From left: Julie Grand (Ward 3 challenger), Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3 incumbent), Jack Eaton (Ward 4 challenger), Mike Anglin (Ward 5 incumbent), Kirk Westphal (Ward 2 candidate), and Sabra Briere (Ward 1 incumbent).

In the Aug. 6 Democratic primary, only two wards offer contested races. In Ward 3, Democratic voters will choose between incumbent Stephen Kunselman and Julie Grand. Ward 4 voters will have a choice between incumbent Marcia Higgins and Jack Eaton. Higgins was reported to have been sick and was unable to attend.

The format of the event eventually allowed other candidates who are unopposed in the Democratic primary to participate: Mike Anglin (Ward 5 incumbent), Sabra Briere (Ward 1 incumbent), and Kirk Westphal, who’s challenging incumbent Jane Lumm in Ward 2. Lumm, who was elected to the council as an independent, was in the audience at the forum but didn’t participate. The event was held at the Ann Arbor Community Center on North Main Street. The Chronicle’s coverage is presented in a multiple-part series, based on common threads that formed directly in response to questions posed to the candidates, or that cut across multiple responses.

This final installment of coverage from the June 8 city council candidate forum focuses on the remarks candidates made that were overtly about the campaign – to the extent that those remarks weren’t included in one of the previous reports on this forum.

The fact that the forum was hosted by the Ann Arbor Democratic Party meant that party politics was an obvious potential topic. State representative Jeff Irwin set that tone early as he addressed the audience with a legislative update. And Ward 2 candidate Kirk Westphal, who’ll face independent Jane Lumm in the general election, stressed that he is a Democrat.

Part 1 of this series focused on the candidates’ concept of and connection to Ann Arbor, while Part 2 looked at their personal styles of engagement and views of how the council interacts. Part 3 reported on the theme of connections, including physical connections like transportation, as well as how people are connected to local government. And Part 4 covered the theme of downtown and its role in the life of the city. Chronicle election coverage is tagged with “2013 primary election.”

The League of Women Voters of the Ann Arbor Area will be holding its candidate forums for Ward 3 and Ward 4 primaries on July 10 at the studios of Community Television Network. Those forums will be broadcast on CTN’s Channel 19 and will be available online.

The Campaign

Julie Grand led things off by saying she had truly enjoyed the opportunity so far of “getting out in the community, listening to your concerns, listening to your solutions.”

During her closing comments, Grand added that if people at the forum had other questions about her campaign, they could look at the literature that had been placed on tables in the back of the room. Her website would be live shortly, she said. [Grand's website] She offered to talk after the forum or when people saw her out in the community – as she was not taking any vacation over the next couple of months.

Grand felt she has a strong record of public service to the community – one that she said has been characterized by hard work, transparency and strong public engagement. That’s what she’d continue to do, she said. [Grand is chair of the Ann Arbor park advisory commission, on which she's served since 2007. She has served on several task forces during that time, including one that's currently focused on the North Main/Huron River corridor.] Grand said she is looking forward to the opportunity to continue listening to people’s ideas and working hard for them.

Stephen Kunselman said he’s seeking re-election. Back in 2011, he noted, he’d campaigned on the tagline of a “strong voice, bold vision, an honest ethic and a new direction.” This year, his tagline is “experienced, effective, ethical leadership you can trust.” [Kunselman's website]

Kunselman thanked Grand for throwing her hat in the ring. Campaigning is not easy, he said. He allowed that it’s a good time because you meet a lot of people – but it’s not that much fun. He thanked other candidates who stepped forward, because it really does give the city a broad representation of interest in the dialogue that’s going to be taking place in the next couple of months, he said. He repeated his tagline for this year: “Experienced, effective, ethical leadership you can trust.” He’d be going door-to-door over the next couple of months, he said.

He’s accomplished a lot during his service on the city council that he’s very proud of, Kunselman said, working with councilmembers Sabra Briere and Mike Anglin. As an example, he gave the public art ordinance that was given a major revision at a recent council meeting. The revision to the public art ordinance meant that the city would no longer be transferring restricted monies into pooled funds for public art.

As another example, he gave his service as the council appointee to the taxicab board. When there were complaints about limo drivers assaulting University of Michigan female students, he had stood up to make sure that the police department was addressing that issue, he said. When there was a proposal to close fire stations in the last year, he’d opposed that with others on the council, and added FTEs during the last fiscal year. About the former YMCA site – a city-owned property at Fifth and William – he noted that he’d campaigned in 2011 on the idea of selling it. A broker is now being selected by the city administrator, so that the city can be put back on the tax rolls again.

Kunselman commented on the houses along Main Street – across from the Ann Arbor Community Center, where the forum was held. He noted that the dilapidated houses, which had been part of the demised Near North affordable housing development, had now been demolished. [Demolition had been delayed, in part because the city expected that federal funds could be used to cover the cost, but that proved not to be the case.] Where did that money for demolition come from? Kunselman asked. When he’d been returned to the council by voters, he said, he’d used his experience working in local government. And because of that experience, he said, he’d pushed not for using the city attorney’s office to deal with blight in the community. Instead, he’d said: Let’s use the building department. He’d previously run a dangerous buildings program in a prior position, and he knew that the building department could be effective.

There’s a tremendous difference between playing poker politics and putting the cards on the table for all the public to see, Kunselman said. He gave forum attendees information on his campaign kickoff event.

Jack Eaton said it’s time now to turn attention “from stopping the bad ideas to a positive agenda.” He said it’s important to revisit the idea of protecting the city’s parkland from misuse. “We need to address our infrastructure needs. We need to address our unfunded liabilities. I want to help rebuild our police and fire departments,” he said. He’s running because he wants to be responsive to Ward 4 voters. But he also wants to represent the interests of the entire city. [Eaton's website]

Eaton reported that when he goes door-to-door talking to voters, he hears repeatedly that people really like it when he talks about commonsense priorities. It’s not that difficult to understand that public safety is more important than some of the other things the city spends money on, he said. It’s not that difficult to understand that when roads are in horrible condition, the city needs to address those problems. It’s not that hard to understand that neighborhood flooding should have been addressed a long time ago and we have just ignored the symptoms, Eaton said.

Sabra Briere ventured that she’d been “annoying my spouse lately” because every time she goes through a neighborhood and sees the sidewalks being repaired, she says, “If I have accomplished nothing else, I’ve done that.” She described how the first thing she did after she was elected to the council was to object to the method of paying for sidewalks. At that time, it was an individual’s responsibility as a property owner to pay for the sidewalk adjacent to your property. She was really happy that the community was asked to approve a millage for that, and had agreed to pass a millage to pay for sidewalk maintenance.

“Infrastructure is my big deal,” Briere stated. Her other big deal, she said, was a focus on affordable housing and human services. She’d been working on that “more quietly perhaps than some people might like, but it is making a real change in the budget.” She pointed out that this year the council was able to allocate $100,000 to the city’s affordable housing trust fund, when that had not been done in the last several years. That’s important because it’s a community value, she said.

Briere said she’s really tried over the last few years to be open and available to the public – to benefit from other people’s viewpoints as much as possible. Sometimes she’ll play devil’s advocate, she said – countering somebody’s view with someone else’s view to see how well they can defend it. Yes, she has a website, Briere said, and yes, you can e-mail her. But she pointed out that you can also talk with her – every Monday morning at the Northside Grill at 7:30 a.m. She stays until at least 9 a.m., she said. Some of the candidates and councilmembers at the forum had come to visit her there. She’s there to hear what anybody has to say. If nobody shows up, she has other stuff to do while she’s sitting there – adding that Northside Grill makes “a decent cup of coffee.”

Democratic Party

As a gathering of members of the city Democratic Party, it was not unusual to hear partisan talk at the June 8 candidate forum.

Democratic Party: State Politics

Jeff Irwin – representative for Michigan’s 53rd House District, which includes most of Ann Arbor – led off the morning by filling some time until moderator Mike Henry was able to arrive.

Irwin described how progress had been made on the possibility of Michigan adding LGBT individuals [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] as a protected class under its civil rights law. Based on an NPR news story he’d heard, Irwin indicated that Republican Rep. Frank Foster would be willing to introduce the necessary changes to Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen civil rights act. “This is something we have been working on in Lansing as Democrats for at least a decade,” Irwin said.

Michigan is one of only a few states that does not have that language in its civil rights act, Irwin continued, so Democrats have been working on this issue for years and years, trying to get LGBT protection inserted into Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen act. Explaining why it’s a Republican who’s bringing the proposal forward, Irwin explained: “When those of us like myself get to Lansing and see the Republicans control everything, we realize very quickly that, you know, the best way [to move the issue forward] is to get a Republican to lift up the banner and carry it across the finish line.”

So a number of Democrats had been working behind the scenes with Republicans to try to encourage them, particularly younger Republicans, Irwin said. “… [I]f they want to have a political career in Michigan, that if they want to survive in politics, they need to understand that the politics of this issue is moving so fast that they are going to get run over and flattened if they don’t get on the right side of it.” If the Republican Party wants to maintain its “bigoted position” on marriage, he said, then the Elliott-Larsen change would be a way to mollify that and “save themselves.” Irwin thought a number of Republicans had been convinced that a change to Elliott-Larsen is a good move for the Republican Party in the next couple of years.

And in response to a question from local attorney David Cahill about Democratic Party prospects statewide in 2014, Irwin took the opportunity to heap criticism on the most recent Republican U.S. president. Michigan Democrats are looking at 2006 as a model for how to achieve success, but one part of the 2006 success had been the fact that George W. Bush was in office – something that couldn’t be repeated, Irwin noted, describing Bush as a “buffoon.”

Democratic Party: Candidate Forum

The candidate forum also touched on partisan themes. In particular Kirk Westphal asserted his Democratic Party credentials. Although he’s unopposed in the Ward 2 primary, he’ll face incumbent Jane Lumm in the general election. Lumm is running as an independent, though she ran for mayor in 2004 as a Republican and served in the mid-1990s on the city council as a Republican. Lumm attended the June 8 forum and sat in the audience. She told The Chronicle she had no expectation of participating in the candidate forum, and that she was there just to listen.

In his remarks, Westphal noted that he’s unopposed in the August primary by saying, “I’m the only Democrat running for the seat in the Second Ward – so I’ll keep my remarks brief and mostly focused on personal background.”

