Thanks for clarifying this.

Your points about the conduct of Council in these working sessions are spot on. The Council is deliberating and should admit that those deliberations require OMA compliance. Council should not pretend that giving us most, or even all, of the OMA accoutrements is the same as recognizing that the sessions are meetings under the Act. Muzzling Lumm while allowing other Council members to deliberate is the bizarre result of this erroneous distinction between meetings and sessions.

It’s true that allowing for public comment time is not the only requirement imposed by the OMA on meetings of a public body. For example, there are noticing requirements. There are requirements that minutes be kept and filed in a timely fashion. The meetings have to be accessible to the public.

But I think all these other requirements, other than the one providing that the public be allowed to address the body, are already met by the city council in its habit and practice. Specifically, the work sessions are properly noticed to the public, and minutes are kept and filed for the work sessions, and the sessions totally accessible to the public. I’ve gone through the list, and I haven’t spotted any that aren’t met already. Jack, is there any other specific OMA requirement you’re thinking of that work sessions don’t currently meet? Or was your point simply that there’s more to the OMA than just public comment?

So, why is the opportunity for the public to address the council the only piece of the OMA that’s been missing for the work sessions? It’s because councilmembers do not want to sit through potentially hours of comment from the public on topics they aren’t interested in hearing about from the public. Fair enough. Seriously, I get that. But how do you balance things here? Our city council’s historical solution has been to invite the city attorney to establish a legal framework under which they could theoretically escape the requirement of the OMA for public comment – by establishing work sessions as “information sessions” during which the gathering of the council is for the purpose of receiving presentations and asking only clarificational questions, and any deliberative verbal behavior is strictly forbidden.

Two observations about the legal framework.

(1) In actual practice, the council has failed over the last 4.5 years to confine itself during work sessions only to clarificational questions, and has consistently engaged in deliberations towards decisions on which they’ll eventually be required to vote. That makes them meetings under the OMA. This is not surprising, given the nature of us as a species. We human beings just have to share our damn opinions about everything all the time. Exhibit A: The Internet. So while in theory the framework could be a valid one, in actual practice the Ann Arbor city council doesn’t adhere to the legal framework.

(2) The legal framework is just stupid from a public policy perspective. To see how stupid it is consider this: The legal framework puts any assistant city attorney who happens to be in attendance at a work session in a position of having an ethical duty to muzzle any councilmember at a work session who seems like they’re on the verge of expressing their point of view on a matter of public interest. That’s actually what happened at the March 25 work session, when Jane Lumm (Ward 2), towards the end of the that session, said she wanted to make a comment about public safety. Assistant city attorney Mary Fales shut Lumm down by telling Lumm that it was supposed to be an information session, not suitable for councilmembers to make comments. [Fales may not have noticed the earlier part of the work session when deliberations took place on the DDA and the capital budget.]

So think about that: The consequence of this legal framework is that we have assistant city attorneys policing the verbal output of councilmembers at work sessions to make absolutely certain that elected officials don’t reveal their point of view on matters of public interest. I think that’s simply a perverse outcome of trying to conform with the Open Meetings Act.

The “high price” that the city council has to pay to have an exchange of views at a work session – unfettered by a back-of-the-mind fear of their talk erupting into actual full-fledged deliberations – is only this: Allow an opportunity for the public to address the council during its work sessions. It’s a reasonable balance.

The Washtenaw County board of commissioners understands this – and allows public comment during its work sessions. The city’s own planning commission manages to get this right – and allows public comment during its work sessions.

Lumm’s view on the work session public comment issue, as expressed to The Chronicle, is refreshing: It’s that no rules committee meeting or rules change is necessary and this situation has a simple, straightforward fix: The city administrator simply starts public comment to the work session agendas. [There's no rule against public comment at work sessions, and indeed the existing rules already appear to require it.]

I hope the Council’s rules committee will take a broader approach to rules concerning working sessions. Without regard to how working sessions were conducted in the past, it should be obvious that such sessions now include deliberations of the kind that require full compliance with the Open Meetings Act. Merely adding public comment time does not accomplish full compliance.

