Commemorative May Day Medley mug.  (Columbus, Indiana 1988)

At that point, we will likely write a column with some reckoning of total words, or total number of public meetings covered, or some other statistical breakdown.

And even though we will say, “It’s a half decade,” those numbers will not mean we are half way there. Because there is where the finish line is. And in this race The Chronicle has been running, there is no finish line.

In that respect it is not like a marathon – when you know at the start that if you settle into a sustainable pace, you will eventually finish. But for a race that has no finish line, what does a sustainable pace even mean?

Here at The Chronicle, a sustainable pace means that the business is financially stable enough to cover the freelance writers, basic business expenses and the livelihoods of a full-time editor and publisher. But The Chronicle is not sustainable in an important sense. It requires a full-time effort from two people – and here I don’t mean 40 hours, or 60 hours, or even 80 hours a week. I mean basically every waking moment.

So The Chronicle is not sustainable in the sense that it’s a business that could be sold to someone else to carry on – unless that someone else were two people who are willing to run down a race course that offers a simple livelihood with few water stations and some occasional cheers.

To pound this running metaphor completely into the ground, The Chronicle is not sustainable in the sense that it could passed like a baton to the next runner in a relay. And that reminds me of a relay race I ran a quarter century ago in my hometown of Columbus, Indiana.

It was called the May Day Medley. 

The May Day Medley was a two-part relay – a bicycling leg followed by a running leg. My recollection is that the distances were fairly modest – a 10-mile bike ride followed by a 5K run. A high school buddy and I decided we’d form a team for the relay. Long story short, he was offered a job on the east coast and had to bail on the race. I entered the event knowing that when I pedaled into the transition area, there’d be no one there waiting to receive the sweatband that was supposed to serve as the relay baton. That is a very easy thing in theory.

In actual practice it’s sometimes hard to find your running shoes in a crowd. And drinking out of a water station cup while running is not as easy as you’d think.

My memory of the actual race is pretty hazy. It was warm and humid, as early May in southern Indiana can be. I lacked mental focus, because the following day, I had arranged a first date with the woman who eventually became my lovely bride. She’s publisher of The Chronicle.

But among the cheers from spectators, one guy stood out. He ventured that I needed to alter my stride: “Stop landing on your toes!” What he meant by that, I’m sure, is that I have a suboptimal foot-strike for distance running. It’s too far forward, and is more suited to sprinting. It was probably a fair coaching point.

But here’s a pro-tip for running spectators: During the race, just deliver what’s asked – a cheer of encouragement or a drink of water. You’re not actually helping that much by coaching, even if your coaching advice is sound. It would be only the oddball runner who might remember your advice anyway, much less write it down 25 years later for everyone else to remember.

In the same way, I find that some Ann Arborites are enthusiastic roadside coaches – when it comes to the race The Chronicle is running. They’ll offer sound advice, like: faster turnaround for meeting reports would make The Chronicle better; Ann Arbor Public Schools need more coverage beyond just board meeting reports; we shouldn’t have dropped coverage of University of Michigan regents meetings; high school sports would give people a reason to visit the website; The Chronicle should cover crime and spot news; a weather almanac feature would be great; more opinion columns would be welcome.

It’s not that I necessarily disagree with any of that advice. It’s just that advice alone doesn’t pay the bills.

And ultimately, that advice is not what we need most in order to make this enterprise sustainable for the longer run. Right now, as we’re running down the road, what we need from a greater number of Ann Arborites is a simple cheer, or a drink of water – in the form of regular voluntary subscription dollars.

To those of you who’ve already been staffing the metaphorical water station – as advertisers and voluntary subscribers – we thank you. You’ve helped us cover the distance so far, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

Dave Askins is editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle. For the first four years of publication, a milestone column was published every month in The Chronicle. Now the column is only an occasional feature. When the milestone column does appear, it’s on the second day of the month – to mark the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s Sept. 2, 2008 launch. It’s an opportunity for either the publisher or the editor of The Chronicle to touch base with readers on topics related to this publication. It’s also a time that we highlight, with gratitude, our local advertisers, and ask readers to consider subscribing voluntarily to The Chronicle to support our work.

Screenshot of blue overlay reminder notice. After it’s been closed – by clicking the “close button” in the upper righthand of the overlay – it should not appear again as a reader continues to navigate through The Chronicle’s site.

The monthly milestone column was also a vehicle for reminding readers that it takes regular financial contributions from readers like them to sustain this publication. As we look to transition this from a monthly to an occasional column, we’d like to maintain a monthly schedule of reminders to folks: If you perceive a benefit from The Chronicle to yourself and the broader community, then please consider contributing financial support so that benefit can be sustained.

So, to maintain a regular monthly reminder, especially in those months when we don’t publish a milestone column, we’re trying out a blue overlay – which should have appeared on your screen if you visited the website today (Feb. 2, 2013). In some ways, it’s an awful and ostentatious way to greet Chronicle readers. But to make it go away, just click in the upper righthand corner on the “close button.” It shouldn’t appear again for the duration of your visit.

Of course, instead of clicking on that “close button,” we’d prefer you clicked on the SUBSCRIBE link. Or failing that, we’re hoping that the blue overlay might remind you to review your check register for the last time you wrote out a check to The Chronicle.

And of course, if you’re already sending your regular financial support to The Chronicle, we’d like you to interpret that blue overlay as a thank-you. We hope it will encourage you to mention to your friends, co-workers and acquaintances that you voluntarily subscribe to The Chronicle, and suggest they do the same.

Dave Askins is editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle. For the first four years of publication, a milestone column was published every month in The Chronicle. Now the column is only an occasional feature. When the milestone column does appear, it’s on the second day of the month – to mark the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s Sept. 2, 2008 launch. It’s an opportunity for either the publisher or the editor of The Chronicle to touch base with readers on topics related to this publication. It’s also a time that we highlight, with gratitude, our local advertisers, and ask readers to consider subscribing voluntarily to The Chronicle to support our work.

Samples of postcards – sent out in a mailing a few months ago to encourage voluntary subscriptions – are temporarily preserved on the refrigerator “scrapbook.”

Judged against the developmental milestones of human four-year-olds, The Chronicle can now be expected to command a vocabulary of at least 1,500 words, express itself in relatively complex sentences, use words that relate one idea to another, and express number and space concepts.

Over the last couple of weeks, as University of Michigan students have streamed into Ann Arbor for the start of the fall semester, I’ve wondered what this four-year-old kid called The Chronicle will be doing when it reaches college age.

And should I perhaps be thinking about starting a college fund?

Funding for The Chronicle is, of course, one theme we typically highlight in these Monthly Milestone columns – as a reminder that part of our funding comes from voluntary subscription dollars contributed by readers.

That’s a reminder to some readers to translate a good intention into action. And it’s a hearty thank you to those who already send in regular contributions in the form of a voluntary subscription.

This month, I’m putting The Chronicle’s funding in the context of a public art millage that the city council has placed on the Nov. 6 ballot.

But to start off, I’ve tallied up some summary statistics on the items published in the first four years. 

Some Publication Stats

As of a week ago, the total number of items published in The Chronicle was 10,404. That includes 711 full-length reports of public meetings in the Meeting Watch section. It also includes 1,253 briefs, mostly filed directly from public meetings, published in our Civic News Ticker section. We’ve published 411 opinion pieces, a figure that includes those of our regular columnists.

And according to the little word-counting widget that Ross Johnson of 3.7 Designs installed on The Chronicle’s website, all of those different articles add up to 6,207,171 words.

That grand total also includes 3,498 Stopped.Watched. items – short observations contributed by “correspondents” as they go about their ordinary lives. Based on those items, an out-of-town reader might conclude that Liberty Street is where most of the action is – because 741 of the Stopped.Watched. items involve that corridor. A bit more geographic diversity would probably be a worthy goal for those items.

For any readers who are intimidated by the word “correspondent,” filing a Stopped.Watched. item is really as simple as sending an email (dave.askins@annarborchronicle.com), a text (734.645.2633), or an @replied Twittered message (@a2chronicle).

How Small Numbers Matter

To support publication of all those items, The Chronicle relies on advertising revenue as well as voluntary subscriptions.