Later, Westphal stated, “I’m a strong Democrat,” and went on to list out where he stood on basic issues. He believes in a strong government role in the environment, the arts, transit, affordable housing and in successful cities overall. He wanted to bring those values to the Ward 2 council seat.

Westphal characterized the local government as the face of the community. Some folks think that a local government should play a very small role, he allowed, He felt, however, that the local government captures the personality of the community. He added, “And I’m frankly running because a lot of my wardmates and I have not seen progressive Democratic values reflected in this council seat. And we believe that these values are important to the future, both locally and nationally.”

The other explicit mention of the Democratic Party came from Sabra Briere, who told the audience that she’s sorry there’s no Democratic primary in Ward 1 – saying that’s not her doing.

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However, that total was based on a city clerk staff decision to disallow a sheet of 20 signatures submitted by Issa. Beaudry reversed that decision after discussing the issue with assistant city attorney Mary Fales and Issa himself.

The deadline for submitting nominating petitions was Tuesday, May 10, at 4 p.m. With that deadline minutes away, members of Issa’s family – standing at the window of the city clerk’s second floor offices – had pled the case with city clerk staff that a sheet containing 20 signatures should have been allowed to count. Clerk staff had based the decision to disqualify the sheet of signatures – from members of Issa’s family – based on a statement from Marwan Issa, who had circulated the signature sheet.

City clerk staff say that Issa told them he’d left the petition sheet at a house where several Issa family members live so that they could sign it. Staff had disallowed the sheet of signatures because it’s required that a petition circulator witness the signature of people signing the petition. A family member of Issa’s at the clerk’s office window on Tuesday afternoon felt that the circulator may have misunderstood the question asked of him by the clerk’s staff, saying that the sheet had been properly circulated. [.pdf of Michigan state election law, Act 116 of 1954]

On Monday, Beaudry wrote in an email to The Chronicle that “Mr. Issa informed us that he misunderstood Amanda’s [city clerk staff] question regarding the circulator certificate on the page in question, which included mostly family members’ signatures. He [Issa] informed us that he did not mean to indicate that he did not circulate the sheet personally. Given this information, I don’t have any other reason to assume the circulator sheet is not valid so we were able to verify and count 10 of the 20 signatures on that page. Those 10 signatures brought Mr. Issa over the required 100 signatures needed to qualify.”

Other Ward 3 Democratic candidates who submitted enough nominating signatures to qualify were incumbent Stephen Kunselman and Ingrid Ault. [They both graduated Pioneer High School in 1981. No word on whether the 30th reunion festivities will include campaign speeches.] The winner of the Democratic primary in Ward 3 will face Republican David Parker in November.

Jean Ledwith King at the March 26, 2011 dinner to rename the Women's Center of Southeastern Michigan in her honor. (Photo courtesy of Wayne Dabney)

On Saturday, about 300 people gathered to pay tribute to one of those women whose work broke ground for the rest of us: Jean Ledwith King. The event was hosted by the Women’s Center of Southeastern Michigan, which has been renamed in her honor.

As a former board member for the center, I expected to see some familiar faces – staff, volunteers and donors I’d known from my relatively short tenure there. But the turnout for Jean went far beyond that. Judges and attorneys, university administrators, elected officials from across the county and state, business leaders and many others came to say thanks for her years of dogged work on behalf of equal opportunity for women. She calls herself a bomb thrower, but on Saturday she was recognized more for the foundation she’s helped build, particularly through her work on Title IX issues related to high school and college athletics.

Jean’s life story is inspiring, as were reflections by the event’s keynote speaker, Olympian Micki King. (Though they aren’t related by blood, they certainly are in spirit.) Their stories made me think of other histories, too – we all have them, closer to home and less notable, perhaps, but also worth honoring as a reminder of how it’s possible to make dramatic societal changes within a lifetime.

Pressure to Conform

My maternal grandmother was born in the late 1800s, before women had the right to vote – a right granted by the U.S. Constitution’s Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, just four years before my mother was born. (Even as I type those words, the timeframe still strikes me as incredible – less than 100 years ago? How is that possible?)

Neither my mother nor her three sisters went to college. It wasn’t until my mother was in her 70s that she expressed regret about this to me. She told me that one of her older sisters had offered to pay for her education, but that her mother wouldn’t allow it – she was supposed to get a job until she found a husband and started having children, and there was no room for debate.

My mother did what was expected of her, and suffered bouts of depression and anxiety her entire life. Her insecurities over her lack of a college education must have been especially difficult to manage, given that she worked among educators – first as executive secretary for the president of Butler University in the 1950s, then as a secretary at the grade school that my sister and I attended. She was sensitive to even a hint of perceived condescension, and had no patience for people she thought were “too big for their britches.”

It took great force of will to combat society’s pressure to conform. That’s what makes Jean’s own story all the more remarkable. Her mother did go to college, and after Jean was born she went back to earn a Ph.D in psychology. That set the stage for Jean’s own experience – graduating in the 1940s from the University of Michigan, where she met her husband, John King. She then had three children before deciding at age 41 to enroll in law school – that was in 1965. Jean credits her mother with setting an example of how a woman could manage both a family and a profession, and she credits her husband for supporting her desire to pursue that goal.

On Saturday, Jean recalled how she was one of only 10 women attending UM’s law school at the time – today, nearly half of UM law students are women. And of course there were no female faculty members then. You could walk through the law quad for days – even weeks – without seeing another women, she said. It’s hard to imagine now, the isolation that must have permeated her experience.

Challenging the Status Quo

After graduation, Jean built a career out of challenging the status quo. (Many of her stories are described in a booklet by Stephanie Kadel Taras, based on interviews with Jean and distributed at Saturday’s event.) A political activist, Jean was a Democratic Party chair for Ann Arbor’s Fifth Ward, was elected to the Michigan Democratic Party’s state central committee, and co-founded the party’s state women’s caucus in 1970. She fought against the discrimination of women in Michigan’s delegate selection process to the Democratic National Convention – a fight that led to the party requiring that half its Michigan delegates be women. The national party adopted that same rule a few years later.

On the national level, in the early 1970s Jean was also among the founders of the National Women’s Political Caucus, which worked to promote female candidates. She was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1984, when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman nominated for vice president on a major political party ticket. At Saturday’s dinner when the emcee, Carol Cain, announced the news that Ferraro had died earlier that day, an audible gasp rose from the crowd.

Jean was involved in litigation for women’s equality in many venues, but she’s perhaps best known for advocacy on behalf of female student athletes. Much of her work regarded compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments, which was passed by Congress in 1972. It’s a very simple statement, with far-reaching consequences:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance…

The same year that Title IX was enacted, Jean’s family had a breakthrough of their own, which eventually led to Jean’s involvement in gender equity issues related to athletics. Her daughter, Sally, decided to try out for Little League baseball that year. Though unusual, that decision wasn’t challenged by league organizers – Ann Arbor had an ordinance then that prohibited sex discrimination in public schools.

But it wasn’t the norm in the state or nationally, and Jean was contacted later that year and asked to help out in a gender equity lawsuit against the Little League in New Jersey. She got an affidavit from Sally’s doctor, attesting that playing baseball hadn’t harmed Sally physically. Word got out that Jean was sympathetic to these issues, and clients came calling.

Over the years, the cases that Jean litigated touched on dozens of sports, from track and wrestling to football and basketball. One of her highest profile cases was brought against Michigan State University, involving the unequal treatment of the women’s varsity basketball team. It took seven years before MSU finally settled the case out of court. The lead plaintiff – and a member of that women’s team – was Carol Hutchins, who’s been head coach of the UM women’s softball team since 1985.

Of course, these are just brief glimpses of Jean’s decades-long work. The Bentley Historical Library has archived 24 boxes of documents from her career, from 1964 through 2004 – it’s a formidable corpus, as formidable as Jean herself. (And I speak with some authority on this, having been on the receiving end of her formidable opinions when I was opinion editor at The Ann Arbor News.)

The stories about Jean’s work with female athletes in particular hit home for me. In the 1970s my own sister was a varsity athlete – in her senior year of high school, her basketball team won the citywide tournament in Indianapolis. If you’re a Hoosier, you know this was a very big deal. I asked her about it recently, and she reminded me that at the time, there was no statewide tournament for girls – even though basketball is nearly a religion in Indiana.

She also told me it never occurred to her to pursue sports in college. There were no role models for her, no one who encouraged her to do more with her athleticism. And I should note that we weren’t living in rural Indiana – my graduating class in high school had nearly 1,000 students. Even so, athletics just wasn’t something that most people took seriously for girls, regardless of their talents.

A Future Built on the Past

So as I listened to others on Saturday describe Jean’s impact, I thought about how the lives of my sister, mother and grandmother might have been so very different had they lived in different times. And how the girls born today will view those past experiences as quaint. Their challenges will be different, but I hope they don’t forget how far we’ve come.

In her remarks to the crowd on Saturday, Angela Costley Harris – chair of the Women’s Center board – described how her young son had asked why the Women’s Center isn’t called the People’s Center. Wasn’t that sexist? She told him that someday, she hoped, they could change the center’s name in that way. But for now, many women still face obstacles that places like the Women’s Center help them overcome. I would add that we need look no farther than the massive sex discrimination case against Wal-Mart – being heard this week in the U.S. Supreme Court – to see that there’s still work to be done.

In fact, it’s remarkable to me that we’re still living through so many firsts, even now. Debbie Stabenow, the first female U.S. senator from Michigan, was among those who sent a videotaped message of congratulations to Jean that was played at Saturday’s event. Hired nine years ago, Mary Sue Coleman was the University of Michigan’s first female president – and UM’s business school just hired its first female dean, Alison Davis-Blake, this year. Dave Brandon, UM’s athletic director, attended Saturday’s dinner – that job hasn’t yet been held by a woman.

Still, it was heartening to see so many women leaders on Saturday – female judges like Libby Hines and Melinda Morris, politicians like Ann Arbor city councilmember Sabra Briere and former state legislator Alma Wheeler Smith, entrepreneurs like Alicia Torres, business owners like Patricia Davenport, nonprofit leaders like Debra Polich, university executives like Cynthia Wilbanks.

In this context, it’s fitting that March is women’s history month. And though I’m generally more inclined to look ahead than to spend time thinking about the past, I was grateful to bear witness on Saturday to a deserved show of thanks for Jean – and, by extension, to all our foremothers who’ve waged this battle, often without accolades. We are deeply indebted to them for their vision of a better world.

