One of those community forums was held on Thursday, an hour prior to the AATA’s monthly board meeting. But no one from the public showed up to that particular event – several other meetings are scheduled. The board meeting that followed was over within an hour. In addition to the master plan, the board discussed the most recent quarter’s on-time trip performance, which board member David Nacht described as “abysmal.”

Countywide Transportation Master Plan

AATA’s countywide master plan, due to be completed next year, aims to see what the public transit system could become in the decades ahead. AATA staff has scheduled a number of meetings around the county to get input and feedback on the plan. Details about the effort – called Moving You Forward – are available online.

The project came up during Thursday’s board meeting.

“We want to look at the draft of comments from meetings that [AATA CEO Michael Ford] has been holding,” said board member David Nacht in his report on the planning and development committee. “We’re curious as to how staff and consultants will combine that with the scenarios.”

Jack Eaton raises his hand to speak at the public forum held on Oct. 6 at the downtown public library. Eaton wanted more detail about how the SEMCOG population and jobs projections had been calculated for Ann Arbor over the next 30 years. Eaton, an attorney who ran unsuccessfully in the August 2010 Ward 4 city council Democratic primary, was a bus driver earlier in his career. (Photo by Dave Askins.)

The “scenarios” to which Nacht referred are those being developed by staff and consultants based on information gathered from the community. Hypothetical examples of the kind of scenarios that could be produced are a paratransit-intensive scenario, a rail-intensive scenario, a low-funding scenario or a high-funding scenario. Eventually, a preferred scenario will be identified and form the basis of the master plan.

The board will continue to set aside time before upcoming board meetings to see if the public takes advantage of the chance to discuss transportation issues, said board chair Jesse Bernstein. The community forums include staff presentations on the process for service changes and potential service changes for next year, along with discussions on topics brought up by the public.

Several forums were held earlier this month, and several more are scheduled in the next two weeks:

• Monday, Oct. 25: Saline City Hall, 6‐8 p.m.
• Tuesday, Oct. 26: Ann Arbor District Library, Pittsfield Branch, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
• Tuesday, Oct. 26: Ann Arbor District Library, Malletts Creek Branch, 6‐8 p.m.
• Wednesday, Oct. 27: EMU Student Center, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
• Wednesday, Oct. 27: Dexter Township, 6‐8 p.m.
• Thursday, Oct. 28: Manchester Village offices, 6‐8 p.m.
• Wed, Nov. 3: Milan Senior Center, 6‐8 p.m.

MDOT Contract Approval Process, On-Time Performance

During Thursday’s meeting, board members unanimously passed the only resolution on the agenda, allowing AATA CEO Michael Ford to approve contracts up to $1 million with the Michigan Dept. of Transportation without waiting for board approval. Board member Sue McCormick said state programs often have to be approved within 30 days, and since the AATA meets monthly, that could prove to be a problem. Now Ford can approve those contracts himself, though he agreed to inform the board whenever that was done.

In discussing other issues during the meeting, Nacht mentioned that the on-time performance for buses this past summer was “abysmal.” For the three-month period from July-September 2010, 83.3% of trips were on-time. AATA’s goal for this service metric is 95%. Over the previous four quarters, on-time performance ranged from 82.8% at its lowest, to a high of 89.5%.

“On behalf of our riders, this is a big deal,” said Nacht. “If we are going to be a service provider, this is important.”

Bernstein agreed that the numbers were important, but said the numbers were understandable this past construction season when traffic was blocked on many streets. That includes the closing of South Fifth Avenue for construction of the underground parking garage next to the Ann Arbor District Library’s downtown building, where the AATA board meetings are held.

The extensive repaving of Plymouth Road was also a serious problem. “I don’t even know how we got the buses moving on Plymouth,” Bernstein said.

A note in the board packet indicated that the July-September period consistently shows the lowest on-time performance, due to road construction as well as University of Michigan student move-in during September.