I appreciate that it is difficult to find safe investments that pay almost any income these days. That is why critics of the Fed’s policies have said that there could be bubbles in risky properties.

The AATA has suffered from the decline in Federal bond interest, as have many municipalities that restrict investment of their reserves.

The Retirement System has a wide range of investments….domestic and foreign equiy, bonds and other debt, real estate, etc. State law has defined certain paramenters of what and for how much can be invested in different financial instruments.

Also available at the City’s website are meeting minutes for the Retirement Board of Trustees as well as the Annual Actuary Reports.

While the economic bubble was still inflating, the City’s pension fund appeared to be over funded. At the same time, the City had amassed huge unfunded liabilities in the promises it had made to provide retiree health care benefits without actually putting aside any money to pay for those promises.

The City shifted some of its illusory over funding from the pension account to the retiree health benefits costs. The IRS later made the City restore those funds. In the same time frame, the City offered early retirement to safety employees. Those early retirements increased the burden on the pension system, just as the economy deflated. The pension system’s investments lost considerable value, just like the entire market.

While the pension system is recovering with the economy, future retiree health benefits remain massively under funded. While I do not share Steve Bean’s often expressed pessimism about the economy, I hope that the lesson we learned from the last downturn is that at best the economy is cyclical. It’s going up right now, but that cannot be expected to last forever.

Let’s muster a bit of fiscal restraint. We do not need to spend millions of dollars on a new Amtrak station because we already have a train station that “links many cities in this region”. Let’s not spend general revenue money planning commuter rail service for communities who do not want to contribute to the cost of planning and operating such service. Instead, let’s recognize the burden of the unfunded liabilities, the pending cost of addressing our inadequate storm water system and costs of rebuilding our basic safety services.

I hope the first is not true, and I doubt the second. Let’s not gamble.

(So what kinds of investments does the pension fund use? This is little reported.)

Therefore, I am for not continuing the decline in spending by the city, rather I believe it is time to expand and improve city services. Obviously, all services should be done in the most efficient manner, no one is arguing that. But it might take spending some money to make services more efficient, for example an old computer that is slow and slows down employees could be solved by getting the new equipment.

I like the idea of a train station that eventually links many cities in this region together, the promotion of public art, the enhancement of parks, recreation, mass transit, local events, etc.

Since I was mentioned in one of the posts, let me clarify the matter of “service” of the summons and complaint in the cited case.

Technically, Mr. Askins is correct. There is no evidence that the summons and complaint was ever “served”. Legal service under the Michigan Rules of Court may be accomplished by several methods, including personal delivery or certified mail upon authorized representatives of a corporate or governmental defendant. During the pendency of that action I had occaision to visit the Circuit Court and would order the case file from the records department and review the case status which I would impart to others, sometimes to the old Arbor Update blog. David Cahill at one point obtained a copy of the summons and complaint and had it uploaded to a thread on the blog.

A review of that thread, and one my posts on that relevant thread Arbor Update blog, reveals that that action was commenced on August 11, 2009 and on October 29th, Plaintiff’s counsel moved for issuance of a second summons (the life of a circuit court summons is 91 days) due to “ongoing discussions betweeen counsel regarding issues in the Complaint……Defendant has not been served pursuant to agreement between counsel.” On November 2nd, 2009, Judge Archie Brown signed an order for a second summons slated for expiration on February 10th, 2010.

While it is correct that “service” may have not been effectuated, however, it is crystal clear that the City of Ann Arbor had a copy of the lawsuit papers and were working on trying to resolve the case with Plaintiffs’ attorney.

I also take issue with Junior’s assertion that Noah Hall was a party in the case – actually “Great Lakes Environmental Law Center” was a Plaintiff and Professor Hall was the key guiding force behind this entity as well as the lawsuit itself. Co-plaintiffs included Jerusalem Garden, Kiki Properties, LLC and Herb David Guitar Studio.