Thanks, Jean.

About the writer: Mary Morgan is publisher and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Jennie Needleman kept time at the Ann Arbor Democratic Party candidate forum on Saturday morning. (Photo by the writer.)

On Saturday, July 11, the Ann Arbor Democratic Party hosted a forum for candidates in contested primary races for Ann Arbor City Council in Wards 3 and 5.

Responses from Ward 5 candidates audience questions are in a separate article.

The format consisted of questioners chosen in random order, who had 30 seconds each to ask a question. Each candidate then had one minute to respond. At the start and the end of the forum, each candidate had three minutes for a statement. At the end there was a chance for a three-minute closing statement.

Time was kept by Jennie Needleman, who chairs Ward 5 for the Ann Arbor Democratic Party. Responses are presented here in the order they were given at the forum, which rotated among candidates who attended. Jeff Irwin, a Washtenaw County commissioner, moderated the event.

For Ward 3,  it was Stephen Kunselman and LuAnne Bullington who answered questions, which were posed by audience members.

The third candidate in the Ward 3 race, incumbent Leigh Greden, did not attend.

Opening Statement

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Stephen Kunselman. (Photo by the writer.)

Stephen Kunselman: Thank you very much, everyone, I’m Steve Kunselman. Some of you may know me from my tenure on city council from 2006 to 2008. I’m back because I believe very strongly and passionately about my community and the direction that it has been going the last couple of years. Just to be very forthright, I sat next to Leigh Greden for two years on city council – so much of what we are hearing about today, I knew long ago. I’m going to read from my lit piece, because I think it says very succinctly where I stand.

The residents of Ward 3 deserve a councilmember who is honest, genuine, and honors the position of Ann Arbor city council. Clearly we have not had that representation, as reported by the Ann Arbor News, and by the other e-mails that we have seen coming out that have not been reported by the Ann Arbor News but have somewhat been reported by The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Some councilmembers have used e-mails during city council meetings to ridicule and insult residents and colleagues, script votes to parlay political favors, and otherwise exhibit unethical behavior that violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the state law governing public meetings – the Open Meetings Act. As a former councilmember, my reputation and integrity are the highest standard when it comes to honoring the public trust. Please vote Kunselman for council.

As a councilmember I will support the following:

Adoption of a council code of ethics – council must adopt a code of ethics that sets high standards of integrity and honor to the position of councilmember.

South University rezoning – “South U equals D2″ is my motto. When the city council voted to change the zoning at the southeast corner of South U. & South Forest in 2005, they impressed upon the public that 8-story buildings would be the norm. I believe in truth in advertising and as such support South U. as D2 per A2D2. And let’s be very clear: I was involved in this process for a number of years as a planning commissioner and as a councilmember. I did vote against height limits in the D1. And I did vote for height limits in the D2, because I do agree with the community that we need to have a transition zone next to our downtown neighborhoods.

Argo Dam – Dam in. I support maintaining Argo Dam until it has reached its useful life. If Joe O’Neal, the contractor who constructed Argo Dam in the early 1970s, says it’s still in good shape, then I believe him, and you should too.

So again, my tagline is: A strong voice, a bold vision, an honest ethic, and a new direction.

LuAnne Bullington. (Photo by the writer.)

LuAnne Bullington: I’m running for the city council seat in the Third Ward. I am running for the seat presently occupied at the moment by Leigh Greden. I moved back to Ann Arbor in 1992 and settled in the Third Ward in the Pattengill neighborhood.

I love my neighborhood – we have a wonderful neighborhood. We have block parties, we have a local organic food co-op that supports our local growers, and we help each other out. We help each other shovel snow in the winter time, take care of each other’s kids, because that’s what the people of the Third Ward do. We look out for each other.

I’m now retired as a computer information department manager. Before that I was a lead programmer and head project manager for a software company. And I have also been a web team leader for the University of Michigan business school. I have taught community classes and I’ve taught in the public schools.

What have I been doing since I’ve been retired is I work with dozens of organizations. This gets me out into the community to find out what’s going on. I’m a member of the Ann Arbor Dems executive committee, I am the the vice-chair of organization, I’m on the committee for the Susan Greenberg scholarship committee. I’m the past vice-chair of communications for the Ann Arbor Dems and I still help them with that process. I sat on the Ann Arbor Dems nominating committee.

I belong to dozens of organizations – anywhere from the Center for Independent Living, to Project Grow, to the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority’s local advisory committee, Senior Advocates of Washtenaw, the Lions Club – of which I am the director. I have received an honor from the Washtenaw Youth Mentoring Coalition. I also belong to the Bicycling and Walking Coalition that was just recently formed. These organizations help me find out what’s going on, and what is needed. And I can work on promoting the things that Ann Arbor needs.

These groups I work with help me promote environmentalism for the city, mass transit and alternative transportation along with helping social service issues. These are all positive things that help make Ann Arbor a better place. And like President Obama, I firmly believe in the power of community involvement and service where one person can and will make a difference. And that’s why I’m running for city council.

Density and Development

Question: The philosophy of greater density has resulted in a number of city council decisions and zoning changes. What are your views on this?

LuAnne Bullington: I taught school for a lot of years and every time a new bandwagon came along, our school district got on it and it didn’t do us any good. The city is on this high density bandwagon. It didn’t work for Bay City, it didn’t work for Cleveland, and it’s not working for us. After six years of working on high density, the population of Ann Arbor has not gone up, and property values have gone down. Nobody has bothered to define how dense this density thing is. Nobody’s looked into it, nobody has done any studies on it.

When do we know how dense the city of Ann Arbor is? When are we going to stop – when the developers run out of money? I have real issues with this density issue. Six years ago when we got on this bandwagon, we should have sat down and defined where we are going with this, what are our priorities and what direction are we going in.

Stephen Kunselman: I was on the planning commission for two years and also on city council. Much of the new development we have underway or actually finished at this point – three main residential buildings downtown – I was involved in. Those are projects that I feel proud of, because they did involve community discussion at some point.

The big thing for me about density of our community is that our downtown can obtain some greater density, but our neighborhoods need to be protected. And I think my record is pretty clear on that. I have fought hard for the changes to prevent backyard development – or make it much more difficult, I should say – to do backyard development in our neighborhoods. Particularly, in the neighborhood where I grew up, where we had three-quarter acre lots and developers could then come in and buy it and start building houses behind houses. Those are subdivisions, those areas need to be protected, and I understand the great concern that neighborhoods have, especially in our urban ring, are feeling about this idea of what density means.

Our existing ordinances are working, right? We have a development that has occurred downtown, and I think we are comfortable with the buildings that have been constructed. I am very concerned about the changes in A2D2, because I believe it will become a giveaway to developers by providing greater rights to them.

Collaboration with County Government

Question: What are your ideas for collaboration with the county in order to reduce costs? What are your ideas for taking existing ideas further?

LuAnne Bullington: This also goes back to our brand-new police/courts complex that is being built. The Chamber of Commerce urged back before this plan was approved that the courts stay together. We separated them out. I would never have approved of that. We have a new sheriff in the county, who is working with our police chief. I think that’s great.

We don’t own a hook and ladder truck. We are building all this density downtown, we’re putting in all these tall buildings, we don’t have a hook and ladder truck. We have to work with the county in order to protect the people who are in those tall buildings. I think working with the county is important because we don’t have the resources anymore – we need to share.

One of the problems that we have, and the county also has, is roads. Last year, on June 30, 2008 we had $22.7 million in our road repair fund and in September of 2008, that fall, we were listed as the city in Michigan with the second worst roads behind Detroit.

Stephen Kunselman: I think that collaboration with the county, in fact with any public entity – including the schools, the DDA, the library in particular with the underground parking structure – it’s all very important to collaborate and put our tax dollars together in one pile.

I’m always in favor of public-public partnerships and we need to go in a new direction away from these private-public partnerships that the city council has been pursuing for the last few years – which we have no results, nothing tangible to say that we have constructed from that.

We do have some successes. Our IT department is together, community  development is together with the county. I think where we can bring together agencies that can work together, maybe even our building department, infrastructure services – it would all be great if we could bring those things together. Certainly we are defined in our roles and our missions by state law, so it would be difficult to do other things. But space-sharing is very, very important, we cannot have separate facilities when we need to collaborate. In particular, I think our maintenance facility is an indication of where we might be able to share some space.

Public Process in Site Development: City-Owned Parcels

Question: Considering the possible future development of the property at 415 W. Washington, and the library lot, do you think the public should be consulted at the start of the process?

Stephen Kunselman: Yes! And I’ll be very clear – the old YMCA site should be sold today. We’re losing money on it. It’s a poor investment. We paid $3.5 million dollars for it back in the peak of the real estate bubble. We spent another $1 million paying the rent of the occupants, we spent another $.5 million+ tearing it down. And in addition to that, we are paying interest-only payments on the mortgage on that property to the tune of over $130,000 a year since 2003, which adds another half million dollars to the cost – we’re at $5.5 million. If you look at the comparable property for sale downtown – the Ann Arbor News site which was just listed for slightly less than $11 million, with a 100,000 square-foot building on that property, about the size of the police-courts building that is currently under construction – you can see the vast differences in where we are. We should cut our losses.

The Ann Arbor News reported that I was interested in selling 415 W. Washington – no, I’m not. We own that property free and clear, we don’t need to worry about it.

LuAnne Bullington: Of course there should be public input. This is our money, this is our town, for heaven’s sake. Right now we have meetings behind closed doors, they are dividing up into groups so that they don’t have a quorum, they are keeping this information from us. We need to get this information, we pay for this stuff. This is our community.

If I were on city council, I would love to see a resolution passed saying that all of the meetings are open to the public, you know about them ahead of time, minutes are kept. We need to follow the Open Meeting Act, not just to the letter of the law but to the spirit of the law. This helps us figure out what’s going on. We’ve got a city council right now who’s decided they are the deciders. We go to city council, we go to these meetings, we talk to them, they know how we feel. We are giving them great ideas. The [old] YMCA site was supposed to be low-income housing. In 2003 it was supposed to be low-income housing. What happened to low-income housing? That property was taken away from AATA, because city council and the mayor said they were going to put in low-income housing.