Also during Thursday’s meeting. Chris White, AATA’s manager of service development, told the board that a study on the feasibility of a route connecting the corridor from Plymouth Road down to South State Street should be ready in January. [See Chronicle coverage: "Transit Connector Study: Initial Analysis"]

AATA staff also reported that work is continuing on efforts to design and reconstruct the Blake Transit Center, the downtown terminal for all bus routes. The AATA announced earlier this month that it would receive a $1 million federal grant for the work. The center is located north of William Street, between Fourth and Fifth avenues.

At the news conference held on Oct. 11 to announce the grant – which featured remarks from Congressman John Dingell – AATA’s manager of maintenance Terry Black told The Chronicle that the newly reconstructed facility will be nestled in the southeast corner of the same parcel of land where the current facility and drive are located. The direction of bus traffic on the driveway, which splits the block between Fourth and Fifth avenues, will reverse its current configuration, which takes buses from Fifth to Fourth. The driveway for the newly reconstructed center will send buses out onto Fifth Avenue. Black also indicated that a board room, which had been previously mentioned as a possible feature of the new center, would not be included in the new design.

The grant opportunity itself, part of the State of Good Repair Bus and Bus Facilities Initiative, was identified by Chris White, AATA manger of service development, who told The Chronicle in a followup phone interview that he’d seen it on a Federal Transit Authority email list to which he subscribes. He reported that he’d vetted the allocation of resources to make the grant application with other staff, including CEO Michael Ford.

Their decision to invest the time in applying, White said, was based on the good fit between the grant criteria and the Blake replacement project. Because the AATA was well along in developing plans for replacement of Blake, White said, the challenge of the relatively short application window back in the spring – about six weeks – was somewhat easier to meet. White responded to a Chronicle request for a copy of the grant application by emailing a .pdf file, which includes, among other information, a detailed list of the current structural issues identified with the 23-year-old facility. [.pdf of grant application]

Public Commentary

Two people spoke during public commentary at Thursday’s meeting.

Jim Morgensen told the board he is concerned that the board will concentrate so much on attracting new riders that it forgets about the people who depend on the service to get around. Later in the meeting during another opportunity for public comment, he also noted how difficult it is to determine the source of about $2.4 million paid to AATA by the University of Michigan, which picks up the cost for its affiliates to ride AATA buses.

Alex Holden, representing the Ann Arbor Center for Independent Living, also spoke during public commentary, telling the board that many of the people who use the center live outside of town and have a problem with the bus routes ending at 6:45 p.m. on weekends.

Board members present: Jesse Bernstein, Charles Griffith, Roger Kerson, Sue McCormick, David Nacht

Absent: Rich Robben, Anya Dale

Next regular meeting: Thursday, Nov. 18, 2010 at 6:30 p.m. at the Ann Arbor District Library, 343 S. Fifth Ave., Ann Arbor. The board meeting will be preceeded by a community forum on AATA’s countywide master plan. The forum will start at 5:30 p.m. [confirm date]

Chronicle editor Dave Askins contributed to this report.

Marianne Rzepka

The sky was full of fast-moving clouds – disappearing remnants of a morning’s rain – and temperatures were falling from a week of 90-degree weather into the 70s.

A breeze was the final touch to the perfect weather at Kirk Jones’ Good Scents Gardens in Ypsilanti Township.

“Being out here,” said Jones. “I like this.”

Good thing, because the flowers he grows there are his business. Jones uses the yarrow, zinnias, butterfly weed and agastache for bouquets he puts together and personally delivers to regular subscribers.

Jones explains it as a twist on the idea of community supported agriculture, or CSA, in which subscribers pay a set amount for one season of produce from a local farm. Instead of picking up a carton of vegetables once a week, Good Scents’ customers get a floral bouquet delivered to their home or business once a week.

Like a CSA, in which a subscriber’s take depends on what and how much the farmer raises over a season, Good Scents’ customers get what Jones chooses to plant and what comes up each year. No matter what, he said, they will get a bouquet of flowers each week over the 26-week season.

“If I have to buy commercial flowers, I’ll do it,” he said. “You’ll get your flowers.”

Jones, 52, was working on computer software in 2003 when he started Good Scents, selling bouquets through Downtown Home and Garden in Ann Arbor. (He has a B.A. in biology and another in computer science.)

