City council races were actively contested in only three of Ann Arbor’s five wards in the Democratic primary: Ward 1 (orange), Ward 2 (green) and Ward 3 (teal).

November will see at least three newcomers to the 11-member council – Kirk Westphal in Ward 2, Julie Grand in Ward 3, and Graydon Krapohl in Ward 4. Westphal and Grand won their respective Democratic primaries that featured no incumbents. Both candidates were coming off unsuccessful council campaigns last year – against Jane Lumm (Ward 2) and Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3), respectively.

Westphal received 1,819 votes (59%) to Nancy Kaplan’s 1,261 (41%) in a race that was anticipated to be somewhat closer. Grand received 1,516 votes (51.1%) compared to Bob Dascola’s 794 (26.8%) and Samuel McMullen’s 616 (20.8%). That gave a decisive result to a Ward 3 race that had been fraught with legal disputes – about Dascola’s eligibility to appear on the ballot in the first place; and then about how to count misprinted absentee ballots, which omitted Dascola’s name.

Krapohl’s race did not even appear on the Aug. 5 ballot – because he was unopposed in the Democratic primary and no Republican qualified for the ballot. The omission of the race from the ballot under those conditions is stipulated in a clause of the city charter.

Krapohl will be filling the seat to which Democrat Margie Teall did not seek re-election. Westphal will almost certainly be filling the Ward 2 seat that Sally Petersen left to pursue an unsuccessful mayoral campaign. And Grand will almost certainly be elected to fill the seat vacated by Christopher Taylor, who ran a successful campaign for mayor.

Taylor, who’s currently a councilmember representing Ward 3, will be the Democratic nominee in the Nov. 4 general election against independent Bryan Kelly. Assuming Taylor does prevail, he will remain on the council as mayor. And among the 10 councilmembers who represent one of the five wards, he’ll almost certainly see a total of seven returning faces, including the two incumbents who prevailed in the Aug. 5 primaries.

That’s because those two incumbents, like the new Democratic council nominees, will also be unopposed on the November ballot. First-term Ward 1 councilmember Sumi Kailasapathy prevailed over Don Adams, who was seeking elected office for the first time. Kailasapathy received 1,113 votes (56.8%) compared to 840 (42.8%) for Adams.

And first-term Ward 5 councilmember Chuck Warpehoski prevailed over Leon Bryson, who had announced he was withdrawing from the race after the deadline to remove his name from the ballot. Bryson still collected 674 votes (18.6%), but Warpehoski’s total was 2,936 (81%).

Those three newcomers and two incumbents will join the five councilmembers who are currently in the middle of their two-year terms: Jane Lumm (Ward 2), Jack Eaton (Ward 4) and Mike Anglin (Ward 5) – as well as Sabra Briere (Ward 1) and Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3), who were unsuccessful in their mayoral bids.

Below are some maps illustrating the geographic distribution of votes in the three actively contested city council races, as well as some limited analysis of the Ward 2 race in terms of questions that were part of a pre-election poll conducted by Public Policy Polling.

Ward 1 Maps

In the Aug. 5, 2014 Democratic primary, first-term Ward 1 councilmember Sumi Kailasapathy prevailed over Don Adams, who was seeking elected office for the first time.

Maps are shaded by precinct based on the percentage of votes received by each candidate. Kailasapathy’s percentages are shown in red; Adams’ percentages are shown in blue.

Kailasapathy received 1,113 votes (56.8%) compared to 840 (42.8%) for Adams. That’s a similar percentage breakdown to the 2012 Democratic primary race that Kailasapathy won against Eric Sturgis. In the 2012 race, Kailasapathy received 863 votes (58%) compared to 628 (42%) for Sturgis.

Kailasapathy lost one precinct to Adams – Precinct 1-10. The tally there was 273 for Adams compared to 211 for Kailasapathy. That precinct includes Arrowwood Hills Cooperative Housing, where Adams lives.

When The Chronicle dropped by the Precinct 1-10 polling station on its Election Day tour of the polls, Adams indicated he’d be spending the whole day at that precinct, saying “This is my family.”

In the color-shaded maps that are included in this article, Precinct 1-10 stands out in the central northern part of the ward.

In 2012, Kailasapathy was not as strong in Precinct 1-10 as she was in other parts of Ward 1, but still prevailed there against Sturgis. That year she lost a different precinct to Sturgis – Precinct 1-5, just to the south of Precinct 1-10 – by a tally of 123 to 157. That precinct was the home precinct of Sturgis. This year she prevailed there against Adams – by a tally of 177 to 136. Sturgis worked for Kailasapathy’s campaign this year.

Ward 1 Maps: Adams

Ward 1 Maps: Kailasapathy

Ward 2 Maps

In the Ward 2 city council race, Kirk Westphal received 1,819 votes (59%) to Nancy Kaplan’s 1,261 (41%) in a primary that was anticipated to be somewhat closer.

Westphal currently serves on the city planning commission, with a term ending in July 2015. In November each year, the city council makes an annual appointment from its own members to the planning commission – a position currently held by Sabra Briere (Ward 1). Regardless of how the council handles that appointment this year, an additional appointment will need to be made to the planning commission from the citizenry at large – to fill the spot that Westphal will be giving up to serve on the council.

Ward 2 precincts color-shaded according to percentage of the vote received: Westphal (blue) and Kaplan (red).