Allen Creek

Question: Are you in support of a watershed study for the Allen Creek like the other watersheds in the city have had already?

LuAnne Bullington: In 2006 George Bush signed an executive order gutting what protections we had for our floodway and our floodplains. And as residents of the city of Ann Arbor, we need to move on city council to protect those three sites, especially. The mayor held a focus group on what should be done with those, and nothing has happened since then.

It’s time that city council move to pass resolutions to pass ordinances to protect them. We are talking about density downtown – how are we going to get people downtown if we don’t have a park for them to walk their dog, or take their children? They are not going to go downtown – they’re going to go out to Saline and Chelsea. We are not going to be able to see this wonderful vision of density if we don’t put a park in there.

And the greenway, the floodplain, that whole area there should be a park going from William right on over to the river – that will help the flooding issue. Council needs to move on that and they should have done it years ago.

Stephen Kunselman: Yes, we need to take it more seriously. I think it’s clear we’ve been studying the floodways of Allen Creek for some time and we don’t seem to really be getting anywhere on that. Why is that? Well, we keep cutting staff. If we don’t have enough staff to get the job done, they can’t get work done on it. As a former staff person working in local government, I know well about the implications of flooding in floodways and the laws governing them – whether it’s the federal, state or local.

I don’t think the city of Ann Arbor has taken that seriously – I don’t think we have a very viable floodplain development ordinance. We need to make that a priority. But again, without the staff – right now we’ve got Jerry Hancock, who is the main staff person, I believe. How are we going to get these things accomplished if we keep cutting staff and then telling them to do other things? We haven’t done enough, and we need to do more.

Follow-up question: A watershed study would show that a greenway in the downtown would be a tremendous benefit for the Old West Side, reducing the flood hazard. Are you in support of a full greenway in the Allen Creek watershed?

LuAnne Bullington: I have been to AATA board meetings and committee meetings, and in the last year the AATA has been in negotiations and talking about purchasing First & William to move a transit station there. The mayor, I understand, has received $.25 million to uncap First & William and turn it into a park.

But the AATA has received $50,000 to put a train station platform there, too. I think that the AATA is moving Blake [Transit Center] there because of the WALLY. I told them that the hill there is not going to work for seniors and people pushing strollers and if they want to do something with it they should they should put a ski lift on there. They [the city] also tried to sell them Washington, but the AATA was smart enough to realize you can’t send that many buses into Washington, and so that deal fell through. Now they’re talking about moving Blake out of downtown and putting it out on Fuller Road. We need to keep the greenway green.

Stephen Kunselman: I struggle with this one because it could certainly sound like good politics to say, “I support the greenway in its entirety along the Allen Creek right-of-way.” But we’ve got to remember that most of this property is owned by the private sector. It is not practical for the city to come in and think that it’s going to buy these pieces of property in order to create a greenway.

But for the properties that we do own – the three parcels – yes, we need to incorporate those into a greenway of some force, in some manner. Those properties need to have multiple purposes, whether it is for flood storage, whether it is for recreation, whether it is for civic activities. We own them outright, so I don’t have any problem with working with the community to ensure that they provide service to the neighborhoods, particularly that are adjacent to them.

But to say that we are going to protect the community from flooding by buying all the properties down along the right-of-way – especially if you look at the railroad, they have yet to come to the table and even give us the time of day to talk to them about using the railroad right-of-way for a greenway. Until they do, there is no point in trying to pursue it.

Committee Assignments: Budget and Labor

Question: What is the Budget Committee? What is its membership? How is it selected? Is there a representative from each ward? If not, why not?

LuAnne Bullington: E-mails were FOIA-ed, and in the stack of e-mails that came out, Karen Sidney saw an item about budget spreadsheets. And she FOIA-ed them, and I was able to see a copy of them. There are only a few people who sit on the committee, and I don’t know how they are decided.

But when that budget went to the book [distributed as a binder to councilmembers], there are two people who had input on that committee – Marcia Higgins out of [Ward] 4 and Leigh Greden out of [Ward] 3, and the decisions were made by those two people. The social service programs that were cut, those were spearheaded by Leigh Greden.

You want to eliminate the Burns Park Senior Citizens Center? These are people who work for us for years, this is a wonderful place for them to go. When you get older your friends and family start dying off so you need the community support that the community center provides. We should open the budget up, everybody sitting at the city council should have had input to that budget. It should been open, it should have been televised. And the city administrators also should have been in on that.

Stephen Kunselman: I have serious issues with the Budget and Labor Committee. It’s a committee that has no bylaws, no city clerk record of its creation – it’s not in the city charter. It does not report out to other councilmembers, unless it’s done by e-mail on occasion. When was it created?

Look how it works: It is nothing more than a strategy session for the cabal. They send things out and then take credit for defeating those things that the public doesn’t like. For example, in the FY 2007 budget, a number of amendments were out there to demote officers in the police department. That could have been defeated in the budget committee. A lot of these things they sent out could have been defeated in the committee: No, Mr. Fraser, we don’t need this stuff to go out and cause turmoil in the community. But they then take credit for defeating them with their scripted amendments at the council table.

Administrative Renewal of Site Plans

Question: In the Kerrytown area, Kingsley Lane and The Gallery were passed as projects a while ago, and there was a lot of controversy about them. They have not yet been built. Is it appropriate to extend those PUDs administratively?

LuAnne Bullington: Have you seen the new administrative fees that the city council has passed? They are trying to pass these fees to cover the cost of the city doing anything. I thought that’s what we paid the employees for. This is backdoor taxing. If they came in with the old fee schedule, I would love to see them stay on it and not go to the higher fee schedule.

Stephen Kunselman: I’m familiar with what those issues are, and yes, that concerns me as well. Our ordinance allows for the administrative renewal of these lapsed site plans. I do believe that needs to be changed. I think the council needs to have some oversight.

Some of these site plans were contentious in their day when they were approved at some point. Especially site plans that might have some sort of connection to a tax credit or some other proposal that connects them to something other than just a site plan, that needs to come back in front of city council. Particularly 601 [S. Forest ] is not going to be built in the next couple of years over there on South Forest – it has brownfield tax credits associated with it that will probably expire. So it should come back to council.

The Gallery, yes, it should come back before city council. All of the site plans need to have some kind of review and direction to the administration to approve them. Having staff renew things without having city council oversight is a bad direction for our community.

Question: I didn’t hear a direct answer. Is it okay to administratively approve renewal of site plans that might violate the newly proposed D2 standards?

LuAnne Bullington: No. And the city council has a history of violating their promises. Look at the parks. They promised back when the city passed the millage, the promise to the citizens was to take care of the parks. They went back on that shortly thereafter. It was dishonorable. Going back to what Steve brought up on these site plans, the city has approved dozens of them and a lot of them aren’t going up because the economy is so bad.

Look at Georgetown, look at Lowertown. Georgetown used to be a thriving neighborhood strip mall, a community meeting place, and it is now pretty much abandoned and owes the city $500,000 worth of back taxes. These plans come up for review every three years, the city automatically approves them or move them along for another five. We need to take a look at them – if they owe back taxes, if they owe us fees, they should go to the city administrator and say, Hey, get caught up with this, or you’re going to have to reapply.

Stephen Kunselman: I thought I gave you a direct answer: I said no, the city council should have oversight over administrative renewal of site plan renewals. I think that is very clear. I think that what will happen if that’s the case, is that it will prevent “fishing” by developers who don’t have finances to actually construct.

We know that the development review process is actually fairly cheap – it’s just paper and talk. So yes, we need to change the ordinance to allow for council oversight for administrative approvals by our staff. That will prevent some of this “fishing” that has been taking place. If they don’t have money up front to start constructing something within three years, then why are they up in front of city council or the planning commission at this point?

Campaign Financing

Question: You are each in a campaign. How much will you be spending on your campaign? Please give a dollar amount. You must know roughly how much you’re going to spend. Please share that figure with us. Just the figure.

Stephen Kunselman: Okay, I will tell you what I’ve got to date: I have $820 in my campaign account. How much am I going to spend? In the last two campaigns I spent pretty much between $2,500 and $3,000. I work with that amount, because actually that’s what Jean Carlberg mentored me on – that’s how much it took to run a campaign for Ward 3. And I’m sticking by that, because I think that’s a reasonable amount.

I pursue money and campaign funds from Ward 3 residents and the residents of Ann Arbor. I do not pursue campaign financing from city unions, from my employer, or from outside the city by any great means. And I think is important that our campaign financing for city council races be relegated basically to our community, not outside influences like developers and law firms that have deep pockets.

LuAnne Bullington: Like Steve, I’m trying to keep my costs low and use a lot of volunteers. We have printing costs, we have sign costs, but we shop around and we make sure we get a good price. Most of the work is done with volunteers. And we’ll keep working with volunteers. We don’t have to go out and pay people to do our work for us.

Question: How much, LuAnne?

LuAnne Bullington: Probably between $2,000 and $2,400.

Near North PUD

Question: Council is considering a proposal to demolish eight houses across the street from here [Near North project on N. Main Street] and replace them with a five-story apartment building. What is your position on the Near North site plan?

LuAnne Bullington: I don’t really consider that project across the street low-income housing. There are only 14 units that are truly going to be truly low-income housing. We bought the [old] YMCA lot for low-income housing and that was back in 2003. Why don’t we put something there? That was originally bought and designed for low-income housing for people who work downtown. We do need supportive living and that’s what those 14 units are for.

But I’m concerned about how that whole project was designed and set up. We get a study that comes out and says North Main Street is the perfect place to build. And now we are using low-income housing as an excuse to put up an oversized one and too big a structure for this area. And we also find out right on the heels of that that Argo Dam has got problems and we need to take out Argo Dam. Are they going to use that project across the street has a “foot in the door” to build tall buildings in Argo Park?

Stephen Kunselman: No, the project across the street, the PUD, is too big. It’s against the historic policies of this community on affordable housing – which is to have it throughout the community, not large, dense affordable housing units in one place. It tends to create problems – I believe we’re all aware of things like Miller Manor where people are really having problems with too much density of low-income and affordable housing.

