The board’s resolution did not try to resolve differences between the versions of the four-party agreement that have now been approved by the city councils of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Instead, the board gave the four-party agreement its approval, contingent on resolution of the technical difference that has emerged between the Ypsilanti version and the Ann Arbor version – a difference that concerns a municipal service charge. The AATA board may need to vote again on the agreement, depending on how Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti change the document.

The four parties to the four-party agreement are the AATA, the city of Ann Arbor, the city of Ypsilanti and Washtenaw County. One key element of the four-party agreement is that the two cities would pledge their existing transit millages to the new countywide authority, instead of to the AATA. The Ann Arbor city council approved a version of the four-party agreement on March 5, 2012, after amending the version that the AATA had first presented. Amendments were made in several ways, and stretched over multiple meetings.

On May 15, 21012, the Ypsilanti council approved the four-party agreement, but amended it in a way that may require reconsideration by the Ann Arbor city council – in the opinion of Ypsilanti city attorney John M. Barr. [.pdf of red-lined four-party agreement as amended by Ypsilanti city council] The Ypsilanti amendment relates to a 1% municipal service charge that the agreement originally allowed the two cities to impose on their millages, before forwarding the millage money to the new transit authority. The Ypsilanti council struck the municipal service charge from the agreement. But at its Feb. 6, 2012 meeting, the Ann Arbor city council had already contemplated – and rejected, on an 8-3 vote against it – an amendment of the language related to the municipal service charge.

Also approved at the AATA board’s May 16 meeting were the articles of incorporation of the new transit authority. The evening before, the Ypsilanti council unanimously approved, without amendment, the proposed articles of incorporation. The Ann Arbor city council has not yet voted on the articles of incorporation. [.pdf of articles of incorporation]

The Washtenaw County board of commissioners will consider the four-party agreement and the articles of incorporation in the near future. County commissioners have already been briefed more than once on AATA’s countywide initiative, but have not yet formally considered the proposal.

This brief was filed from the Holiday Inn Express, 600 Briarwood Circle, where the AATA board held its monthly board meeting, which it combined with a retreat. A more detailed report of the meeting will follow.

The software comes in the context of the AATA’s planned entrance into the vanpool services market. On Sept. 15, 2011, the AATA board authorized a contract with VPSI to provide vanpool services, and on Jan. 19, 2012, the board authorized the purchase of up to 25 vans to provide the vanpool service.

According to a staff memo accompanying the resolution, a requirement of the software is that it must be accessible through standard Internet appliances, and provide instant, accurate online ride‐matches through detailed map information presented to the end‐user. It must also integrate with social networking services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

This brief was filed from the Holiday Inn Express, 600 Briarwood Circle, where the AATA board held its monthly board meeting, which it combined with a retreat. A more detailed report of the meeting will follow.

According to the staff memo accompanying the resolution, revisions include: (1) changes in ethics policy to include annual disclosure requirements for board of directors, CEO, deputy CEO, senior staff and procurement staff; (2) addition of a vendor contact form as directed by the auditor, which requires a CEO or deputy CEO approval for all new vendors; (3) addition of MITN (Michigan Intergovernmental Trade Network) as a resource to maintain AATA’s current list of vendors; (4) addition of The Davis‐Bacon Act for construction projects – also a recommendation of the auditor; (5) inclusion of the AATA’s living wage policy, which was approved by the board on June 16, 2011; and (6) an increase in the small purchases threshold from $2,500 to $3,000 – as directed by the Federal Transit Administration.

The procurement manual was last revised on March 19, 2009.

This brief was filed from the Holiday Inn Express, 600 Briarwood Circle, where the AATA board held its monthly board meeting, which it combined with a retreat. A more detailed report of the meeting will follow.

This brief was filed from the Holiday Inn Express, 600 Briarwood Circle, where the AATA board held its monthly board meeting, which it combined with a retreat. A more detailed report of the meeting will follow.

Small group work made up a portion of the May 14 budget forum. (Photo by the writer.)

Attendance at the second community budget forum held Monday at Huron high school was lighter than at the first one, held a week earlier. Still, almost 40 community members and about a dozen staff members participated.

