Correspondence sent to the Ann Arbor City Clerk gets stamped and filed as a official communication on the city's website.

As we’ve reported previously here at The Chronicle, one of the cost-saving measures that’s been proposed in connection with the city’s budget for fiscal year 2010 is to eliminate publication of the city council agenda in the local newspaper. The move would save $15,000 per year. I imagine there are some citizens who rely on the newspaper publication of the council agenda to stay informed on civic matters, but would speculate that it’s not many – probably not enough to lobby successfully for its continued publication in the twice-weekly print edition of AnnArbor.com, which is to replace The Ann Arbor News.

One advantage of the city’s online publication of the council agenda is that it includes as attachments all the communications to the city clerk, whether they’re from boards and commission within the city, neighborhood associations, private citizens, or even anonymous sources.

Part of  my preparation to cover council meetings is to skim through those communications. For the May 4 meeting next Monday, the following item caught my eye: Illegal Restaurant & Chickens.

The letter outlines a variety of potential code violations associated with the Selma Cafe, located on Soule Stret, which is a residential property owned by Jeff McCabe and Lisa Gottlieb. Here’s partly how they describe the Selma Cafe:

a hub, a center, a heart of the many ongoing efforts to improve our lives through community building and free access to affordable, healthy foods and efforts to foster right-livelihood in vocations with meaning and purpose

The Selma Cafe serves breakfast on Friday mornings, made with ingredients that are locally grown and sourced, and prepared by chefs from local area restaurants on a rotating basis. There’s a suggested donation of $10-15 for the meal. A recent breakfast drew 123 people over the course of the  period from 6:30–10 a.m.

I’ve opted  to write this piece as a column, in the first person, categorized as “opinion,” because on April 10, my wife, Mary, and I ate breakfast at the Selma Cafe when Max Sussman was the rotating chef. Even though it’s not my main intent here to argue a position or express a particular opinion, I think it’s a clearer way to indicate to readers what my perspective is. For one thing, it helps explain why the “illegal restaurant & chickens” communication label in the list of attachments on the council agenda caught my eye – when it might not have caught someone else’s eye.

On the morning when we ate Max’s mushroom crepes and hippie hash, the chickens kept on the property were in a pen on the side of the house. One of them had ambitions to escape but was quickly thwarted.

The chickens are identified in the anonymous letter as constituting a violation of the city’s relatively new backyard chicken ordinance, because they’re also allowed into a pen in front of the house. McCabe and Gottlieb don’t currently have a backyard chicken permit, as required under the ordinance.

The letter addressed to the city clerk, as well as to the county health department and the principal of Eberwhite Elementary (located one house away from McCabe and Gottlieb’s home), was submitted anonymously “due to potential retribution for whistle blowing.”

So what’s the city doing about it? When there’s an apparent open flouting of its ordinances (as with front-yard chickens), it’s the job of city staff to take appropriate action. I wondered what action the city might have undertaken, because I think  it’s hard to argue that an appropriate action would be to ignore it.

So yesterday, I inquired with the city via email and the question was passed along to Kristen Larcom, senior assistant city attorney, who wrote back: “The City has taken action by requesting the owners to comply with City ordinances.” Later in the day – by pure chance – I ran into city attorney Stephen Postema, and asked him if he was tracking the situation. He confirmed that his office was working with McCabe and Gottlieb to help get them into compliance with the chicken ordinance, and that McCabe and Gottlieb had been cooperative in that effort.

I would note that some time has now elapsed in the time since McCabe described in a blog post how he had not intended to apply for a chicken permit. In an email sent yesterday, Gottlieb confirmed that they were applying for a permit in order to comply with the ordinance and that they’d moved the hens from the front yard into the back yard.

As for the contention in the letter that the Selma Cafe is, in fact, a restaurant subject to all appropriate licensing requirements, I have not yet been able to learn anything definitive about what the criteria are that would make it a restaurant. If I invite 10 friends over for dinner one time, I’m certain I haven’t created a restaurant. If I invite them over every Friday night, I’m still almost certain that’s not a restaurant. If those 10 friends start giving me a few $20 bills to help defray my costs, I’d argue that it’s not a restaurant, because I’m not requiring them to pay for the meal – it’s something they do because they want to. What if I now expand the offer to any friend of those 10 friends or anybody who wants to eat the meal? I don’t know.

If I were to call the event “Dave’s Diner,” it would probably not help me make my case that it’s not a restaurant. But surely the difference between “Dave’s Diner” and “Dave’s Dinner Club” is not the crucial one that defines it as a restaurant.

In any case, I would weigh in for the same kind of approach to the restaurant question as seems to have been taken for the chicken question. Namely, you don’t begin by issuing fines, citations and tickets, but rather with working with citizens to figure out what needs to be done – if anything – to adapt their current practice to conform to code.

Previous mentions in The Chronicle of the Selma Cafe:

• April 10
• March 29
• March 8