Westphal’s decisive margin in the Aug. 5 primary – of nearly 3 to 2 – saw Kaplan receiving about the same percentage of the vote as Westphal did last year in the 2013 November election in Ward 2 – a race in which Jane Lumm prevailed.

One of the two precincts Westphal won that year was percentage-wise especially strong for him this year against Kaplan – Precinct 2-1 in the middle of the ward. In 2-1, Westphal received 73% of the vote this year. But it was comparatively lightly voted – with the actual tally just 77 to 28 votes. The neighboring Precinct 2-8, just to the west of 2-1, was also nearly as strong for Westphal percentage-wise at 68%, but offered a much greater plurality. The tally was 289 to 136.

Kaplan did not win any precincts. The sparsely voted 2-2 was split three votes apiece for both candidates. Kaplan’s home base of support in the southern part of the ward near Huron Hills golf course delivered the closest meaningful total for Kaplan – at 48%. Kaplan had campaigned in part on her participation in an effort a few years ago to defend Huron Hills golf course from a future that’s different from its status as a public park.

Ward 2: Poll Question Breakdown

Westphal had campaigned in part by contrasting himself with Kaplan with respect to three points: (1) attitude toward downtown development (as a planning commissioner, Westphal voted to recommend 413 E. Huron for approval); (2) public transportation (Westphal supported the recent AAATA millage, which was approved by voters in on May 6); and (3) development of rail-based transportation options (Westphal supports investment in a new rail station).

Two of those issues were touched on in a pre-election poll of Ann Arbor voters, which was conducted by Public Policy Polling (PPP). Voters were asked their opinions about recent downtown development and their perceptions of a need for a new train station.

In general, do you support or oppose the increased development being approved and built downtown in recent years?

Do you think Ann Arbor should build a new train station/transit center, or do you think the current train station is adequate?

Base on those poll results, Westphal’s general position on those topics seems to resonate with more Ann Arbor voters citywide than not. A slim majority of Ann Arbor residents think Ann Arbor needs a better train station: The need for a new train station polled at 52%, while the alternate view – that the current station is adequate – polled at 35%. The poll indicated 46% support for the downtown projects that have been approved and built in recent years, and with opposition at 39%.

The poll had 435 respondents citywide, which means that the numbers for each of the individual five wards were fairly small. So conclusions about each ward’s cut of the data would need to be viewed with even more caution than the poll’s overall results.

But the breakout by ward on those two pre-election poll questions showed a great deal more ambiguity amongst Ward 2 voters than among voters citywide. Contentment with the current train station polled two points better in Ward 2 than a perceived need to build a better one – 44% to 42%. And support for recent downtown developments showed a split of 43% to 42%. Westphal’s ultimately successful campaign strategy did not appear to try to straddle the fence on those issues. Those results are presented in Charts 1 and 2 below.

Chart 1: From July 28-29, 2014 pre-election survey of 435 likely Democratic primary voters by Public Policy Polling. Chart by the Chronicle.

Chart 2: From July 28-29, 2014 pre-election survey of 435 likely Democratic primary voters by Public Policy Polling. Chart by the Chronicle.

Also part of the Ward 2 campaign was an explicit association of Westphal with mayoral candidate Christopher Taylor by the Michigan Talent Agenda’s set of endorsements. Westphal and Taylor also shared several donors to their campaigns. To the extent that voters perceived Westphal as similar to Taylor, that may have worked to Westphal’s benefit – because according to the PPP poll, voters have a favorable opinion of Taylor – not just citywide, but also in Ward 2.

Poll respondents were asked a different question about current mayor John Hieftje – related to job performance, as opposed to a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the person. But on that question Hieftje’s approval showed a different pattern from Taylor’s. Both men polled positively citywide, but more Ward 2 voters disapprove of Hieftje’s job performance than approve of it. There’s been a smattering of commentary over the last few years attempting to associate Westphal with Hieftje – based on the fact that it was Hieftje who nominated Westphal to the planning commission. Based on the outcome of the primary, that appears to be an association that is not felt strongly enough by voters to make a difference.

Results by ward on poll questions about Taylor and Hieftje are presented in Chart 3 and Chart 4.

Chart 3: From July 28-29, 2014 pre-election survey of 435 likely Democratic primary voters by Public Policy Polling. Chart by the Chronicle.

Chart 4: From July 28-29, 2014 pre-election survey of 435 likely Democratic primary voters by Public Policy Polling. Chart by the Chronicle.

Ward 2 Maps: Westphal

Ward 2 Maps: Kaplan

Ward 3 Maps

In the three-way Ward 3 race, Julie Grand received 1,516 votes (51.1%) compared to Bob Dascola’s 794 (26.8%), and Samuel McMullen’s 616 (20.8%).

Grand (green), Dascola (red), and McMullen (orange).

That gave a decisive result to a Ward 3 race that had been fraught with legal disputes – about Dascola’s eligibility to appear on the ballot in the first place; and then about how to count some misprinted absentee ballots, which omitted Dascola’s name.

Concern about how to count those ballots – if a voter did not send in a replacement ballot – had been heightened by the fact that Ward 3 has historically featured close races. The 2009 primary race was decided by just six votes, which triggered a recount.

In the end, Grand eked out an actual majority of votes, comfortably outpolling Dascola and McMullen.