In Ann Arbor’s local news market, a large number of relatively small contributions could add up to a sizable operating budget for a local publication. To see how this is at least feasible, consider that the city council voted on Aug. 20 to put a public art millage on the Nov. 6 ballot – to test whether Ann Arborites are willing to be taxed at a rate of 0.1 mills to support art in public places.

A rate of 0.1 mills works out to an average of something like $10 a year for the owner of a $200,000 home. The public art millage will likely face little organized opposition – partly because it’s hard to imagine that a large number of people would be willing to contribute even $50 to an anti-millage campaign. That amount is just a bit more than the average property owner would pay over the course of the four-year millage.

But the public art millage is estimated to generate around $450,000 annually. So small amounts do add up.

Worth noting, however: The Chronicle doesn’t have the power to levy taxes.

Voluntary Subs

So we’re especially indebted to readers who voluntarily subscribe. When The Chronicle launched, these voluntary subscriptions were not part of the business plan. We implemented the voluntary subscription program in response to readers who asked us specifically to give them a way to support this enterprise financially.

Some readers do not have the economic means to write a check for $480 a year, $240 a year, $120 a year, or even $12 a year without weighing that carefully against other vital needs. So it’s gratifying when The Chronicle survives their balance test.

It’s the subscription dollars of that kind of reader we have in mind when we weigh what to spend The Chronicle’s money and time on. And that’s partly why we have a commitment to focusing the vast bulk of our time and resources on reporting, researching, editing and writing local news. We estimate that less than 10% of The Chronicle’s effort is allocated specifically to revenue generation – things like ad sales, voluntary subscription pitches, marketing and promotion.

Surely some effort at revenue generation is justified – because readers can’t be expected to intuit our desire that they send in a voluntary subscription. Indeed, when I voluntarily contribute to an enterprise I think deserves my support, I’d like to see that organization make a basic effort to broaden its financial support. These milestone columns serve part of that function. Also a part of that effort was the postcard mailing we sent out a few months ago – samples of which are shown in the photo included in this column.

Even the small percentage of our effort that we invest in revenue generation might strike some readers as too much. But it’s almost trivial compared to other media organizations – which can allocate as much as 50% of their staff to advertising positions. Certainly a sales staff that size might be necessary, if the product that’s being sold is itself primarily a marketing platform, not the actual “thing of value” that is supposed to be holding up that platform.

Our pitch to voluntary subscribers is not “You can express your opinions to thousands of other people in the comment section!” And likewise, our pitch to advertisers is not, “You can use the marketing power of The Chronicle’s media platform to sell more widgets than you ever dreamed possible!”

Instead, the pitch to both kinds of financial supporters is basically the same: The Chronicle’s coverage of local civic and government affairs makes Ann Arbor a better place – to live and to do business.

With The Chronicle’s four-year anniversary today, it’s become clear that this approach to funding local news coverage can work – for at least a while. But it currently depends in large part on two people (its publisher, Mary Morgan, and editor, me) putting virtually every waking moment into the effort.

So if it’s going to work for a long, long while, we’ll need to convince the community to increase its financial support of the enterprise.

For today, however, in celebration of our four-year anniversary, I will focus on doing some of those things that other four-year-olds can also do: turn somersaults, gallop, catch and throw, bounce a ball …

… and hop on one foot.

The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s Sept. 2, 2008 launch – is an opportunity for either the publisher or the editor of The Chronicle to touch base with readers on topics related to this publication. It’s also a time that we highlight, with gratitude, our local advertisers, and ask readers to consider subscribing voluntarily to The Chronicle to support our work.

This taxicab meter reads "VACANT" – just like two seats on Ann Arbor's taxicab board.

This little taxi ride is going to start where Mary Morgan’s milestone column last month left off – she drew a comparison between news media choices and transportation choices.

This column also will deliver readers to a destination that asks them to consider applying for a mayoral appointment to Ann Arbor’s taxicab board.

If you’d like to take a shortcut, then go ahead and download the application form for the city’s boards and commissions, and return it to the mayor’s office. The address is printed right on the form.

But the longer route will include some discussion about who’s paying the fare for this media cab we call The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Last Friday evening, Mary Morgan and I ordered an actual cab to cover the 3/4 mile from our Old West Side neighborhood to the near edge of downtown Ann Arbor. Who on earth orders a cab to cover that short a distance? A journalist who needs a piece of art for a column involving taxis, that’s who. The trip required a detour from the planned route. That’s because Washington Street between Ashley and Main was closed for the FoolMoon festival – which we were headed downtown to see.

The taxicab driver circled around to have another go at it from Huron Street.  And he told us he’d knock a quarter mile off the final distance on the meter. He could exercise that discretion, because taxicab drivers function essentially as independent contractors, who lease the vehicles from the taxicab company each night.

There’s a limit to a cabbie’s discretion. I’m guessing he wouldn’t earn a livelihood if he decided just to let passengers ride for free, for as long as they liked, and expect that they might later send him an equitable fare. Yet if operating The Chronicle were like driving a cab, that’s what the voluntary subscriptions part of our business model would look like. 

The Chronicle Cab

So The Chronicle’s business model is different from that of a taxicab.  But when Mary Morgan drew an analogy in last month’s column between media choices and transportation choices, I asked myself: If The Chronicle were a transportation option, which form of transportation would it be – pedestrian, scooter, bicycle, car, bus, train, dirigible or something else?

And I concluded that reading The Chronicle is in many ways similar to taking a ride in a cab.

Cab drivers are stereotypically a talkative bunch. And I think that The Chronicle’s reports of public meetings that routinely exceed 10,000 words qualify us as a “talkative” publication. On a personal level, let’s just say I generally achieve some fairly robust words-per-mile statistics. Plenty of people can vouch for that – for example, anyone who has been trapped in a conversation with me, and has simply walked away to get me to stop talking.

For those who’ve never met me, I’ll offer this vignette by way of illustration. A few weeks ago, I bumped into the city’s transportation manager, Eli Cooper, on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, between Huron and Washington, across the street from the offices of the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority. Early in that conversation, Amber Miller, who’s a planning specialist with the DDA, walked past. It was around lunch time, so I imagine she was headed to lunch. Later in the conversation, she walked past us in the opposite direction. Cooper had stood his ground for a whole lunch period!

It’s worth noting that Amber exchanged pleasantries with us, but she had the sense not to stop and chat. She’s been there before. And she learns fast.

I think all those words The Chronicle uses to describe what goes on in our community are also probably a little bit like getting into a cab with a driver who wants to show a tourist the scenic route – the path through every back lane and alleyway of the city. It’s a path that does not use the major thoroughfares that would get you to a destination fastest. You know, the larger avenues, with names like Story-Telling Street, Conflict Crescent, Bombast Boulevard, and Rile’em-Up Road.

Unlike the stereotypical cabbie, who might be using the scenic route to add miles to the meter to boost the fare, we’re not adding those words to increase revenues. The scenic route doesn’t cost extra for a passenger in The Chronicle cab. To those Chronicle riders who send in a regular voluntary fare, thank you.

Taxicab Board

Close readers of The Chronicle will have noticed that Stephen Kunselman announced at two recent city council meetings (Dec. 19, 2011 and March 5, 2012) that the city’s taxicab board has some vacancies. Kunselman is the city council representative to that body, which consists of seven members total, two of whom are non-voting ex officio members.

Before pitching readers the idea of at least considering an application for an appointment to the taxicab board, here’s a question: How would anybody know about vacancies on city boards and commissions if they weren’t announced at city council meetings and reported by The Chronicle? During public commentary at the council’s Dec. 19 meeting, resident Michael Benson pointed out that the city’s online Legistar system did not at that time accurately reflect the full range of vacancies on city boards and commissions.

But since then, the Legistar system has been updated. It’s currently possible to generate online a list of all boards and commissions with vacancies. [The vacancy indicated on the AATA board is not accurate, but I believe the others to be true indications of vacancies.]

Back to the taxicab board. With two vacancies on a board of five voting members, the board needs perfect attendance to achieve a quorum. Recently the board needed to hold a special meeting – at a different time from the usual 8:30 a.m. on the last Thursday of the month – just to make sure it could achieve a quorum.

I’m not suggesting that a Chronicle reader apply for a mayoral appointment to the taxicab board just to fill the seats, or out of a sense of civic duty. There’s a place on the application labeled “Reasons for Seeking Appointment (Areas of Interest, Goals, etc.)” So you should have something sensible to write in that space.