He soon added deliveries to his Good Scents business, but worked both jobs for five years, dropping out of the computer world in 2008 to work and manage the bouquet business full time.

Now Jones has about 70 customers. About 40 of them get their bouquets delivered to their homes, and the rest at their workplaces.

Kirk Jones of Good Scents Gardens arranges bouquets of flowers in his garage, before delivering them to customers at their homes or offices. (Photos by the writer.)

Jones will pick the flowers a day or two before the bouquets are delivered, going out with buckets and wide-mouthed jars to gather whatever is ready. “If there’s anything blooming, I cut it,” he said.

At home – about four miles and two stop signs from the garden – Jones arranges the flowers in his garage, assembling the bouquets among the tools, the lawn mower and a bright yellow kayak hanging from the rafters.

Each of the bouquets is different, depending on which flowers are available. However, he thinks about what each customer has gotten in the past when he decides which bouquet goes to which customer.

So don’t expect the same thing every week, and don’t expect any of the dozens of bouquets he puts together every week to be identical.

Then, in the early hours of each Monday morning, he begins delivery to homes, then goes out again during business hours bringing bouquets to offices. For customers who prefer bouquets for the weekend, Jones also makes deliveries on Friday. Each week he also retrieves the empty glass jars that contained the previous week’s bouquet, which customers set out for him much like people used to leave their empty milk bottles for the milkman.

“He must do it in the middle of the night,” said Nancy Slezak, one of Jones’ customers who always finds a bouquet in the breezeway of her Ypsilanti home on Fridays from May to mid-October. And, she said, Jones has never missed a week.

Slezak started getting the flowers as a prize in a raffle several years ago. Now, it’s an extravagance she allows herself even though she just recently retired from her teaching job in the Ann Arbor schools.

But the bouquets are beautiful, she said. Sometimes they are pink, purple and cream. Sometimes they come in bright yellows and oranges.

She especially likes the yellow sunflowers and the orange lilies, and she likes how the bouquets are arranged. “He puts thought into it,” Slezak said. “He doesn’t just stick things in a jar.”

Sometimes she breaks up the big bouquets up into smaller sprays to spread around the house or give them away. Sometimes a bouquet will become a birthday gift to give a friend.

Slezak knows the flowers are an extravagance, but “as long as I can afford it, I will get it,” she said.

Jones charges $14 per bouquet, a total of $364 if you get a whole seasons’ worth of blooms – though Jones said he’ll consider something shorter.

Kirk Jones at the large plot he rents from Dawn Farm, where he grows flowers for his business, Good Scents Gardens.

Jones was always growing flowers. He had a plot with the community gardening group Project Grow, and over time the flowers pushed out the vegetables.

He’s still on the Project Grow board, but finds he doesn’t really have time to tend another garden.

Though his interest in flowers turned into his job, Jones said it’s still fun to grow and arrange the bouquets. He doesn’t even mind the early morning deliveries, though he admits that the least likable part of his business is dealing with traffic when he delivers during the day.

During his delivery season, Jones spends more of his time tending the business than the flowers.

He figures he spends about 15 hours a week out at the land he rents from Dawn Farm on Stony Creek Road. His plot is out behind the parking lot, within sight of the donkeys and llamas, just next to the turkeys waiting for Thanksgiving. If the wind is right, you’ll get the full smelly effect of life on a farm.

On the day I stopped by, the gusty wind was easily outmaneuvered, and it was a treat to watch the bees, the butterflies and even the giant orb spider while morning clouds cleared out of a blue, blue sky. A wall of goldenrod barricaded the rows of beds on the far side.

Jones has about 100 beds in the garden, each about 100 square feet with either flowers in bloom, flowers waiting to bloom or flowers finished blooming.

The daffodils, of course, have already disappeared for the year, and the short lilac bushes are nothing but puckered leaves. But there are beds busy with colorful zinnia and dahlias, along with pale pink lisianthus, a light green nicotiana and Frosty Morn sedum.

Jones also grows greenery for his bouquets, including boxwood and red cedar, but not firs, which make every bouquet look like Christmas, he said.