The two main themes that came out of the second forum were: (1) a desire to keep the cuts away from the classrooms (i.e. not cutting teaching staff or increasing class sizes); and (2) a concern that the cuts as proposed would disproportionately affect the most educationally vulnerable segments of the district’s population. Many participants also expressed concern that the timing of the proposed budget reductions would not allow for transition planning this late in the year, and that the district was not being sufficiently forthcoming with detailed budget information.

Trustees Glenn Nelson, Irene Patalan, and Christine Stead attended the May 14 budget forum. The board will hold a discussion on the budget during their next committee of the whole meeting to be held on Wednesday, May 16 beginning at 5:30 p.m. in the Balas administration building’s main conference room.

Budget Presentation

AAPS superintendent Patricia Green welcomed everyone to the forum, and reviewed the reasons behind the structural deficit that has caused AAPS to need to make over $55 million in cuts in the past five years. Green said that her administration does not want to be suggesting any of these cuts to the board, and that the cumulative effect of these reductions will be painful no matter which decisions the board makes. She then invited AAPS deputy superintendent of operations Robert Allen to present the proposed budget.

The proposed budget was made in terms of three alternatives – Plans A, B and C – each with progressively bigger cuts. Even Plan A, with the smallest number of cuts and the greatest use of the district’s financial reserves, calls for a reduction in staff by 32 full-time positions, the elimination of some busing services, and the closure or merging of one of the district’s alternative high schools. Plans B and C have progressively greater cuts and less use of reserves.

Allen gave a presentation of the full budget proposal almost identical to the one presented to school board members last month, and then asked participants to break out into small groups to discuss their concerns with the potential budget reductions and brainstorm additional revenue enhancement ideas. An AAPS administrator sat with each of the small groups to serve as the facilitator and recorder.

Community Response

Community members attending the forum were asked to answer the following three questions:

1. Given the budget realities facing the Ann Arbor Public Schools, what is your main concern with the proposed budget for 2012/2013?
2. Based on revenue options, do you have any suggestions on how the district could raise revenue, such as private giving or increased marketing?
3. What other questions to you have that were not answered this evening?

They were then asked to report out to the whole group. Meeting handouts also stated that AAPS would post additional information on the district’s website after the community budget forums to answer questions from participants, and also invited forum attendees to submit their concerns or questions in writing.

Community Response: Concerns

The concern mentioned most often at the May 14 budget forum was that the proposed cuts could negatively affect student learning – due to higher class sizes. Participants expressed the belief that the core curriculum will be what closes the achievement gap, and suggested that keeping class sizes as low as possible should be prioritized above everything else, including all extracurricular activities. “Don’t cut anything related to instruction,” “Cut anything but the basics,” and “Students first – preserve class sizes” were all suggestions made at the forum.

One community member noted that higher class sizes is what caused a lack of success for some students at their comprehensive high schools. And that had created the need for alternative programs such as the one in place at the Roberto Clement Student Development Center.

Another main set of concerns had to do with a perceived lack of equity in the proposed cuts. Participants argued that marginalized students who need the most support will be the most affected by transportation cuts; that “at-risk families are being hit hard across the board with cuts;” and that the cuts are being made “from the bottom up.” Another contention was that students of color would have more trouble getting to school, but the budget cuts will not reduce the academic achievement of whites, thereby widening the racial achievement gap.

Regarding the possible restructuring of Roberto Clemente Student Development Center, a few tables compared the timeline for transition for that alternative high school to a timeline for transition of an athletic program. Participants noted that lacrosse, previously a varsity sport, had been given a year to transition to a club sport, but Clemente could be closed with seven weeks notice – not enough time for the community time to re-group. According to a Clemente student who attended the forum, “Clemente students are starting to freak out.”

Participants also questioned if there was enough time left in the year to enact the budget reductions as proposed, and said that “people should have been given more time to react.” One table requested that the community be given detailed information earlier next year, because it’s projected to be another bad budget cycle.