Maybe you’re interested in mobility issues, and you see the availability of taxicabs that are safe, efficient and well-regulated as an important piece of a transportation system for the city. Maybe you have legal expertise and are attracted to participation in the hearing and grievance procedure for revocation of licenses. For any applicant, it’s probably worth reading through the taxicab ordinance. That’s the piece of legislation the board is responsible for administering. [.pdf of taxicab ordinance]

Taxicab board membership is not compensated. So what reward do you get for your three-year term of service? I think you might get some potential social capital out of the deal – you’ll expand your network and at least increase the number of “weak ties” you have in the community. With the other citizen members of the board, you never know who you’ll get, but right now they include a former candidate for city council (Tim Hull) and an attorney (Tom Oldakowski).

Also baked into the taxicab board membership are a city councilmember (currently Stephen Kunselman), and two ex officio non-voting positions – the city’s chief financial officer (currently Tom Crawford) and a representative from the police department (currently William Clock).

In the end, someone will need to step forward to serve on the taxicab board to pay the “civic fare” for the rest of the community. That someone could be you. Or maybe you know someone who might be interested. Thanks in advance for helping fill those slots.

And to the folks who help pay The Chronicle’s fare for the rest of the community, thanks for your support too. We’d love to have more of you on board with that in the future.

About the writer: Dave Askins is editor and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle could not survive to count each milestone without regular voluntary subscriptions to support our coverage of local government and civic affairs. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

The two groups are known as the “mutually beneficial” committees, reflecting the language of a January 2009 city council resolution that called upon the DDA to begin a conversation about revising the parking contract in a “mutually beneficial” way.

On Monday morning, for the first time in public view, members of the DDA board and the city council met to discuss the contract.

The two mutually beneficial committees (starting at the far right of the frame, proceeding clockwise around the table): Carsten Hohnke, Margie Teall – both city councilmembers; Sandi Smith, city councilmember, but representing the DDA; Christopher Taylor, city councilmember; Roger Hewitt and Russ Collins, both on the DDA board. (Photo by the writer.)

The basis of these further discussions was a term sheet that had been produced in late April by some members of the city council and the DDA working outside of either body’s committee structure.

That term sheet had been the good faith basis on which the DDA board, on a 7-4 vote in May, voted to amend the parking contract. That unilateral amendment amounted to a payment from the DDA to the city of an additional $2 million that had not been required under the existing contract.

The specific outcomes of Monday’s meeting between the two committees were: (i) staff for the DDA and the city would be asked to develop a list of policy points that would need to be addressed in order for the DDA to assume responsibility of enforcing parking rules, but not other codes; and (ii) the DDA would be asked to develop a detailed plan by Sept. 13, 2010 describing the role of the DDA in the development of city-owned surface parking lots within the DDA district.

The planned schedule for meetings between the two committees will be the second Monday morning of each month at 8:30 a.m. at the DDA offices on Fifth Avenue. Members of the council’s committee are Margie Teall (Ward 4), Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) and Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5). Representing the DDA are Sandi Smith, Russ Collins, Roger Hewitt and Gary Boren.

Who Was There

All members of the committees attended except for Gary Boren on the DDA’s committee. Besides The Chronicle, in the audience was Maura Thomson of the Main Street Area Association.

There was no discussion of the objections raised at the city council’s May 17, 2010 meeting to Sandi Smith’s participation on the DDA’s committee. Smith serves on both the DDA board and the city council. Those objections had been raised by Marcia Higgins (Ward 4) and Stephen Rapundalo (Ward 2). Their objections were countered at that council meeting by mayor John Hieftje and Margie Teall (Ward 4):

Higgins then expressed concern about Smith sitting on another body’s committee that was having discussions with the city council.

Smith was quick to respond to Higgins’ remarks by indicating that if there was a strong feeling on the part of the city council, then she would resign her committee membership on the DDA’s mutually beneficial committee. However, she told Higgins that she’d thought about the issue a lot. Smith said she felt she had an opportunity to provide insight into both organizations. She also said that up to that point, she had helped the two organizations get past some historical hard feelings – she characterized it as a “clash of cultures.”

Smith said the DDA may or may not be interested in doing any of the items listed on the term sheet. Smith then floated the idea that both the city council and the DDA board would meet together as entire bodies.

Higgins picked up on Smith’s offer to resign from the committee by indicating she wanted to request that Smith not be a member of the DDA’s mutually beneficial committee. Rapundalo echoed Higgins’ request, saying he meant no disrespect to Smith. However, he said that if she were removed from that committee, he would be more comfortable.

Hieftje noted that Smith brought a great deal of knowledge to the work.

And Teall echoed Hieftje’s sentiments that Smith’s skills and knowledge would be useful. Hieftje also suggested that the work going forward should not be thought of as a negotiation but rather a conversation.

Teall was appointed to the council’s mutually beneficial committee in summer of 2009 along with Carsten Hohnke and Leigh Greden, who represented Ward 3 at that time. Teall and Hohnke’s appointments to the council’s mutually beneficial committee at the May 17 meeting was thus their second time to be appointed to such a committee.

Not present at the discussion on Monday morning were any staff members from the city or the DDA.

Opening Discussion

The group spent the opening moments of the meeting reciting familiar facts – the term sheet produced by the working group had been acknowledged by both the city council and the DDA board as a basis for further discussions. As chair of the DDA board’s committee, Sandi Smith took the lead in reviewing the results of the recent retreat, which the board had held to discuss the term sheet.

Opening Discussion: Term Sheet

In bullet-point form, the key elements of the term sheet for discussion were these:

• Parking Enforcement: DDA assumes responsibility for enforcement of parking rules.
• Code Enforcement: DDA assumes responsibility for enforcement of other community standards codes (e.g., sign violations).
• Services: DDA assumes responsibility for various services in the downtown.
• Development: DDA assumes responsibility for development of city-owned downtown surface parking lots.

There were some additions to the term sheet at the DDA retreat, Smith reported. But with respect to the items already on the term sheet, she said, there was “not really stomach” to do code enforcement. If the DDA had no ability to establish the code, she said, the sentiment was that the DDA would be set up only to be “the bad guy” – not something the DDA was interested in doing. In addition, she said, she didn’t think there would be a lot of financial savings.

Opening Discussion: No Deals Already Cut

Russ Collins led off his contribution to the discussion by cheerfully saying that he would like to make “a posturing statement for the media and the citizens attending today.” Collins then stressed that the discussion was “an open dialogue” – there were preliminary discussions where the group had been exploring possibilities, but “no deals were cut.”

The idea that no deals had already been cut, Collins continued, was made clear from the fact that when the entire DDA board and the city council had looked at the term sheet, there had been some reaction among other members along the lines of “I don’t know if we want to do that.”

Collins noted that they were just volunteers who were public servants who were trying to do the best job possible for the citizens. [Editor's note: While DDA board members like Collins are appointed and are not compensated financially for their work, city council members are elected and paid an annual salary of $15,913.]

Teall added to Collins’ “posturing statement” that she felt the term sheet was a “great framework” for the discussion.

Opening Discussion: Basic Premise Is that DDA Manages Parking

Hewitt noted that there were not a lot of additional items that came up during the retreat, and there was one item about which there was not a lot of interest in pursuing – code enforcement. He emphasized that something not explicitly discussed – perhaps because everyone just assumed it – was that the DDA would continue to be in charge of management and operations of the parking system throughout the city.

Consolidation of Parking Management, Enforcement

The two committees dove fairly straightaway into discussing the idea that parking enforcement could be added to the existing DDA responsibility of managing and operating the parking system.

Parking Consolidation: DDA Handles Parking

It should be a single entity that handles the management and the enforcement of parking, Hewitt said – that was the basic assumption underlying the idea that the DDA would assume responsibility for both. Teall asked if it meant that parking enforcement would be done throughout the city, not just downtown.

That brought the conversation to a brief halt. Collins responded by saying, “I don’t know that there’s an answer to that.” He said that his understanding was that parking enforcement outside of parking districts would essentially be accomplished by the community standards officers – there are not meter attendants who cover the whole city.

