However, fortunately for the health of downtown, it is unique compared to other areas of the city and the outlying areas. Because of this uniqueness, I rarely (if ever) find myself making a decision about going downtown vs. somewhere else based on parking.

Some examples:
* The bars and restaurants downtown don’t exist elsewhere.
* If I need to buy groceries, clothes, or hardware, there is no downtown option.
* If I want to attend a concert or a play, downtown/campus is the only option.

This differentation between downtown and the other areas is important to maintaining its vibrancy. I have consistently objected to the AA District Library expanding to the new branch libraries, because it violates this differentiation. I expect that eventually, a combination of the branches and other modern media delivery formats will doom the downtown AADL.

With regard to CM Briere, I believe that she had already committed to giving the 3% salary raise to charity before the giveback idea came up. I don’t have documentation, however. Mike Anglin was donating his 3% to the Michigan Theater for a time. Again, this is based solely on my recollection.

I gather that rusted risers are deliberate. This is definitely Not A Good Sign.

It’s called weaseling out of a public promise. I’m not surprised–it’s pretty much par for the course with several members of council.

Not sure which structures. In their discussions of this issue, which we’ve reported, DDA board members have described the maintenance to be deferred as non-essential maintenance: painting and the like. Maintenance to be deferred is not supposed to include items like the deck washdowns, which are essential to remove the brine from winter, which can lead to accelerated deterioration of the concrete. The maintenance to be deferred has been vetted with Carl Walker, Inc., the DDA’s parking structure engineering consultant, who devised the current maintenance schedule.

But to my mind, maintenance is another issue of “discipline.” In a different draft of this column, maintenance was the highlighted theme, and it was to feature lead art of my broken bicycle front fork. I’d noticed noodling and grabbing for several months and had attributed it to worn brake pads, which I replaced myself. I talked myself into believing that I’d achieved some improvement, even though the problem persisted. Then, as I was braking to a slow stop, I lost about two feet of altitude, as the aluminum fork simply broke. I was lucky I was not bombing down Liberty and trying to make an aggressive stop. If you’ve ever pre-scored an aluminum beer/soda can and torn off the whole top, you’re familiar with the phenomenon of the crack getting to a certain length, then the aluminum basically just “tears.” So was that a case where a failure to perform basic maintenance lead to catastrophe? Maybe not — but if I’d taken the bike into a shop and described the problem, a test ride by a professional mechanic who looks at “bike metal” every day, would have had a decent shot at spotting the crack that led to failure.

To me, that seemed to illustrate more the idea of “trust a pro” as opposed to “be disciplined in your maintenance.” So it was shareholders and stakeholders that received prominence in the column.

I think it’s a pretty easy slide from “we’re deferring transfers to the maintenance fund, but not deferring any maintenance” to “we’re only deferring non-essential maintenance” to “we’re deferring essential maintenance, but only for a little while” to “we’re not doing any maintenance.” We’ve already gone from the first to the second.

[It took me till now to parse Cahill's "grossed" out joke. I assume other readers did that mental computation faster.]

Are we going to see these structures start to deteriorate – again?