Finally, it was argued that the district need to be more transparent, and that data should not need to be requested via Freedom of Information Act requests. A participant suggested that the district should also provide more background on the institutional history that had gone into the budget recommendations. Forum attendees also asked to be kept involved in the budget process between the May 14 budget forum and the final budget vote.

Community Response: Revenue Enhancement Suggestions

Community members suggested the following strategies for bringing in additional revenue – which are grouped thematically:

• Redouble efforts to pass a countywide enhancement millage
• Support the AAPS educational foundation
• Help the AAPS educational foundation raise substantial amounts of money
• Cut middle school athletics
• Cut all sports
• Convert more sports teams to club sports [as was done with lacrosse]
• Cut all extracurricular activities
• Institute a “pay to ride” plan to cover busing costs, waiving the fee for those who can’t afford it
• Have the PTOs subsidize busing
• Use smaller buses for smaller routes
• Outsource busing
• Eliminate two of the buses serving Ann Arbor Open
• Eliminate swimming at Ann Arbor Open [at Mack pool]
• Allow advertising in district spaces
• Apply for more grant funding
• Open more alternative programs in the district to bring in more School of Choice students
• Fill Clemente to capacity by allowing additional School of Choice students to enroll there
• Add Arabic language as an elective to attract kids who are attending local charter school
• Join the Early College Alliance
• Make sure the district is getting all of its Medicaid reimbursements
• Redistricting so all students can attend the elementary school closest to their homes
• Combine elementary schools and sell off unused properties
• Merge low-enrollment elementary schools
• Eliminate employees’ dental and vision benefits
• Outsource the payroll department
• Take back central administrators’ salary raises
• Cut administrator’s salaries
• Prohibit all administrators’ vacations until the budget is resolved

Community Response: Questions

Table groups asked a number of questions that were not answered formally for the whole forum group, though administrators did walk around and answer specific questions individually during the small group discussion and after the forum. The district has said it would post on its website answers to questions asked by forum attendees. Questions asked included:

• How would cuts to the three dedicated police officers impact the schools?
• What percentage of the budget needs to be kept in the fund balance?
• What process was used in coming up with these suggested reductions?
• Why aren’t there details being offered in the plan to restructure Clemente?
• What is an estimate of the value of the Clemente building and property?
• Is there a plan for the alternative schools that could be shared to explain what could be happening and reduce fears?
• Why aren’t all of the alternative schools on the chopping block?
• What savings would be realized by eliminating the NWEA assessment?
• Why were there increases in central administration salaries?
• Can the district release more details on the proposed cuts?
• When a proposed cut in listed, are “offset expenses” reflected in that cut?
• What is the timeline – when will these budget decisions be made?
• How can people who aren’t present at the budget forum give input?

Green closed the forum by thanking everyone for their input, and saying that everything discussed at the forum would be shared with the board and posted on the district’s website as the budget conversations continue over the next several weeks.

Next board meeting: Committee of the whole, May 16, 2012, 5:30 p.m., at the Balas administration building main conference room, 2555 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104.

David Erik Nelson

Mitt Romney and I went to the same high school – three decades apart. This would be immaterial, except the Washington Post just published a fascinating 5,500-word remembrance of Mitt Romney’s hijinks at Cranbrook, a high-pressure prep school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

I attended this same school in the 1990s; it’s an architectural gem, the staff is excellent, the program an academic crucible. Later, as a University of Michigan student, I shared a broken-down house with three fellow Cranbrook alums. One was in a sociology class, and we were delighted when he revealed that his textbook listed Cranbrook as “one of the last vestiges of American aristocracy.”

Because Mitt and I attended Cranbrook exactly 30 years apart, we ended up standing back-to-back on a balmy June evening in 2005 – the same year Mitt received the school’s 2005 Distinguished Alumni Award. The governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and I stood together at the lip of a deep, inset fountain, which gurgled contentedly, almost as though it was whispering ♪♫Daaaaave, I would be an excellent place for a GOP splaaashdown!♫

A Question of Character

Jason Horowitz’s May 10 Washington Post piece is long, detailed, and narrative, but so effectively pulls its punches that (apart from the title, which I imagine was written by an editor) it has no express argument at all.

