Interim Ann Arbor police chief John Seto talks with Eunice Burns, a longtime activist who attended an April 12 sustainability forum at the Ann Arbor District Library. Seto was a panelist at the forum, which focused on building a sustainable community. (Photos by the writer.)

Community is one of four categories in a framework that’s been developed over the past year, with the intent of setting sustainability goals for the city. Other categories – which have been the focus of three previous forums this year – are resource management; land use and access; climate and energy; and community.

At the April 12 forum on community, Wendy Rampson – the city’s planning manager, who moderated the discussion – told the audience that 15 draft goals have been selected from more than 200 already found in existing city planning documents. The hope is to reach consensus on these sustainability goals, then present them to the city council as possible amendments to the city’s master plan. The goals are fairly general – if approved, they would be fleshed out with more detailed objectives and action items. [.pdf of draft sustainability goals]

Rampson said that although this would be the final forum in this year’s series, there seems to be interest in having an annual sustainability event – so this would likely not be the last gathering.

The forum was held at the Ann Arbor District Library’s downtown building, and attended by about 50 people. Panelists were Dick Norton, chair of the University of Michigan urban and regional planning program; Cheryl Elliott, president of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation; John Seto, Ann Arbor’s interim chief of police; Jennifer L. Hall, executive director of the Ann Arbor Housing Commission; Julie Grand, chair of the city’s park advisory commission; and Cheryl Saam, facility supervisor for the Ann Arbor canoe liveries.

Several comments during the Q & A session centered on the issue of housing density within the city. Eunice Burns, a long-time local activist and former Ann Arbor city councilmember, advocated for more flexibility in accessory apartments.

Doug Kelbaugh, a UM professor of architecture and urban planning, supported her view and wondered whether the city put too high a priority on parks, when what Ann Arbor really needs is more people living downtown. He said a previous attempt to revise zoning and allow for more flexibility in accessory units was shot down by a “relatively small, relatively wealthy, relatively politically-connected group. I don’t think it was a fair measure of community sentiment.”

Also during the Q & A period, Pete Wangwongwiroj – a board member of UM’s student sustainability initiative – advocated for the concept of gross national happiness to be a main consideration in public policy decisions.

The April forum was videotaped by AADL staff and will be posted on the library’s website – videos of the three previous sessions are already posted: on resource management (Jan. 12); land use and access (Feb. 9); and climate and energy (March 8). Additional background on the Ann Arbor sustainability initiative is on the city’s website. See also Chronicle coverage: “Building a Sustainable Ann Arbor,” “Sustaining Ann Arbor’s Environmental Quality” and “Land Use, Transit Factor Into Sustainability.“

Update on Sustainability Goals

The overall sustainability initiative started informally two years ago, with a joint meeting of the city’s planning, environmental and energy commissions. The idea is to help shape decisions by looking at a triple bottom line: environmental quality, economic vitality, and social equity.

In early 2011, the city received a $95,000 grant from the Home Depot Foundation to fund a formal sustainability project. The project set out to review the city’s existing plans and organize them into a framework of goals, objectives and indicators that can guide future planning and policy. The overall project also aimed to improve access to the city’s plans and to the sustainability components of each plan, and to incorporate the concept of sustainability into city planning and future city plans.

The Home Depot grant funded the job of a sustainability associate. The position is held by Jamie Kidwell, who’s been the point person for this effort. In addition to city staff, this work was initially guided by volunteers who serve on four city advisory commissions: park, planning, energy and environmental. Members from those groups met at a joint working session in late September of 2011. Since then, the city’s housing commission and housing and human services commission have been added to the conversation.

Over the past year, city staff and a committee made of up members from several city advisory commissions have evaluated the city’s 27 existing planning documents and pulled out 226 goals from those plans that relate to sustainability. From there, they prioritized the goals and developed a small subset to present for discussion.

Fifteen goals have been organized into four main categories: climate and energy; community; land use and access; and resource management. The draft goals are:

Climate & Energy

• Sustainable Energy: Improve access to and increase use of renewable energy by all members of our community.
• Energy Conservation: Reduce energy consumption and eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions in our community.
• High Performance Buildings: Increase efficiency in new and existing buildings within our community.

Community

• Engaged Community: Ensure our community is strongly connected through outreach, opportunities for engagement, and stewardship of community resources.
• Diverse Housing: Provide high quality, safe, efficient, and affordable housing choices to meet the current and future needs of our community, particularly for homeless and low-income households.
• Safe Community: Minimize risk to public health and property from manmade and natural hazards.
• Active Living: Improve quality of life by providing diverse cultural, recreational, and educational opportunities for all members of our community.
• Economic Vitality: Develop a prosperous, resilient local economy that provides opportunity by creating jobs, retaining and attracting talent, supporting a diversity of businesses across all sectors, and rewarding investment in our community.

Land Use & Access

• Transportation Options: Establish a physical and cultural environment that supports and encourages safe, comfortable and efficient ways for pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit users to travel throughout the city and region.
• Sustainable Systems: Plan for and manage constructed and natural infrastructure systems to meet the current and future needs of our community.
• Efficient Land Use: Encourage a compact pattern of diverse development that maintains our sense of place, preserves our natural systems, and strengthens our neighborhoods, corridors, and downtown.

Resource Management

• Clean Air and Water: Eliminate pollutants in our air and water systems.
• Healthy Ecosystems: Conserve, protect, enhance, and restore our aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.
• Responsible Resource Use: Produce zero waste and optimize the use and reuse of resources in our community.
• Local Food: Conserve, protect, enhance, and restore our local agriculture and aquaculture resource.

A public meeting on March 29 to get input on these draft goals drew only a handful of people, but feedback can also be sent to the city via email at sustainability@a2gov.org.

Framing the Discussion: What Is Community?

As he did at the first sustainability forum in January, Dick Norton – chair of the University of Michigan urban and regional planning program – began the April 12 event by giving an overview to frame the subsequent discussion. He started by defining three terms: community, development and sustainability.

What is community? It’s not “I am an island unto myself,” he said, nor is it anarchy, nor dystopia, nor even utopia. Rather, community brings to mind images of the common, the social aspects of our nature, the notions of inclusiveness, identity and belonging. But it’s likely that most people in the room didn’t give much thought to what community means, he said.

The concept of development connotes improvement over time in the things we value, Norton said. It’s a sense of improving the human condition, in a qualitative way. Sustainability is harder to define, he noted. If we sustain our society, we keep it going and stable. But we want a just community, too – we want governments and those with power to treat the rest of us fairly. We also want happiness, Norton said, so we want to develop communities that we love, that are desirable places to live, work and play.

The trick is to do all these things simultaneously, he observed. So what institutions can help us get there? Government certainly plays a role, as do markets, to some extent. But nonprofits and religious institutions also play an important role. All of these entities interact, Norton said, adding complexity.

Norton also talked about the wide range of components that are necessary to build community. Citizen participation is key – residents need to be engaged. Fair and affordable housing, jobs, public safety, landscape and environment, services and amenities, historic preservation – all of these are important.

Norton also raised the issue of connectivity – how accessible are things? [This was a topic addressed at length by his UM colleague Joe Grengs at the Feb. 9 forum on land use and access.] Redevelopment is another component of community, but that’s set against concerns of gentrification. There are also issues of race, class and inclusiveness, Norton said. Who are we talking about when we talk about community?