I really do appreciate the work of Avalon Housing. Mr. Appel’s daughter and my daughter are best friends [Michael Appel is executive director of Avalon]. And I really understand. But I don’t think that their model of their work is comparable to this. I think that they are a little bit out of their forte. We know that they did Carrot Way Housing in terms of high-density, low-income housing, so to speak. But it’s way up on the edge of town, it’s not downtown. And I think that’s not something that I can agree with – their effort to join in on this project. I think it was added to “sweeten the pie” so to speak. Let’s remember, a PUD is discretionary and they can be voted down by council outright.

[In the ensuing follow-up questioning, some of the exchanges amounted to short clarificational exchanges between the questioner and individual candidates, without all candidates responding. Jeff Irwin, who was moderating, checked to see if candidates who had not spoken wanted an opportunity to say something.]

Follow-up question: One of the reasons why there is some support for this project is that three of the houses that will be torn down are in the floodway, and there is also discussion by these developers and others that to make it a part of the greenway, we should take out all of the housing on Summit, Depot, and so forth. Is that something that you support – that we take out a whole block of housing for the greenway?

Follow-up question: The question is, they are low-income housing right now, so should they be removed for the greater good of creating the greenway?

LuAnne Bullington: My understanding is that I think there are three houses that have been damaged by the flood and they want to take out three houses that have not been damaged by the flood. I don’t think we should be taking out houses that are in good shape.

Like Mike [Anglin] and Steve said, we need affordable housing, there is nothing the matter with these. We don’t want to do the greenway overnight. When property comes up, and the city has the money, we can use money from the greenbelt. In fact, the city just bought easements north of town to help build the greenbelt. We can work on the greenway in the same way. We do need low-income, affordable housing. A lot of our workers are moving out of the city, and they have to use mass transportation to get back here.

And a couple of members on city council are now talking about a city income tax. You add that to the prices we have, we will lose a lot of our low-income workers. We need more affordable housing here in Ann Arbor for them.

Stephen Kunselman: It’s kind of a loaded question, because those are private properties and I don’t think the city is in any position to buy them to establish a greenway. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

You’ve also characterized them as “low-income housing.” Well, I don’t know that for a fact, either. The landlord makes a choice about how affordable they are going to rent those units out as. That’s not something that the city is involved in. If the landlord chooses to give them to the public to establish a greenway, that would be great. If the landlord chooses to tear down the houses, then they are going to have serious restrictions in terms of rebuilding there. And that’s why our ordinances and our floodplain requirements need to be updated to be sure that that’s the case.

The landlord or the property owner makes those decisions, not the public entity. I’m pretty clear on what our private property rights are, versus what our public obligations are. So again, I don’t think it’s a fair question: Should the public purchase those houses?

Question: In establishing the public benefit for the PUD agreement for Near North, a public benefit is considered to be removing three houses. Do you agree that’s a public benefit?

Stephen Kunselman: That is a choice for the Ann Arbor city council to make.

Question: And what would your choice be?

Stephen Kunselman: No.

Question: Should the city buy it?

LuAnne Bullington: I don’t believe that the city should take over anybody’s private property. Only if the owners of that property want to sell it to the city and they negotiated a price. Should we buy it? If we’re buying greenbelt property, why can’t we buy greenway property?

Historic Preservation: City Place

Question: Is there any way we can get the city to take action on preserving housing like those that are proposed for demolition in connection with City Place on South Fifth Avenue?

LuAnne Bullington: I love those old houses and I’m sorry that it hasn’t been designated as a historic district already. I consider these to be jewels in the crown of Ann Arbor along with our parks. We have these wonderful old homes. We have them in Germantown, we have a handful on the west side, we have some on the east side – this is our history. We need to protect them.

To let a homeowner come in and buy those houses up and then let them deteriorate so that they can use it as an excuse to build another building – that really bothers me. We have city inspectors who could go in and say, Keep your property up! My sister owns a bunch of apartment buildings and she has inspectors on her all the time to make sure that those apartment buildings are fine.

But some city inspectors in the city let certain things slide. Like that apartment building that’s over on East University across from the School of Education, they didn’t have a furnace and they had all kinds of problems, that thing slid, and then they wanted to sell it and put in new construction. I warn that that’s going to happen in our old neighborhoods.

Stephen Kunselman: LuAnne makes a very good point – if you don’t have inspections to keep up rental property and you do find that they become blighted, then you find that there’s another reason to tear it down. We don’t have good inspections because they don’t have the staff. The staff has been cut, because our budget has been cut – everything is tied together.

And these things take time, it’s not going to be immediate, these things happen over the course of a number of years. We are still feeling the effects of the Engler administration in Michigan. In terms of that particular area, my stance has always been that there is a great responsibility between the private and the public.

We do not have the authority to go and tell a private property owner what they can do. We can regulate what they can do, and then they can do those things within the law. If the law says if they can do certain things, we have to respect that. If they go beyond that and want to do a PUD, then we have discretion. As it comes to a historic district or the creation of a historic district, I’ve been pretty clear on that: The majority of the property owners have to agree.

Email Controversy

Question: I would like to see the city of Ann Arbor and city council not only be more transparent but have certain rules and regulations, things where they have to give out any information as to what their involvement is. How can we make the city council at least honest?

LuAnne Bullington: Last March I wrote a letter to the editor complaining about the email issue. In other cities, councilmembers aren’t allowed to open their laptops at all until after public comment time. And then they are only allowed to email back to the clerk.

So what I think we should take a look at, is restricting people on city council from using Blackberries, or their computers, or the city computers – that the only correspondence they should be able to do is back and forth to the clerk, when they have to do amendments to a resolution. It’s unfortunate that this has come up and it’s unfortunate that it has been abused. One person has also recommended that they put a big screen up and then all email messages would be put on the screen.

Stephen Kunselman: That’s why I said we need to adopt a council code of ethics. That code of ethics could be very encompassing and address many of the issues that I think that we’re now understanding as they come to light. Whether it’s emails, whether it is passing notes, it’s all kinds of things – but I do believe that there needs to be a higher standard for our elected officials at city council.

We know that the county board of commissioners, I believe, doesn’t use laptops, they get monitors. So they are not e-mailing each other. We know that the Ann Arbor school board does not use laptops, they actually just sit there and pay attention. It’s important that we adopt a council code of ethics that sets a high standard and goes beyond just what we do at the table, but also deals with issues of who you are working for, if you have received their campaign contribution.

And that needs to come to light much earlier in the process instead of just recusing yourself on this vote – because that person may have had much more influence other than just not voting.

Priorities

Question: What you think is your biggest priority over the next two and half years on city council?

Stephen Kunselman: Next year’s budget is going to be one of the most serious budgets that the city council has had to grapple with. A lot of people have asked me: Why would you want to be a part of that? Because obviously it’s going to be more cuts, things are going to be very uncomfortable for city politicians and for our public, if things don’t turn around. But that will take cooperation among everyone.

And it has to be open so that we understand where these things are coming from. And that is my biggest priority and that has always been my priority – to make sure that the conversation happens at the table. I campaigned on that in 2006, and I campaign on that again today. There is no reason that these events need to be scripted, and there is no reason that we can’t have the public involved in the community discussion. I’m sure that we all accept the fact that cuts have to be made and that we will have some serious issues to deal with. But as long as people know that we are having them in the open, then they will have more confidence and trust in our government.

LuAnne Bullington: Well, I could go on for hours on this one. Priorities – fiscal responsibility. You know, cut this, cut that, cut the other thing. Less than a year ago, we heard that we had cut the city budget and staff to the bone and that now we were in great shape, so we could build this police-court complex.

We went to these hearings where the deciders decided not to listen, and decided to go ahead and do this, and the citizens said, If you do this, we’re going to have to cut the police. [Former chief of police] Chief Oates said for a city the size of Ann Arbor, we need 200 police officers. They just cut us down to 125. If you’re on any of these list-serves, you can hear what is happening to the citizens of our city.

Another side effect of that is that we are doing early buyouts to allow these police officers who are going to start collecting that retirement immediately. We are having to pay for that, and we are having to pay for new police officers. We’ve got trouble at the fire department, our roads are to deteriorating, and our bridges are falling down.

Closing Statements

LuAnne Bullington: I want to thank the Ann Arbor City Dems for hosting the forum and I really want to thank you all for coming out for this. I believe that getting this information out is extremely important.

I want to go back to fiscal responsibility – everybody says, “Cut the budget, cut the budget.” We’ve got one of the largest average income taxes of anybody in the state. We have a ton of money. What we don’t have is the right priorities. As I said earlier, in June of 2008 we had $22.7 million in our road fund. $22.7 million! And a couple of months later we wind up on the list as the second worst city in our state for bad roads. We are second behind Detroit, for heaven sakes. With all the money we’ve got!

We’re spending too much money on the wrong things. We went out and purchased large-screen plasma TVs – it was over $7,000 for those plasma TVs. That was enough money to save Project Grow. So we’ve got plenty of money – what we don’t have is the right priorities. We need somebody on city council who’s going to be looking out for you. Who’s going to be looking out for your neighbors not for the developers? We give a huge amount of property tax money, brownfield money, to developers. What did you get?

We came across an incident where a piece of property was bought here in the city for a little over $5 million and then it was reevaluated for under $300,000. Has anybody reevaluated your home and dropped your taxes by that much? We have too much development going on and nobody is paying attention to what’s happening with that development. We talked about this earlier. When people buy this property, a lot of what’s going on is pure speculation – the city council needs to take a look at that, and if they haven’t done anything in three years except maybe move a bulldozer around, that needs to come back and that needs to be evaluated.

We also need to take a look at their finances. Again this has been mentioned. We are now being backdoor taxed. We have had our own water rates increased three times over the last three years. Where is that money going? Have you seen any sewer projects going? We had people in Wards 1, 2 and 5 have their neighbors’ sewage back up in their houses, and what have they done? They put in some pumps to keep your sewage in and your neighbor’s sewage out. We need a process to look at our infrastructure. We need to take care of our sewers. We need to spend that money – why is the city sitting on that kind of money? That was over a year ago.

Our roads have deteriorated even more since then. The governor put the Stadium bridge on the “replace the bridge” list in 2005. The only thing that we’ve ever seen on that bridge is another $20 million. We need a conversation with the people in the city to keep us safe. We’ve got problems with the fire department – we have cut it too much. We’ve got problems with police, we’ve cut it too much. We’re not taking care of our roads. The priorities are off.

Stephen Kunselman: I’m Steve Kunselman, I really appreciate everyone coming out to this as well. I feel like I’m at a support group! I fought the cabal, and the cabal won!