The mix means the color and life of the garden changes as the summer moves on. This can make for a less-than-neat plot, but Jones doesn’t care. It’s the difference between gardening for a business and gardening for yourself.

“I have to remember this is not my yard, and it’s not my garden,” he said. “It’s never going to be perfect.”

For information about Good Scents Gardens, including a gallery of bouquets, is on the firm’s website.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Flowers soon to be transformed into bouquets for Good Scents Gardens' customers.

Marianne Rzepka

Take a walk through Sunset Brooks Nature Area in Ann Arbor, and you’ll see the next generation of trees that in the past decade disappeared from the streets of the city.

Ash trees are sprouting up in nature areas and woods in and around the city, the successors of the green, white and black ashes we watched die in droves from an invasion of the emerald ash borer. Some of the new trees sprouted from ash trees, but larger saplings were probably just too small for the borers to bother with when the first invasive wave came through and destroyed the larger trees.

“For sure we’ve seen them in a lot of the natural areas,” says Kerry Gray, the city’s urban forestry and natural resources planning coordinator.

The Ann Arbor forestry crew spent at least three years doing nothing but removing ash trees, says Gray. Crews cut down an estimated 7,000 dead ashes along city streets and another 3,000 or so in parks and some nature areas, she says, at a cost of at least $2 million.

Many homeowners tried to save the trees in their own yards, to no avail. An estimated 30 million ash trees in southeast Michigan alone were wiped out.

The emerald ash borer lays its eggs in the bark of ash trees, and the larva proceed to eat the pulpy tissue just below the bark, in the layer that provides the pathway for water and nutrients to reach the branches and leaves of the tree. Soon, the trails of the borer larva effectively girdle the tree, killing it.

David Cappaert in the Sunset Brooks Nature Area. (Photo by the writer.)

David Cappaert spent about seven years working on the emerald ash borer invasion – his home is just a quick walk from the Sunset Brooks Nature Area, which is located on the city’s north side, north of Sunset and south of M-14. Though he now works for a commercial greenhouse, every day he can see a testament to his work on his garage door: the silhouette of a parasitic wasp that bears his name, Atanycolus cappaerti.

The wasp, using its long ovipositor, drills through ash bark to lay an egg near an emerald ash borer larva. When the eggs hatch, they feed on the beetle larva, says Cappaert.

Whether the parasitic wasp exerts some control over the emerald ash borer will be “interesting,” he says. “I don’t predict it will keep (the beetle) under control, but you never know.”

Cappaert got involved in the emerald ash borer saga when the insect was first identified and several counties, including Washtenaw, were placed under quarantine – meaning that no ash wood could be taken outside their borders.

Michigan State University researchers set up shop at the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens to conduct research on the insect, and they signed up Cappaert, an entomologist, to do some of the work.

What is now Atanycolus cappaerti showed up in ash trees at Seven Lakes State Park near Holly, Cappaert says.

It’s not that common to have a newly identified insect named for you, says Deborah McCullough, professor of forest entomology at MSU and the go-to researcher on the emerald ash borer. But Cappaert is the reason that the parasitic wasp was finally identified. “He leaned on the taxonomy guy to get it identified,” she says. And now that researchers know what they’re looking for, she says, “we’re finding this parasitic wasp in a number of places now.”

Cappaert says that besides Atanycolus cappaerti, two other likely killers of the emerald ash borer have been found in Ohio, and there could be more.

Atanycolus cappaerti, a parasitic wasp that feeds on emerald ash borer larva, is named after David Cappaert, an Ann Arbor entomologist. (Photo courtesy of David Cappaert.)

Will parasitic wasps someday wipe out the emerald ash borers? Cappaert doesn’t think so. Probably the emerald ash borer will continue to be in the environment, since there are always new ash trees around. But it may reach equilibrium either because there are not a lot of ash trees to eat or because of enemies such as Atanycolus cappaerti.

The destructive emerald ash borer invasion first appeared in southeastern Michigan, and studies have found traces of the pest dating back to the early to mid-1990s. Now the borer has moved on, spreading to 14 states and Canada, with its farthest reach so far in Minnesota, New York and Kentucky, as well as Quebec.