Norton then laid out challenges faced in promoting community development. First, people are individuals, yet they’re also social creatures – we live in that tension, he said. Added to that, we’re a community of individuals with a variety of abilities, ambitions and circumstances. That causes us to behave differently, yet we still need to make communities work, given that variation.

Another challenge is the huge plurality of viewpoints and values that we hold about what’s important and valuable. We tend to want people to see things the way we see them, Norton said. But there are different preferences for whether things should be planned or evolve organically, for example, and those preferences influence how much government we want.

Norton also pointed to the challenge of randomness and uncertainty. That makes planning difficult, because you don’t know how things will play out. Measurement is also a challenge, he said. How do you measure whether you’re achieving your community development goals?

Community is vital, Norton concluded. The American ethos tends to be a cowboy mentality, the idea of individuals bootstrapping themselves and making it on their own. “That is just so untrue,” he said. People depend on communities to help them thrive.

Quality of Life: Community Foundation

Cheryl Elliott, president of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation, described the work of her organization. It was founded nearly 50 years ago, and its overall mission is to improve the community’s quality of life. AAACF manages more than 425 funds with over $60 million in assets, and administers scholarships, grants and other community support.

Cheryl Elliott, president of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation.

Elliott focused her comments on the quality-of-life issues of community, and said some of her remarks were informed by the recent book “The Economics of Place,” a publication of the Ann Arbor-based Michigan Municipal League. Quality of life plays a vitally important role in the community’s economic future, she said. When Elliott came to Ann Arbor as a University of Michigan freshman in 1969, “you could have shot a cannon down Main Street,” she said, and not hit anyone. It took a lot of collaboration to achieve the city’s vibrancy that you see today.

A wonderful community is crucial to attract and retain workers in a knowledge-based economy, Elliott said. An AAACF board member [Kevin Thompson] works for IBM and could live anywhere, she reported, but he chose to live in Ann Arbor. Quality of life and place wasn’t something that was previously considered as a factor in economic development. But today, a functioning, safe community isn’t enough, she said. It needs to be a place that inspires people, and that encourages creativity and innovation.

Elliott ticked through eight dimensions that affect quality of place: physical design and walkability, green initiatives, a culture of economic development, entrepreneurship, multiculturalism, messaging and technology, transit, and education. We need to think more regionally to achieve goals in these areas, she said.

Turning her comments to the role of culture in economic development, Elliott highlighted the importance of a healthy creative sector. Before Pfizer pulled out of Ann Arbor, its leadership talked about the city’s diverse cultural environment as an important factor in their desire to be located here, she said. Communities with healthy cultural sectors help create jobs, build a stronger tax base, and bring in more tourism.

Ann Arbor ends up on a lot of national Top 10 lists, Elliott noted, in large part because of the city’s quality of place, and a lot of that has to do with arts and culture – everything from the Ann Arbor Summer Festival and art fairs, to the University Musical Society and events like FestiFools. But “it doesn’t just happen,” she added. These things require partnerships and a lot of collaboration.

Elliott wrapped up her remarks by saying that the area has a creative, entrepreneurial nonprofit sector. She cited the example of a coordinated funding approach being taken to fund human services – a joint effort of the city of Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, Washtenaw Urban County, AAACF and Washtenaw United Way, administered by the city/county office of community and economic development. No other community in the country is doing that, she said.

Public Safety

John Seto, Ann Arbor’s interim chief of police, told the audience that when he first was asked to speak at the forum, he wasn’t sure how public safety fit into the notion of sustainability. But after giving it some thought, he realized that most of what the police force does helps create a sustainable community, and it would be difficult to condense it into the limited time he had for his presentation.

John Seto, Ann Arbor's interim chief of police.

So what does sustainability look like for public safety? he asked. It entails a vibrant downtown, safe neighborhoods, disaster preparedness, and a partnership with the community. Seto outlined a variety of ways that Ann Arbor police work toward these goals:

• Neighborhood crime watch: There are over 300 neighborhood crime watch captains in the city, working with a police coordinator who disseminates information throughout the city.
• Crime Stoppers: The coordinator for this Washtenaw County program works out of an office at the Ann Arbor police department. The anonymous tip line is 1-800-SPEAK UP.
• Justice Center e-kiosk: Located in the lobby of the new Justice Center at the corner of Fifth and Huron, an electronic kiosk allows users to make a police report, get traffic crash reports, pay a parking ticket, obtain a Freedom of Information Act request form and more.
• Online police reports: Several types of reports can now be made on the police department’s website, Seto said. They are typically crimes with no suspects, or reports that are needed for insurance purposes. The reports that can be filed if there are no known suspects include harassing phone calls; theft (but not of a home or business that’s been entered illegally); and vandalism. Reports of private property traffic crashes – if your vehicle was parked and struck by an unknown vehicle, for example – can also be made online, as can reports for lost or damaged property.
• CrimeMapping.com: Ann Arbor is now participating in this online mapping of crime data, which indicates the location and type of crimes. It allows users to search by date, crime type or address.
• Disaster preparedness: The city’s office of emergency management coordinates the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), a countywide effort with more than two dozen members.
• CodeRED notification: Residents can sign up to be notified of crime alerts and other warnings – such as missing persons – through an automated phone notification system. It can handle 1,500 calls per minute, Seto said.
• Regional collaboration: Sustainability means collaborating to make the most out of your resources, Seto said. For policing, the city is collaborating both in everyday operations – like a joint dispatch unit with Washtenaw County, or mutual aid agreements with surrounding communities – and in special units like the SWAT and crisis negotiations teams.

Seto concluded by asking the audience how they would like to see the police department partner with the community. He said he hoped to hear some questions and comments about that later in the evening.

Affordable Housing

Jennifer L. Hall gave a shorter version of a presentation she made at the Ann Arbor Housing Commission’s December 2011 board meeting, which was her first meeting as executive director of the AAHC. Previously, Hall served as housing manager for the Washtenaw County/city of Ann Arbor office of community development.

She began by describing affordable housing. It’s defined relative to income levels – what is affordable to a higher income family is not necessarily affordable for a lower income family. For federal funding purposes, affordable housing means that a household is paying 30% or less of its gross income for housing, including utilities, taxes and insurance. Several programs of the U.S. Dept. of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) provide affordable housing assistance for low-income families – AAHC is one of the local entities that receives funding from these HUD programs.

Hall described a continuum of affordable housing throughout Washtenaw County. On one end are shelters for people who are homeless, including the Delonis Center, SafeHouse Center (for victims of domestic violence), Interfaith Hospitality Network’s Alpha House (for families), and SOS Community Services, which runs a housing access hotline. At the opposite end is market rate housing that is affordable. Within those extremes, Hall outlined a range of other housing assistance and types:

• Transitional housing (Dawn Farm, Michigan Ability Partners, Home of New Vision)
• Group homes (Synod House, Washtenaw Community Health Organization)
• Senior assisted-living (Area Agency on Aging 1-B, private sector)
• Nonprofit supporting housing (Avalon Housing, Michigan Ability Partners, Community Housing Alternatives)
• Senior housing (Lurie Terrace, Cranbrook)
• Public housing (Ann Arbor Housing Commission, Ypsilanti Housing Commission)
• Tenant vouchers (Ann Arbor Housing Commission, Ypsilanti Housing Commission, Michigan State Housing Development Authority)
• Private developments (Windsong)
• Cooperatives (Arrowwood, Pine Lake, Forest Hills, University Townhomes)
• Houses for homeownership (Habitat for Humanity and other nonprofits)
• Units within private developments (First & Washington, Stone School)

Ann Arbor’s owner-occupied housing market is getting more expensive compared to other areas nationally. According to data from the National Housing Conference, in 2011 metro Ann Arbor (Washtenaw County) ranked as the 87th most expensive housing market among the nation’s 209 metro areas, Hall reported. The median home price for the Ann Arbor metro area was $162,000. Just two years earlier, the median home price was $136,000, and metro Ann Arbor ranked 132 among the 209 metro areas, she said.

