Archive for November, 2008

In an account of the Nov. 6 city council meeting, we attributed to councilmember Mike Anglin a question posed to the developer about per-bed versus per-unit leasing. In fact, the question was posed by outgoing councilmember Stephen Kuselman. We note the mistake here as well as in the original piece.

Some of the 40 or so people who attended Friday morning's CEO Connect event at Zingerman's Roadhouse.

Kim Cameron projected an image on the screen and asked people what they saw. “Mars,” someone guessed.   Someone else thought it was an aerial satellite photo, presumably of planet Earth.

It was a cow, Cameron revealed, at which point the group murmured a collective “Aaah!”

The cow’s head was defined by the lighter shadings in the image. “When you look at the light,” Cameron said, “everything changes.” It’s not the image that changes, it’s your perspective on it.

The exercise was an effective illustration of Cameron’s message: Being positive can yield enormous results, both physiologically and in your business. [Full Story]

Developers for the City Apartments PUD show elevations and materials to city council.

On a night when nobody showed up for public commentary reserved time, council passed the majority of its agenda items with no discussion. Noteworthy exceptions included the City Apartments PUD project (passed), Quickie Burger’s application for a liquor license transfer (postponed), and a decision to go into closed session (passed – with the discussion and dissent by councilmember Marcia Higgins fairly characterized as somewhat lighthearted). The mood was a little more relaxed than is typical, and a bit sentimental, as council said farewell to four of its members: Ron Suarez, Joan Lowenstein, Stephen Kunselman, and Chris Easthope. [Full Story]

Podium sign at Wednesday's Think Local First annual meeting.

A local living economy is about maximizing relationships, not maximizing profits. About a living return, not the highest return. Sharing, not hoarding. Being more, not having more.

Judy Wicks, a leader in the local living economy movement, laid out these and other tenets at Wednesday’s annual meeting of Think Local First, a nonprofit network of local businesses. Though Wicks is from Philadelphia – her 25-year-old White Dog Cafe is how she walks the talk in Philly – the evening’s event was all about how communities can foster and sustain themselves at the local level, regardless of where “local” is on the map. [Full Story]

On the Book Without a Cover blog, the Washtenaw County Workers Center and the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Michigan have a job posting for a full-time organizer to start a satellite center for Washtenaw and western Wayne restaurant workers. [Source]

RealKidz, an Ypsilanti clothing retailer, is featured in a Freep article, part of an ongoing series that looks at how this startup builds its business. The piece focuses on finding investors, and quotes CEO Merrill Guerra: ”I’m not impressed with angel groups at all. You have a bunch of people sitting together and they’re all too scared to invest.” [Source]

A Lansing State Journal article previewing Friday’s earnings release by GM quotes David Cole of the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research: “It’s going to be a very bad earnings announcement. It’s going to be bad enough to get everyone’s attention.” [Source]

The Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners Wednesday night was chaired by Barbara Levin Bergman, who led the board crisply through an agenda that saw most of the items moved all in one go by commissioner Leah Gunn, and passed unanimously without discussion – with the exception of the affirmation for the second year of the 2008/2009 biennial budget. Commissioner Karen Lovejoy Roe did not support that affirmation. [Full Story]

The petting zoo on Kingsley goes for a walk. Photo by Ari Sussman

Ted Kennedy bought his house on East Kingsley in May, and is interested in how people react to the stuff he puts in his yard. He’s hung empty picture frames from trees – you know, that kind of thing (more on that later). On Wednesday, he did a performance art piece that involved a petting zoo, which looked a lot like … just a petting zoo.

Now, if you’re driving or walking through downtown Ann Arbor’s residential streets, you might not expect to encounter, say, a Clydesdale – especially not in someone’s front yard, with an alpaca, two goats, a duck, chicken and Shetland pony named Bronco. You’d probably stop to look. You might think, “Huh?” Or you might take some photos and send them to The Chronicle, which is what Ari Sussman did.

People were pretty confused by it, Kennedy says. Which was sort of the point. Plus, it was fun. [Full Story]

Peg Kohring of The Conservation Fund talks to members of the Ann Arbor Greenbelt Advisory Commission on Wednesday, as commissioners Gil Omenn and Peter Allen (far right) look on.

The Greenbelt Advisory Commission met Wednesday, spending about 45 minutes in their public meeting before going into a closed session to discuss land preservation proposals.

Field trip: The first major item on the agenda was a presentation by Peg Kohring, Midwest director of The Conservation Fund, which manages the city’s greenbelt program. She gave a brief talk about the Cuyahoga Valley Countryside Conservancy, describing it as a think-and-do tank focused on local land use and food systems. Kohring said that she, city staffer Ginny Trocchio and Susan Lackey of the Washtenaw Land Trust made a trip to northeast Ohio to take an up-close look at this organization, and glean ideas that might be applicable to the Ann Arbor area. [Full Story]

In a roundup of Election Day coverage, HD described a text message he thought he’d received from city attorney, Stephen Postema. The message was not from Postema. We note the mistake here as well as in the original report.