That outcome was based in part on Grand’s strength in the two precincts nearest to the center of the city near the Burns Park area – 3-3 and 3-4. Grand’s support in those precincts approached 60%. Grand also won Precinct 3-3 in her race against Kunselman last year, which she narrowly lost overall.

Like last year, Grand was not quite as strong in the mid-outer precincts of 3-8, 3-7 and 3-6, but still had more votes than Dascola and McMullen in every precinct in the ward.

The pattern of Grand’s support in the ward was similar but not identical to that of mayoral candidate Christopher Taylor’s in Ward 3 – his home ward. Precinct 3-6 was the only precinct won by Stephen Kunselman in the mayoral race (his home precinct). Grand still polled 41% there, after losing the Democratic primary to Kunselman last year. Grand had publicly endorsed Taylor in his mayoral race.

Precinct 3-6 was also one of the strongest precinct for Bob Dascola – among those precincts with a significant turnout. Dascola had publicly endorsed Kunselman in his mayoral race.

In the 2013 primary, Grand had also won Precinct 3-5 in the south of the ward. And that precinct was one of her stronger precincts again this year. Grand received nearly 58% of the vote in that precinct.

McMullen’s strongest precinct was 3-7, where he received nearly 28% of the vote. That’s the home neighborhood of Jeannine Palms, a long-time parks and environmental activist who had publicly endorsed McMullen and campaigned on his behalf.

Ward 3 Maps: McMullen

Ward 3 Maps: Dascola

Ward 3 Maps: Grand

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“Vote Here” sign designating an Ann Arbor polling location for a previous election.

No Republicans are running for mayor or in any of the city council races. Only one independent candidate – Bryan Kelly, who’s running for mayor – will appear on the Nov. 4 ballot.

Races for probate judge and circuit court judge offer fields of five and three candidates, respectively.

This article provides a roundup of Chronicle election coverage, for anyone who’s still studying up on the candidates. It includes links to reports and recordings of candidate forums, campaign finance data, analysis and other information. Links are also provided to candidate websites and League of Women Voters candidate profiles.

If you’re not sure whether you’re registered to vote or you’re not sure which ward you live in, Michigan’s Secretary of State website offers an easy way to check. The site also lets you look at a sample ballot. To give you a general idea of what ward you live in, check out this ward boundary map.

Polls open on Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. Readers can follow along during the day as The Chronicle goes poll-hopping, checking in at locations throughout the city. We’ll also be posting updates with results starting soon after the polls close. The Washtenaw County elections division website also provides unofficial results on election night.

Below you’ll find more information on the Ann Arbor mayoral and city council candidates, as well as judicial candidates for the probate and 22nd circuit courts.

Ann Arbor Mayor

Competition for the Democratic Party’s mayoral nomination is a four-way race: Stephen Kunselman, Sabra Briere, Christopher Taylor, Sally Petersen. All are current city councilmembers. Incumbent mayor John Hieftje is not seeking re-election, and there is no Republican candidate. The winner of the Aug. 5 primary will face independent Bryan Kelly in the Nov. 4 general election.

The League of Women Voters provides written candidate profiles with responses to questions on its Vote411.org website. [Mayoral Vote411.org profiles]

Here are links to Chronicle coverage of mayoral candidate forums, campaign finance reports, and other analysis:

• Poll: Clear Favorite for Ann Arbor Mayor
• Local Candidates Sketch Views on the Arts
• Live Mayoral Forum: Affordable Housing
• Chronicle Column: Mayoral Folk, Easy Listening
• Mayoral Candidate Forum: CTN Broadcast
• Chamber Forum: Ann Arbor Mayoral Race
• Ann Arbor Dems Mayoral Candidate Forum
• Live from Literati: Mayoral Candidate Debate
• Candidate Forum Focuses on Downtown
• 2014 Pre-Primary Finance: Donor Analysis
• Mayoral Election Finance 2014: Charts, Maps
• Council, Mayor Primary Election Lineups Set

Ann Arbor City Council

There are five wards in Ann Arbor, with two councilmembers from each ward serving two-year terms. Each year, one of those ward seats is up for election. This year, races are actively contested only in Wards 1, 2 and 3.

In Ward 4, Graydon Krapohl – a Democrat who is currently vice chair of the park advisory commission – is the only person who has qualified from either party for the primary, so that race will not appear on the Ward 4 primary ballot. There are no Republican or independent candidates running for that seat. Incumbent Democrat Margie Teall is not seeking re-election.

Ward 5 voters will see two names on the Democratic primary ballot: one-term incumbent Chuck Warpehoski and Leon Bryson. Bryson has announced that he’s withdrawn his candidacy and won’t campaign for the seat. However, Bryson’s name will still appear on the ballot. As in Ward 4, there is no Republican or independent candidate running for the Ward 5 seat.

Ann Arbor City Council: Ward 1

The Ward 1 Democratic primary features one-term incumbent Sumi Kailasapathy and Don Adams, who is seeking elected office for the first time. There are no Republicans or independents in this race.