Let’s talk about the other side working with us who have diversity of opinion and who have different ideas, rather than trying to exclude us. There is a common term used by some councilmembers in terms of trying to isolate other councilmembers from being participants in the process. It’s called “Groomed” as in “They were ‘Groomed.’” Or, “You better watch out, or you’ll be ‘Groomed.’” [The reference here is to Kim Groome, who served on the city council from 2002-2005.]

I was told that and I fought it. I fought it wholeheartedly because it is a matter of ethical standard of how we operate our local government. I fought it because I believe in a higher ethical standard. I was naive when I first came on city council, because I was idealistic. I had worked in local government and I had worked with local politicians – I work with Ypsi Township politicians for a short period of time. I understand very well what it means to start cheating the public trust and what it means to your reputation and your integrity – what it means to have your skin crawl when you’re on the edge of doing something illegal.

That, to me, is what is important about running for Ann Arbor city council and taking on those who will cheat the public trust. We have to remember that what is unethical is not always illegal. You have to ask yourself: What is the ethical standard that you hold for the councilmembers that you are supporting?

As others told you a little bit about themselves at the beginning, I’m going to tell you a little bit about myself now. I’m a lifelong Ann Arborite. My grandparents are founding members of the St. Francis Catholic Church over there in Ward 3. My mother was a strong activist in the Ann Arbor fight against the Vietnam War – among other things, while raising me from 1969-72 while she was in college. She taught me great ethical standards.

I’m going read to you an insult from one councilmember to another that was done during a council meeting while I sat next to that person. From the other councilmember: “I know what I’m doing, my momma didn’t raise no fool.” The incumbent, next to me: “SK’s mama did. He’s killing us with this stuff.”

Here’s a person who insulted my mother’s honor and integrity sitting next to me at a city council meeting, and then working against me behind my back. That, to me, is unethical and shows clearly who it is that we are dealing with on Ann Arbor city council.

I don’t work that way. My mother didn’t teach me to work that way. And I’ve yet to receive an apology for that insult.

Jeff Irwin, who serves on the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners, moderated the Democratic Party's candidate forum. (Photo by the writer.)

Last Saturday, July 11, the Ann Arbor Democratic Party hosted a forum for candidates in contested primary races for city council in Wards 3 and 5. The forum was held in the context of the party’s regular monthly meeting at its usual location in the Ann Arbor Community Center on North Main Street.

Independent campaigns could make the November election interesting in Wards 1 (Mitchell Ozog) and 4 (Hatim Elhady). But in Wards 3 and 5, the lack of any Republican or independent candidates means that those spots are almost sure to be decided in the Democratic primary on Aug. 4.

Currently, only Democrats serve on Ann Arbor’s city council.

The council consists of the mayor plus two representatives from each of five wards, who serve for two years each. That means each year, one of the two representative seats for each ward is up for election. Saturday’s Democratic Party forum was attended by three out of 11 current councilmembers: Mike Anglin (Ward 5), who was participating in the candidate forum; Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5), who was first elected in November 2008, and whose seat is not up for election until 2010; and Sabra Briere (Ward 1), whose Democratic primary race is uncontested.

After the break: What the Fifth Ward candidates, Mike Anglin and Scott Rosencrans, had to say.

The Democratic Party’s forum was not divided by ward. In fact, some audience members were thrown off by the seating arrangement for candidates that had them lined up from the audience’s left to right: Scott Rosencrans, Steve Kunselman, LuAnne Bullington, and Mike Anglin. That meant that the forum’s two Ward 3 candidates – Leigh Greden did not attend – played meat to Ward 5′s bread in a Democratic sandwich.

In this article, we’re serving up the just the bread. Comments from the candidates in Ward 3 who attended the forum are contained in a separate article.

The format consisted of questioners chosen in random order, who had 30 seconds each to ask a question. Each candidate then had one minute to respond. At the start and the end of the forum, each candidate had three minutes for a statement. Time was kept by Jennie Needleman, who chairs Ward 5 for the Ann Arbor Democratic Party. Responses are presented here in the order they were given at the forum, which rotated among the candidates. Jeff Irwin, a Washtenaw County commissioner, moderated the event.

Opening Statement

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Mike Anglin. (Photo by the writer.)

Mike Anglin: I want to give some of my background on how I arrived in politics and why in my entire adult career I have always worked with people. In high school I was elected class president twice. In college, I led lots of different groups and different activities. I worked at a boys’ reform school and organized all the people to go out and work there – it’s called Boys’ Village and it was in a program called “The Wire.”

I have always been an organizer and a leader of people and worked with them very well. I work with people who have similar values. I present my ideas very strongly, and I think that’s what leadership does. It speaks for itself without watching what’s on the side. You move forward and you leave a wake behind you, you don’t wait to watch where the tide is flowing.

I hold a BA in American history and a masters in special education. I then left teaching in 1981 and started my own electrical firm, where I hired four people. I hired four people and had to deal with their personalities daily. That was in the ’80s, and I was paying each of them $1,000 a week. I also paid their health insurance. I had good workers and people devoted to me for 14 years until we decided to close the business due to people moving out of state.

So I have a very strong position with people, I have always worked with people. And that is my passion. That’s why I am willing to go out every single day and walk the ward, talk to people, get their ideas, and try to bring them back. I am an elected representative – elected by whom? The people! I am elected by them. So I bring their voice forward and that’s what my programs are. If I see a program that is strong for the people, even though it’s not a popular force, I’ll take it. I will definitely take that. Because I think that becomes representative grassroots government. And without that we don’t have really good government. So my motto is: The only job of government is to provide services to those who have elected them.

Scott Rosencrans. (Photo by the writer.)

Scott Rosencrans: Good morning, everybody, my name is Scott Rosencrans. I am a carpenter by trade – that’s what I do during the day here in Ann Arbor. I’m married to Helen Bunch, who is a townie and is a schoolteacher at Pioneer High School. We live in Ann Arbor’s Lakewood neighborhood on the far west side.

In addition to working as a carpenter for over 20 years, 40 hours a week, I also spend about 30 hours a week on my civic business. I have served on nine different commissions, committees, and task forces for the city over the last four years. And what that has given me is an excellent foundation on things like budget oversight, land acquisition, major infrastructure, underground contamination and natural area preservation – just a really good across-the-board experience.

What are the things I’d like to do for the city? I think we need to improve customer service to our residents. Things like the building department and the sidewalk repair program are still giving people an enormous amount of frustration, and really it doesn’t cost us any more money to offer better business acumen and a better customer service approach. I think that we should increase recycling rates in the business community to be on par with that in the neighborhoods – and I have been working on that for several years with the environmental commission. I think we need stronger protections for the Huron River. And that’s something I’ve been working on with the Huron River Impoundment Management Project and the park commission.

And I believe in regionalism, where we can share our buying power and resources to pool together with the county and the townships and the Ann Arbor Public Schools in order to leverage our buying power to buy everything from police cars to expensive software programs. Cooperation is really what we need here.

I believe that the job at city council, once you are elected – because people believe in your ideas – is to have the ability to communicate your ideas in such a way that they can be understood by the other people in the room. If you are unable to reach across the board, to absorb yourself in every side of every issue and gain a full set of knowledge from which to make excellent decisions, and therefore gain the respect of your peers, nobody else is going to go along with you.

You have to get five other votes – or seven other votes depending on the vote – in order to move things forward. So if you are not able to communicate well, and absorb yourself entirely in the issue, get cooperation from your peers and show that you can work with everybody, then nothing happens. And I believe that’s the case now at city council. And I believe that’s where I can provide the greatest amount of improvement. Thank you.

Density and Development

Question: The philosophy of greater density has resulted in a number of city council decisions and zoning changes. What are your views on this?

Mike Anglin: The present city council believes that the more we build, the more prosperous we will be. When we attended the Calthorpe study, the purpose of it was to see how much density we could put in the downtown – 5,000, 10,000 – and each of those had different consequences. We have seen what has happened. We have buildings that are built, but we as taxpayers have seen no benefit from any of this.

Your neighborhoods have declined, your services have declined, you are seeing no benefit. You are the voters, and you elect these people, we have not been given what we thought we were going to get. Those buildings will remain after time goes on and we won’t get the benefits that actually have been planned for this city.

Scott Rosencrans: I, too, believe in providing greater density in the downtown urban core, but only within the current existing DDA boundary. And I do not believe in expanding the boundaries.

There are a lot of great environmental reasons for increasing density in the urban core. It reduces suburban sprawl, it uses existing infrastructure, and so on. The other important component is that it supports local businesses. Local businesses downtown that are struggling to survive because of pressure from the outside need a vitality downtown in order to keep going. We are starting to see local businesses close up downtown, just because we don’t have the traffic.

I think the target population for increasing density downtown is going to be young professionals, people in their 20s and early 30s. I know that in my early 20s, I lived in urban downtowns and it was a terrific lifestyle. You walk out the door, you walk to the State Theatre, you walk to the Power Center, you go to fabulous restaurants, you take the bus out to Washtenaw Community College where you are going to school, and so on. So I think there are a great number of benefits to increasing density in the downtown. However, I think it’s critical that we protect the adjacent neighborhoods without compromise.

Collaboration with County Government

Question: What are your ideas for collaboration with the county in order to reduce costs? What are your ideas for taking existing ideas further?

Scott Rosencrans: As I mentioned in my opening remarks, regionalism is one of the primary tenets of my campaign. When we’re talking about buying police cars, why can’t we get together? If Scio [Township] is buying police cars, if we are buying police cars, if the county is buying police cars, why can’t we get together, pull together our buying power and get a better deal and experience greater cooperation?

The same thing could be done with expensive software programs, and some ground is being broken in that area, as we speak. The consolidation of our dispatch centers through Huron Valley Ambulance is a positive step in the right correction in terms of regionalism. Reorganizing our fire fighting districts so that they are cooperating in new ways so that the closest fire station to your burning house is the one that responds. There’s no question that regionalism and cooperation between all of the public entities can be a great success, not only in saving money, but in experiencing greater cooperation across the board with better communication.

Mike Anglin: The economics will drive this to happen. We are gradually running out of money. So we aren’t going to have the services that we once had. So the times will direct us. Much more important than this – the money that we do have, how we spend it is much more important. We have taken on $100 million in debt in the last year. In the last six years we have taken on over $420 million in debt. In a small town of about 100,000 people, this is quite large.

