Whether it is the over 200 live gavel to gavel meetings we cover every year, or the DDA, AATA, or County board meetings we present on GovTV (Comcast 16), or “Ward Talk’s” live monthly opportunity to ask questions of your Mayor or Councilperson, or the twice monthly “Conversations” with your elected representatives from the United States Congress, the Congress of State of Michigan, Washtenaw County Commission, the Ann Arbor District Library, the Ann Arbor Board of Education or officals in city and county government on CitiTV (Comcast 19), CTN has through the years delivered an ever increasing palette of programs to inform and educate our citizenry and to support the idea that open dialogue and transparency are a basic tenet of democracy.

For two decades CTN has partnered with the Ann Arbor League of Women Voters to bring you live candidate debates, delivering a specturm of races from City Council & Mayor to Board of Educations Trustees, right into your living rooms on Comcast Cable Channel 19 (CitiTV).

We also provide our programming on the internet for non-Comcast subscribers through our online Video-On-Demand services. GovTV meetings can be found 24/7 at [link] and CitiTV programming at [link]. Earlier this year we launch Live Streaming of GovTV, the government meetings channel at [link], so now it can be viewed live anywhere in the world an internet signal is available. This fall we plan to have CitiTV programming up live and streaming on the internet as well.

And this is just half of our mission, visit us on the web at http://www.a2gov.org/ctn and learn about A2TV, your public access channel (Comcast 17), and EduTV (Comcast 18) the Educational access channel.

That said, I remember reading that you used to be able to vote at pubs…how much fun would THAT be!?!? :)

The problem with government, and therefore elections, is that it is intrinsically broken. Why make an effort to perpetuate something that’s never worked? To discuss democracy while failing to note that the product of government (all around the world for all time since its invention) has been a lack of democracy is another example of how easily distracted from living life we’ve been conditioned to be.

Even the well intentioned focus on local decision making overlooks this. A city of this size is too large for meaningful, workable decisions to be made for all.

The activity in the financial markets might just help alert us to how off track we’ve gotten. For whatever reason, the problems with our life support system–the so-called “environment”–haven’t, however. I wonder what it will take.

1643 S. State is in the process of being annexed at the owner’s request, but it’s not residential.

1575 Alexandra Blvd was just annexed a couple months ago at the owner’s request. It is a single family residence.

2562 Newport was annexed at the end of last year, at the resident owner’s request.

These requests are usually made by people who want to take advantage of City water and sewer.

That of course spurred me to look for evidence one way or the other, and I found that the Ann Arbor/Ypsi system of partisan council races being de facto decided in August is really fairly unique. All of Oakland, Macomb, and Wayne County municipalities appear to have non-partisan council elections, in which there’s still an August primary, but the top n candidates go on to the November ballot (where n is usually twice the number of open seats–most of those Counties’ cities also appear to have at-large Councils, rather than ward-based, so it’s not uncommon to have 6- or 8-way races when several seats are in play). I know Lansing is the same way, with some at-large and some ward-based Councilmembers, all elected on non-partisan November ballots.