Smith noted that the DDA currently operates parking meters outside of its tax increment finance (TIF) district, so the idea was not that the district would be an absolute boundary. Hewitt gave an example of something that the DDA did not want to pursue: There are “no parking” signs out near West Stadium Boulevard on a side street in the vicinity of the Dairy Queen that’s outside the DDA district – the DDA doesn’t want to go out and write tickets there.

Christopher Taylor’s characterization was accepted by the others around the table: “DDA-managed parking will be enforced by the DDA.” Smith offered the example of residential parking permits as a “gray zone” – community standards were not likely to take that on, she said.

Hewitt reasoned that the DDA was not doing code enforcement inside the DDA district – there was no board support for that. But there would be code enforcement by community standards staff outside the DDA area, so it would be possible for community standards officers to do parking enforcement outside the district too.

Collins noted that the spirit of previous discussions was essentially that neighborhood parking discussions were a complex matter, and it was important to have an opportunity for political input from the citizens. Hewitt labeled the issue as a “question that needs to be answered” and suggested that there was no particular leaning in one direction or the other at this point.

Parking Consolidation: Consolidate, But Separate From the DDA?

Collins then tentatively raised the issue of a general strategic direction – he indicated he was almost hesitant to say it, because it probably wouldn’t come true. The notion of consolidating “the parking world” and then possibly moving that to a separate kind of authority “isn’t a crazy notion” from the DDA’s standpoint, he ventured. He allowed that this was probably a minority opinion on the DDA board at this point.

Smith offered the counterpoint that parking in itself was not the end – it’s a tool in the development toolbox. “Nobody comes downtown to park,” Smith noted, “they come downtown for other reasons.” Parking is something that can be leveraged and made part of a development strategy – she pointed to the fourth item on the term sheet.

Collins said that for the foreseeable future, unifying management and enforcement within the DDA made sense. He reiterated, though, that as a strategic direction – in terms of aligning Ann Arbor with the way that other cities do things – it was worth bearing in mind that it could be separate. Other cities, he said, had parking authorities that handle these kind of things – it would be a good thought experiment. Other cities had already solved these problems of what’s in and what’s out and who enforces what, he noted.

Parking Consolidation: City Council Approvals, Vetoes

Hewitt noted that there were a number of places where the Ann Arbor city council would want to have control in terms of ratification and veto power, as they have now with the parking rates. So he identified as a challenge to specify where the council had input on parking policy. He said he did not expect the city council to say, “Take the parking system and never come and darken our door again.”

On the other hand, Hewitt said, if the parking system were to be a very complex and dynamic system of the kind that transportation demand management calls for, he did not want to have every decision micromanaged by the city council, and he figured that the city council would also not want that. Where the line was drawn – residential permits, fines, rates – those were details that would have to be worked out and clarified.

Smith suggested that on an annual basis the DDA could do an update to the parking plan that it had submitted to the city council in April and make an annual presentation to the city council. It would not make sense, she said, to say to the city council, “On these five blocks we want to raise the rate, and on these five blocks we want to lower the rate.”

That’s why, Hewitt said, he would still like to have a joint working session with the city council to review the parking plan and the complexity of it.

In response to Hewitt, Taylor said he wanted to “push as much of this to staff as possible.” He suggested that the city staff create a chart of policy decision points by July 12 – the next joint meeting of the two committees. Teall noted that there would be city councilmembers who would want to have input on the policy issues, to which Taylor responded, “That is so deeply true.”

Taylor felt that the discussion would be best served, however, by having a pre-existing list to check through. The list/chart would include, for example, all the points of entry into the public parking system, meter location inside and outside the DDA, loading zones, residential parking, fees, fines – what are the city council’s veto, ratification and initiation roles for each of those?

At the mention of rates, Hewitt noted that under a transportation demand management strategy, the rates would be highly variable depending on the time of day and the location. The rates would also vary depending on demand. It would be difficult to express that as something the council could approve or disapprove. To that Taylor suggested that you would use a range of rates – you can charge “up to X.” Teall stressed that she just wanted the rate to be clear.

Hohnke brought the conversation back to the day’s agenda, after the group had drilled down fairly deep into the issue of parking.

Collins said that they needed a significant representative from the city’s and the DDA’s administration at the meetings. Teall asked if there were legal question about what the city council could and could not have veto power over. Collins said he didn’t know that they needed an attorney to sit at the meetings. The legal matters had to get vetted out eventually, and having attorneys present would simply make the meetings longer, he feared. Teall countered that it would be important to get legal advice quickly when a question came up.

Parking Consolidation: But Wait – Separation of Parking From Code Enforcement?

The committee discussion took an arc that included the third term sheet item – services in the DDA area – before Hohnke again brought the conversation back to a substantive issue related to separating parking enforcement from code enforcement.

Based on Hohnke’s query, the conversation circled back around to whether the DDA was interested in code enforcement. Hewitt reiterated that the DDA was concerned that it would wind up being responsible for enforcing codes that it had no input on – it should be eliminated from future discussion.

Taylor observed that the same problem could occur with respect to parking, in view of the city council’s veto power, but said that it was a smaller point. Collins called it a matter of scale. The only reason code enforcement had originally been included as a possible DDA responsibility was that community standards officers essentially enforce the parking, so there was a thought that an efficiency could be gained by consolidating that function.

But Collins said it was complicated by matters of law and politics. It was logical to do from a work-flow dynamic, but not for the public. Teall asked if community standards officers performed code enforcement work inside and outside the DDA district, would they be only looking for code violations and ignore parking violations? Hewitt pointed out that code enforcement throughout the city would be complaint-driven. They only enforce if someone complains. At that point Smith suggested that level of detail would require staff input.

Collins said it didn’t make a lot of sense to take an officer with the responsibility of doing a variety of enforcement and then to exclude certain geographic areas. Taylor suggested that the language of the term sheet adequately addressed the issue by stipulating “primary, but non-exclusive, responsibility.” Collins said that if a community standards officer was downtown in response to a sign problem and noticed a car parked in a no-parking zone, then of course they would write a ticket for that.

Collins allowed that some DDA members would disagree with that kind of scenario. But he said that he thought if someone is told “don’t worry about that area, someone else is doing the work” then it would not get done. Smith noted that she thought there was a difference between parking in a no-parking zone – that’s an illegal act – versus an expired meter, which is a just a ticketable offense, she said. There was a difference between someone who has chosen to park in an illegal spot versus someone whose meter expired, she contended.

Hewitt also raised the question of where the revenue from various citations would go.

Hohnke indicated a desire to have staff input on the question of whether there was any economy of scale and the potential for mutual benefit by having one group of people responsible for parking enforcement and code enforcement. It would be nice, he said, to have staff verify that separating the two kinds of enforcement is not a financial stumbling block.

Taylor noted that it was clear that the DDA board was not interested in taking on code enforcement. He said that at least some councilmembers had also expressed concern about it. Asking staff if separating the two would cause difficulty would be a good idea, said Taylor. The question to staff should be along the lines of: Right now it looks like we’re going to separate these two – tell us if we should change our minds.

Provision of Services in DDA Area

The third item on the term sheet was the possibility that the DDA would provide various maintenance type services in the downtown area.

Services: Enhancement, Calculation of Cost Savings

Hewitt moved the conversation to the topic of the DDA providing some types of services in the DDA district currently done “occasionally” by the city – in the area of trees and parks.

Smith gave a somewhat more complex representation of the DDA view on services. First, she said, there was a question of whether it was an enhancement of what was supposed to be done. The second issue, she said, related to possible cost savings. If the DDA hired a company to do all the tree trimming, that would have a cost to the DDA, but the cost saved by the city would be different. The city’s crew already existed, she said. So the DDA would not be able to write off the full cost of the tree trimming in any arrangement under the general context of the parking contract.

Collins said there was a two-edged sword with respect to downtown areas and taxation. Yes, he said, we want to have a nice downtown so that people will want to go there. But there was also a view among some DDA board members that downtown was being bled financially for the benefit of the wider city. That was not true, Collins said, but some people had the idea that if the DDA takes responsibility for doing some things downtown, it freed up other money so that leaf collection could happen in Ann Arbor Hills. Collins said he knew that it was not true, but observed that this was the “folk logic” to it.