The League of Women Voters provides written candidate profiles with responses to questions on its Vote411.org website. [Ward 1 Vote411.org profiles]

Here are links to Chronicle coverage of candidate forums, campaign finance reports, and other analysis:

• Council Candidates Live: Ann Arbor Dems
• Council Election Finance 2014: Charts, Maps
• 2014 Pre-Primary Finance: Donor Analysis
• Ward 1 Candidate Forum: CTN Broadcast
• Sound Bites: Two for Ward 1, One for Mayor

Ann Arbor City Council: Ward 2

In Ward 2, there are two candidates in the Democratic primary: Nancy Kaplan, a current trustee of the Ann Arbor District Library; and Kirk Westphal, who until recently served as chair of the Ann Arbor planning commission. The incumbent, Sally Petersen, is running for mayor rather than seeking re-election to that council seat. There are no Republican or independent candidates in Ward 2.

The League of Women Voters provides written candidate profiles with responses to questions on its Vote411.org website. [Ward 2 Vote411.org profiles]

Here are links to Chronicle coverage of candidate forums, campaign finance reports, and other analysis:

• Council Candidates Live: Ann Arbor Dems
• Council Election Finance 2014: Charts, Maps
• 2014 Pre-Primary Finance: Donor Analysis
• Live from the Library: Ward 2 Council Forum
• Ward 2 Candidate Forum: CTN Broadcast

Ann Arbor City Council: Ward 3

This year’s Ward 3 contest features Julie Grand, Bob Dascola and Samuel McMullen, who are all competing for the seat that Christopher Taylor is leaving in order to run for mayor.

In addition to the candidates’ websites, more information is provided in the League of Women Voters written candidate profiles with responses to questions on its Vote411.org website. [Ward 3 Vote411.org profiles]

Here are links to Chronicle coverage of candidate forums, campaign finance reports, and other analysis:

• Council Candidates Live: Ann Arbor Dems
• Council Election Finance 2014: Charts, Maps
• 2014 Pre-Primary Finance: Donor Analysis
• Ward 3 Candidate Forum: CTN Broadcast
• Court: Don’t Count Ward 3 Defective Ballots
• Dascola Mistakenly Left Off Ward 3 Ballot
• Dascola Election Lawsuit Fees Settled: $30,731
• Judge Puts Dascola on Ward 3 Ballot

Links to more coverage related to Dascola’s lawsuit against the city can be found here.

Probate Judge

Five candidates are seeking to be the next Washtenaw County probate judge: Jane Bassett, Tamara Garwood, Constance Jones, Tracy Van den Bergh and recently appointed judge Julia Owdziej. The nonpartisan primary will narrow the race to two candidates for the Nov. 4 general election.

Owdziej was appointed to the seat by Gov. Rick Snyder just last month, on June 2, 2014, to fill the vacancy on the court left by Nancy Wheeler’s retirement. The announcement of that retirement came on May 1, after candidates had filed to run. Wheeler was expected to retire at the end of the year, but it came earlier than expected due to health reasons. Bassett, Garwood and Jones currently work in private practice while Van den Bergh is a staff attorney for a legal services nonprofit.

On its Vote411.org website, the League of Women Voters has posted candidates’ written responses to questions: [Probate court candidate responses]

Here are links to Chronicle coverage of the probate judicial race:

• Five Candidates Vie for Probate Judgeship
• Washtenaw Dems Host Judicial Forum
• Chronicle Column: Get Your Sign Outta My Yard

22nd Circuit Court Judge

Pat Conlin, Veronique Liem and Michael Woodyard will compete in the nonpartisan Aug. 5 primary for 22nd circuit court judge. The top two candidates will advance to the Nov. 4 general election. The winner of that contest will fill the open seat left by judge Donald Shelton, who turned 70 in June. According to Michigan state law, only a person under the age of 70 can be appointed or run for the position of judge.

Conlin and Liem are local attorneys, while Woodyard works in the Wayne County prosecutor’s office. A second seat on the court is also up for election, as judge David Swartz is at the end of a six-year term. He is running uncontested to retain his 22nd circuit court incumbent seat.

On its Vote411.org website, the League of Women Voters has posted candidates’ written responses to questions: [22nd circuit court candidate responses]

Here are links to Chronicle coverage of the 22nd circuit court judicial race:

• Circuit Court Race: Conlin, Woodyard, Liem
• Washtenaw Dems Host Judicial Forum

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Contributions made to candidates in Ward 1, Ward 2 and Ward 3 council races are plotted based on the address of the contributor. (Image links to sets of dynamic maps by broken down by candidate.)

That’s about $100,000 less than the amount raised by four candidates in the mayoral primary. The filing deadline for pre-primary reports was July 25.

In Ward 4, incumbent Democrat Margie Teall is not seeking re-election and only one candidate is running – Graydon Krapohl. So he did not need to file campaign finance reports. In Ward 5, Leon Bryson announced several weeks ago that he was withdrawing from his challenge of first-term incumbent Chuck Warpehoski. Even though both Ward 5 candidates filed campaign finance reports, this article does not analyze them.

Accounting for more than half of the total amount raised in the other three wards were the two candidates in Ward 2: Kirk Westphal and Nancy Kaplan. Kaplan’s $16,314 was easily more than any other candidate. By way of comparison to recent Ward 2 races, for the pre-primary campaign period in 2011 and 2013 Jane Lumm raised about $19,000 and $20,000 in those respective years. Westphal raised $12,420 this year, which is about $2,000 more than he raised during the comparable period in his unsuccessful 2013 campaign against Lumm. Westphal and Kaplan are competing for the Ward 2 seat currently held by Sally Petersen. She decided to run for mayor instead of seeking re-election to the Ward 2 seat.

