David Askins initially was able to gather that the amount paid to the Maddin Hauser law firm for the first month of legal representation last year was over $6,900.00. This is not mentioning that Jerry Lax’s law firm is also assisting on the AATA defense of this case and a University of Michigan professor was retained at the cost of $250.00 per hour to render an expert opinion that was used in an affidavit in the AATA’s ill-fated attempts to get the action dismissed.

I fail to see how defending this lawsuit squares with the mission of the AATA. The AATA has a $50,000.00 fee and cost deductible with its liability insurance carrier that it will have to exhaust before the carrier takes over payment of Maddin Wartell’s fees and expenses.

David Nacht is one of the applicants for the position on the Regional Transit Authority. My opinion is that the decisions made vis a vis the advertising guidelnes ACLU intervention and eventual federal court lawsuit amount to public policy failures of the AATA board. If David Nacht voted for and acquiesced in these policies, then maybe he should be denied any seat on the RTA.

We have been struggling to figure out how to fund regional transit in our own local region (just Washtenaw County and slightly beyond) for years now. This (RTA) is likely to make it harder for us to serve our own urban area as it is needed. Ypsilanti City’s median income was $34,685 in the last census and Ypsilanti Township’s was $47,820. (Ann Arbor is just above them, 3rd from the bottom in the county.) AATA has been trying to extend bus service to these areas. But this move will actually make it more difficult for AATA to function. It will likely result in a loss of overall funding and in the ability to plan independently.

It might be added that many, though not all, of these residents of our shared urban area are black. We have plenty of “people who can’t afford both a decent place to live and a car”. I believe that overall we have a communal will to resolve the problem of how to provide transit within our own county’s urban area. This will not be helped by a shift of local resources to Detroit. I for one resent the suggestion that Ann Arbor’s concern with the RTA is because we support white flight (a non-subtle implication that we are racist to resist this co-opting of our transit system to serve metro Detroit).

I agree with the point made in (8) that the main beneficiaries of the new programs in the RTA are (relatively affluent) commuters from the suburbs into metro Detroit. The RTA does not provide new funding for the Detroit area bus systems, just a new layer of “coordination”.

Actually, the most important issue regarding southeast Michigan transit is adequate funding of the urban bus services. The new Regional Transit Authority (RTA) does not address that longstanding problem. Instead, the RTA establishes a new layer of bureaucracy over the existing, underfunded, agencies. The new RTA will raise new funding for commuter services but not for existing transit services. Thus, once again we see the relatively wealthy commuters from areas of urban sprawl receive funding for commuter service while relatively less wealthy urban transit users watch their bus systems suffer lack of funding.

Ann Arbor is not really part of the Detroit suburbs, in spite of what Conan Smith would like to believe. We are a destination, not an outlying burb. Having our relatively well run transit system (AATA) lumped in with the massively larger Detroit Department of Transportation (DDOT) and SMART systems will lead to our becoming a secondary consideration in the regional planning of transit services. We provide 2.06 mill tax funding for AATA while neither the DDOT nor SMART have such high tax rates supporting them. It is not a question of whether we will be part of the solution or the problem so much as a question of whether we will become an irrelevant part of the much bigger problem of Detroit transit funding.

“Not coincidentally, there’s also a distinct absence of any sort of regional public transportation [in the Detroit area]. And so in the adopted city of Rosa Parks, the bus system remains essentially segregated, as the surrounding suburbs maintain their own regional bus line, wholly separate from that of the city, where the riders are almost entirely African-American. Certain suburban bus lines will take riders from the suburbs downtown, but they go express as soon as they cross into the city proper and will not pick up any new passengers.” (Binelli, Detroit City is the Place to be, 2012, p. 26)

Don’t we want to be part of the solution to the problems of people who can’t afford both a decent place to live and a car? Just asking!

We often hear cries for the UM to contribute its intellectual resources to the community. Here is someone willing to do that. Wouldn’t that be a great outcome of having Washtenaw County dragged into the RTA?

I hope that Conan Smith belies all cynical predictions (including mine) and goes beyond politics to appoint a non-political public policy expert who is not invested in a particular outcome.

The RTA is set up to suck money out of the AATA. Insiders say that when the dust settles, the worst-case scenario is that the AATA could lose 10% of its annual budget.

Will Smith appoint David Nacht in an attempt to minimize the damage to the AATA? Stay tuned.

Just as a general note, board members are to serve without compensation, but with “reimbursement for necessary travel and expenses consistent with relevant statutes”.

Her victory over the DeBoers in the Michigan Supreme Court reversed a trial court defeat her clients had sustained and elevated her to a pre-eminent status in the specialty of adoption law.