Smith raised the issue of scale – she’d just visited Austin, Texas, and talked to the director of the downtown development authority there. Based on that conversation, Smith said that 90% of the taxes generated in the Austin district are used throughout the rest of the city, due to the high density. In that case, the amount of taxes generated in a small area suggested that it needed to be disbursed. It was a real question, she said, of how much money generated in the DDA district needed to stay inside the district.

Hohnke asked Hewitt what the level of support on the DDA board was in exploring service levels. Hewitt indicated that there was, in fact, interest in pursuing that as part of the parking contract. There was some discussion about how current the data was that had been included in the chart accompanying the term sheet.

Services: Private Support for Parks

The idea that private companies might adopt certain areas, like parks, in the downtown was not discussed at the committee meeting on Monday.

However, following up on some information from an audience member at the meeting, The Chronicle spoke by phone with John Teeter of First Martin Corp. about First Martin’s current supplement of maintenance in two Ann Arbor parks – Wheeler Park just north of the DDA district, and Liberty Plaza at the corner of Division & Liberty, located squarely in the DDA district.

According to Teeter, First Martin paid for the tree trimming at Wheeler Park this year and is handling the mowing, trimming and edging through this year’s mowing season. They’ve also repaired the steel fence around the playground area. In Liberty Plaza there’s no area to be mowed, but First Martin will be taking care of the tree trimming as soon as the holiday lights are taken down. In addition, the trash collection in the plaza has been added to a First Martin employee’s task list.

The two parks are not accidental choices of First Martin as locations where the real estate company thought about helping to supplement city services. Wheeler Park is located directly across from First Martin offices on Depot Street. And Liberty Plaza adjoins a First Martin property – the Michigan Square Building at 330 E. Liberty. The plaza was built at the same time as the building. First Martin takes an interest in neighborhoods where they operate, Teeter said.

DDA Does Development

Collins described support for parking enforcement by the DDA as strong, but complicated by legal issues, so support wasn’t 100% from the DDA board. Provision of services also had strong support, said Collins, but was work-flow complicated, so also not at 100%.

On the other hand, said Collins, support for the idea of the DDA assuming a leadership role in downtown development might have 100% support from the board. You could make a business case for the parking enforcement, because there are dollars in and dollars out. For services, that was more difficult, there were no dollars in per se, Collins said.

Development: Blueprint for DDA’s Role

Teall asked what staff should be asked for in terms of evaluating development. Hohnke said there was currently a work flow associated with development involving planning staff. He suggested it would be important to look at what currently happens and what a more DDA-driven work flow would look like.

Hewitt characterized current development as “reactive” on the part of city staff. The city council might say that it would like to see a particular lot developed, and staff then reacts to that. A DDA approach would be to look at all the lots in the DDA area and come up with a master plan for those – how they should be used and developed, with timelines.

Hewitt allowed that everything would have to be approved by the council, but it would be a more proactive, comprehensive approach than a one-at-a-time reaction. Smith said she didn’t think it belonged in the parking agreement – it should be a resolution from the city council directing the DDA to create a master plan for “divestment” of the city-owned parking lots over the long term. That would mean gathering input from consultants and the community and presenting it to the city council. Taylor objected to the term “divesting,” saying he’d prefer “optimizing.”

Collins indicated that the reason there was strong DDA support for this fourth point on the term sheet was that it was viewed as the core of the DDA’s mission, so everyone could agree with it. Developing for the benefit of the community was the core of what the DDA was about – parking, trees, community standards were part of the equation, but the development of the downtown was the real core of the DDA mission.

Smith said she didn’t think the city had a great track record recently, and concurred with Hewitt’s characterization of the approach as “reactive.” Hewitt said that with a one-project-at-a-time approach it was hard to maintain expertise among city staff. It was a matter of trying to fit it into people’s responsibilities who had other things to do.

Taylor asked if the Aug. 9 meeting of the committees would be a useful target date for a DDA proposal on how it should work – something fairly detailed. There would need to be appropriate points of city council check-in for the process. Smith noted that the DDA board did not typically meet in August and Hewitt said he’d need to check with staff – the DDA had just recently had its staff develop a parking plan on four months notice. So he wanted to at least consult with DDA staff before pledging them to a certain timeline.

Taylor suggested that at least among the committee members they would hope for a fairly detailed proposed by the Sept. 13 meeting for how the DDA would run development.

Development: Ann Arbor as a Suburban Community

At the most recent DDA board meeting, Russ Collins expressed a lament that what a lot of people wanted was acres and acres of parking, and that in general people did not necessarily support the idea of a downtown. He continued with that theme at a couple of points during Monday morning’s committee meeting.

I think that collectively we need to figure out how to deal with this – I’ve said this before so this is not new – but Ann Arbor is bottom line a suburban community where people pull up in their driveways at their house on a lot. So the vast majority of the electorate, of the population, doesn’t relate viscerally to what a downtown is. So consequently, it’s very easy for the NIMBY nature of communities and neighborhoods … to be encouraged to oppose things that are logical and appropriate for a downtown, but are more nuanced, or complicated or even inappropriate in a suburban kind of environment.

Collins said that accounted for the resistance on the part of citizens and the government alike to those things that the downtown needed in order to be vital. There was too much focus on parking as a problem – either as something there was under- or over-capacity for. Parking is something that suburban people worry about, said Collins, it’s not what urban people worry about.

There was a similar over-focus on parks, he continued. In a suburban setting, parks are 100% positive, he said – in an urban setting it’s more complicated and nuanced. When you say, “Parks” and 95% of your voters are suburban people, they go “Yes!” when that could really be a bad idea for a downtown, he said.

Overcoming the complicated dynamic of the electorate and politicians who have to respond to that electorate, said Collins, is going to be critical.

Development: The Politics of Downtown

Hewitt noted that less than 3% of Ann Arbor residents live in the DDA district. If that were 20%, he said, there would be an entirely different political dynamic going on. On that scenario, Hewitt continued, there would be a constituency that viewed the downtown as a downtown that would have political influence. With the current numbers, it was too small a group and it was divided among all the wards.

The shaded areas are Ann Arbor's five wards with the DDA district in red outline. The roughly pie-shaped configuration of the wards is specified in the city charter. (Image links to higher resolution file.)

Teall agreed with Hewitt, noting that each ward only had a slice of the downtown. Hewitt continued with the theme by saying there was no constituency that votes in numbers, with enough influence and a stake in downtown. It’s not that people don’t go downtown, he said, it’s just that “They love it in the wrong way.”

Taylor began his response to Collins and Hewitt by saying, “Without agreeing with a good deal of that …” He acknowledged that residents appeared before the city council and expressed opinions about developments. It struck him, however, that there is a strong consensus about density in the non-South-University area of the DDA district.

Development: How Tall Is Tall?

Collins contended that the only way to have a significant impact on density was to put up 20-30 story buildings – because that’s when you get the real estate efficiency and payback. But the citizenry at large, he said, would go “Whoah! Anything more than five stories makes me nervous!”

Taylor pointed to Zaragon Place 2 as an example of a project that enjoyed support. Hewitt allowed that Zaragon Place 2, at 14 stories, did not seem to be getting a lot of opposition at this point – it had not gotten high on the public’s consciousness, yet. The possible acceptance of Zaragon Place 2, he thought, suggested a slow transition was taking place. [The development, proposed for the southeast corner of William and Thompson, received approval from the city's planning commission on Tuesday.]

Hewitt noted that at First & Washington, a project had failed to get support 10 years ago because it was going to be seven stories instead of six stories. So 14 stories in the core of downtown was starting to become acceptable, Hewitt said. But 20 stories probably isn’t acceptable at this point, he said.

In response to an indication from Hohnke that he wanted to get the discussion back to the specific agenda of the DDA assuming responsibility for development, Taylor characterized the discussion to that point as acknowledging the challenges of putting together a proposal by Sept. 13.

Hewitt suggested that the DDA draft something and put it out there – the DDA was aware as well or better than anyone of the opposition. Smith suggested that the DDA board’s partnerships committee would be a good venue to discuss the issue – there was representation from the city council there, as well as the city planning commission, via the council’s representative to the planning commission, Tony Derezinski.

