Christopher Taylor, a Ward 3 Ann Arbor city councilmember, also currently serves as an ex-officio member of the city’s park advisory commission. This photo was taken at PAC’s Sept. 17, 2013 meeting.

Taylor is an attorney with Hooper Hathaway. He’s a graduate of the University of Michigan law school.

Taylor’s 2008 Democratic primary win came over incumbent Stephen Kunselman. Kunselman was then returned to the council representing Ward 3 the following year, in 2009, when he received more votes than incumbent Leigh Greden.

Ann Arbor councilmembers are elected to two-year terms. So by choosing to submit the required 250 signatures (50 from each of the city’s five wards) to run for mayor, Taylor would be choosing not to seek re-election to a fourth term on the council in 2014. According to the city clerk’s office, for the partisan primary in August 2014, petitions must be turned in by May 13 April 22.

In a press release sent to the media on Friday mid-afternoon, Taylor included an endorsement from former Ward 5 councilmember Carsten Hohnke, who is quoted as saying: “He always approaches the complex issues that come before Council by reaching out for broad input and engaging in careful analysis. His competence, collegiality and clear, balanced vision of a thriving community will serve Ann Arbor exceptionally well.” Hohnke and Taylor were both first elected to the council in 2008.

Kunselman had previously announced that he’s running for mayor. If Taylor were to prevail in a mayoral race, both men would remain on the council, because Kunselman would still represent Ward 3. Because Taylor cannot run simultaneously for a seat representing Ward 3 on the council and for mayor, that opens the door for other candidates to step forward to run to represent Ward 3.

In a telephone interview on Friday afternoon, Sabra Briere – one of two city councilmembers who represent Ward 1 – said that Taylor’s decision to run for mayor would have “no impact” on a decision as she weighs the possibility of her own mayoral candidacy. She’ll make that decision sometime in the new year, she said.

Names of other possible candidates include Ward 2 councilmember Sally Petersen, and Washtenaw County commissioners Conan Smith and Yousef Rabhi. Rabhi has reportedly met with the other potential candidates to discuss his possible candidacy. Rabhi has previously endorsed Kunselman in his races and worked on Kunselman’s campaigns as a youth.

Petersen faces the same choice as Taylor with respect to a mayoral run or seeking re-election to the council. And if Petersen were to run for mayor, that would leave Ward 2 with an open seat on the council that other candidates would need to step forward to fill.

The field of mayoral candidates is somewhat wide open this year, because mayor John Hieftje announced on Oct. 11, 2013 that he would not be seeking re-election to an eighth two-year term in 2014.

The item had been added to the agenda on the day of the council’s Dec. 16, 2013 meeting by Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3). He had attempted to add the item on Friday before the Monday meeting, but had not managed to do that. In that context, during the Dec. 16 meeting Kunselman asked for a postponement, even though other councilmembers seemed inclined to vote for it without much debate.

Fuller Road Station was a planned joint city/UM parking structure, bus depot and possible train station located at the city’s Fuller Park near the UM medical campus. The council had approved the MOU on the Fuller Road station project at its Nov. 5, 2009 meeting on a unanimous vote.  [.pdf of Nov. 5, 2009 MOU text as approved by the city council]

However, a withdrawal of UM from the project, which took place under the terms of the MOU, was announced Feb. 10, 2012. So it’s been clear for nearly two years that the MOU was a dead letter.

The idea to terminate the MOU has its origins in election campaign rhetoric. Kunselman had stated at a June 8, 2013 Democratic primary candidate forum that he intended to bring forth such a resolution to “kill” the Fuller Road Station project. From The Chronicle’s report of that forum:

Kunselman also stated that he would be proposing that the city council rescind its memorandum of understanding with the University of Michigan to build a parking structure as part of the Fuller Road Station project.

Although UM has withdrawn from participation in that project under the MOU, Kunselman said he wanted to “kill it.” That way, he said, the conversation could turn away from using the designated parkland at the Fuller Road Station site as a new train station, and could instead be focused on the site across the tracks from the existing Amtrak station.