Yet the piece has elicited a lot of reaction. Clearly, it shows that Mitt is a homophobe! Clearly, it shows he’s a bully! Clearly, it shows he’s a friend of the Jews! Clearly, it shows he’s a classist prick! A meretricious lout! A great practical joker! A disrespectful, bloodthirsty monster! Clearly, it’s totally not germane because no one would pick a president based on what that person was doing in high school!

Clearly it’s not clear what we’re supposed to take from this – but that seems fine, because as of last Friday everyone in the old media and on its coat-tails was perfectly happy to take the dark glass Horowitz delivered us and scry it for meaning.

But, as a Cranbrook alum, and as someone who was bullied [1] in those pleasant pastures among those dark Satanic Mills [2], and as someone who was a Jew at Cranbrook during what might have been the queerest time in history to be a Jew at Cranbrook, what interested me most were the Facebooked reactions of my old classmates. And their thoughts eerily matched mine: That doesn’t really sound so different from what things were like when we were there.

Then, of course, there’s this Wall Street Journal blog post penned by an alum who was gay at Cranbrook a decade after I’d graduated. His concluding sentence: “Call us elitist, or removed, or privileged, but don’t say that Cranbrook hasn’t changed.”

The Promised Land

What initially struck me about Horowitz’s article wasn’t the description of Cranbrook – which was so familiar that it didn’t even strike me that it should have changed more over the 30 most tumultuous years of the 20th Century – but a simple mistake.

In explaining the division between boarding students and “day boys” (who were “day students” by the time I came to Cranbrook, because the two campuses had largely been integrated), Horowitz notes: “Students within the limits of Detroit’s 8 Mile Road had the option to attend the school without boarding.”

This comes just a bit after Horowitz takes pains to highlight Cranbrook’s “significant Jewish contingent” at that time. He even mentions that Romney dated Mary Fisher – the stepdaughter to Max Fisher, who was certainly one of the most notable Jewish-American philanthropists of the 20th Century – and notes how “studiously nondenominational” the school was.

But Horowitz has gotten this admissions policy exactly wrong: By the time Mitt was enrolled, Cranbrook had long taken measures to limit Jewish enrollment (as is both attested and documented in the biography of Cranbrook’s most politically significant alum during my tenure, Daniel Ellsberg). One measure was to mandate that students living south of 8 Mile – i.e., within Detroit city limits – must attend as boarding students (at a much higher tuition rate). [3]

Until the 1970s, the vast bulk of Southeast Michigan’s Jewish population – including my own father (not a Cranbrook alum) – lived within Detroit, largely along its northern edge. When I was a student this policy was characterized as anti-Semitic, not racist, although it obviously affected a huge African-American population. Make of that what you will. [4]

But, I think most tellingly, this was a policy that teachers told us about in the 1990s. I know this will sound absurd – I am, after all, talking about one of the last vestiges of the aristocracy – but when I was a student the school was admirably ahead of the curve on multiculturalism, with classes with names like “Diversity?” and teachers who didn’t play with kid gloves. Our privilege – by dint of socio-economic class, race, gender, creed – was not something we were permitted to blithely ignore. Classroom debates asked us to take a long look at how it was we ended up where we were, and what we might owe the rest of the world as a consequence. The kid gloves were left at the school room door. Our folks got their money’s worth – because this is what they were paying for.

The entire point of bringing up these policies – which, to my understanding, remained in place until the early ’70s – was to discuss how institutions change over time. Cranbrook was – and evidently remains – a smart place, and a complicated place. It’s a classic example of how institutions – real institutions with real traditions, institutions like governments – make their progress: sidling and inch-long, often mind-numbingly slowly, but bending toward justice.

The Rich Are Different

The implied argument in Horowitz’s Washington Post parable – the argument being made explicit by us chattering hordes now – is that there is something to be said about Mitt here, something that can be distilled from these facts about his boyhood cruelty, about an environment that was intense and rarified.

