“In a March 16 exchange with Council Member Margie Teall, Council Member Leigh Greden dealt with a political hot potato while council guests and rank-and-file citizens stood at the mic and talked about community events and problems.

The subject is Ann Arbor’s public art program and the move to spend perhaps three-quarter of a million dollars for an installation at city hall. (Previous coverage.)

7:29 p.m. Greden to Teall – “Did Taylor call you? The art thing is a disaster. We need to find a way to clean it up.”

7:31 p.m. Teall to Greden – “…stop calling it a disaster.”

7:35 p.m. Greden to Teall – “Margie, I have *very* good instincts. We haven’t had a PR mess like this in quite some time. This has stretched into the masses. Taylor says Ned and Bernstein were complaining. The public sees it as a very simple analysis: Cops before art. Roads before art.”

That’s not the analysis Greden offered when he complained about News’ coverage of the issue. Instead, he argued that there was no controversy… and certainly no “disaster.”"

Dave Askins reports: “Later, during council deliberations on the resolution, Tony Derezinski thanked Michigan Peaceworks and Veterans for Peace from his perspective as “a veteran of an earlier unpopular war” and said that he was pleased to support it.”

From: Leigh Greden
Sent: March 02, 2009, 8:16 p.m.
To: Derezinski, Rapundalo, Higgins, Teall, Hohnke, Taylor

“The winner of the Golden Pandy Award, by unanimous vote of the committee, with nobody else even coming close to his performance: Tony Derezinski for pandering to veterans.”

Dave Askins reports: “Councilmember Carsten Hohnke said he’d seen a presentation when Dreiseitl was in Ann Arbor last year for the Huron River Watershed Council’s State of the Huron conference. He said it would bring storm water control out into the open and would thus be both educational as well as aesthetically pleasing art.”

From: Leigh Greden
Sent: March 02, 2009, 8:16 p.m.
To: Derezinski, Rapundalo, Higgins, Teall, Hohnke, Taylor
Subject: Oh wait….

Never to be outdone, Councilman Hohnke is demanding a re-count on the Pandy vote. His pandering to the artists is rivaling Derezinski’s pandering to the veterans.”

As it is, the decision makers are putting themselves in the same tone-deaf stance — “the decision can’t be reviewed” – as the execs who received bonuses at AIG. Under the changed circumstances — I now favor asking questions about how to “claw back” the money, and, at the very least, I propose that we reduce the public arts subsidy going forward to 0.1 %.

The Ann Arbor District Library made a much wiser decision several months ago and shelved the idea of building a new downtown library until *after* we emerge from the worst recession in 50 years…

The answer is that a dedicated group of local residents (artists among them) who have been working on this commission for years made the decision to have the project tie in with the environmental values of the community and they chose the most renowned person in the world to do it.

You might have influenced this decision if you had been following it, the meetings are open to the public and there is time for public comment and conversation. Like a lot of things, the people who work on them make the decisions.

Also, no one has answered the aesthetic question: why should we focus our public art on the storm water management theme? The only reasons I hear are 1) that’s where the $ come from and 2) A2 wants to be green. Those are reasonable arguments, but they’re not *artistic* arguments.

It is incredibly important to not cheat those who will follow us buy cutting back on what is artful, beautiful and unique because of the crisis of the day. This economy will pass but art will last.

I think the city of Ann Arbor would suffer no harm whatsoever if the new building was constructed without a storm-water-themed piece of public art, and I suspect a lot of voters feel the same way.

This building is being built now and the storm water management art needs to be created along with the construction. We cannot create it later and then install it. If the money has been budgeted why not just do it now.

A city is made up of more than just buildings and infrastructure; it is made up of culture, lifestyle, entertainment, reputation etc. These items are intangible items but still are important for the city to invest in. These sorts of investments have major impacts on whether businesses and people relocate to this area.

What bothers me more is that a funding vehicle was created that allows city officials to make a very substantial and arguably quite extravagant outsourced purchase in a time of severe hardship, and that the structure of the funding vehicle insulates the expenditure from any effective present-day review in the light of current circumstances.

It’s the opposite of zero-based budgeting. Because the money is already tucked away, it has to be spent. *That* is messed up.