Jennifer L. Hall, executive director of the Ann Arbor Housing Commission.

For the rental market, metro Ann Arbor also ranked 87th among the 209 markets in 2011, with an average monthly rent of $882 for a two-bedroom apartment. But that is a drop in the rankings from 2009, when the area ranked 51st with an average monthly rent of $940.

Hall noted that in an ideal world, every household would live in a unit it could afford – there would be units available for all income levels. But unfortunately, that’s not the case, she said. There’s a mismatch of availability and income, with some families paying more than 30% of their income for rent, and others paying far less than 30%.

There’s a growing need for more affordable housing in this community, Hall said. A study conducted by the Washtenaw Housing Alliance showed that in 2004, 2,756 people in Washtenaw County reported that they had experienced homelessness. In 2010, that number had grown to 4,738.

AAHC manages two main programs: (1) the Section 8 voucher program for Washtenaw, Monroe, and western Wayne counties; and (2) public housing units in Ann Arbor. Hall noted that the majority of people on wait lists for these programs fall into the category of extremely low-income families, with income at 30% or less of the Ann Arbor area’s median income. For a family of four, Ann Arbor’s median income is $86,300 – 30% of that would be an annual income of $25,900.

Hall then turned to the issue of fair and equitable housing. She showed the audience a map that indicated levels of poverty throughout the county, and pointed out that the map showed concentrations of poverty in downtown Ann Arbor, in the student neighborhoods around the University of Michigan. The city has benefited from its student population, in terms of federal funding, because students typically report poverty-level incomes, she noted. And because federal funding to communities from HUD is based on formulas that are tied to poverty levels, Ann Arbor receives more funding than it otherwise would, Hall explained. HUD is looking to change that formula, she added, but the formula hasn’t been changed yet.

In fact, this measure of poverty doesn’t reflect where most true low-income households are located, she said. For example, you’d see very different areas of poverty – primarily clustered in Ypsilanti and Ypsilanti Township – if measured by the number of people on public assistance.

Hall also observed that as people search for affordable housing and move further away from where they’d prefer to live, they often increase the amount they pay for transportation to get to work or to necessary services, like grocery stores. That increased cost often isn’t factored in to their housing decisions, she noted, and the more distant location can end up being more expensive overall.

Hall wrapped up by noting that federal funding for low-income housing is decreasing. In 1976, HUD’s budget was $86.8 billion. By 2010, its budget had dropped to $43.58 billion.

Parks & Recreation

Giving the presentation on Ann Arbor’s parks and recreation were Julie Grand, chair of the city’s park advisory commission, and Cheryl Saam, facility supervisor for the Ann Arbor canoe liveries.

The city has 157 parks and recreational facilities, 52 miles of pathways, and 2,008 acres of land – 72% of that land in open space. How the city cares for these resources makes an impact on the quality of life for residents here, Saam said.

Grand noted that one of the city’s draft sustainability goals is to have an engaged community. The goal states: “Ensure our community is strongly connected through outreach, opportunities for engagement, and stewardship of community resources.” One way to do that is through neighborhood parks, Grand said – this is a community that’s very engaged with its parks, and many neighborhoods are defined based on their relationships to nearby parks.

The city also engages residents through its senior center and other community centers, as well as through volunteer programs like the Give 365 program, Adopt-a-Park, or natural area preservation program. The thousands of volunteer hours benefit the parks system, Grand said, but also provide a way for people to feel connected to the community and give back in a meaningful way.

Julie Grand, chair of the Ann Arbor park advisory commission.

The parks system also supports the community goal of diverse housing, Grand said, through partnerships with the office of community and economic development. Parks land acquisition funds paid for property to expand the Bryant Community Center, for example. The city’s goal is to have a park within a quarter-mile of every residence, she said, and to make sure that low-income areas are well-served.

Grand said that having a safe and healthy community is also important to the parks system. Using best practices in stormwater management, protecting the Huron River ecosystem, and building non-motorized pathways are all examples of that. Parks and recreation also contribute to the city’s economic vitality, with facilities that draw people in, she said – the farmers market, golf courses, and other venues. “People want to live in communities with a vibrant parks system.” Parks also improve safety and add value to neighborhoods, she said.

Saam addressed the goal of providing an active living and learning community. The parks system provides both structured and unstructured active recreation, where people can get measurable health benefits and social interaction – summer camps, classes, or places just to relax and take a walk. A scholarship program offered by the parks system makes the venues and class offerings accessible to lower-income families.

The mission of the parks system is to provide open space and recreation that’s accessible, Saam said, and they strive for a broad range of services and facilities for people with disabilities. Recent examples include adding steps in Buhr pool, and plans to renovate the Gallup canoe livery, adding ADA-compliant pathways.

Saam also highlighted recent renovations in West Park and the new Argo Cascades, a bypass by the Argo Dam that’s just now being completed. And Grand pointed to land acquisition – both through the city’s greenbelt program, and for parkland within the city – as other examples of the parks system enriching the community.

Turning to the future, Grand said the parks system hopes to increase volunteer opportunities, expand non-motorized pathways and connections between the Huron River and the city’s urban core, continue paying attention to best practices in stormwater management, and emphasize making improvements to existing facilities – it’s important to improve what the city has before building something new, she said.

Grand also reminded the audience that the parks maintenance and capital improvements millage would be up for renewal in November. She encouraged people to get more information online or to attend an upcoming public forum on the topic. [Also see Chronicle coverage: "Park Commission Briefed on Millage Renewal."]

Questions & Comments

During the last portion of the forum, panelists fielded questions and commentary from the audience. This report summarizes the questions and presents them thematically.

Questions & Comments: Accessory Dwellings, Density

Several questions and comments centered on the issue of housing density within the city. Eunice Burns, a long-time local activist and former Ann Arbor city councilmember, described how she’d sold her house to her daughter and son-in-law, and now lives in the home’s garage that was renovated into an apartment for her. But because of existing zoning constraints, only a family member can live in an accessory dwelling, she noted – no one will be able to use the apartment when she’s gone. The city’s ordinances need to be revised to allow for more types of dwellings like this for a wider range of people, Burns said.

Eunice Burns advocated for zoning changes to allow for more accessory dwellings in Ann Arbor. Her record of public service includes the Ann Arbor city council, the board of the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority and the local officers compensation commission.

Ann Arbor faces a growing senior population, and many of them can’t afford senior housing like Glacier Hills, Burns noted. She recalled that when the city tried to change zoning for accessory dwelling units in the past, it had met with resistance. ”I’d like to see us work on this again and see if we can get it through this time,” she said.

(Burns concluded her remarks by putting in a plug for Huron River Day on July 15.)

