May 6, 2013 Ann Arbor Council: In Progress
The Ann Arbor city council’s May 6, 2013 meeting agenda includes significant unfinished business – postponed from its meeting on April 15. Live updates on action taken at the May 6 meeting will be included in this article “below the fold.”
Door to the Ann Arbor city council chamber.
The April 15 meeting had lasted until 3 a.m. before the council decided to postpone all remaining items on its agenda until May 6. Two controversial issues left unfinished from April 15 – 413 E. Huron’s site plan and the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority ordinance – could themselves potentially take up enough time to extend the May 6 meeting into the early morning hours.
In addition to a significant amount of new business on the council’s agenda, the May 6 docket includes a total of eight public hearings, including one on the fiscal year 2014 budget. The council will need to make any amendments to the city administrator’s proposed budget by the end of its May 20 meeting.
Based on discussion by councilmembers after their special workshop held on April 29, and subsequent follow-up by The Chronicle, the council has a contingency plan for the May 6 meeting. If it lasts too long, councilmembers may decide at a certain point to recess the meeting until May 13. That is, on May 13, the May 6 meeting would continue. That’s a different strategy from the one used on April 15, when the council chose to end that meeting, but postponed all remaining items until May 6.
Recessing a meeting, to be resumed at a later time, is a strategy the council last used two years ago. The council began a meeting on May 16, 2011 – when it was supposed to adopt the FY 2012 budget – but recessed the meeting until May 23, 2011. Then on May 23 councilmembers immediately recessed the meeting again, and finally ended the meeting on May 31, 2011.
Readers can follow the live meeting proceedings on Channel 16, streamed online by Community Television Network. But even for interested residents, the proceedings might be difficult to follow – due to their sheer length.
So in this report, we’ll be filing live time-stamped updates from the meeting. At the end of the May 6 session, these updates will provide a record of what items received council action and which (if any) were left until later. [Full Story]