Collins said that from an emotional point of view, he was “about to give up and just say, screw it, bulldoze the downtown.” Everybody loves it to death, he said, and let’s just turn everything into a “strip mall karma,” so that when you’re outside of downtown you have one-story strip malls, and when you’re inside the downtown you have five-story strip malls. People want acres of parking everywhere, he said. “It takes a helluva lot of backbone to not cave in to that,” he concluded.

Hohnke allowed that it was a fair point, but he did not think it was exactly accurate. He then ticked through a list of approved developments:

• 8 stories at First & Washington [Village Green's City Apartments]
• 8 stories at Washington & Ashley [Tierra on Ashley]
• 10 stories at Kingsley & Ashley [Kingsley Lane]
• 5 stories on North Main [Near North]
• 10 stories of development at the Greek Orthodox church [The Gallery]
• 10 stories at Washington & Division [Metro 202]
• 14 stories at S. Forest [601 S. Forest]
• 14 stories at William & Thompson [Zaragon Place 2]

Hohnke concluded that the notion that there isn’t forward movement with development downtown is factually inaccurate.

Collins came back to the complicated nature of the discussions. Any building above five stories and below 20 stories, he said, is inherently inefficient, because above five stories you have to build a skyscraper in terms of the building code. And if you’re going to build that complicated a building, you need to build to 20 stories to get the payback you need to accommodate that.

Collins compared a 10-story building to a car with only two wheels. That was only halfway to where the city needs to go to get the financial incentives that would create density and development. Teall added that the greater height would also allow residential units to be affordable.

Development: City Council Would Retain Approval Power

Smith came back to idea that the DDA would just be creating a blueprint and it would remain 100% within the city council purview to execute the plan. Teall cautioned that she thought the DDA was to execute the plan as well. But Smith stressed that the city would not simply be turning the deeds to properties over to the DDA. And final approval of anything would rest on council, she said.

Taking Kline’s Lot – on Ashley between William and Liberty – as an example, Smith said the DDA could develop a plan, it would be presented to the city council and the council would either say, “You’re crazy!” or “Go for it!”

Teall said she wanted the city administrator, Roger Fraser, to be part of the development of the plan – she felt he had a good feel for the big development picture right now. People came to Fraser to ask about development, she said. Collins said that one of the things he and Teall had talked through with Fraser a few months ago was the idea of an “ombudsman for development” – someone to be an advocate for the developers within the city. Collins noted that obviously the ombudsman would not be able to circumvent the law or the process.

Smith mentioned that in Chicago they’d created a policy whereby green buildings went to the top of the processing pile.

Additional Ideas: Village Green, Bonding, Fees

At the DDA’s May 28 retreat, board member Newcombe Clark had raised a collection of points with hopes of getting some contractual consideration in connection with the $2 million payment the DDA had already agreed to make to the city.

Village Green

Those points included creating a deadline for Village Green, the developer of the City Apartments project at First & Washington, to exercise its option to purchase the land. The city council will vote at its June 21 meeting on extending that option.

At Monday’s meeting, Smith characterized the Village Green City Apartments issue as more of “an FYI” because it was coming before the city council for a possible extension of the deadline.

Hewitt said that from a budgeting point of view, the DDA was reserving a significant chunk of cash and bonding authority to finance the project and it was important to have some clarity.

Bond issuance, Smith said, was a valid point to raise, related to fees that the DDA pays to the city on major projects. Hewitt described the situation with the underground parking garage as paying for the privilege of paying for bonds for a structure that the DDA was giving to the city. “I think you can probably imagine,” Hewitt told the councilmembers present, “that it does grate somewhat.”

Downtown Policing

Clark has also pushed the idea of contracting for downtown police patrols – or some other means of getting “eyes on the street” as part of the possible parking contract discussions.

At Monday’s meeting, Hewitt said that having contracted for downtown beat patrol officers for State Street back in the mid ’90s, he had some clear ideas of how it should be handled. He said the DDA board was not yet ready to determine what their approach would be.

Smith stressed that it was important to inquire of the city staff what the capacity was for community standards officers to provide “eyes on the street.” Can they ask panhandlers to move on? What’s possible and what are the efficiencies? Chief Barnett Jones or the deputy chief will be addressing the DDA board’s partnerships committee next month on safety issues. Collins noted that he’d been reading “Freakonomics” recently, which includes a range of examples illustrating the difference between perception and reality.

The results of the safety survey had come back not as bad she thought they might, reported Teall – the results had been discussed at the last partnerships committee meeting. Hewitt noted there were only three reported crimes in parking structures in 2009 – it was his favorite statistic. Collins addressed the 84% statistic of those who felt the city was safe – what he didn’t know is if 16% considering it unsafe was too high.

Recap

Smith moved the group to wrapping things up and the next two main steps identified were: (i) to ask the staff of both the DDA and the city to identify the key policy decision points for parking enforcement, and (ii) to share with DDA staff the goals of putting together a proposal for the DDA’s role in developing city-owned surface parking lots.

As part of the concluding discussion, Collins noted that it was important to be mindful that using words like “development” already caused a lot of anxiety. He characterized it as a leadership issue – you lead people to what is beneficial without obfuscating. Teall agreed that it was important not to use trigger words.

Rough notes for the first rough draft of Ann Arbor history.

In this month’s milestone message, I’m going to explain what we do here at The Ann Arbor Chronicle. And I’m going to do it in a way that is intended to inspire additional voluntary subscriptions to our publication.

About 47 years ago, in a speech delivered in London to correspondents for Newsweek magazine, Washington Post publisher Philip Graham called journalism the “first rough draft of history.” The contention that journalists are writing history – even just a first rough draft – is pretty high-minded talk. Writing any draft of history certainly sounds sexier than the sheer drudgery of taking notes through a six-hour city council meeting seated on hard pew-like benches and condensing that material into a few thousand words for Ann Arbor Chronicle readers.

That’s an aspect of the job Graham meant in the first, less famous part of the “rough draft” quote [emphasis added]: “So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand …”

I think that digital technology allows journalists the possibility of providing a far better first draft of history than was previously possible. It’s better in the sense that it can be more comprehensive, and more detailed than the drafts that were constrained by printed newspaper column inches.

But seriously. Why does Ann Arbor need someone to write down its history? Do we here at The Chronicle really imagine that 100 years from now anyone will care that some new parking meters got installed in front of the Old Town Tavern? Nope. I don’t. Not really. Well, maybe. Okay, no. Not, really.

Sure, in an unguarded moment, I’ll indulge in the reverie that Ann Arbor’s 2110 version of Laura Bien will be mining The Chronicle archives and writing – for some next-century information distribution system – an article called “The Man Who Loved Parking Meters.”

More useful than 100-year-old history, however, is the history of five years ago, a year ago, or even a month ago. Because it’s the things that were said and done one month ago or one year ago that matter for elected officials making policy decisions, and for voters making choices at the polls.

So this month’s milestone provides a couple of examples demonstrating that The Chronicle is a pretty decent  source of recent local history – a better source than the recollections and conversations of our local political leaders.

Whereas: History is important

Legislative bodies, like the Ann Arbor city council, have an opportunity to record their own version of history when they write resolutions. Resolutions are divided into two blocks of statements, first the “whereas” clauses followed by the “resolved” clauses. It’s the “whereas” clauses that provide an opportunity for establishing a historical record of events that give background for the action that the body is taking. The action part of a resolution is expressed in the “resolved” clauses.

This ground was actually covered by Chronicle commenters back in March 2010 in a thread about a Chronicle city council meeting report. A question was posed by Rod Johnson [link]:

I’ve never understood the function of “whereas” and “resolved” clauses in resolutions. Do they actually have some specific force, or are they just part of the rhetoric of resolution-talk? Some sort of archaic survival from the 18th century?

And a response to Johnson’s question came from Vivienne Armentrout [link]:

… there is a very specific meaning to whereas and resolved clauses. Basically, the whereas statements are background to establish the thinking behind a legislative motion. They are also used as political puffery. [...]

But the “resolved” is actually the law being made. [...] It’s the resolved clauses that you have to watch.

Just as an aside, that’s a pattern of interaction for comments on this website – question followed by answer – that’s worth highlighting. It’s the sort of commenting that I think adds value to The Chronicle.

