It is a relief to see that a new member of council understands that our local government(s) have largely exhausted their stock of moral capital. The reason to want a discussion out of sight and sound of the public is that “The Public” (i.e., the people that make up our community) will go ballistic when board members brainstorm. The reason the public will go ballistic is that there is no longer any basis to trust that members of public bodies are looking out for the interest of city residents. Indeed, it is no longer obvious that our governments can discern wheat from chaff. Things are so bad that the assumption is that EVERY public body is “out to get us”. The fear of the public going ballistic at brainstormed ideas, is the acknowledgment by those seeking secrecy that no one trusts them.

The exhaustion of the public’s trust in the members of its government – elected, appointed, employed – is the lasting legacy of The Council Party, worse even than the eyesores of Huron Street or the distruction of 5th Avenue. This point needs to be underscored: more than any policy decision, it is the depletion of public trust that is the great lasting damage this Council Party has caused. It follows its members wherever they go in government.

It is a great sadness that the absence of trust, not policy, is gradually becoming the driving force in our community’s political dynamic. It is possible to have policy disagreements, and still have trust. Indeed, the capacity to disagree and still – win or lose on policy – be able to trust is the very foundation of self-government. The Council Party’s members – including its appointees – are afraid of the public, and rightly so. That’s why they crave secrecy.

It might not be a terrible thing, from the standpoint of a creative process, to hold the need for public information in abeyance for a little while, but there doesn’t really seem to be room for that within the Open Meetings Act framework. So maybe Mr. Fleetham has been hired to do something he does well, but it’s just not a good fit with the way government operates.

Dave, thanks for your attention to public process, and sins of both omission and comission.

I recently joined the SSWWE CAC and this morning received a “Doodle Poll” from Charlie Fleetham on which I was supposed to vote to either keep the BaseCamp conversations private or to make them public. This is what I wrote to Charlie Fleetham: “I have decided not to vote in today’s Doodle Poll because it implies there is something to vote about. I believe that this is a public study funded by public dollars and the public has a right to know what is going on and what is being discussed. It is not up to the volunteer CAC members to decide if the discussions are FOIA-able or not.”

I feel very strongly about this, as I already knew about the 2001 SSO Report in which some of the data was kept by the consultant/contractor so that it would not be available via FOIA.

For the City to address the problems related to storm flooding, sewer back ups and the impact of the footing drain disconnect program, we will need public trust. How can the City expect residents to trust a process that involves secrecy?

Two examples:

The Alternative Transportation (ALT)Committee serves at the advisory committee to the Non-motorized Transportation Plan Review. See [link] page 187 for full description and note the lack of AAPS in the listing of stakeholders. Many other references to the ALT Committee are listed on the A2gov.org website, but not the meeting schedule, location or minutes.

Committees of the board of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) are held in private and committee reports are very brief.

I found another lack of information about sewers and our policy regarding them when I began to inquire about the extension of utilities to two Scio Township proposed developments. It appears that our city has quietly been supporting sprawl by offering utility service to outlying developments even as we tax ourselves for the Greenbelt in an effort to minimize sprawl. We are also extending our transit system in order to minimize auto traffic into the city core, yet Scio Township’s developments would result in 500 new trips into the city each day, or more, if all were built and all worked in Ann Arbor. Scio does not participate in AAATA at all, even to the extent of a limited POSA.

Of course we do have utility contracts with Scio and a couple of other surrounding townships. But though I found Ann Arbor Township’s agreement on the internet, I have been unable to find the contracts for Scio and Pittsfield Townships. This is a policy issue that has not been sufficiently addressed in public.

Is it Abigail Elias’ job as city attorney to give legal advice to block open and transparent flow of public information? Did she decide to take this path on her own? Did it come from her boss? This is the kind on nonsense that invites skepticism about this entire process. From her other legal advice to the group paticipants (which sounded half baked and off the cuff and certainly poorly researched at best)about person liability and now this, it makes me wonder who is she protecting? The interests of Ann Arbor residents or for the flooding issue task force that moving in the direction of covering the City’s previous bad decision ala sump pumps. Either way it stinks to high heaven.