This year’s Ward 3 contest features Julie Grand, Bob Dascola and Samuel McMullen, who are all competing for the seat that Christopher Taylor is leaving in order to run for mayor. Among the three, Dascola raised the most money with $7,385 in contributions compared to $6,595 for Grand and $5,248 for McMullen. (McMullen’s campaign reported a total of $5,315 in itemized contributions, but The Chronicle’s calculation was for $67 less than that, based on the documents.) Grand’s total this year is significantly less than the $10,825 she raised in the comparable period in 2013 for her unsuccessful campaign against Stephen Kunselman.

The Ward 1 race features one-term incumbent Sumi Kailasapathy and Don Adams. Kailasapathy raised $5,345 compared to $4,570 for Adams. Kailasapathy’s amount this year is about $1,000 more than what she raised during the pre-primary period for the 2012 primary, which she won against Eric Sturgis.

While the raw totals provide some insight into how the campaigns are being financed, there’s more to it than that.

Here’s a read-only link to the Google spreadsheet used by The Chronicle to generate charts and maps: [2014 Council Campaign Finance: Ann Arbor] For readers who’d like full-sized versions of the maps embedded below, here’s a link to the Google Fusion tables: [2014 Council Campaign Finance Maps]

Below we present charts and maps to illustrate the distribution of donations by amount and geography.

Charts

Below are frequency distributions of donations grouped by size of the donation. In the last few years, winning campaigns for city council races have been characterized by distributions that skewed toward smaller donations.

Charts: Ward 3

McMullen raised a total of $5,248 from 88 contributions for a mean contribution of $59. The median contribution was $25.

Grand raised a total of $6,595 from 45 contributions for a mean contribution of $146. The median contribution was $100.

Dascola raised a total of $7,385 from 75 contributions for a mean contribution of $98. The median contribution was $50.

Charts: Ward 2

Westphal raised a total of $12,420 from 95 contributions for a mean contribution of $130. The median contribution was $100.

Kaplan raised a total of $16,314 from 132 contributions for a mean contribution of $123. The median contribution was $50.

Charts: Ward 1

Kailasapathy raised a total of $5,345 from 51 contributions for a mean contribution of $104. The median contribution was $50

Adams raised a total of $4,570 from 31 contributions for a mean contribution of $147. The median contribution was $100.

Maps

Maps are plotted by location of the person making the contribution.

Ward 3 Maps: McMullen

Contributions to Samuel McMullen’s campaign are plotted in red. Several contributions came from the area south of Washtenaw Avenue in Ward 3 – from the ward’s tip in the pie-shaped wedge to the farther reaches of the ward. But those Ward 3 contributions do not form an obvious concentration in Ward 3. Several of McMullen’s contributions – 35 of 88 contributions –were made by residents outside the city, in other parts of the country. Many of those appear to have been made by family members.

Ward 3 Maps: Grand

Contributions to Julie Grand’s campaign are plotted in yellow. They show a clear clustering toward the tip of Ward 3′s pie-shaped wedge near the center of the city.

Ward 3 Maps: Dascola

Contributions to Bob Dascola’s campaign are plotted in green. Many of Dascola’s contributions come from south of Washtenaw Avenue in Ward 3. But he’s received many contributions from across the city. He received several contributions from north of Washtenaw Avenue, in Ward 2. He also received several contributions from the central western part of the city in Ward 5 as well as the northwest corner of Ward 4.

Ward 2 Maps: Westphal

Contributions to Kirk Westphal’s campaign are plotted in green. The majority of Westphal’s contributions come from Ward 2 – north of Washtenaw Avenue and in the Glazier Way area in the central eastern part of the city. There’s a sprinkling of contributions from other parts of the city as well.

Ward 2 Maps: Kaplan

Contributions to Nancy Kaplan’s campaign are plotted in yellow. Kaplan’s contributions show a heavy concentration in the southern part of Ward 2 – in the Huron Hills area north of Washtenaw Avenue. The central western part of the city (Ward 5) shows a fairly high concentration of contributions as well.

Ward 1 Maps: Kailasapathy

Contributions to Sumi Kailasapathy’s campaign are plotted in blue. Kailasapathy’s contributions are mostly from Ward 1 in the northern part of the city. But she’s also received contributions from the central western part of town (Ward 5).

Ward 1 Maps: Adams

Contributions to Don Adams’ campaign are plotted in purple. Adams received contributions from the Northside area along Pontiac Trail. He also received a sprinkling of contributions from the Burns Park area.

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Group photo of candidates in Ward 1, Ward 2 and Ward 3 at the Ann Arbor Democratic Party forum held on Saturday, July 12, 2014. From right: Ward 1 candidates Don Adams and Sumi Kailasapathy; Ward 2 candidates Nancy Kaplan and Kirk Westphal; and Ward 3 candidates Julie Grand, Samuel McMullen and Bob Dascola.

The forum will be held at the Traverwood branch of the Ann Arbor District Library.

The Ward 2 city council race features Kirk Westphal, current chair of the city planning commission, and Nancy Kaplan, current trustee on the Ann Arbor District Library board.

There’s no incumbent in this race, because Ward 2 city councilmember Sally Petersen is running for mayor instead of re-election.

The Chronicle plans to broadcast live audio of the event. The live audio player is embedded below. After the event, it will be replaced with an .mp3 recording. Update: Several .mp3 files broken down by question are now included in the article in place of the live-stream player.

