This is much of the same thinking that gave us term limits for state officials. The result is to give even more power to staff, who are not accountable to the public, and to make office less attractive to well-qualified people. Apparently that is the purpose of this commentor (Kathy Griswold). But operations are the extension of policy, and at the local level it is hard for citizens to distinguish between them.

I also contest the assumption that council has been micromanaging. In my view, they have not been sufficiently involved and have let many poorly conceived initiatives go through, the most recent being the single-stream recycling initiative. Apparently council was completely hypnotized by staff recommendations.

I’m not familiar with the King School crosswalk question. However, I would suggest that if it has become a political football, it is either because there are serious disagreements between different citizen factions, a serious expense, or a serious engineering/technical reason. This is precisely why council needs to play a role. They are the ultimate arbiters between different public interests. That is the purpose of politics.

Ann Arbor has a council-manager form of government, which is defined by Wikipedia as: The council is responsible for establish policy, passing local ordinances, voting appropriations and developing an overall vision for the city. Council appoints a manager to oversee daily operations of the city and implement the policies of the council.

For the last 15 years, based on my experience with the City, council has been so involved in the operations of the city that they have had little time left for decisive policymaking. The result is that the professional staff (management and white-collar, nonunionized staff) is forced to try to make decisions and recommendations based on ever shifting political positions.

A very concrete example is the request to move the King School crosswalk to a safer location. A citizen made this request two years ago, and it has resulted in over 100 emails and over 30 hours of staff time, not including council time. However, no decision has been made. It has become a political issue even though the Transportation Safety Committee (TSC), with city engineering representation, recommended the move in early 2009.

The lack of clear policy and the politicalizing of the simplest projects undermine the authority of professional staff and negatively impact their productivity. Thus the savings from reimbursing council members for policymaking is many times the approximate $150,000 savings in council salaries.

A conservative estimate of the savings, based on management best practices, is that the nonunionized professionals could be reduced by the same 18% as the union staff have been reduced since 2002. This would result in a reduction of an additional 22 professionals, at a much greater savings than reducing 14 firefighters.

Ms. Lesko is confusing the distinction between a raise and a one-time lump-sum payment, which both Fraser and the city attorney, Stephen Postema, have received the last few years. Further, they did not receive a lump sum payment at their most recent performance evaluation. From the Chronicle’s report of the Nov. 5, 2009 council meeting:

According to Greden, both Postema and Fraser had volunteered to accept no increase in base salary and no one-time cash payment as they’ve been given in previous years when there’d been no increase in their base salary. The only revision to their contracts was a clause that allowed them to cash out an additional 120 hours of accumulated paid time off before June 30, 2010.

Last year, Fraser earned $145,354 and Postema made $142,000. They received lump-sum payments of $3,640 and $3,900, respectively.

Without the lump-sum payment this year, they each will take home this year the same amount they did four years ago.

For readers who don’t see a clear difference between a raise and a lump-sum payment, take a concrete example some someone making $100K per year. For each of ten years, if you give that person a $1,000 raise each year, in the tenth year, they’re making $110,000. On the other hand, if you you give them a $1,000 lump-sum payment each year, in the tenth year, they’ve taken home just what they did in the first year — $101,000. Over the course of 10 years, our lump-summer gets $10,000 extra, while the guy with the actual raise gets $55,000 extra.

The Ann Arbor News began using the strategy of making lump-sum payment “bonuses” in lieu of actual raises sometime in the early to mid 2000s.

HRWC has no issues using other people’s money (OPM). Since the HRWC cannot persuade any of the government bodies from Washtenaw to Washington into paying for their plan, they resort to sticking their hands in any pocket they can find.

It is unfortunate that the nature of the director has become clear and why in the world does Ann Arbor provide $10,000 per year to this organization? How many years has this organization been paid this amount? How does one spell budget cut?

This doesn’t make sense by itself. 1,000 tons per what? Year? Hour? Kilowatt-hour?