Though I had hoped that every last emerald ash borer had moved on from this area, that’s not the case, says McCullough. Research by McCullough and her students show there still are emerald ash borers in the neighborhood, but studies aren’t sure how many. The insects “probably will never be gone completely – at least not for a long, long time,” she says.

And though Ann Arbor might not have many more ash trees to lose, the emerald ash beetle is not far away. The beetle population is very much at or near its peak in the Lansing and Grand Rapids areas, says McCullough.

One positive result of the years of researching the emerald ash borer is that there now is a protective treatment for ash. Emamectin benzoate, marketed under the name TREE-äge (pronounce triage), must be applied by professionals. The root-injected treatment was developed only two years ago but seems to be nearly 100% effective for at least that long, says McCullough.

I remember writing stories about the emerald ash borer invasion for The Ann Arbor News, and one of the most interesting things about the story was how scientists responded to the insect’s invasion. It was known primarily in Asia and somehow was imported into this country, probably on packing material.

At first, there was little information on the bug – only a taxonomic description and a few paragraphs in Chinese (the emerald ash borer is native to China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Taiwan and eastern Russia).

Researchers had to find out the bug’s life cycle – when the borers fed, mated, laid eggs and emerged from the trees. Did the emerald ash borer overwinter – that is, did they stay alive through the winter? (Some larva did.) Would the insects lay eggs in any trees besides ash? (They don’t seem to.) Why does the emerald ash borer exist with some native ash trees in China? (Good question.)

At the outset, researchers brought in pieces of infected ash bark to identify emerald ash borer eggs. But at that point, they didn’t even know what the eggs looked like, and the ash bark has “all kinds of weird stuff,” McCullough said. “Eventually, we figured it out,” she says.

Leaves of an ash tree.

Scientists also figured out how to build effective traps. They found that emerald ash borers were attracted to purple and to stressed trees. They measured volatile gases given off by the ashes. They girdled trees and counted bugs.

“We did some fun stuff,” says McCullough. She does admit that there were some not-so-fun times – stomping through poison ivy, sweating through top summer temperatures and slapping bugs.

After all these years, McCullough says she’d still like to know how the beetles choose which ash tree to infect. “Why do beetles fly past really good host trees?” she asks.

Another problem is how to tell if the emerald ash borers have already infected an ash. It can take a year or longer for an infected tree to show signs of dying, and it’s not so easy to see the emerald ash borers flying around. “They’re up in the tops of the trees,” says McCullough. “They’re fast, and they’re little.”

Researchers are still working on the problem, she says. “We want to model how the population spreads, so we can predict where the beetle is,” says McCullough. In the past, she says, “we were always trying to catch up with the beetle.”

Though any new findings are too late to save the thousands of dead ash trees removed in Ann Arbor, the story’s not done. McCullough and others studying the problem are fielding calls from places that are only now seeing the first signs of the destructive insects.

And Gray is keeping an eye on it from Ann Arbor. “We’re kind of all waiting to see what will happen,” she says.

A Second Chance for Would-Be Conservation Stewards

In my April column, I wrote about the Michigan Conservation Stewardship Program in Washtenaw County, a 40-hour course on environmental issues for the public. The program, hosted by the county’s Extension Service, lines up a variety of speakers over two months to introduce ecological issues through talks on wetlands, forests, grasslands and other natural resources.

The course was planned for the spring but postponed until this fall because of a shortfall of enrollees. The course is now scheduled to start on Saturday, Sept. 11, with an introductory class lasting a full day. After that, classes will meet every Wednesday from 6-9 p.m. beginning Sept. 15 and ending Nov. 3, with two additional all-day meetings on Saturday Oct. 9 and 23.

Sometimes participants will be up to their waders in a stream or foraging for plants along a railroad track. Everyone will have to do 40 hours of conservation-related volunteer work before graduating. Last year, projects included surveying parkland and installing a native plants garden.

The course costs $250, which is due by Sept. 2. You can get an application and brochure online or at the extension office, 705 N. Zeeb Road. If you have any questions, call Bob Bricault at 734-997-1678.

If you’re interested in knowing more about how the environment works, this is the course to take.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.