As the caretakers of a half-way decent democracy, this should probably disturb us. The last few election cycles have seen our national discourse stumble into the logical endgame of identity politics. We’ve ceased even to bother asking how a candidate’s identity might influence his or her performance of duties, and instead seem content to ask how his or her identity influences our guts. With John F. Kennedy (a Catholic), or with Joe Lieberman (a practicing Orthodox Jew), our questions about their strange Otherness was at least couched in functional concerns: How might their identities impact their performance of the duties of their offices?

But in the Birther controversy (or lack of one for John McCain, who was born in Panama) and with questions of Romney’s socioeconomic class and upbringing and faith [5], no one seems to be bothering to ask: “Does this obstruct the performance of his function?” It all seems to just swirl around: “Is he like me? Is he too different? Are the rich too different from me? Did He who made the lamb make thee?”

After all, how could your average American possibly expect to see his or her interests effectively addressed by a slightly right-of-center moderate millionaire with an elite education, a pragmatic attitude towards universal medical coverage, and several New York Times bestsellers in bookstores? Are we seriously worried that Mitt Romney might get elected in 2012, or that we already elected him in 2008?

It’s one thing to not want a Jew VP because you fear the President might drop dead during Yom Kippur and there’d be no one to pilot the ship of state until sundown. It’s another not to want a Jew VP because you aren’t a Jew, and Jews are different, and you aren’t comfortable with that, and what if he decided he didn’t want a White House Christmas tree and oh good God won’t someone think of the children!!!

Whatever nebulous feelings we might now have about Mitt and Mormonism and bullies and boys bleaching their hair and growing it long, Horowitz’s Washington Post article has at least brought us one concrete fact: Mitt Romney is an enthusiastic prankster. And that, my Dear Readers, my Trusted Interlocutors, brings us back to me and Mitt standing at our high school reunion in 2005.

We stood together once, Mitt and I. It was June and it was warm and it was breezy and the sun was westering, and there were a lot of other folks there. Because Cranbrook is small, they hold their reunions mod 5, which means that everyone who graduated in 1930, ’35, ’40, ’45 . . . ’65 (like Mitt), ’70 . . . ’95 (like me) share one big reunion. The next year it’s the 1931, ’36, ’41, ’46 . . . etc. kids who reunite, and so on. So Mitt and I shared a reunion.

I was standing in Cranbrook’s celebrated Quadrangle next to that lovely fountain drinking a beer and talking to General Ambrose Burnside (not his real name). The general looked past my shoulder and said, “Holy shit, that’s Mitt Romney!” I turned, and not five feet away, three-quarters turned away from me, was the governor of Massachusetts. He wasn’t flanked by security, or by his wife, or by anyone in particular. He was in an Izod and chinos, smiling and chatting to a young African-American man who, judging from his blue-and-green club tie and navy blazer, was one of the students there to serve the alums. The kid was smiling, hands clasped in front of his belt, asking something complicated. Mitt was smiling back and nodding and squinting a little in the sun.

“Who?” I asked.

“The governor of Massachusetts, asshole,” and then it clicked: Less than a year earlier Romney had backed same-sex civil unions. A few months later some skinny, crazy-named black guy from Chicago had slam-dunked at the DNC Convention. America seemed to be bending toward justice.

“Oh. That Mitt Romney.” I looked again, “That dude either has a huge ass or a terrible tailor,” I said. And it drunkenly dawned on me: I will almost certainly regret not pushing this guy into the fountain. At the very least, I will have assaulted the governor of the Hated Commonwealth of Massachusetts [6].

But those fountains steps can be slick, and I worried he’d brain himself on the way down, and then I’d be the man who murdered the governor of Hated Massachusetts. And I didn’t like imagining the aftermath: Some middle-aged dude, ass-down in a big fountain, the water pouring over him, shocked and ashamed, and stuck in wet shoes for the rest of the evening. I didn’t like the idea of how triumphantly malicious I’d feel, about how I’d screw up that club-tie kid’s chance to talk to Someone Really Goddamn Important, when he ought to be clearing cocktail glasses off of linen tablecloths.

And then General Burnside said, “You want another beer?” and I did.

And we left.

But, maybe, if I’d seen the Washington Post article back then, I would have rushed Mitt.

After all, of all the guys who want to have their finger on the national trigger, we now know that Mitt’s the one who can take a joke.

