now, Hieftje, Taylor and Briere have come out in favor of once again shifting the cost of sidewalk repair onto taxpayers in the form of a five-year millage.

Voters should turn down the Street Repair Millage, and send a clear message to Hieftje and his Council pals like Taylor and Briere that their recent votes in favor of non-essential capital projects such as the Fifth Avenue Underground Parking Garage, service cuts, and profligate spending in general, need to stop.

Just in case you were wondering how stupid John Hieftje, his Council pals and city staff think you are: Next up on Council’s agenda? Guess what?!? A resolution to spend a whole $500,000 on road repair. Don’t fall for it.

It’s a ham-handed gesture that’s a day late and somewhere between $13.5 and $27.5 million dollars short.

If this libretto sounds familiar, it originated in ancient Greece. Aristophanes’s comic play “Lysistrata” debuted in 411 BCE, and it is the story of one woman’s devoted efforts to end the Pelopennesian War. Lysistrata persuades the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace.

Over at the blog Classical Values, the author posted an entry today under the title, “Say ‘NO’ to being screwed.” Eric Scheie, who is running for City Council against Fourth Ward incumbent Marcia Higgins, writes, “In Ann Arbor where I live, there are potholes galore, and many people complain about the city doing a piss-poor job of fixing them.”

Scheie then goes on to suggest a possible remedy, one of the more clever solutions suggested by a Council candidate in recent memory. With tongue firmly in cheek he writes:

As to how the city might be persuaded to fix the crumbling road beds, perhaps Ann Arbor women could do what the women of Barbacoas, Columbia are doing, and  threaten to withhold sex:

Women of Barbacoas, a small town in remote southern Colombia, are using access to their netherregions as a bargaining chip in trying to sex starve the men of town and, by extension, the government into doing something about the sorry state of the road that leads from their hamlet of 40,000 people to the rest of civilization. Mudslides as a result of heavy seasonal rainfall has left the road in such a sorry state that the 35 mile journey from Barbacoas to the nearest town takes nearly 10 hours. The government has promised to fix the road, but so far has not followed through.

It worked in 411 BCE, and it will work in Barbacoas. Could the same strategy work in Ann Arbor? Scheie writes: “The only way to make a sex withholding plan work in Ann Arbor would be for everyone to threaten to withhold sex until the crumbling road beds are fixed. You know, like, when you’re being screwed, just say no!”

How long would it take for, say, the Stadium Bridge to be rebuilt? I’m guessing a matter of days, perhaps a couple of weeks at the latest. There would be no more mewling and puking by city staffer Pirooz about the missing TIGER II grant money from the federal government. No more ridiculous “jumping through hoops” excuses by Hieftje. Second Ward Council member Tony Derezinski might even sell his classic car and motorcycle collection in an effort to come up with some part, any part of the $13 million needed to replace the Stadium Bridge. Third Ward Council member Christopher Taylor might even sing show tunes on street corners in an effort to busk $1 or $2 million for the bridge replacement project.

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.