Kunselman prevailed in that Democratic contest over Julie Grand. He has since taken out petitions to run for mayor in 2014. Current mayor John Hieftje has announced that he will not be seeking re-election to an eighth two-year term.

The city continues to pursue the possibility of a newly built or reconstructed train station, but not necessarily with the University of Michigan’s participation, and without a pre-determined preferred alternative for the site of a new station. At its Oct. 21, 2013 meeting, the council approved a contract with URS Corp. Inc. to carry out an environmental review of the Ann Arbor Station project – which should yield the determination of a locally-preferred alternative for a site.

That rail station project relates most immediately to the prospect that Amtrak will be offering improved intercity service on the Chicago-Detroit Amtrak line.

The total budgeted for the Ann Arbor Station contract at the Oct. 21 meeting – which covers public engagement, site selection and conceptual design – was $824,875, an amount that includes a $63,083 contingency. The city will pay 20% of that, or about $165,000. A transfer of $550,000 to the city’s major grant fund was approved a year ago by the city council at its Oct. 15, 2012 meeting for the total project budget.

The federal grant that will cover 80% of the project cost, up to $2.8 million for the federal share, had been accepted by the council at its June 4, 2012 meeting. So for the contract approved on Oct. 21, the city’s share worked out to approximately $165,000, with the Federal Rail Authority covering the remaining $660,000.

This brief was filed from the city council’s chambers on the second floor of city hall, located at 301 E. Huron. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

The crash of the financial markets in the fall of 2008 was the best thing that ever happened to the Teeter Talk interview series. Why? Because the word on everyone’s lips two years ago was … “teeter,” which gave the awkward and vaguely dirty-sounding word some well-deserved airtime. On Oct. 12, 2008, the BBC reported the remarks of Dominique Strauss-Kahn this way [emphasis added]: “The world financial system is teetering on the ‘brink of systemic meltdown,’ the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned in Washington.”

Steve Bean, independent candidate for mayor of Ann Arbor.

Closer to home, a week earlier, on Oct. 3, 2008, a dozen distinguished alumni from the University of Michigan Department of Economics had gathered for a panel discussion focused on the financial crisis. Linda Tesar, department chair and professor of economics, stated that “the financial markets are teetering.” [Chronicle coverage: "Economists Gather, Talk About Markets"]

That same financial crisis still persists, and it’s occupying a lot of Steve Bean’s attention. Bean is an independent candidate for mayor of Ann Arbor – the election takes place on Nov. 2. We talked recently on the totter, a few days after the League of Women Voters mayoral candidate forum. During our talk, he spoke about the need for the city to prepare for various worst case financial scenarios on the national financial scene – dramatic inflation or deflation. The coming decade could be worse than the last one, he believes, and that could be exacerbated by diminished worldwide capacity for oil production.

So if there’s a large theme to his campaign, it’s about the challenge of translating national issues to the local level in a way that best prepares our community for whatever unfolds in the next 10 years. Presumably, the way that Ann Arbor prepares for the next decade might look different from the way other communities prepare. Bean and I touched on that idea in the context of some recent environmental commission deliberations. Bean chairs that city commission.

At their Sept. 23, 2010 meeting, the commission discussed a recommendation to the city council to create a task force to educate the community about peak oil. [Peak oil is the idea that worldwide oil production capacity will soon peak, if it has not already peaked, and then begin to taper off.] The resolution got support from only three commissioners – Bean, Kirk Westphal, and Anya Dale – and did not pass. One of the suggestions during commission deliberations was that commissioners could simply read the reports that other communities had produced about what local strategies would be appropriate – instead of asking the city council to appoint an Ann Arbor task force.

Portland, Oregon, is one such community that has produced such a report. But Portland’s population of more than half a million residents – compared to Ann Arbor’s 114,000 or so – makes Portland a substantially different kind of community from Ann Arbor, doesn’t it? Well, buried in the appendix of a new book – “Our Patchwork Nation” written by Dante Chinni and James Gimpel – is a way of looking at Portland and Ann Arbor that makes the Ann Arbor-Portland comparison … still seem a little crazy, but perhaps a little less so.

