The cars are parked in a parking lot, in spaces striped for parking. There’s an aisle on the near side of the grassy island that runs next to the headquarters building, the location from which the photo was taken.

As Carolyn Grawi noted, RTA meetings have been held in locations relatively inaccessible to Ann Arbor residents (for example, in SEMCOG’s Detroit headquarters), but it was mentioned at this meeting that the RTA will hold an October 2 meeting at the Ann Arbor District Library (2 p.m.). I assume that will be confirmed later but this will be an excellent opportunity for those of us in this area to observe the RTA board in action.

The big questions raised are:

(A)How much money was alluded to by ACLU attorney Daniel Korobkin when he indicated monies were paid to the ACLU toward its fees and expenses?

(B)Who paid the defending law firms and expert witness Aaron Ahuvia and how much was paid?

(C)Who requested the confidentiality clause in the settlement agreement?

FOIA requests are being considered to disclose this information.

I assume that POSA contracts are calculated on the basis of some sort of cost formula, how much it actually costs the AAATA to provide that particular service or route. That is how Ypsilanti fell short of being able to pay its POSA costs in the first place, because the costs shifted upward.

My point is that if we are going to write a lot of extended POSA contracts, I’d like to see that cost formula include some system expenses, not just the cost of a driver and a bus. Otherwise the millage payers will continue to spend more and more on support of the system while the POSA customers will be paying a unit cost that is much less. I’d like to see an overhead fraction included in the POSA costs. I think Jim Mogenson’s points are relevant here too.