And as we look to regionalism, we first must look at home at our city, at where we are spending our dollars. I applaud the different groups that have gotten together for cost savings. But I deplore the fact that we built a building and let 35 police officers leave. That was our decision, not the county’s or anybody else’s.

Public Process in Site Development: City-Owned Parcels

Question: Considering the possible future development of the property at 415 W. Washington, and the library lot, do you think the public should be consulted at the start of the process?

Scott Rosencrans: Many of you know that I sit on the 415 W. Washington proposal review committee and I favor a solution that offers a combined use of that property – a green space sector, an organization in the old building that offers community benefits such as the Ann Arbor Art Center or a similar organization, and a residential development that will complement both of those elements. For example, if it is an art organization that goes into that piece of property, the residential development should include artist workspaces that complement the whole thing. In the process we get greenway, we get community benefit, and we get anywhere from $250-$300,000 onto the tax rolls for that. I think that’s a great way to go.

When it comes to things like the YMCA site and other sites available here in town, I think you need to start by coming up with some ideas to get the ball rolling – to get public input. We certainly need to have public input in the process. Let’s get the ball rolling and show people what is possible there, and what parties are interested in developing on the sites, if we are going to sell them. You can’t put out an idea that’s not achievable by anyone. So let’s see what is available to us.

Mike Anglin: All the questions that are being asked are much more complex than the answers we can give in a short time. I keep going back to the sentiment that the more we involve the public, the better answers we will get. I’ll give you good example: the water treatment plant. Someone told me recently we’re going to have the “oldest newest” water treatment plant in the nation – meaning we had options to build elsewhere. There was a proposal developed to go at the top of Pauline, right at the top of Pauline and Maple, we could have purchased some land up there, it’s on the west side of town. We have the gravity to feed downtown, we could have supplied Scio. We could build a more efficient plant and we could’ve built a brand-new plant that was much, much, much better.

Allen Creek

Question: Are you in support of a watershed study for the Allen Creek like the other watersheds in the city have had already?

Scott Rosencrans: That’s a great question. There’s no question we have problems – especially when we see the manhole covers popping off on the near west side. The problem there is that the size of the pipes feeding into the Allen Creek system are smaller than the progressive pipes as you work your way down the system. There is an infrastructure problem there that we need to take care of. We need to find the money for that.

In the meantime we need to solve the problem upstream. We need to keep storm water from feeding into that system in order to make it work effectively. That’s how we clean up the Allen Creek – by not having stuff go into it in the first place. The city is encouraging people to retain their storm water on their property to feed rain gardens and rain barrels and things of that nature – that will help. And there are regulations regarding commercial projects and civic projects that require the detention of water onsite. That’s the real solution – let’s not let the rainwater and the runoff and all the oil and gunk and crap, if you will, get into the system in the first place, but stop it at its source. And yes, I support the study.

Mike Anglin: As those who live in Ward 5 know, our most serious issues have to do with water and water contamination. And unfortunately we are the ward that has these major issues. The topography of the ward is such that we will have flooding someday. Now we just have to decide, what can the city do? Do they allow us to take a risk? The city allows us to take too many risks right now. They have allowed us to take the risk of the bridges over Stadium Boulevard. They have allowed us to take the risk of water possibly flooding the downtown area, which will happen.

I would rather take a serious ecological study of it, and I would also encourage us to act as true environmentalists to work with nature, water retention on properties, working with the Drain Commissioner in the county to find the solutions.

Follow-up question: A watershed study would show that a greenway in the downtown would be a tremendous benefit for the Old West Side, reducing the flood hazard. Are you in support of a full greenway in the Allen Creek watershed?

Scott Rosencrans: I think that not building in the floodway is a good move. There’s no question of that. Like I said earlier, I believe in a combined use for 415 W. Washington, which includes a greenway stretch. For First & William, I favor a total greenway sector there. This piece of property behind us [721 N. Main], there is much more floodway here than at 415 [Washington] in terms of broadness of the area. So the combined uses might be limited on it. But once again: No building in the floodway. But if there are developable areas in the adjacent areas, if we can put them on the tax rolls, especially if they are for community benefit type organizations.

Mike Anglin: I think that we should as a city move forward with the safety move of risk management to declare the entire areas that could flood as parcels that we set aside for no building at all – zero building. Now, around them is quite different. We’re talking the floodplain, so this would take place, the water would run down during a violent storm like this morning, and go through the center and then kind of back up and fill the floodplain area. It’s also a way to improve safety in the community, which I am very much in favor of. And then we could have people adopt those areas – like garden groups and neighborhood groups, could adopt these areas, and then the city’s cost would be very, very little, but the protection would be very, very high. We would let nature work for us and not against us.

Committee Assignments: Budget and Labor

Question: What is the Budget Committee? What is its membership? How is it selected? Is there a representative from each ward? If not, why not?

Mike Anglin: That is the most serious question that has been addressed to this group. The budget committee has been basically under the control of the mayor and Leigh Greden, who does the appointments to the committees. In the last election, I asked if I could be appointed to it, and he said that is a question of seniority.

My proposal is this: That the budget committee should have a representative from each ward. Ward 5 particularly – which turns out 30% of the total city vote, is not present when money is being discussed? Shame. We need a charter amendment. We need something different. Because each ward has to be represented with their presence. Now the thing being with this we would then have a whole year to look at what’s coming through. We have real bad budget times now and I believe that we have to look at the budget very carefully as an entire city.

Scott Rosencrans: I feel that I’m actually the man on the outside in this particular case, because I don’t know how the committee is formed, and I don’t know what the regulations are for that committee. There is certainly transparency required and needed for the community on all aspects of the budget and different areas of the budget.

For example, I do budget oversight for the Park Advisory Commission. Those are open to the public and certainly are open to commentary by the public. This is an extremely difficult time, and I am glad that the budget is coming up, because as you know, we are going to be losing a lot of funding from the state, and that might disappear entirely in the near future. Revenues are of course going down from property values, whether it’s a millage or direct taxes.

There is a hell of a lot here to be angry about. Frankly, as a carpenter I have found that being angry is when I am least productive. If I’m not angry then I’m not going to risk injury, and I’m not going to make mistakes, because that’s what happens when I’m angry. My idea is to move forward, get more transparency and work forward proactively to find solutions to these problems.

Administrative Renewal of Site Plans

Question: In the Kerrytown area, Kingsley Lane and The Gallery were passed as projects a while ago, and there was a lot of controversy about them. They have not yet been built. Is it appropriate to extend those PUDs administratively?

Scott Rosencrans: Certainly the new administrative fees in the new budget are unpalatable and need to be re-looked at, moving forward. Nobody can afford the fees as proportionate to the information being requested – they are completely out of line.

As for the site plans being reviewed after a certain period of time, yes, I can see that. Let’s make sure that these ideas are still valid in relationship to the neighborhood. Let’s make sure that the neighborhood input is still current, so that we can move forward before we start planting them in the ground. You talked about a couple of different projects – let’s make sure that they are still valid for the community.

Mike Anglin: We spend a lot of time on other types of commissions, but we really should spend more time now on the budget as a group. I spoke at city council and said that we spend entirely too much time on developers and answering to them. And that time could have been spent much better listening to community concerns rather than developers’ concerns.

Let the developer come forward when he’s got a project ready to go – city council can consult with city planning staff and make a good decision. But right now, we’re really spending entirely too much time on the things that don’t really influence the community as much, and then we bring these problems forward to the community and they get all agitated about them, and everyone then has wasted a whole heckuva lot of time on them. Again, early input from the community helps solve the problems.

Followup question: I didn’t hear a direct answer. Is it okay to administratively approve renewal of site plans that might violate the newly proposed D2 standards?

Scott Rosencrans: The answer to your question is no. That’s why we have a vote.

Mike Anglin: It’s very disappointing to see this process move forward the way it does. The 202 Metro property was a good example of that, over on Division. The developer was turned down, a story or two was added, it was turned around and turned into a hotel, I believe, at that time. And they wanted to approve it administratively. Luckily, there was an attorney in town that had enough teeth to stop it – that’s the sort of thing that we need.

We also need very, very strict time frames. And we have to ask them, I believe, to open their financials to us. These people are coming forward with a lot of dreams, and very little financials. You can sign a private agreement. You can step forward as a developer and sign a private agreement with the city – we would not disclose and they would not disclose. But if we looked at their assets and found out that they had no money, wouldn’t we handle them a little differently? And in three years when the project’s time has finished, it is withdrawn.

Campaign Financing

Question: You are each in a campaign. How much will you be spending on your campaign? Please give a dollar amount. You must know roughly how much you’re going to spend. Please share that figure with us. Just the figure.

Scott Rosencrans: We’re probably going to wind up spending about $4,500 for the campaign as a whole. And all of our contributions come either from individuals or rank-and-file organizations – unions that are not directly associated with the city, mainly people who appreciate me as a tradesman and have that level of association. So about $4,500.

Mike Anglin: The average campaign contribution that I get is around $50. There are some people in town who give me more because they believe in the same principles as I do – mainly historic preservation, and restoration of old buildings, and keeping the town looking a certain way. Those are my largest contributors and two of them have given me $500 each.

Last year at the time I ran, I was criticized for raising $6,200. And I felt that was an undue criticism, but we had to do that because of the people running against us. At this present time we’ve raised about $7,000 I believe. And we will spend all of it. A yard sign costs five dollars, printing costs a lot. The amount of volunteerism I have in my organization – I’m very, very grateful to all the volunteers who help me.

Near North PUD

Question: Council is considering a proposal to demolish eight houses across the street from here [Near North project on N. Main Street] and replace them with a five-story apartment building. What is your position on the Near North site plan?

Scott Rosencrans: I think there’s a real need for low-income housing in Ann Arbor – the question is where do we put it. I think Avalon Housing has, I think as people know, an excellent track record of managing these type of facilities, and I encourage them to continue to try to find comprehensive housing projects.

Is it appropriate for this particular neighborhood? Perhaps not. We need all of the community input – we’re getting some in the form of signs and whatnot, we will continue to get more community input. But there is definitely the need for this kind of a project. If aesthetically it fits in with the community, if the massing fits in with the community – we need something pretty close to downtown so that people have access to services without having to drive places. I think it’s important that we have this type of housing, the question is whether it can be tolerated by the community. That’s why we have the input process.

