The second Ann Arbor city council meeting of the month, set for Sept. 16 19, 2013, comes after three home football games have been played by the University of Michigan football team.
The sign on the door to the Ann Arbor city council chamber, installed in the summer of 2013, includes Braille.
That’s actually pertinent to the council’s work – because Ann Arbor chief of police John Seto has a spot on the meeting agenda to provide an update about the implementation of new traffic control measures on home game days. This year for the first time, the council gave approval for street closures around the Michigan Stadium in the hours before kickoff through the end of the game.
The council’s 7-4 vote approving the street closures was taken on Aug. 8, 2013. No council action on the issue appears on the Sept. 16 meeting agenda. However, the council’s approval had included a request for a review after the first three games, which featured three different start times.
The council’s Sept. 16 meeting includes two other items on which it has previously punted a number of times: final approval of revisions to the ordinance regulating the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority’s tax increment finance (TIF) capture; and revisions to the council’s internal rules. The council’s Sept. 3 meeting was planned to be the session when the council would tackle those two issues. However, the necessary committee work had not been completed by that time.
A joint committee composed of DDA board members and councilmembers huddled up for a second time on Sept. 10, 2013. And based on that meeting, it’s somewhat unlikely that the council would use its Sept. 16 meeting to take a simple yes-no vote on the ordinance revisions currently in play, which had already been given initial approval back on April 1. Those revisions would enforce the existing language of the ordinance in a way that has an impact on the DDA’s TIF revenue roughly matching the DDA’s projected revenues in its 10-year planning document.
The consensus at the Sept. 10 joint committee meeting appeared to be that the council should give itself a fresh set of downs on the question – by changing the basic conceptual approach to limiting the DDA’s TIF. That approach would impose a cap on TIF revenues with a built-in increase each year. But it’s not clear that a substitute set of changes would be ready for the council to consider at its Sept. 16 meeting.
Starting with a fresh draft of ordinance revisions would mean that the council would again need to give the changes an initial approval, followed by a second vote at a later meeting. The fresh start could also eliminate changes to the governance of the DDA board that had been included in the original revisions initially approved by the council on April 1. Those included term limits for DDA board members.
Among the options in the council’s parliamentary playbook are: tabling, postponing indefinitely, or postponing the DDA ordinance revisions until a date certain. If the council amends the proposal with a substitute proposal, postponement to a date certain would be more likely. However, the council could also choose to vote down the current proposal and leave the committee to come back with a future recommendation.
The council’s rules committee also met on Sept. 10, 2013. Based on discussion at that meeting, the consensus appeared to be that no shortening of speaking turns for the public or for councilmembers should be undertaken, and that the procedure for reserving public commentary time at the start of the meetings should not be altered. Among the substantive changes that survived the committee’s conversation are: adding public commentary to work sessions; changing the order of the agenda to move nominations and appointments to boards and commissions to earlier in the meeting; and prohibiting the use of personal electronic communications devices while at the council table.
The council’s agenda is otherwise fairly light. It includes an expansion of the Honda testing facility on north of Ellsworth on Research Park Drive, formal acceptance of the final report from the North Main Huron River task force, and a $117,200 expenditure for the rental of rear-loading trucks to supplement the city’s fleet during the fall leaf collection season.
Update: An item to reconsider the fossil fuel resolution that failed to pass at the council’s Sept. 3 meeting was added to the agenda on the morning of Sept. 16. The original resolution called on the city’s employee retirement system to divest from fossil fuel companies – but it failed on a 5-4 vote, with two councilmembers absent. Six votes were needed to pass. The motion to reconsider is sponsored on the agenda by Margie Teall (Ward 4).
More detail on other meeting agenda items is available on the city’s Legistar system. Readers can also follow the live meeting proceedings on Channel 16, streamed online by Community Television Network. The Chronicle will be filing live updates from city council chambers during the meeting, published in this article “below the fold.” The meeting is scheduled to start at 7 p.m. [Full Story]