An article in MetroMode takes a look at women’s ice hockey in Ann Arbor. Says Mich Rasulis, a player and manager on both a co-ed team and a women’s team in the Michelle and Camille’s Recreational Hockey League (MACRHL): ”You don’t hear anyone saying, ‘Aw, women can’t play hockey.’ The women don’t feel that way; the men don’t feel that way. I’ve got a lot of husband-and-wife teams, where I play with the husband at The Cube and I play with the wife at MACRHL. It’s the liberal water in Ann Arbor, I think, that makes women and men think it’s all fair game.” [Source]

The Prague Daily Monitor interviews UM economics professor Jan Svejnar about Obama’s economic and social plans: “He has competent people around him and he himself is very competent. Hence the chance that after America overcomes the recession it will be pushed forward in the social and economic respects.” [Source]

ScienceNOW Daily News reports on the aftermath of the passage of Proposal 2, which lifted prohibitions on embryonic stem cell research. The article quotes Sean Morrison, director of UM’s Center for Stem Cell Biology: ”We’ll be spending the next few months going through the regulatory process. It’s important for people to understand this research will be very highly regulated.” [Source]

Alert from someone in line who observed Stephen Postema inside on Election Day as I was standing outside Slauson Middle School.

City attorney Stephen Postema visited around 25 different polling places on Election Day in his capacity as election commissioner. First off, I’d like to thank Stephen for allowing me to tag along with him all day as he checked in on various polling places. One point we had addressed the previous day when discussing logistics was what kind of access I’d be afforded at the various precincts: I would at all times avail myself of exactly the privileges afforded the general public. Every polling place has a public viewing area.

From those public viewing spots there’d be no talking to people waiting in line, no photography, nothing to disrupt the ritual of democracy. (I don’t think lending my pen to Dave Boutette, who asked me for it to fill out his voter application, broke the spirit of the rules.)

Postema and I had agreed to meet at Slauson Middle School to start the day. I wasn’t sure where exactly he’d meant, and figured it would not be smart to just barge into the polls asking, “Anybody seen Stephen Postema?” At 6:58 a.m., two minutes before the polls opened, I received a text message clarifying the situation: “Postema is in here conducting the masses.” [Full Story]

The Freep reports that a hiring slowdown at Google might affect its Ann Arbor office: “Google’s Ann Arbor office has been touted as a bright spot in Michigan’s ailing economy…But so far, Google’s hiring in the state has been slower than many outsiders had expected. In June, Google employed about 262 workers at both its Ann Arbor office and a much smaller one in Birmingham.” [Source]

Unofficial results from the Washtenaw County website indicate a victory for Easthope. Easthope, 21,099; Gutenberg 18,825; Write-in, 480. Miss Saigon was not officially registered as a write-in candidate, so any votes cast for her will not be tallied.

At various polling places around the city of Ann Arbor, the colorful campaign signs for candidates stuck into the ground provided a nice complement to the spectacular fall foliage still stuck to the trees. But it wasn’t signs that impressed The Chronicle most – it was the live human beings offering literature in the 15th District Court judicial race. Many of them were family.

We met Eric Gutenberg’s parents, Erwin and Barbara, at Bach Elementary. At Thurston Elementary we met Christopher Easthope’s mother, Mary. And at Tappan Middle School we chatted with his sister, Tracey Easthope, and his nephew, Luke Desprez. And we met plenty of other Gutenberg or Easthope supporters at other polling places as well. [Full Story]

On Eclectablog, “Mr. E” celebrates Obama’s victory: “In four days I knocked on nearly 1,000 doors and spoke with literally hundreds of residents in the rural area south of Ann Arbor. I trained over a hundred volunteers, stuffed walk packs, and made phone calls. Mrs. E had similar numbers. So nothing looks sweeter than this: President Barack Obama.” [Source]

Early morning celebration of Obama's victory at Main and Liberty in downtown Ann Arbor.

After checking in with county clerk Larry Kestenbaum at the county building at Main and Ann Street (he was hosting an election night non-partisan gathering), The Chronicle walked back down Main Street, took a left at Washington Street and looped around past Arbor Brewing Company. Overheard from the small pods of young folks gathered on the sidewalk were complaints about the lack of liveliness among the crowd inside ABC: “They f&^*ing suck.” We rounded the corner at Fourth Street and headed for Liberty Street. [Full Story]

The Michigan Daily covers the aftermath of Tuesday night’s election results on campus, including an exuberant celebration on the Diag and a parade of thousands through the downtown streets: “Shortly after Obama gave his acceptance speech near midnight, a band of percussionists, a saxophonist and a tag-a-long didgeridoo player headed to the Diag playing a jazz version of the National Anthem. The hundreds already gathered at the center of campus circled the band.” [Source] See a video here.