Notes:

[1] I hate saying that. The cognitive dissonance I experience typing the words “I was bullied in school” is so great that I’m almost overwhelmingly tempted to delete the following 600 words (which, agreed, might well be a blessing for both the reader and me).

On the one hand, the term “bullied” carried nowhere near the weight then – either for kids or for adults in education –  that it does now. Back then it never dawned on me to take my problems to a teacher or administrator. I simply could not fathom what they might do about any of it. Consequently, I’m a big, unstunted grown-up man now, and feel like “it’s all water under the bridge” and “didn’t mean anything.” There are kids – even today, and certainly in the 1960s, as the Washington Post article demonstrates – who suffer a great deal more at the hands of their peers than I ever did. What I experienced was mild by comparison. Or, at least, that’s what I want to say. Hey, I’m fine! “It gets better,” kids!

On the other hand – which I’ll just arbitrarily call my left hand, the one that clicks and grinds when I rotate my wrist even now, 20-plus years on – I was bullied right into a broken arm, and bullied beyond. I was bullied right up until I stopped giving a fuck about what it should mean to be “one of the guys” – which happened to coincide with my classes largely switching to being mixed-gender. (When I attended Cranbrook the middle schools were entirely gender segregated, as were a good portion of the freshman and sophomore humanities classes. Having seen firsthand – both as a student and a teacher – how young American men railroad young American women in classroom discussions, I have trouble beefing with this policy. A lot of the girls really liked it. But if you’re an effete, loud-mouthed, heterosexual fat-boy who has trouble socializing with males, single-sex education is pretty hellish.)

So yeah, I also got pushed and shoved and snotted on and tripped and my hair surreptitiously clipped and that broken wrist and . . . well, that’s as honest as I’m going to be about it. The things that were most hurtful will sound so mild in the telling that maybe it’s better to leave it there. In 1999, when coverage of the University of Michigan’s Naked Mile was interrupted to report on something awful that had happened in a little Denver town with the floral name of Columbine – and in the following years, as we started zero-tolerancing all sorts of bullied kids out of our public schools – I understood those boys, all those terrible boys who made threats, who packed heat, who lashed out. I understood because I remembered sitting on the benches that line Cranbrook’s beautiful, wood-paneled halls with my buddy General Ambrose Burnside (not his real name), and talking about how we might stalk through the Quadrangle, who we’d kill, in what order, and how. But not why. Why was pretty self-evident.

And, just in case it’s unclear why I never finally cracked and curled finger ’round trigger: It was because the classes were small, and regardless of how one’s peers felt and what they said, the teachers valued a loud-mouthed “fat faggot fuckup” who would try answering any question, no matter how obtuse. If my experience is any indication, then a simply mind-boggling number of young lives are saved each year by well-timed – and likely entirely unknowing – chuckles, back-pats, and tossed off attaboys from over-worked, under-compensated teachers.

Anyway, on the up-side, I was a day student, so I didn’t have to share communal showers with those pricks.

Incidentally, since it may begin to seem important, the bulk of folks who picked on me were my fellow Jews – but that’s really just selection bias: The vast bulk of my peers were Jews.

[2] Yeah, okay, I’ll own that this flourish seems totally excessive. The school song I was most familiar with at Cranbrook was not “Forty Years On” – which I vaguely remember singing at graduation – but “Jerusalem,” which is based on a poem by William Blake and, for a Jew, is probably the most fascinating possible thing to sing in a “nondenominational” church during your “nondenominational” graduation ceremony from a school founded to provide that church with choir boys, situated in the richest community in America. “Satanic mills” indeed.

[3] As an aside, I can see how Horowitz cocked this up. A few grafs earlier he quotes a Romney classmate who says he “commuted from east Detroit” [sic] each day. Unless Horowitz is from the Metro area and older than mid-thirties, he has no reason to know that the speaker is almost certainly not talking about the section of Detroit east of Woodward Avenue – which is usually called the “Eastside” – but rather likely meant “East Detroit,” an entirely separate community that’s bordered on its southern edge by 8 Mile, and thus entirely outside, and north, of Detroit. In 1992 East Detroit changed its name to “Eastpointe” for marketing reasons. But, if you came of age even as late at the ’80s, you likely still think of this as East Detroit. See, for example, this Eminem track – with apologies to women, the Beastie Boys, Kid Rock, and the Loch Ness Monster – around the 2 min 6 sec mark.