The derailed effort that Burns mentioned would have changed the city’s zoning to make it possible for non-family members to live in accessory apartments. Wendy Rampson, the city’s planning manager, told the audience that the concern had primarily been about neighborhoods close to campus becoming too densely populated.

Conditions have changed since then, however. Rampson noted that according to the most recent census, Ann Arbor’s population has stabilized while the size of households has decreased. With fewer people living in individual homes, density isn’t as great as it was a few decades ago.

Dick Norton responded to Burns’ comments by taking a broader view. Like sustainability, the concept of community is difficult to define – it means different things to different people. Residents of a gated community might have a different definition than people who live outside of it. Norton pointed to sociologist Max Weber’s description of the Protestant work ethic in America – the idea of individuals making their way in society through hard work, and succeeding on their own merits. That concept influenced how people viewed the world, and complicated efforts to help people who are less well off, Norton said – people think that if someone is poor and homeless, it’s because they lack the ambition to work.

There are some deeply embedded ideological perspectives that need to be addressed, Norton said. Americans need to figure out how to ensure that people who are in less fortunate circumstances are at least doing okay and have opportunities to do better, he said. It requires people to open their minds a little bit. People tend to fear change and feel threatened if they’re asked to do something where there are no easy answers. Norton concluded by saying he knew he was preaching to the choir – the people who show up to the sustainability forums are already engaged in these issues, he said.

Doug Kelbaugh, a University of Michigan professor of architecture and urban planning, also commented on the topic of density. The carbon footprint of those living in the suburbs is dramatically higher than for urban residents, he noted. Increasing urban density would have the single greatest impact on reducing that carbon footprint – saving energy, the amount of land that’s used for development, the amount time people spend commuting, and more.

Kelbaugh said he loves the city’s parkland, but he sometimes thinks there’s too much of it – what the city really needs is more people living downtown. Perhaps parkland is being over-prioritized.

Regarding sustainability and affordable housing, Kelbaugh said the lowest-hanging fruit to address that issue is accessory dwellings. The previous attempt to revise zoning and allow for more flexibility in accessory units was shot down by a “relatively small, relatively wealthy, relatively politically-connected group,” he said. “I don’t think it was a fair measure of community sentiment.”

There cannot be too many people living downtown, Kelbaugh concluded – the more, the better – and Ann Arbor is far from hitting the upper level of the population it can sustain.

Julie Grand, chair of the city’s park advisory commission, said she’d argue that the city needs greenspace to allow people room to breathe. There also needs to be recreational opportunities for residents, she said.

Questions & Comments: Being Proactive

Ann Larimore, a UM professor emeritus of geography and women’s studies, followed up on the issue of density by saying that it doesn’t help to use the word in a general way. There are different kinds of density – of families with children, of low-income people, of students living in high-rise apartment buildings, of people who only use their Ann Arbor homes on football weekends and otherwise those homes sit empty.

But Larimore said her question related to creating a community that’s proactive. An increase in private high-rise apartments aimed at students has been a national trend that’s also seen in Ann Arbor, she said, often fueled by out-of-town development money. Pfizer pulled out of Ann Arbor several years ago and UM bought its large research campus, thus taking that property off of the local tax rolls and creating an employment crisis. There’s also been more severe weather because of global warming, she said. What can the community do to be more proactive to these kinds of outside events?

Dick Norton noted that by the very nature of these events, it’s difficult to be proactive. But it’s possible to build a community that’s adaptable and resilient, he said. Creating a diverse economic base is also important, so that the community is not dependent on any one entity like Pfizer or UM.

Norton said he teaches planning, which includes taking stock of how things currently stand and reflects on where you’d like to go. But a plan is never a fixed thing, he added. You need to build in a resiliency and a capacity to respond as conditions change. That’s an unsatisfying answer, he acknowledged, but it’s a complicated world.

Jennifer Hall of the Ann Arbor Housing Commission responded by saying that you can’t discriminate against the type of people who might move into a building. You can plan for the type of building, but not the type of people who ultimately live there, whether they be students or the elderly. It’s a fair housing issue, she said.

Questions & Comments: Gross National Happiness

Pete Wangwongwiroj introduced himself as a University of Michigan student who’s active in the campus sustainability movement – he’s a board member of the student sustainability initiative. He said he’s shifted the focus of his studies from environmental issues to happiness. Happiness is an issue that’s bipartisan and that can unite people, he said. The country focuses its attention on the gross domestic product as an economic indicator, he noted. But there’s a new concept that deserves consideration: gross national happiness. Wangwongwiroj advocated that this concept should be the main consideration of public policy decisions. He asked the panel what has been done in Ann Arbor regarding the well-being and quality of life for residents, and what more can be done?

Jennifer Hall observed that there are some interesting new studies related to that topic and public health, looking at how your environment can make you happy or depressed. People are more depressed who live in neighborhoods with buildings that have boarded up windows and are in disrepair, with uncollected garbage and broken streetlights. She related an anecdote about developers who came to Ann Arbor and were interested in building affordable housing. Hall took them on a tour of one of the city’s low-income neighborhoods – the Bryant area, on the southeast side of Ann Arbor – and reported that the developers were shocked that it was considered low-income, because it was so much nicer than the low-income areas they were used to seeing elsewhere. So Ann Arbor is doing relatively well, she said.

Cheryl Elliott pointed to the involvement of youth as a community resource, through volunteering in different organizations – in youth advisory councils, for example. The community can leverage that enthusiasm and creativity, she said: “They aren’t jaded yet.” In general, a more engaged community does bring more happiness to residents, she said. Elliott also pointed to public events like the recent FestiFools parade as another way that Ann Arbor brings happiness to residents.

John Seto of the Ann Arbor police said that many times, it’s the smaller things that affect quality of life. Many complaints that the police receive have to do with quality-of-life issues – a neighbor’s barking dog, or uncut grass. It’s important not to lose sight of those smaller issues, he said, adding that Ann Arbor does a good job of that. Any complaint is important, he said.

Wendy Rampson noted that as the sustainability project moves ahead, the next step – after a consensus is reached on goals – will be to develop objectives and metrics to measure progress. She asked Wangwongwiroj to fill out a comment card, and said the group that’s working on these sustainability goals would be happy to consider adding happiness as a factor.

Dick Norton noted that happiness is based on a sense of safety and stability, but also on the relationships you build. The problem is that there’s too much focus on GDP, especially at the national level. The government needs to rethink that approach, and people need to resist the constant bombardment of advertising to buy more stuff. Norton also recommended getting backyard chickens to increase happiness – chickens are very calming and fun to watch, he said.

After the panelists finished weighing in, Doug Kelbaugh, a UM professor of architecture and urban planning, stepped to the microphone to make a comment related to accessory dwellings and density (see above). But he prefaced his remarks by saying that although a happiness index might sound frivolous, in fact it’s getting a lot of serious professional and academic respect.

Questions & Comments: Spending Priorities

Thomas Partridge said he wanted to know how the community could prioritize, when there was no sustainable, progressive tax base. He said he’s called on the Ann Arbor city council and Washtenaw County board of commissioners to place a Headlee override on the ballot. He also wondered why there is a dedicated millage for open space and parkland, while at the same time there are homeless people living in parks and under freeway overpasses. The city isn’t giving priority to human values like affordable housing, health care, transportation, education, human rights, and adequate fire and police protection.