Mike Anglin: I think the idea of providing affordable housing is certainly one that this town sees as a priority. Unfortunately, this particular area of the Fifth Ward and the First Ward combined have quite a few affordable housing and support services of all kinds in this location. And therefore I have asked that we start to look elsewhere, other areas that can sustain and maintain these.

There are apartment buildings that are available in different parts of the city that are already built – they are on bus lines, they are near shopping, they are easy access to St. Joseph’s Hospital, support services of all kinds. I would like to limit the size of these places that have people living in them to about 4-6. We have one that just opened down the block from me – it’s very successful. It’s six young men, 18-22 years of age. We have another one where there are five men living. I would like to see more women and children also.

[In the ensuing followup questioning, some of the exchanges amounted to short clarificational exchanges between the questioner and individual candidates, without all candidates responding. Irwin, who was moderating, checked to see if candidates who had not spoken wanted an opportunity to say something.]

Follow-up question: One of the reasons why there is some support for this project is that three of the houses that will be torn down are in the floodway, and there is also discussion by these developers and others that to make it a part of the greenway, we should take out all of the housing on Summit, Depot, and so forth. Is that something that you support – that we take out a whole block of housing for the greenway?

Scott Rosencrans: If those houses are in the floodway and they’re demolished, then it would not be a good idea to replace them if they are directly in the floodway.

Follow-up question: The question is, they are low-income housing right now, so should they be removed for the greater good of creating the greenway?

Scott Rosencrans: For creating the greenway? No.

Mike Anglin: If you try to keep every house standing, that’s the most environmentally friendly thing you can do. And keeping lower-income housing is what we should be looking at throughout the city. This area, sure. The area I look at more is in the Germantown area, where the housing affordability is about $650 for an apartment, maybe a little higher. We can’t build anything better than that, so why even try? We are in an economy right now where we have to go into status mode for a time. Keep the affordable housing. Affordable housing is the house you have – it’s not what you can build.

Question. In establishing the public benefit for the PUD agreement for Near North, a public benefit is considered to be removing three houses. Do you agree that’s a public benefit?  Should the city buy it?

Mike Anglin: One time on city council one of the city councilmembers said that creating jobs is a public benefit. So in this particular case, I would say if the owners are willing to sell, and we have money to buy it, and the houses are no longer usable because the landlords can’t make payments because of flood insurance that they probably have to maintain, then I would say, yeah. I would not consider it a public benefit, though. I would say that’s just the circumstance of what happened. I’m a big greenway supporter, but I’m not for putting people out of their houses.

Scott Rosencrans: I would not tear down a house in order to create a greenway. If the houses are condemned, because they are at high risk or because their foundations are degraded to the extent that they are no longer viable, certainly nothing else can be rebuilt on a piece of property.

Historic Preservation: City Place

Question:  Is there any way we can get the city to take action on preserving houses like those that are proposed for demolition in connection with City Place on S. Fifth Avenue?

Mike Anglin: I look at it in terms of the various neighborhoods of the city. The people who live in a more suburban setting may not really understand what the downtown neighborhoods go through, in terms of how they view their neighborhoods. Maybe others view that they don’t like living in an old house and they don’t desire to live there. Well, for the people who live there, it is quite desirable.

So it’s your vision of the neighborhood you have to keep in mind. And naturally the oldest ones are the ones first “on the block,” so to speak. Meaning that they are the ones that people look at and say, Oh, we should do something else, because they’re close to downtown. Again, I think that the neighborhood should decide if they want to do it.

The city is moving forward in September and October to do at least an outreach into this community [Germantown area] to start to think about making a historic district there. City Place is coming up for a vote, and unfortunately, if it is approved, you will have a scar in that neighborhood that’s irreplaceable, and we will probably have a big empty lot there.

Scott Rosencrans: I actually lived where they are talking about building City Place – when I first moved to town. I rented an apartment there on Fifth Avenue. It’s a terrific place to live. They are beautiful homes, they are nicely set back from what is otherwise a busy street, so you can still have community there.

And I’m completely against the City Place project. When it comes to historic districts I should tell you as somebody who has spent their entire career remodeling homes and doing historic preservation, that an idea to put forward a study to see whether or not it should be a historic district, I think is a pretty good idea. Because I think it will help people understand what it is to live in a historic district. People have to have a full set of information for that. If you want to increase the energy efficiency of your home, you are going to have a great deal of difficulty – to replace windows and doors and things like that, if you live in historic district.

I think everybody who lives there needs to have a full set of information on that as they move into the future. Now that the fees have gone into the outrageous for a historic district application, it takes on even a different light. So I’m against City Place. I am for a study. And I think that people should be aware of what they’re getting into when they move into a historic district.

Email Controversy

Question: I would like to see the city of Ann Arbor and city council not only be more transparent but have certain rules and regulations, things where they have to give out any information as to what their involvement is. How can we make the city council at least honest?

Scott Rosencrans: My friends make fun of me all the time because they say I am a Luddite. I was pretty slow in getting a laptop for my own personal use and I was one of the last people on the block to get a cell phone. I can see where the laptops would come in handy – we’ve got a huge council packet in paperless form, you can look at things that way, you can transmit back and fourth amendments to resolutions that are on the table. I can see where it would be handy for that.

I don’t see it useful to me in terms of emailing back and forth other than emailing an amendment. I don’t see myself being in that situation. I am more of a listener. That’s where I am with the computer. We don’t use them with the Park Commission either. If you have a paperless packet that’s huge, it can be a benefit. We have a need for open information. In answer to your question, we have the Open Meetings Act. The idea is to have greater compliance with the Open Meetings Act – which is not a bad idea.

Mike Anglin: I was disappointed that this happened about the emails, because several of us are the objects of those. And it’s not very pleasant to read about this. Because it lowers the integrity of the people you thought you were working with. We live in a small town. Your name is worth everything.

I’ll give you a good example. Chris Easthope ran against Eric Gutenberg [for judge] – their kids play together. During debates there was never anything that was critical of one another. Why? Because there’s going to come another day. Remember that. There’s another day.

The cooperation that we have, the council and the openness that we have, we will be with one another for many, many years in this small town. And that’s what I think was violated – the trust that you might have had similar to that.

Priorities

What you think is your biggest priority over the next two and half years on city council?

Scott Rosencrans: Clearly, the budget is the most important item on the agenda for council in the coming future. Not only for this term, but in terms of for the future. And everything on my campaign platform offers either a budget-neutral solution or a budget-surplus solution. I think we should move those things forward.

I think we need to start looking at alternatives that are coming up from the community. It looks like we have to close a swimming pool – “Wait a minute,” the community says, “let’s get together and come up with ideas to save it.” Well, we may have to close the Senior Center – “Wait a minute,” the community says, “let’s get together and find ways to save it.” We need to be reaching out into the community to find solutions so that we can maintain the services that we have with the limited dollars that we have.

There is a direct relationship between the amount of services that you can provide with the amount of dollars that you bring in. So, creative solutions as a community – we should be pulling together to create them in a proactive, solutions-oriented fashion, and not just getting up and bitching and moaning about what the problems are.

Mike Anglin: I think of a few things that could happen. On Tuesday sometimes, or as late as Thursday, the city council will receive a packet of 600 pages to go through – bad process. The city council starts its meetings a 7:00 and major decisions are made at 11:00 at night – bad process. Appointments are made on commissions without any public input, just appointments from the mayor – bad process.

How do we change? We start changing all of those things that we do. Right now you could post an agenda that might be coming for August. You could post an agenda that is coming for September. We are asking for a moratorium – that’s posted already, you can find it online. That’s coming on the 20th [of July 2009]. Advanced postings, alerts to the public, and a better calendar.

Closing Statement

Scott Rosencrans: Thank you all for coming out today to listen to us all and get a better understanding of our points of view. I’d like to thank my fellow participants for their input into this.

As I mentioned earlier, the key to doing this job is moving things forward. You can’t move things forward simply by stomping around and complaining about what the problems are or accusing people of conspiracy theories.

What you need to do is to find ways to reach across the table, and look at every side of an issue, and find cooperation so that you can move things forward. And as I said earlier, otherwise nothing happens. And that’s what’s been happening in the Fifth Ward at my opponent’s seat.

We need to move things forward, because we are in difficult times. This is my forte. This is the praise that I have received from every commissioner, committee member and task force member that I have ever worked with – that I have never walked away with an enemy, and I have always been able to work another day with the same people. That’s what we need on city council. Somebody to move things forward, somebody who’s smart enough to look at all sides of the issue, somebody who can be clear.

Mike Anglin: I’m proud to serve the citizens of the Fifth Ward since I was elected. I feel that it is a group of people who I respect a great deal. I feel they have helped me a great deal in my understanding of my role, and have shared their ideas of how we can build a better city, and for that I am extremely grateful. And therefore I work very hard at it – I spend about 30 hours a week working on this. I still try to do my community service.

We have the most creative ward, in my opinion. As I go door-to-door I meet so many people who say things like “I volunteer for this, I volunteer for that,” it’s an amazing thing what people do out there. And it is heartening. And it gives me the strength to move forward, to say that these are the people that I represent. And yes, I am working hard to be reelected, for myself but more for them – for all the people who had the trust in me, to say, “Mike, we appreciate what you are doing.”

America was founded on diversity, difference of opinion. And that’s what makes us great, not our discourse, but our difference of opinion. That’s how we move forward as a democracy. If we all lined up together and marched down this narrow road, we would not be the country we are today. Just think about all the legislation that would never have passed, because someone stepped out of line, god forbid. That’s what makes us a great nation. Just that.

We are in a democracy. And we share different opinions and values, thank god for that. So I will not apologize for my different stance that I take, because I am representative of the people. And as this continues to go forward, the people’s voice will be heard. It’s always a slow, hard process, but it is one that is the foundation of our democracy. So again I would say that I am very appreciative of having served, and I’m very proud of the people of the ward who are coming forward every day with new ideas that will make this city better.

The most recent one is the skate park, for instance. Who needs a skate park? Well, I didn’t think of it, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t accept it. I don’t ice skate, but I’m not closing Vets. And I don’t play baseball anymore, but I’m not closing the fields. Diversity – allowing people to be diverse and to listen to them, that’s our town and that’s what makes us very, very great.