Maybe some kind of mix is the best course. Encourage public transport but also encourage downsizing cars. Create parking spaces by building some and downsizing the per vehicle provision in others. Create monumental public art while at the same time provision moderate income housing.

This kind of thing should be doable. Ann Arbor is after R&D type firms as well as those with high intellectual content. That’s our competitive advantage. It seems to me that the people who populate these kind of firms should be able to find common ground with the other interests in town. Maybe the final recipe involves a “little of this” and “smidge of that.”

To be sure, we’re not Chicago. A good model for transit in this town is Eugene, Oregon, which is a college city of Ann Arbor’s size in a county of about Washtenaw’s population. It’s not quite as dense as Ann Arbor, I think, but they’ve got a countywide transit authority, and have developed a plan for a comprehensive bus rapid transit system. Its first 4-mile corridor opened in 2007, and a 7.8-mile extension is set for action in 2010. Combined cost: $61 million. That’s $50 million federal, $5.5 state, and less than $7 million local money. Not a bad investment.

When I visited Eugene recently, I made a stop at their brand-new downtown library. Interestingly enough, it’s adjacent to the downtown transit center, which was also brand-new (and the terminus of the bus rapid transit line.) I thought I’d better check the number of parking spaces underneath the library. For what it’s worth, it was about 56: roughly equivalent, I think, to the number of sheltered bike parking spaces just outside.

And for [17] the 50+M that Council is willing to borrow for a “few hundred more parking spaces” would go a long, long way toward improved public transportation. If only. :-(

I lived in Chicago for 10 years without owning a car. However, the buses came every 5 minutes, I had the option of using the “L” and could hail a cab any time of the day or night. That made public transportation viable–at least to me.

I question whether a city the size of Ann Arbor could pull off the public transportation convenience needed for business purposes. I can see it working with the regular hours of the University or with students with flexible schedules. The days of 9 to 5 in business are gone–at least for the foreseeable future.

But, if you can figure a way of pulling it off I’m all for it. However, a few hundred more parking places does not sound to me like a an excessive insurance policy when viewed in the context of decades.

The future, however, isn’t going to look like the past fifty years. In much of the U.S., housing and transportation patterns are already changing. Phoenix, the embodiment of DODD, just got a light rail line. And even in Michigan, the shift is starting to arrive. You could say we’re witnessing the freezing-over of the past fifty years of housing-and-transportation-pattern hell. Not everyone in the Google set wants to live in a mini-Manhattan, but it’s fair to say that most don’t want to have to drive everywhere for everything, and few still see “bigger and bigger houses farther and farther apart from one another” (Bill McKibben’s words) as the embodiment of the American Dream.

That’s precisely why Ann Arbor is going to be such a prosperous place in future. We have a downtown that hasn’t been bulldozed or burned, and the return of Detroit commuter rail, as well as high-capacity transit along Plymouth and State, will allow a much better mix of transportation choices. I only hope that before things really shoot through the roof, we can put policies in place to ensure a larger supply of affordable housing within the city.

So growth doesn’t have to mean new parking. As Steve pointed out, U-M and downtown workplaces have already figured this out, kind of. (Our failure to provide affordable housing, or indeed much new housing at all, has meant that a lot of workers can’t live here, so many drive to Ann Arbor’s outskirts from elsewhere and use the AATA park-and-ride.) In fact, growth won’t mean new parking, owing to the shift in preferences and the fact that the economic and environmental costs of DODD are just too great.

To sum up, you might say that we can have our growth, and eat less gasoline, too. Prosperity is no longer positively correlated with parking capacity. Indeed, the latter is hindering the former, certainly where our City finances are concerned. If we hadn’t dawdled so long in getting transit off the ground, no one would even have proposed this garage. As it is, Ann Arbor citizens could hardly choose a worse investment, and one can’t help but wonder why we should allow our elected officials to make that decision.

However, if the suit has colorable legal merit as to the procedures used to approve issuance of the bonds, then the question for Bond Counsel (and others) is whether the bonds are validly issued – a core legal requirement that speaks to whether the repayment obligation is enforceable (and whether invalidly issued bonds are entitled to tax-exemption). Although litigation matters, Bond Counsel’s opinion of the validity of the bonds is a more fundamental concern for the bond purchasers.

As you might imagine, a post-sale lawsuit is never a welcome development for the financial and legal professionals involved in issuance of bonds.