Panelists responded primarily by pointing to examples of collaboration. Cheryl Elliott talked about the collaborative funding approach used to support local human service organizations – a joint effort with the city of Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, the Urban County, Washtenaw United Way, and the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation. They aren’t working in silos, she said. They’re communicating and working more effectively with the resources they have.

Julie Grand noted that the city parks collaborates with the county – the proposed Ann Arbor skatepark project is an example of that, she said, and also involves the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation. The county’s parks and recreation commission has committed $400,000 to that project.

Grand also reported that when the city park commissioners discuss land acquisition, the first question they consider is how much it would take away from the city’s tax base. She said they’ve determined that the Headlee rollback isn’t significant enough to be a real concern.

Jennifer Hall thanked Partridge, saying that she appreciated his advocacy for the same people that she was trying to support. She raised the issue of Michigan being a “home rule” state, making it difficult to overcome the jurisdictional boundaries of townships, cities and villages. The city of Ann Arbor’s tax rate is much higher than the townships, she noted, so many people want to live in the townships and pay lower taxes, yet they use the amenities of the city. It results in some “weird dynamics,” she said. Hall also noted that Ann Arbor is very generous in its funding of housing and human services for low-income residents.

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A piece of string too short to use

Writing on Damn Arbor, a blog maintained by a half-dozen self-described “grad students, townies, and derelicts,” Quinn Davis wondered recently: “So. If a citizen gasps during a city council meeting but no one reads about it, what’s the point?”

Davis posed the rhetorical question in the context of an article she’d written for the Washtenaw Voice, a Washtenaw Community College publication she edits. About that article, her advisor ventured: “I worry that our readership may not be that interested enough to get through 800 words you have so far.”

Here at The Ann Arbor Chronicle, we would also worry about an 800-word article. We’d wonder what happened to the other 5,000 words.

Count that exaggeration as a rhetorical flourish.

In fact, since since June of last year, we’ve routinely published items shorter than 500 words. These  items are outcomes of individual public meeting votes and other civic events – they’re collected in a sidebar section we call the Civic News Ticker. Readers can view all those items in one go on the Civic News Ticker page. Readers who prefer to receive The Chronicle using an RSS feed reader can subscribe to just the Civic News Ticker items with this feed: Civic News Ticker Feed.

But back to the rhetorical question: What is the point of ever including details that most people might not ever read, in an article that tops 10,000 words? 

Here at the The Chronicle, we depart from A.J. Munson’s advice, written down in his 1899 book “Making a Country Newspaper”:

Trivial items should always be cut out of a correspondent’s report. The news service outlined here is so extensive that only important and valuable news can have space. John Smith may be pleased to read in the paper that he is husking corn, or that he has a sick calf, but those who pay their money for the paper are entitled to something better than such trivialities. ["Making a Country Newspaper," p. 37]

I’m not going to argue that John Smith’s sick calf needs to be part of a community’s permanent historical archive. But it doesn’t take a wild imagination to think up a scenario where  the inclusion of the sick calf could wind up being “important and valuable” – say for an epidemiologist who was studying the spread of some disease among cows, like “Mad Cow” disease, and wanted to try to get a geographical fix on where to start looking for “patient zero.” But really now, how likely is that?

It’s not at all likely.

Collecting apparently trivial details of public meetings into an article is actually a bit like hoarding various artifacts in one’s home – left over Christmas wrapping paper, empty mayonaise jars or twistie ties off bread wrappers. Mary Morgan, publisher of The Chronicle, had a great aunt who maintained a neatly labeled box: “Pieces of String Too Short to Use.”

In this month’s column, I’d like to explore just one reason why we collect pieces of string too short to use. On their own, they might be too short, but if you save them, someone might be able to tie together events that would otherwise be forgotten.

Here’s an example from the Teeter Talk website, which in some ways was a pilot project for the kind of detail we include in The Chronicle. Those Talks – which I conduct in the guise of HD (Homeless Dave) – are presented to readers pretty much as they happen, including walnuts falling out of trees, or people wandering past, joining in the conversation. This excerpt is from a March 2008 Talk with Kate Bosher, which included a guy who turned out to be a photographer – he wandered past the West Park band shell during the teeter totter interview.

KB: Well, I would like to ask you a question.
HD: Absolutely!
KB: Which it not traceable on the Web, the answer to this, which is, what do you mostly do in between tottering?
HD: What I mostly do in between tottering. You know it’s evolved so that this is the way I spend the majority of my time. Recruiting people to ride, writing up – hey, how’s it going?
Photog: What are you doing?
HD: We are riding a teeter totter, man.
Photog: Can I take a picture?
HD: Absolutely. [to KB] You don’t mind, do you?
KB: Oh, no.
Photog: You’re a traveling movie crew?
HD: Not exactly, but we are documenting it in a very subtle way.
Photog: Am I in the way or something?
HD: No, no you’re fine.
Photog: You’re in the Film Festival? [Ed. note: The 2008 AA Film Festival ran from 25-30 March.]
HD: No, we’re not in the Film Festival. This is actually for an interview website where all the interviews take place on a teeter totter.
Photog: Where do I find that?
HD: Google ‘Ann Arbor teeter totter’ and it should come up.
Photog: Are there pictures?
HD: There’s pictures, lots of pictures.
Photog: Ann Arbor teeter totter.
HD: The URL is homelessdave.com.

I was reminded of that West Park band shell ride a few weeks ago, when an obituary for Jeff Lamb filtered through the Internet. That name stirred an old memory. It’s what made me search the old Teeter Talk interviews for Kate Bosher’s Talk. It continued this way:

Photog: If you Google ‘Jeff Lamb’ on Flickr you’ll see me, or go to ‘Jeff and Leyla’ and you’ll see everything on Ann Arbor.
HD: I’ll do it. Okay. Will do.
Photog: This is pretty amazing. [inaudible]

Lamb posted that photograph of me and Kate on the totter, to his Flickr account.

The brief encounter with Lamb is a piece of string, too short to use. But nevertheless, it’s been stored there in the record of that conversation with Kate Bosher. And it can now be tied to other, longer strands of those who knew him well. They’ll likely recognize, even in that brief thread, a man who seemed to be polite, curious – and at home in West Park.

Readers who are familiar with the history of Ann Arbor Internet writings might also remember Lamb from an old 2008 Ann Arbor is Overrated post, back when the Fifth Avenue residential project now known as Heritage Row was first proposed. Yes, Heritage Row has been around in some form or other that long. Julia Lipman, author of AAiO, served up a blog post by Lamb to her readers about the seven houses on Fifth Avenue that were proposed to be demolished to make way for developer Alex de Parry’s project.

The current iteration of the project, Heritage Row, has been rejected three times by the city council, depending on how you count, but in February, the council offered to waive a portion of the fees if de Parry chooses to resubmit it. De Parry held a citizen participation meeting on March 25, but has not yet taken any further steps in the submittal process.

Lamb stood his ground in that AAiO thread, even taking advantage of some snark about his dog to advocate for the protection of the seven houses.

So back to Quinn’s question: If a citizen gasps at a public meeting, and nobody reads about it, what’s the point of including that short, stubby little piece of string in a report of that meeting?

I think the point is this: Somebody might actually read about it, much later, years from now, and be able to tie that short little piece of string into the fabric of our community life.

Dave Askins is co-founder and editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

A photo taken in 1985 with the Moudyoutenday family at the start of my Peace Corps experience in the Central African Republic. I'm the one looking the least dignified.