Whereas: Implied history is also important

While Armentrout is right that it’s the “resolved” clauses that have a material impact on the world, I think it’s worth watching the “whereas” clauses as well – not just what gets written into them, but what gets redacted from them. Tracking the versions of different “whereas” clauses can reveal that councilmembers care deeply not just about the history that’s explicated in “whereas” clauses, but about history that might be implied by the language of “whereas” clauses.

Consider, for example, a resolution approved at the city council’s most recent meeting on May 17, 2010 concerning the city’s future discussions with the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority. Those discussions will address a revision to the contract under which the DDA manages the city’s parking system. It’s a topic The Chronicle has covered in detail starting in January 2009.

Considered by the council on May 17 was a resolution that for the second time created a city council committee to meet with a corresponding committee of DDA board members to negotiate a revision to the parking contract.

Among the “whereas” clauses was this:

Whereas, It is in the public interest that these negotiations are conducted transparently;

As The Chronicle reported out of that meeting, Stephen Rapundalo (Ward 2) wanted that clause stricken. Why? Is Rapundalo against transparency? No. Rapundalo was working from the premise that the city council’s work is always conducted transparently and that the city council in general values transparency. To include such a “whereas” clause would be redundant. So by including the clause, Rapundalo felt it somehow implied, through redundancy, that to date there had been less-than-transparent behavior.

The fact is, there had been less-than-transparent behavior. This is not something open to dispute or interpretation. Specifically, a working group of city councilmembers and DDA board members had met for the first four months of 2010 out of public view, and outside of the committee structure that the two bodies had established to undertake the work that the working group actually did.

But the “whereas” clause was stricken – with dissent from three other councilmembers, who are apparently better students of recent city council history than Rapundalo. At the council table, he subsequently revealed that he was not in command of some basic facts crucial to his contention that there’d been no less-than-transparent conduct.

Whereas: The Ann Arbor Chronicle writes a historical record

Rapundalo contended that he’d done “due diligence” in reviewing city council minutes and that he’d found no action by the city council since January 2009 on the issue of the DDA parking agreement. He thus questioned whether the council had ever appointed a committee for the purpose of renegotiating the parking contract with the DDA. At the council table Sandi Smith (Ward 1), supported by the city clerk, corrected Rapundalo’s gap in knowledge of recent history.

The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s coverage of the issue has featured prominently the fact that the city council did create and appoint a committee – but only reluctantly, because city councilmembers did not like the composition of the DDA’s committee. On multiple occasions, The Chronicle has published timelines featuring the city council’s creation and appointment of its own committee.

Chronicle coverage confirms what Rapundalo could have confirmed for himself – even if he’s not a Chronicle reader – using the city’s publicly accessible online Legistar system that manages the legislative history of all the city’s public bodies. Legistar turns up the council appointment of its committee on a simple search.

Whereas: Talking about parking in parks is upsetting

The city council meeting that featured Rapundalo’s worries about the implications of including transparency language in a “whereas” clause was the same meeting when the council approved its FY 2011 budget.

In the city administrator’s proposed budget there’d been a very modest amount of revenue factored in for introducing a program to allow parking in two city parks – Allmendinger and Frisinger – only on University of Michigan football Saturdays. The council amended out the parking-in-the-parks proposal.

Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3) expressed some irritation that the proposal had even been part of the proposed budget. He wanted to include a “resolved” clause in the city budget amendment that would direct the city administrator to refrain from proposing it in the future. It was the city administrator’s budget to propose, so the direction to the city administrator, Roger Fraser, seems on target.

But where did that idea of Saturday football parking in the parks come from? If you were forming an opinion based only on the conversation at the council table that night and at the council’s previous meeting, you might reasonably assign the “blame” for the idea to the city’s park advisory commission (PAC). Mayor John Hieftje said that PAC had recommended the idea. Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) went on at some length praising PAC for leaving the proposal in their recommendations, saying that PAC had less latitude to look elsewhere to address budget challenges than the city council did.

Not included in the remarks by Hieftje and Taylor was the salient point that PAC did not conceive of the parking-in-the-parks idea. PAC was reacting to a proposed budget from city staff, who ultimately report to the city administrator. So it wasn’t PAC’s idea. Maybe it was Fraser’s.

That’s a convenient historical narrative and one consistent with Hieftje’s comments the night the budget was approved. Hieftje moved the conversation past Kunselman’s suggestion to give the city administrator explicit direction on parking in the parks, by assuring Kunselman that Fraser had “gotten the message.”

But I don’t think it’s just Fraser who needed to hear the message. It was also Kunselman’s fellow councilmembers. For FY 2011, the idea for parking in the parks could reasonably be analyzed as sprouting back in October 2009 – in the form of a resolution placed on the agenda by four councilmembers, but which was then subsequently deleted from the agenda. From The Chronicle’s reporting in October, which we cited as a part of the budget meeting report:

Placed on the agenda on Oct. 2, with sponsorship from Sandi Smith (Ward 1), Sabra Briere (Ward 1), Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5), and Mike Anglin (Ward 5), was a resolution that would have allowed the city to generate revenue from parking cars in Frisinger Park on home football Saturdays. Frisinger Park is just south of East Stadium Boulevard between Woodbury and Iroquois. It was pulled off the agenda on Oct. 5.

Here’s how the resolution read:

Whereas, Frisinger Park is well situated to provide special event parking, in particular for University of Michigan home football games; and

Whereas, The City is providing home football game parking at other City-owned facilities, including its facility on S. Industrial and these parking revenues are a new source of funds for the City which is striving to maintain high quality level of service for its citizens;

Resolved, That the City Administrator establish a parking program for University of Michigan home football days at Frisinger Park, including the option for pre-game/post-game tailgating.

Sure, it’s Fraser’s budget to propose and he need not have included parking in the parks as part of it. But in answering the question of why it was in the budget at all, it’s appropriate to say out loud that six months earlier there was at least some support on the city council for the concept.

Whereas: History is sexier than bridges

The city council got an update at one of its recent meetings on the planned reconstruction of the Stadium bridges over South State Street and the railroad tracks. At one point during the meeting, there was frustration expressed by some councilmembers that the University of Michigan was not shouldering a share of the cost for the project.

Sandi Smith (Ward 1) raised the issue with respect to the bridge reconstruction itself. Margie Teall (Ward 4) raised the issue of UM helping to pay for street reconstruction due to road surface damage that the football stadium reconstruction project had caused in the same corridor.

City administrator Roger Fraser, and city project manager Homayoon Pirooz, were essentially diplomatic in their responses to councilmembers. They both reported that the university had not indicated it would be shouldering costs for either of those two issues.

It would not have been out of place, however, for the pair to have mentioned that the council had three months earlier heard from Fraser, during a council meeting, that the university would be footing the bill for $450,000 worth of street and utilities work that the city itself would ordinarily fund. The work will be done in connection with the transit station on North University Avenue – improvements to the corridor are taking place this summer. The Chronicle included the $450,000 as part of a February city council meeting report.

City councilmembers equipped with The Chronicle’s reports fresh in mind on that occasion might have mentioned the $450,000. That could have led to a conversation framed by the question: What’s the balance of payments like between the city and the university? It’s a conversation that I think would be really useful for the city council to conduct in a comprehensive way, instead of the piecemeal way that the council currently thinks of city-university relations.

That conversation is unlikely to happen, I think, if on obvious occasions no one points out relevant recent history – like the university’s willingness to pay for $450,000 worth of work the city would normally fund. I think city councilmembers and Ann Arbor citizens who have the city’s recent history in mind, as recorded in detail by The Chronicle, are more likely to point out the facts that will start good conversations.

But recent history is in many ways like the Stadium bridges as described to me recently by Eli Cooper, the city’s transportation program manager. We were out on a field trip to the bridge on the occasion of a visit from the U.S. assistant secretary of transportation.

Said Cooper: “It’s a bridge. It’s not sexy.”

History is not all that sexy, either. But with all due respect to the engineers in The Chronicle’s readership, history is sexier than bridges.

Resolved: Readers will subscribe to a valuable historical record

The Chronicle’s business model is based partly on voluntary subscriptions. What voluntary subscribers are helping to buy for themselves and the city is a decent historical record of much of the city’s civic life.

And that’s valuable not just for the 100-year archives, but for the community’s shorter-term collective memory. I think The Chronicle provides what President Obama, in his UM commencement address, suggested was necessary for useful dialogue: “a certain set of facts to debate from.”