Previous Chronicle coverage of the Ward 2 city council race includes: “Ward 2 Candidate Forum: CTN Broadcast” (embedded video with transcript in a scrolling text box) and “Council Candidates Live: Ann Arbor Dems” (.mp3 audio files).

Community Television Network has pre-recorded some comments from candidates in all races. [link to CTN video-on-demand for council candidate comments ]

And the League of Women Voters provides written candidate profiles with responses to questions on its Vote411.org website. [Ward 2 Vote411.org profiles]

Listen below to the live broadcast from the Traverwood branch of the Ann Arbor District Library.

Under the audio player are two text boxes with identical content. They’re used to provide notes to the listener about what’s happening during the live broadcast. The first box forces the view to the bottom of the file so that a reader is always offered a view of the most recent notes. The second box does not force the view to the bottom of the file.

[.mp3 of Ward 2 Traverwood forum]

• Traverwood-01-Intro
• Traverwood-02-Public-Safety-Staffing
• Traverwood-03-Nixon-Dhu-Varren-Dev
• Traverwood-04-NHoods-vs-Downtown
• Traverwood-05-Public-Schools
• Traverwood-06-Nixon-Plymouth-Corridor
• Traverwood-07-Train-Station-Location
• Traverwood-08-Social-Justice-Issues
• Traverwood-09-Big-Small-Small-Big
• Traverwood-10-Response-Times-Medical
• Traverwood-11-50-Story-High-Rise
• Traverwood-12-Crosswalk-Ordinance
• Traverwood-13-Streams-Watersheds
• Traverwood-14-Budget-Cuts-Revenue
• Traverwood-15-Chains-Downtown-Vitality
• Traverwood-16-Current-Mayor-Legacy-Mayoral-Campaign
• Traverwood-17-Revitalization-of-N-Main
• Traverwood-18-Closing

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Nancy Kaplan and Kirk Westphal marches in Ann Arbor’s Fourth of July parade.

The Ward 2 city council Democratic primary forum features current chair of the city planning commission, Kirk Westphal and current trustee on the board of the Ann Arbor District Library board, Nancy Kaplan.

The Ward 2 seat does not have an incumbent this year, because Sally Petersen is running for mayor, instead of seeking re-election to another two-year term on the city council.

The scheduled broadcast start time on CTN is at 8 p.m. today (July 8) and can be viewed as a live video stream in the embedded player below.

CTN has pre-recorded some comments from candidates in all races. [link to CTN video-on-demand for council candidate comments ]

And the League of Women Voters provides written candidate profiles with responses to questions on its Vote411.org website. [Ward 2 Vote411.org profiles]

If you’re not sure whether you’re registered to vote or you’re not sure which ward you live in, Michigan’s Secretary of State website offers an easy way to check.

If you don’t think you’ll be able to make it to the polls on Aug. 5, an application to receive an absentee ballot can be downloaded from the city clerk’s website. [.pdf of absentee ballot application form] Completed applications can be mailed or hand delivered to the clerk’s office on the second floor of city hall, 301 E. Huron St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104. The applications can also be scanned and emailed to cityclerk@a2gov.org.

Watch the Ward 2 candidate forum below. The Ward 3 candidate forum will follow at 9 p.m.

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Exactly one week before the vote, Ward 2 Ann Arbor city councilmembers Jane Lumm and Sally Petersen hosted a resident meeting on the topic.

This AAATA route map shows the current configuration of fixed-route buses. Label and icon for Earhart Village added by The Chronicle.

Invited were all residents of Ward 2, city residents at large, as well as representatives of the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority. The AAATA board voted in February to place the millage on the May 6 ballot.

About 50 people attended. Among others, the meeting drew Ward 2 city council candidate Nancy Kaplan, former Ward 1 council candidate Jeff Hayner, former mayor Ingrid Sheldon, Ward 3 council candidate Julie Grand, and state rep Jeff Irwin (D-53).

This is a report of that meeting.

Lumm and Petersen had previously co-hosted a half dozen similar meetings for their constituents on a variety of topics. The April 29 event had a potentially broader impact: At a candidate forum held on April 16, 2014, mayoral hopeful Petersen had stated that she was planning to wait until after the April 29 ward meeting to decide on a possible endorsement of the millage.

At that time, Petersen was still a little bit on the fence – but leaning toward supporting it. By then, the three other candidates in the Democratic mayoral primary – Sabra Briere, Christopher Taylor and Stephen Kunselman – had already indicated support for the additional tax.

The April 29 evening meeting was held at Earhart Village – a 174-unit condominium community just off the north-south Earhart Road, between Plymouth and Geddes. The Route #2 bus line runs from downtown to the northeast up Plymouth – with a relatively infrequent variant, Route #2C, that offers service down from Plymouth to the Earhart Village area. Accessing Route #3 to the south, on Geddes, would mean about a 1-mile walk up Earhart for an Earhart Village resident.

Frequency of service to the Earhart Village area was among the complaints of some attendees. Many in the room were negatively inclined toward the millage, as one woman announced she’d already voted no, using an absentee ballot. But there were some voices in the room that backed the proposal. Responding to criticism that the AAATA was not a “lean-and-mean” organization, a teacher in the audience made a comparison to cuts by the school district: “Lean-and-mean is not serving our students.”