But 25 years later, my life was tightly intertwined with that speech, though I didn’t know it at the time. In October of 1985 I was a Peace Corps volunteer, fumbling my way through the first few weeks of life in a mud hut, learning to accept rats and roaches as daily encounters, realizing how much I missed American toilets – teaching English, of all things, to youngsters in the impoverished Central African Republic.

It was a transformative two years for me – but not in the way that recent hagiographic celebrations of the Peace Corps’ 50th anniversary might have you believe. In fact, I emerged from the experience with ambiguous feelings toward the Corps, and specifically toward the mythos that’s arisen around it.

I was struck by that ambiguity again on Thursday morning, as I listened to speakers on the steps of the Michigan Union describe with such certitude the pivotal role that the Peace Corps plays in fostering world peace. It gets to the crux of my discomfort with this message: While I believe wholeheartedly that the program benefits the mostly single, middle-class, recent college grads who make up its ranks, I’m much less convinced of its lasting positive impact on the countries where volunteers serve.

A Volunteer’s Life

So if the big picture is a goal of world peace, what are the pixels that make up that composite? On a daily basis, mundane things consumed our time as Peace Corps volunteers. Fetching and purifying water was a Herculean effort, as was buying and preparing food. It’s one reason why most volunteers hired help – in that way, we made a concrete contribution to the local economy, at least.

In fact, the direct economic incentives for communities to have Peace Corps volunteers stationed there were formidable. The head of the school where I taught also got rent from me and my roommate – another volunteer – for our small hut. My understanding was that the headmaster “helped” with the housing of most volunteers who passed through the school every two years, providing him with steady, supplemental rental income. My guess is that this was of far greater value to him than anything we brought to the classroom, where on any given day 50% of the students skipped class, out of necessity, to work the fields. Bear in mind, this was an elementary school.

We also hired someone to cook on weekdays, and to do our laundry. This was common practice among volunteers in that country and elsewhere. And on the advice of just about everyone, we also hired a “sentinel” to stand guard over our home at night – or rather, to sleep in a chair outside the door – as a deterrent to thieves and snakes.

Our salaries, a pittance by U.S. standards, put us among the affluent in Dekoa, the village where I lived during my first year in the Corps. More powerful, perhaps, was the undertone of even greater wealth that was never far from the surface: The periodic caravans of Peace Corps officials, passing through in Jeeps and delivering care packages from our friends and families; photos of home that showed nearly unfathomable excess, by comparison to our African neighbors; and the knowledge that after our relatively brief stint of service, we’d be returning to this land of plenty. One of the most common questions I heard from Africans while I served as a volunteer could be roughly translated to this: With all that you have at home, what the hell are you doing here?

In fact, for most volunteers I knew, the reasons had more to do with adventure and career ambitions – or lack thereof – than the more noble goals espoused by Peace Corps officials. Many volunteers were recent college graduates who either didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives, or who knew they wanted a career in the foreign service, and viewed the Peace Corps as a way to pay their entry-level dues. Though we were often accused of being CIA operatives, which I found to be both hilarious and unnerving, in fact the volunteers I knew who were on a career path were more likely destined to be bureaucrats than spies.

And being an American bureaucrat in a Third World country wasn’t a bad life, from what I observed. Peace Corps administrators in the Central African Republic lived in spacious homes with servants, were provided with a car and a driver, entertained frequently, and spent considerable time being courted by African officials who were eager to profit from whatever U.S. aid was available. Aside from fairly common gastrointestinal issues – when volunteers gathered, we talked a lot about the color and texture of our bowel movements – life in that strata was hardly a hardship.

But more than that, serving in the Peace Corps – even at higher levels – conferred a status on people who would be unremarkable if they held similar jobs stateside. I squirmed whenever someone told me they thought I was brave or selfless or somehow worthy of praise just for being a Peace Corps volunteer. Would they have offered the same praise if I’d been teaching English in inner-city Detroit or rural Mississippi? Maybe, but not as likely.

So being involved with the Peace Corps clearly benefits the volunteers and other paid staff. There are also benefits I haven’t mentioned, like the ripping away of assumptions that forever transformed my perspective on the world. Not everyone has easy access to potable water? This was a revelation for a young, middle-class Midwesterner like me. More profoundly, living for two years in Africa grounded my belief in the common ties of humanity: a love of family, the ability to laugh at the absurd, to feel the heavy hand of sorrow, to struggle for a better life – all of the things that show how we’re more alike than our differences might mask.

Then what’s the harm, even if the end result is a program that only provides personal growth for individual Americans? Maybe that’s enough – that we volunteers take away a richer understanding of our world, and carry that with us the rest of our lives. Yet I’m not convinced that those benefits offset the massive U.S. aid-industrial complex that’s grown over the past few decades, which seems to foster a culture of dependence and to enrich the developing country’s elite more than its impoverished population. At the least, it’s a debate worth having.

Something to Celebrate

I say all this to bring a little reality into the whole Peace Corps narrative. The tendency to romanticize is strong, particularly given the program’s ties to John F. Kennedy – the Peace Corps capitalizes on its association with the idealism embodied in Kennedy’s Camelot era.

Bob Dascola at the Oct. 14 ceremony marking John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech at the Michigan Union, which Dascola also witnessed.

On Thursday morning, I thought a lot about my own experience in the Peace Corps, as I watched people gather for the ceremony marking Kennedy’s Oct. 14 speech at the Michigan Union. Many of them brought their own reflections, having fond memories of being in that spot 50 years ago. They remember Kennedy’s charisma, and the sense that they were part of something special.

Bob Dascola, whose barbershop is just a couple of blocks away on State Street, was 14 years old at the time, with generous parents who let him stay out late until Kennedy appeared around 2 a.m. The next day he rode his bicycle alongside Kennedy’s motorcade as it left the union – that moment was captured by a Michigan Daily photographer and it ran in the newspaper the next day, Bob told me. He remembers it like it was yesterday.

Thursday’s event drew a lot of people from the community, like Bob, who also attended a smaller gathering across the street, just before the ceremony on the steps of the Michigan Union. Standing in a tight cluster at the corner of State and South University, they were there to unveil the latest historic street exhibit, a program spearheaded by Ray Detter 11 years ago. If you ask him, Ray will tell you the practical realities of getting this project off the ground took tremendous effort. (Nothing like doing laundry in an African village by beating it against a rock, but still.)

This newest street exhibit marks the Kennedy “Peace Corps” speech, which was actually just some brief remarks that included a general call to international service, as well as a call to help in his presidential campaign. The speech reflects Kennedy’s mastery at mixing the practical and the ideal, and it struck me that many people at the event – politicians and community leaders like Bob Guenzel, Joan Lowenstein and Leah Gunn, among others – often do the same.

And, of course, that’s what we do here at The Chronicle, too – balancing the idealism of fighting for an open, inclusive government and working to  inform this community better, with the practical reality of slogging through a city council report or trying to sell an ad.

It’s important that the narrative of our work includes both aspects, because one doesn’t exist without the other. I’d hope that more of our elected officials and other community leaders embrace that as well – it’s important, even essential, to acknowledge the sometimes uncomfortable reality, even if it doesn’t meet your ideal, even if it isn’t pretty, even if it’s sometimes painful to confront that reality in public.

And that’s an ideal worth celebrating.