[4] I’d hate to give the impression that, by the 1990s, there was any hint of institutional racism or anti-Semitism lingering at the school. Far from it, the institution itself sought to be as broad and inclusive as possible, in terms of teaching staff and student body, and was certainly far more diverse than the neighboring public schools (esp. in terms of nationality). It was also overrun with Jews like me. By the time I graduated, the Jewish High Holidays were also school holidays, purely for pragmatic reasons: It was impossible to get anything done on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur because a quarter of the school was gone. I’m not arguing that 1990s Cranbrook was a Rainbow Coalition Utopia, I just want folks to have an accurate picture of what the aristocracy was in the 1990s.

[5] I knew exactly one Mormon who attended Cranbrook in the seven years I was there – which certainly makes Mormons the most extreme minority at Cranbrook, far outnumbered by Jews, Hindus, Muslims, African-Americans, homosexuals, Latinos, Canadians, lady hockey players, etc. He was a nice – if, upon reflection, somewhat odd – kid who was widely accepted, and happened to be either a nephew or cousin to Jim Davis (of “Garfield” fame). Nonetheless, I’d be dishonest if I said anything other than this: “His Mormon cosmology was mercilessly mocked as ludicrous, primarily by the Jews I knew and spent the most time with.” Before you judge us too harshly, please bear in mind that we were total and unforgivable assholes.

[6] At that time I had a beef with Middlesex County, Mass, as a consequence of a snow-emergency/parking/towing/plastic-Santa situation that had gotten somewhat out of control. There’s no sense pointing fingers now, but a bench warrant may have been issued. I have subsequently avoided the Commonwealth ever since.

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The four parties to the agreement are the AATA, the city of Ypsilanti, the city of Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County.

The Ann Arbor city council approved a version of the four-party agreement on March 5, 2012, after amending the version that the AATA had first presented. Amendments were made in several ways, and stretched over multiple meetings.

However, on May 15 the Ypsilanti council amended and approved the agreement in a way that may require reconsideration by the Ann Arbor city council – in the opinion of Ypsilanti city attorney John M. Barr. [.pdf of red-lined four-party agreement as amended by Ypsilanti city council]

The Ypsilanti council also unanimously approved, without change, the proposed articles of incorporation for the new transit authority. The Ann Arbor city council has not yet voted on the articles of incorporation. [.pdf of articles of incorporation]

The amendment to the four-party agreement, proposed by Ypsilanti councilmember Peter Murdock, had two components. Murdock’s amendment involved the transit millages currently levied by the cities of Ann Arbor (a perpetual millage authorized in the charter at 2.5 mills) and Ypsilanti (a .9879 mill tax authorized by voters in 2010).

First, Murdock’s amendment  eliminated a “municipal service charge of 1% of the annual millage,” in all sections where it appears – for Ypsilanti and for Ann Arbor. In the original four-party agreement (approved by the Ann Arbor city council), the two cities would be able to withhold the 1% municipal service charge from the millage dollars they transfered to the new countywide transit authority. The rationale, Murdock said, is that “the money should go to the new authority, not to the two cities, and that Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor should both do that.”

The second component of the amendment was specific to Ypsilanti. The following language was inserted: “… and in Ypsilanti specifically authorize the continued collection and transfer of the full Charter Transportation millage to the new Act 196 TA.”

By way of background, Ypsilanti voters approved, in 2010, a “Charter Transportation” amendment to the city charter that provides for .9879 mill of the city’s revenue to be used to pay for a purchase-of-service agreement with AATA. That part of Murdock’s amendment is intended to remove any uncertainty about that provision in the future.

The Ypsilanti council voted after hearing a presentation by AATA CEO Michael Ford, who focused on the improvements that the countywide system could bring to Ypsilanti. Ford said that AATA would consider the four-party agreement on May 16 (at its combined board meeting and retreat), and that the Washtenaw County board of commissioners would consider it in the near future.