The Portland-to-Ann-Arbor comparison is one that has appeared in the pages of The Chronicle before – Republican city council candidate for Ward 5, John Floyd, took up the issue during public commentary at the city council’s Jan. 4, 2010 meeting:

Floyd thanked Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5) for clarifying at the council’s Nov. 16, 2009 meeting that Hohnke saw Seattle, Portland and Boulder as models for Ann Arbor to emulate. Floyd then asked Hohnke if he thought that Ann Arbor should change to resemble Seattle and Portland by increasing its population to upwards of half a million people.

Floyd and the Democratic incumbent, Carsten Hohnke, are contesting the Ward 5 seat in the general election on Nov. 2, along with independent candidate Newcombe Clark.

So what do Chinni and Gimpel have to say in “Our Patchwork Nation” about Ann Arbor compared to Portland? Nothing specific, actually – even though the second chapter is devoted to Ann Arbor. But they do have something to say about all 3,141 counties in the United States. [That struck me, on reading it in the book, as a surprising number – for two reasons. First it seems small to me. Off the top of my head, I would have guessed 10,000 or so. Second, 3141 is the same way that π begins. How Chinni and Gimpel resisted the temptation to insert jokes about slicing up the country's "pie" – that's more than I can fathom.]

Chinne and Gimpel have analyzed all 3,141 counties in the U.S. as belonging to one of 12 community types: boom towns, campus and careers, emptying nests, evangelical epicenters, immigration nation, industrial metropolis, military bastions, minority central, monied burbs, Mormon outposts, service worker centers, tractor country. It’s worth noting that by “analyzed” I don’t mean that the authors made up these categories and then went through and just introspected about which category each county belongs to. The categories emerged from a very complex and involved statistical technique with prodigious amounts of data called exploratory factor analysis.

For the purposes of the book, each county is assigned to just the one category where it fits best – that’s the category on which it scores highest in the factor analysis. But that means that every county got some score or other for each of the other 11 categories, too. It turns out that Washtenaw County, where Ann Arbor is located, fits best in the category “campus and careers.” And Portland’s Multnomah County fits best in the category “monied burbs.” But after “campus and careers,” Washtenaw County fits second best into the category “monied burbs.” So from the factor analysis point of view, it might make some sense to talk about the similarity of Ann Arbor and Portland in terms of their monied burbi-ness factor.

Now, if you’re like me, you’ll buy your copy of “Our Patchwork Nation” at Nicola’s Books – that’s where Chinni will be talking about his book later this month – and you’ll open it up to page 25 and read every word on the next 10 pages to see how Chinni answered the question: How did Ann Arbor get to be awesome enough to be included in this book – a book that Ray Suarez, PBS senior correspondent, describes in the forward as “a handbook for understanding your own country.” [Notable local quotables include: mayor John Hieftje; Jesse Bernstein, who's now Ann Arbor Transportation Authority board chair, and at the time he was interviewed, Ann Arbor Area Chamber of Commerce president; Jane Coaston, editor of The Michigan Review; and Paul Dimond, who worked in the Clinton administration and is now senior counsel with the law firm Miller Canfield.]

I believe that if Suarez thinks of “Patchwork” as a handbook for understanding the country, then he means for us to read more than just the chapter about Ann Arbor. Following the 12 chapters that illustrate the community categories come three chapters that tackle general themes, using the heuristic of the patchwork: the economy, politics, and culture. The chapter on the economy concludes with a passage that, I think, sums up the kind of question that Steve Bean is trying to grapple with as a candidate for mayor of Ann Arbor: “Dramatic economic changes of one kind or another are coming, probably sooner than we expect. The question is, What will they be where you live?”

For more details on Bean’s thoughts on local and national issues, read Steve Bean’s Talk.