Jo Mathis

I don’t willingly leave my comfort zone. And don’t tell Oprah, but I’m comfortable with that.

I don’t skydive. I don’t sign up to melt in a Sedona sweat lodge. And I do not speak to big groups of people if I can possibly help it.

It’s not that I mind being the occasional center of attention. This picture of me, for instance, was taken on my last day at The Ann Arbor News minutes after my boss had left the building.

I am lying on my belly on his desk.

But I was among friends. It just sort of happened. And I didn’t actually say anything. (Unless you count: “If this had been my desk all along, this paper would not be closing!”)

All this is to explain why nothing within me wants to be among those speakers at Friday night’s Ignite Ann Arbor.

And why I already admire the 15 people who will.

Ignite is an event started three years ago in Seattle that’s slowly creeping across the country. It’s a chance for people to speak on any topic for five minutes, using 20 slides that rotate every 15 seconds.

Electrical engineer Ryan Burns was surprised Ann Arbor was Ignite-less when he moved here from Chicago 18 months ago. So he helped start the first one in June at the Neutral Zone, and looks forward to the next Ignite Friday night at UM’s Ross School of Business Blau Auditorium.

So who are these participants?

“They’re people who are passionate about what they’re doing, or what their interests are,” says Burns. “And they want to tell the public it.”

He says foodies often talk to foodies, academics to academics, and tech and music and creative types talk amongst themselves.

Ignite, he says, is a chance for all sorts of people to get together.

What’s not to love about that? And as one who believes no speech should ever be longer than five minutes anyhow, I give the whole concept a hearty hip-hip.

Ignite Ann Arbor is free for participants and attendees alike. Nobody makes anything other than a bit of publicity in some cases. But strong commercial pitches are not allowed. Nor will anyone be talking politics or religion.

“We want it to be entertaining,” says Burns.

He noted that Ignite is one of many “open geek-related events” around town – including OpenEverything, ArbCamp, CloudCamp, GoTech Meetup, NewTech Meetup – that help make Ann Arbor a dynamic environment for startups in many fields.

“They are part of the public commons where people can interact in a serendipitous way not available online,” Burns added in an e-mail.

Angela Kujava

Angela Kujava, acting interim director of 826michigan in Ann Arbor, a nonprofit writing and tutoring organization for students, will speak Friday night about the importance of one-on-one tutoring.

She’s a big supporter of Ignite.

“Just the sheer number of people who are able to speak about something they are truly passionate about is incredible, and to be able to do so in front of an audience in your own community is really important, and very engaging for the community,” she says. “The fact that they’re five-minute speeches is very much an exercise in brevity when you’re editing and writing these things. Every single word is important.”

She admits she’s nervous.

“You get to the point where you think, ‘OK, I’ve got it. It’s five minutes and two seconds, but they’ll forgive me for those two seconds,’” she says. “Then you practice for the first time and you read the speech in four minutes and 24 seconds.”

What’s wrong with that?

“Then your speech doesn’t match up with your slides. You have no control over when those slides rotate. It’s every 15 seconds. So yeah, there’s a lot of practice involved.”

I look forward to hearing Angela and the others at Ignite Ann Arbor on Friday. To me, there’s nothing quite like the feeling you get when the lights go down, the curtain goes up, and all you have to do is … nothing.

That’s what I’m talking about.

The doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the event starts at 7. For more information, or to RSVP, go to igniteannarbor.eventbrite.com.

Friday’s participants include:

• Mary Lemmer: I Scream for Gelato
• Garrett Scott: Rosicrucian Barber-Orators, Humanist Doodles, and a Bible Dictionary amid the Cherokee.
• Patti Smith: The Braille Embossinator: Technology for the Visually Impaired and Disabled
• Carl Wright: How to Spin a Rope
• Linda Diane Feldt: There Is a Free Lunch – and Twitter Helps to Find It.
• Devon Persing: Ambient Librarianship, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Job.
• Aaron Worsham: Why Geeks Love Wood.
• Aaron Santos: How Many Licks Does It Take?
• Brenda E. Bentley: These Buns are Made for Walking
• Angela Kujava: The Uprising Behind the Robot Store or, Why One-On-One Attention Is Crucial for Our Students.
• Bill Van Loo: Are Our Kids Technologically Literate?
• Jack Zaientz: The Silver Age of American Jewish Music is Happening Now! And Why We’re Missing It.
• Bilal Ghalib: Hacker Spaces and PBLE’s – American Re-education and the Importance of Making Things
• David Bloom: Why Sex Is Great

About the author: Jo Mathis is an Ann Arbor-based writer.

The home page for Chelsea Update, a new online local news site.

As a journalist, Heather Newman is perhaps best known for the technology column she wrote at the Detroit Free Press. Though she left that newspaper last year for a job at the University of Michigan, the Chelsea area resident has found another way to use her journalism skills. This month, she launched an online news site called Chelsea Update, focused on news and information in the town just west of Ann Arbor. In an email interview, we asked Newman to tell us about her new venture.

What got you started down this road? As you were thinking about the possibility of starting this venture, what were the pros and cons in weighing whether you’d actually do it?

I’d been writing for newspapers for almost 20 years when I left to join the marketing staff at the University of Michigan Press (its book publishing division) in December. Working here has been terrific, but I really felt that journalistic itch, so I was looking for something I could do in the evenings and on weekends to keep my hand in. I’ve lived in the Chelsea area for nine years, so I’m naturally nosy about what goes on there, and the only newspaper in the area is a weekly. It seemed like a great place to start.

The possible cons were a shortage of time on my part (always) and the fact that I was reasonably certain this wasn’t going to amount to much in terms of pay. That’s ok. I work better when continually busy, and I’ve done a number of things for free in the course of my journalistic career; all have resulted in something great down the road. Call it karma.

What are your broad goals for this venture, both for you and for the community?

Chelsea needs a reliable source of daily local news. Folks here want to know what the City Council is doing, but they also want to know what the rock at Pierce Park is painted like today, and who passed away recently, and what the gas prices and weather are like right now. They want to know what to plan for, what’s new and what’s happening this weekend. A continuously updating site can provide all of that.

What type of content will be on the site, and how did you determine that? Who will be writing/reporting? Will you be hiring freelancers? Who’s doing photos?

The site focuses on news and information about the Chelsea area, with some features (I’m launching a Virtual Gallery for local artists, for example). We already have a wonderful events-oriented site in the area (www.chelsea-mi.com), and my focus was on filling the gap: timely, extremely local news for folks who live in and care about the town.

So far, it’s mostly been a one-woman band, and the likelihood of my hiring freelancers is slim unless the income reaches a level I honestly don’t expect. I’ve been doing some of the photos, but other family members have contributed as well (my mother, my husband), so that part of it has been a group effort. I’d like to see some regular features that include local residents’ writing and photography, and the Virtual Gallery is a small start to that (the copy and photos are provided by the artist in that case).

Are you partnering with anyone or any group on this, like the chamber of commerce or local bloggers?

Membership in the chamber is on my budget as one of my first reinvestments of income from the site. Everyone from the Downtown Development Authority to the city to the Chelsea Center for the Arts to local merchants have been extremely helpful in passing along news tips and helping out with special projects like the Gallery, but the site is independent. I’ve had too many years in newspapers for it to be any other way.

What are you calling your venture – an online newspaper? Publication?