AAATA staff Chris White, Michael Benham, and Mary Stasiak gave a presentation to the group before fielding questions. Lumm and Petersen structured the interaction by reading questions that attendees had written on index cards, but people were also free to ask direct questions. Some questions were pointedly critical in tone: “Does the millage money cover the additional wear and tear on the roads due to the additional buses?” And some were softballs: “Do Ward 2 constituents understand the benefit of bus expansion for low-income people and people with disabilities?”

At the conclusion of the meeting, Petersen quipped: “We had loaded questions, we had loaded answers. Hopefully one way or another we’ll have loaded buses sometime soon!” And Petersen announced her support for the millage two days later at a May 1 morning meeting of the Main Street Area Association.

However loaded the questions might have been, they elicited some useful information about how public transportation works. This report is organized along three broad themes reflected in the questions and comments from residents: overall efficiency of the AAATA as an organization; the nature of transportation funding; and some basics of public transportation service. The report is supplemented with charts generated from a national transit database.

AAATA Efficiency

A number of questions from the audience – either written on cards and handed to Lumm and Petersen or asked directly – dealt with a perception that the AAATA is not operationally efficient.

AAATA Efficiency: Staffing

Question: If the millage passes, how many new jobs will be created in total at the AAATA, and how many of those will be new drivers? [Background to the question is a claim by opponents of the millage that the AAATA has 52 management staff.]

CHRIS WHITE: We expect over the five-year period about 60 new drivers. And there will be a couple of mechanics because we’ll have a larger fleet of buses. There might be a supervisor or two related to mechanics or facilities – but so far it looks like we can handle this with the staff we’ve got.

Question: Cutting administrative staff could offset increased costs – why isn’t that being pursued?

CHRIS WHITE: Right. That assumes that those administrative staff are not being productive and are not doing tasks that are worthwhile. That’s a judgment for the AAATA board to look at and see what our plans are and what we need to do to carry that out. Administrative staff includes our mechanics supervisors, the transportation supervisors, the people who are dispatching buses, the people investigating accidents, human resources, finance, IT, planning, the people who sell tickets, the people at the front desk, at the Blake Transit Center – it’s a wide range. Our judgment is that the staff that is there is needed in order to provide the level of service that we provide.

MICHAEL BENHAM: There are a number of folks at the office who were amazed to learn that they were “managers.” We have 11 managers. There are 52 non-union employees. That’s a big difference. There’s some messages out there that are a little bit misleading. Take our IT staff – they’re working on the overhead signs on the buses, they work to maintain those, they maintain the fare boxes. The system is very electronic these days. So our IT staff is part of those so-called “managers,” but without them we would not know where our buses are, we would not be able to provide messages to people as the bus arrives at the stop.

[Later in the meeting, Benham stressed the importance of IT staff in some of the shorter-term research and development initiatives.]

The other thing I think we should point out in terms of research and development, some of it is looking fairly far down the road. But some of it is looking at short-range issues. One of those is transit signal priority, where buses can communicate with the traffic signals and a little extra green time or gain a little extra time on that left turn – and that will speed up our operations quite a bit. With more traffic out there, we are concerned that our operations might slow down and we want to make sure that we can keep up with it.

Also, fare box technology is another big thing. Right now, if you ride our service, you see people get on the bus and people unroll their dollar bill and it takes a while at each stop. Obviously you want to collect those dollars, but it slows down our operation to do that. There are technologies out there that are being used by other systems, where you buy your ticket on your phone and you show it to your driver or you have a smart card that you don’t have to put into the farebox, you can just bring it close to the farebox. Those technologies are here, but it takes work to figure out how to apply these technologies in the system. But that’s going to speed up service. We’re looking long-term, but we’re also looking at very near-term possibilities.

Question: Does the AAATA conduct salary surveys and keep its salary levels commensurate with the corporate world?

CHRIS WHITE: We have a salary administration program that we’ve had in place for a number of years. It compares our administrative wages by position with similar positions in southeast Michigan. We benchmark those positions that are relatively simple to compare: Manager of human resources is pretty much the same at a transit agency as it is at a lot of other places … finance manager and that kind of thing. And so those are benchmarked. We keep our salaries in line with those in southeast Michigan.

AAATA Efficiency: Expenditures on Marketing, Campaign

Question:What about all the marketing staff and consultants on marketing?

MICHAEL BENHAM: As far as marketing, we have 50% more riders per service hour than our peers. In part that is because of our marketing. That’s because we offer innovative programs. We go to schools and we talk with kids early on to see if we can introduce them to transit and make them lifelong transit riders. We go to the University of Michigan and we offer options to them for getting to their workplace without bringing their car into Ann Arbor. We go to companies and talk to them about how they can get downtown without bringing their car into the downtown, and on and on.

You know, transit is not necessarily something that people know about or think about. Some people do, but we need to work hard to get people onto the system. We have a big chunk of ridership that we call “transit dependent” – they don’t have cars and they don’t have any other choice. But the big and growing part of our system is what we call “choice riders.” Those are people who have a car, or maybe have one car at home and there are two wage earners. But they have a choice whether to take that bus to work, or to the theater, or what have you. Maybe they do it to save money – which they do – or maybe because they are environmentally conscious. So the marketing we do – we call it outreach – it is our way of talking to the community and getting people interested in the service and getting people onto the bus and making that productivity 50% higher than our peers. That’s what that’s all about.