Since 2008 Lange has been executive director of the Henry County (Ohio) Community Improvement Corp. Lange was chosen over Brian P. Vick, former city manager of Grosse Pointe Shores, Mich., after a second round of public interviews Monday evening.

On Friday, May 11, the number of finalists dropped from three to two, when city clerk and interim city manager Frances McMullan withdrew herself from consideration.

Lange’s previous positions included managing director of the Monroe County (Michigan) road commission, 1999-2008; city administrator and director of public safety for the city of Oregon, (Ohio), 1994-1999; and city manager of Albion. The negotiating committee consists of mayor Paul Schreiber, mayor pro tem Lois Richardson, and councilmember Brian Robb. There was no mention of salary or starting date during the May 15 council meeting.

The project also needs a variance to the 15-foot conflicting land use buffer requirements along the east side property line, adjacent to Riverside Park. DTE is requesting a variance that would allow 33 trees and 38 shrubs to be planted along the far western side of Riverside Park instead of on DTE property. The city’s park advisory commission recommended approval of that variance at its Feb. 28, 2012 meeting.

DTE is building the new Buckler substation in the utility company’s Ann Arbor service center to provide an increase in electrical power to the downtown area due to increased demand for electricity. A DTE engineer told commissioners that within a mile radius of the current Argo substation on Broadway, peak loads were 17% higher in 2001 2011 compared to 2009. He described the Buckler substation project as a $10 million investment in the city.

According to a staff memo, the project will include two 15.5-foot tall electrical transformers and related electrical equipment on raised concrete pads, and a new power delivery center (PDC) – a 630-square-foot, 12.5-foot tall steel structure. The project also will include a new six-foot tall perimeter chain link fence with one foot of barb wire and a concrete block retaining wall. The source of power will be transmitted through underground sub-transmission cables in an existing manhole and conduit system.

Because of floodplain issues, DTE has proposed to build raised transformer pads by bringing in 800 cubic yards of fill. To mitigate that impact to the floodplain, DTE plans to remove 1,155 cubic yards of earth on the MichCon site at 841 Broadway. [MichCon is a DTE subsidiary.] The proposal also calls for removing a building on the MichCon site, which will give the company an additional 55 cubic yards of ”floodplain mitigation credit.” The proposal for this MichCon portion of the project was presented in a separate agenda item, and unanimously approved by planning commissioners.

The Buckler substation project is expected to return to the planning commission at its next meeting on June 5.

This brief was filed from the second-floor council chambers of city hall at 301 E. Huron, where planning commission meetings are held. A more detailed report will follow.

The MichCon site plan approval is contingent on three things: (1) obtaining variances from the city’s zoning board of appeals (ZBA) to exempt MichCon from providing a new stormwater management system; (2) obtaining a Michigan Dept. of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) permit for work within the floodplain and Huron River; and (3) indicating water main and storm sewer easements on the site plan and providing the city with legal descriptions for those easements prior to the city issuing grading permits.

The remediation site plan entails removing 1,155 cubic yards of earth on the MichCon property, including the site’s most heavily contaminated soil. The company would get another 55 cubic yards of “floodplain mitigation credit” as a result of removing a building on the site. The remediation is intended to offset impact on the Huron River floodplain that’s expected when DTE brings in 800 cubic yards of soil to build raised transformer pads at the new Buckler substation.

According to a staff memo, a ZBA variance is needed to exempt the company from building new stormwater detention systems. Because contaminated soil will remain on the site after remediation, the company has indicated that installing new detention systems would be harmful to groundwater and the Huron River. Detention systems would not be required if impervious surfaces were removed on the site. However, removing impervious surfaces would allow contaminants in the soil to leach into the Huron River and groundwater. The proposal calls for leaving the existing impervious surfaces in place to provide a cap on contaminated soils.

The MichCon remediation requires only approval of the planning commission, and does not require action by city council.

This brief was filed from the second-floor council chambers of city hall at 301 E. Huron, where planning commission meetings are held. A more detailed report will follow.