It’s a news and information site. There are no plans for a printed edition, so calling it a newspaper or publication seems counterintuitive. My attitude toward newspapers has always been that they are, in some cases, all the right information in exactly the wrong package. My site attempts to take some material that would have been at home in a tiny, local daily and combine it with special features only possible on the Web.

You designed the site yourself. What were you trying to accomplish in the design?

For the techies and bloggers out there, the site runs on a self-hosted WordPress backbone, with a tweaked version of the Amazing Grace theme by Vladimir Prelovac providing the basis for the design. WordPress is what makes this site possible on my short time allotment; much of what I need is already plug-and-play, thanks to one developer or another, meaning that the plugins and widgets I have to design from scratch have been limited. That lets me concentrate on the writing, since this is a solo effort.

The Amazing Grace theme is pure Chelsea: town and country, classy and natural, all rolled into one. I couldn’t have asked for a better palette to start from. The objective of the site is to represent Chelsea honestly, but with affection; I love living there, and I admit that bias up front. Then again, looking at the slide show of pictures that show up in the postcards at the top of the page each time you visit, who could blame me?

Heather Newman

What’s the business model – have you incorporated? If you’re selling ads (and it looks like you are), who’s selling and how did you set your rates?

The paperwork is still in progress, but Chelsea Update is being incorporated and registered with the state. It’s for-profit, though the chances of it ever actually bringing in positive cash flow are pretty small.

You’re talking to my ad sales department. Rates vary depending on the size and placement of the ads (one thing I’m still tweaking is all the locations where they’ll appear – the one in the right sidebar seems solid, so it’s staying, but there’ll be at least one more vertical and one horizontal position).

Setting the rates has been one of the struggles of the formal launch. Chelsea draws a highly interested and involved community of people from Jackson to Ann Arbor – the Facebook page for the events site in Chelsea, for example, has about half as many fans as [The Chronicle's] own, when Chelsea itself is only a bit over 4,000 residents. But it thinks of itself as an insulated little town, so merchants don’t welcome big-city ad rates. The final rates won’t be set until the day of formal launch.

What’s your goal – do you envision this eventually creating a livelihood? How much have you budgeted for startup costs, and how are you funding that? Any plans to take on investors?

I never expect this site to create a full-time livelihood for me. I enjoy my job at the university, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m careful to keep any work on the site to evenings and weekends; I like what I do, and don’t want to intrude on my day job.

Startup costs have been minimal; a bit of hosting space, a few promotional materials. I’ve paid for them out of pocket. Investors would be welcome, but I’m not going out of my way to solicit them. I’ve reserved the name in a few other nearby towns, but I think one of the things that has the potential to make Chelsea Update successful is its intensely-local focus, which would be more difficult to replicate in towns where I didn’t live.

Looks like you’ve done a soft launch – what bugs have you been working out? Who have you been “testing” the site on?

Projects like this always start with a million ideas: What would I want to read? What are we missing in local coverage? What should it look like, what’s easy to navigate, what links need to be there, what additional information are people going to want? Soft launching meant that I could test all that on the fly, with an audience consisting mostly of people who were contributing news tips to the site. The sidebars, in particular, keep changing as I tinker with what information people want most and how to keep things uncluttered.

Just this week, I added the “Top News” feature after reading a well-thought-out critique of one of [The Chronicle's] competitors. The blog format is wonderful for news, that critic wrote, until you have to wade through three screens of events and less-urgent information just to see that the city courthouse burned down four hours ago.

How do you plan to publicize the site?

I’m sending postcards to members of every local group I can get my hands on (and working with groups and businesses that have been contributing news tips to the site to publicize it at their events and locations). I have Facebook and Google and MSN ad credits, thanks to my hosting company, and I’m making good use of those. I’m making use of very limited advertising/display space: a display at the area’s farm markets, for example, and magnetic signs on our cars. That’s another advantage to being so locally-focused.

Tell us about your background.

I won’t bore you with the whole resume. I started professional life as a sports reporter for the Tucson Citizen in Arizona after doing some stringing work for the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette (back when they were separate papers). I moved on to cops, then courts, then city hall, then left for a job on the business desk at The (Nashville) Tennessean, where I edited our technology page, wrote about the auto plants and transportation and unions, filled in as the Business Editor when she was out and did investigative stories involving analysis of computer databases. My nationally syndicated column on technology started there.

I joined the Detroit Free Press in 1997 as part of its Enterprise Team doing special projects, and the paper quickly picked up my tech column again, which led to my covering tech full-time for a number of years. Eventually tech was moved to the Features department, and the last few years of my work there I covered everything from casinos to health and fitness to video games. Now I’m the Trade Marketing Manager for The University of Michigan Press, where I work on publicity for the books we expect to reach a mass market audience.

[On the personal side], I live just outside Chelsea with my husband Kevin, an auto-body painter; two cats; and my 8-year-old daughter, Kaia, who rocks.

The RelaxStation expansion is expected to be complete in October. Architect Robert Black, left, takes measurements.

Seven years ago, Eileen Bristol was about to move to California when the property at Huron and First came up for sale.

“I said, ‘Oh, man, I love that building – what could I do there?” she recalls, laughing.

The building was a former gas station built in the 1930s, and what she decided to do was start RelaxStation, a small walk-in massage business that crammed a lot of personality into the tight 280-square-foot space. Business has been good – so good that “we pretty well maxed out the space,” she says.

It was time to expand, and her project to more than double the space – a $900,000 $90,000 investment – is nearing completion.

“To me, it seemed like the obvious next step for the business,” she says.

She’s enclosing the canopy that served as covering for open-air massages during decent weather, but keeping as much light as possible with large windows and French doors. The travertine tile is installed and awaits grouting, and covers a radiant heating system.

There’ll be much more space for the 30 part-time massage therapists to do their work. “They’ve just been wonderful working in such close conditions, staying out of each others’ way,” Bristol says. They’ve been gracious about the chaos during construction as well, working in tents and using a truck for their office.

Bristol also is expanding her signature biodynamic garden along the Huron Street side, using an approach developed by Rudolf Steiner. Some designers wanted to build a wall there, she says. “I said no – that garden is for everyone who walks by or drives by. It enriches people’s lives, even people who aren’t clients.”

The staff at RelaxStation uses a truck as their office during the expansion project.

Architect Robert Black, who met Bristol through the local Rudolf Steiner movement, did the design work, and sees it as more than just another project. He describes the business as a “gateway to Ann Arbor,” and in stark contrast to the tall Ashley Terrace structure going up across the street.

“It’s about what it means to the city of Ann Arbor and the quality of life here,” Black says. “This is what it means to be Ann Arbor.”

Ann Arbor City Council members also had praise for her project when they approved the plan earlier this year, thanking her for investing in the business years ago at a time when there were concerns about the Delonis Center, a shelter for the homeless that was being built just down the street.

For her part, Bristol just wants to bring a little beauty into her corner of the city. “I think that building has a real soul to it,” she says.

But people are the heart. “When clients become regulars,” Bristol says, “they feel part of the community here.” To celebrate that, she’ll be throwing a party on Sunday night at the business, where she’ll be playing electric bass with her eight-piece jazz funk band, First Flight. Last year’s event drew about 300 people.

Note: Tip o’ The Chronicle hat to Tom Brandt, who put the RelaxStation project on The Chronicle’s radar in a Sept. 10 Stopped.Watched. item.