And that set of facts is something I think is worth paying journalists to write.  Many of you readers have shown you think so, too, by subscribing voluntarily to The Chronicle. And for that, I thank you.

About the writer: Dave Askins is editor and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Almost a year ago, on March 23, 2009, Advance Publications announced that it would shut down The Ann Arbor News later that year. Ann Arbor Chronicle publisher Mary Morgan wrote a column about that announcement: “Why We Grieve The Ann Arbor News.”

James "Jay" T. Hamilton's book, "All the News That's Fit to Sell" is available on Amazon.com. (Image links to Amazon)

It would be fitting and proper to think back and reflect, ponder, and meditate again on the closing of The Ann Arbor News. But in that column, Mary writes about “moving toward a future in which the landscape of [her] life has unalterably shifted.”

So this month’s Milestone is more about moving forward than looking back. And that’s one reason we’re throwing Chronicle readers a curve ball: Flouting the usual alternating batting order for editor and publisher, I’m stepping to the plate two months in a row to take a hack at the Monthly Milestone.

To make this column easier to read, I’ll tell you what’s coming – I’ll be concluding with a straight sales pitch. [If you're not a fan of baseball then, for crying out loud, be a fan of spring ... spring training games start in a few weeks.]

The pitch I’ll make is informed by a trip I made to Washington D.C. a couple of weeks ago. At the invitation and expense of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, I attended a session of the working group they’ve established there on media and governance. It’s a group that includes representatives of the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission – they’ll be putting together a report for Congress on existing and new media, and their role in providing information on governance issues.

I shared with the group our experience here at The Ann Arbor Chronicle. But greater than any value I provided to them, I’m certain, is the value I took away from the meeting. This column is mostly what I learned from Duke University professor of political science and economics, James “Jay” Hamilton, who had also been invited to address the working group.

Before diving into Hamilton’s presentation, here are some bullet points extracted from the briefing memo on the Chronicle, which I’d prepared for the Miller Center working group. I drew a distinction between newer online readers of news and information and “veteran” online readership – people who’ve been reading, writing, commenting online and using tools like browser bookmarks and RSS readers for the better part of the last decade:

Expectations of Veteran Online Readership

• Rapid access to information. Getting the nugget of news fast is really important to these readers. Why? Because technology makes it possible.
• Simple and brief presentation. We’re told repeatedly that, according to market research, people don’t want to read more than a hundred words at a time. Why? People value breadth. It’s a function of the technology – when there’s such a huge volume of information accessible using digital technology, it fuels a need to condense, and summarize.
• Unfettered ability to express opinion everywhere. Robustness of comment threads are seen as a metric of success. Readers expect online publications to invest considerable resources in managing and moderating comments.

Flouting Expectations of Veteran Online Readership

The Chronicle flouts each of those expectations. Some specific examples:

• We’re slow. A story we write about a city council meeting on Monday evening might not be published until Thursday.
• We’re verbose. We’ll write 4,000 words about a meeting of the Downtown Development Authority.
• We don’t care much (only some) about comments.

In the briefing memo, I outline how the same technology that underpins the expectations of veteran online readers also allows us to pursue our editorial mission. One example is the fact that for an online-only publisher, there is no “news hole” to fill on a printed page. From the point of view of technology, then, there is no pressure for a typical story to be published any sooner than when the reporter is done writing and an editor is done editing it.

But does it pay to be slow and verbose? Or rather, can it pay to be slow and verbose? This is the kind of question that Prof. Hamilton, as an economist, is equipped to illuminate. Hamilton’s book, “All the News That’s Fit to Sell” certainly helps shed some light on it.

One of the first observations that Hamilton made at the working group meeting was this, though he did not phrase it exactly this way: You can sell the same news online that everyone else is selling, but only if you’re willing to set the price at zero.

Here’s why. Let’s say that companies selling news and information decide to restrict the availability of that news and information to those who pay them for it. For online publishers, this means setting up a system – a “pay wall” – that prevents readers from getting access to articles on the website unless they pay for that access. Once that system is in place, what is the cost to the company of adding one more customer?

It’s basically zero. That’s partly a function of the fact that news and information is a public good, not a private good like a glass of water. Public goods, like news and information, can be consumed by multiple people without preventing other people from consuming those goods. A private good like a glass of water is not available to others once I drink it.

So the cost of adding one more customer to an online pay-for-news system is zero – you don’t have to produce “more of” an online news article in order to accommodate additional readers. This cost of adding one more customer is what economists call the “marginal cost” of production. And that’s important, because in terms of economic theory, here’s something that economists know: In a perfectly competitive market, price will equal marginal cost. So a realistic estimate is that the price of online news and information will equal the marginal production cost … zero.

One point that Hamilton highlighted is that this conclusion is “path independent.” That is to say, the reason the price for online news and information has to be zero is not because people have over the years come to expect free access and it’s too late to change their habits. Otherwise put, it wouldn’t make any difference if we went back to the early days of the Internet and established, by convention, that all content must be protected behind a pay wall. An economic theory of online news and information suggests we’ll always get a market where price equals zero.

Conclusion: You can’t charge a price for online news and information in a competitive market.

Even though we don’t and won’t charge a price for Ann Arbor Chronicle content, there’s an important lesson here. The conclusion that price equals zero depends on the idea that the market is competitive. It’s only a perfectly competitive market if every producer of news and information is offering the same news and information. It’s therefore in The Chronicle’s best interest – from the point of view of economic theory – to continue to offer our readers the kind of detailed and comprehensive coverage that we do, because it’s not available elsewhere.

But readers don’t think in terms of economic theories. Readers have information demands, and their willingness to pay for information hinges on whether their demands are being met. Hamilton distinguishes among four kinds of information demands – those of consumers, producers, entertainment seekers, and voter/citizens.

By consumers, Hamilton means people who are thinking of purchasing some product, and are looking for information about which merchants are offering it for the cheapest price, or about which product has the best safety record. Information about cheapest price or safety represents a benefit to consumers they can’t otherwise get. By producers, Hamilton means people who need the information to do their jobs. If it’s your job to look for legal precedents, you would get a benefit from having access to information about court cases. By entertainment seekers, he means mostly what it sounds like – information that provides the benefit of being simply fun.

So for the first three categories, it’s pretty clear that you don’t get the benefit if you don’t get the information. And if you want the benefit, you might be willing to pay for the information.

But what about voter/citizens? What benefit do they get from the information that might be available? Here, Hamilton draws on the work of Anthony Downs in describing “rational ignorance” – it might be perfectly rational not to  invest time and effort in  becoming better informed about civic and public affairs. Becoming better informed about public affairs offers only a small prospect to an individual of getting a benefit – say, of affecting public policy through their one vote.

So what kind of person does perceive a benefit from getting  public affairs information? Hamilton identifies three Ds: (i) people who get a benefit because they feel it’s their duty; (ii) people (political junkies) who benefit from the information because it’s a diversion; and (iii) people who enjoy the drama surrounding such information.

If the three Ds are the kind of people who might be willing to pay for information about civic affairs, then the bad news is that the three Ds are a fairly small set of people.

Here’s two reasons I do not see this as a dream-crushing fact. First, there’s an additional, fourth D that makes the set of people a little bit bigger: People who want to delegate the work of being informed about civic affairs to someone else. These are people who take comfort from knowing that someone is attending the meetings of public bodies and writing down what’s said and making some kind of sense of what happens there.

Second, a locally-based news organization like The Chronicle doesn’t require the kind of massive infusion of revenue needed to sustain layers of executive management and a financial return for out-of-town owners.

Still, our revenue needs to grow, in order to bring additional working journalists on board and to ensure that The Ann Arbor Chronicle will persist as a permanent part of the Ann Arbor media landscape – even after its local owners’ eventual demise. Revenue from Chronicle voluntary subscriptions helps support owners who are themselves working journalists, as well as our freelance writers.

To all Chronicle readers who have already subscribed voluntarily: Thank you. To those Chronicle readers who prodded us to make subscribing voluntarily an option: Thank you. To those Chronicle readers who suggested that what we should be selling is journalism: Thank you.

And to those readers who opt to subscribe voluntarily now: Thank you.

That’s my pitch. Play ball!