RESIDENT A: You said that the marketing campaign is designed to go to schools to urge students to use the bus more. I’ve watched the campaign over the last two years, and much of it has nothing to do with urging people to ride the bus. “TheRide, your way, vote on Tuesday.” “TheRide gets people to jobs for a healthy economy. Vote May 6.” “TheRide is essential for independent living. Vote May 6.” It’s all feel-good stuff to make people feel good about the AAATA – and damn little of it is the kind of thing the Ann Arbor District Library has, which is: We have a program here and we have a program here – Ya’ll come.

MICHAEL BENHAM: The Ride Guide is something we publish three times a year that has all information about how to ride the bus, the different kinds of tickets that are available, how to use the Blake Transit Center – so this is a central book. This is our bread and butter.

RESIDENT A: I’ve lived here 45 years, and I’ve never seen a more expensive taxpayer-funded millage campaign than the one I’m experiencing right now.

RESIDENT B: You think there’s something wrong with the AAATA telling you that there is a millage vote going on?!

MARY STASIAK: It would be completely inappropriate for the agency not to tell people that there was a vote coming up. And it’s really important that we tell people that there is a vote so that they can have a choice and they can decide for themselves what it is and how they want to vote. And you learn about it. It’s our job to tell you that this is what would be included and what you would be paying for. If we did not do that, then I would say shame on us.

SALLY PETERSEN: The sentiment I’m hearing is that some of the informational literature – knowing that you’re not a campaign organization – it feels like it’s going right up on the edge of being campaign propaganda. You say to vote, but you don’t say how to vote.

RESIDENT C: If you say you want as many people to know about it as possible, why are you having it in May instead of voting when we’re voting for governor [in November]?

MARY STASIAK: We did that on purpose so that we would not be competing with all the other issues, so that people have a clear understanding of what they were voting on.

RESIDENT C: You’d have another three months to learn about it.

AAATA Efficiency: Overall Perception

Question: I just want to say that the city, the schools and all of us workers have had to become more lean-and-mean. And I have not seen that from this presentation. We feel like [the marketing campaign] is more grandiose spending of money. We want to see you be lean-and-mean like we’ve all had to – in our jobs and our schools, and our state government. We feel like you could be a little more lean-and-mean on things.

MICHAEL BENHAM: There’s two ways to succeed in business. One is to slash and cut – bring out the meat cleaver, slash costs to the bone to the point where it really hurts your product. The other way to do it is to do what we’ve been doing – which is to build up our customer base, build our customers so we have that 50% more than our peers. We are a lean-and-mean organization. We keep a constant eye on costs and we are always looking at ways to save a few dollars here and there. But by the same token, we pay attention to our customers, both our existing customers and the many people out there who would be our customers in the future. It’s really about how to succeed in business, and I think that’s what we’re doing.

RESIDENT D: Being a teacher, lean-and-mean is not serving our students.

AAATA Efficiency: Comparative National Stats

When Benham referred to the AAATA’s 50% greater ridership per service hour than its peer group, he was citing the result of a peer-group comparison analysis from a tool that is available through the Florida Transit Information System (FTIS) based on recommendations from the Transit Cooperative Research Program.

To determine a peer group, the tool relies on the following criteria to establish a “likeness” index between a transit agency and other transit agencies nationwide:

• urban area population
• total annual vehicle miles operated
• annual operating budget
• population density
• percent of college students
• population growth rate
• percent service purchased
• percent low-income population
• annual delay (hours) per traveler
• freeway lane miles (thousands) per capita
• percent service demand-responsive
• distance between agencies

Based on the “likeness” index, it’s possible to select the top 20 (or any number) of other transit agencies to analyze in comparison to the AAATA. Measured on the above criteria, using 2010 demographic survey information, the most similar 20 organizations to the AAATA are transit agencies in these peer communities: Peoria, IL; Lexington, KY; Moline, IL; Lansing, MI; Syracuse, NY; Savannah, GA; Champaign-Urbana, IL; Roanoke, VA; Concord, CA; Erie, PA; Kalamazoo, MI; Harrisburg, PA; Fort Wayne, IN; Rockford, IL; Shreveport, LA; Hartford, CT; Fort Collins, CO; Scranton, PA; Gainesville, FL; and South Bend, IN.

The peer group scoring based on the following year’s data resulted in a group of peers that overlapped in 19 out of 20 cases, with some minor shuffling of “likeness” scores.

Using the same tool, The Chronicle was able to replicate the AAATA’s conclusions in determining the peer group, as well as the comparative analysis for three metrics. For its fixed-route service, the AAATA’s cost per service hour is higher than its peer group average. But the AAATA’s number of riders per service hour is higher than its peer group. The number of riders per service hour is sufficiently higher that it pushes the AAATA’s cost per ride lower than its peer group.

In the charts below, the AAATA is always presented in the leftmost bar, and the other transit agencies are presented from left to right in their rank order of “likeness.” The peer group median is shown in a horizontal red line.

AAATA Operating Expense per Revenue Hour compared against FTIS Top 20 peers. Top 20 peers to AAATA are based on Florida Transit Information System (FTIS) analysis. Data from Integrated National Transit Database Analysis System (INTDAS), developed for Florida Department of Transportation by Lehman Center for Transportation Research, Florida International University, http://www.ftis.org/intdas.html, accessed Nov. 22, 2013.

AAATA Passenger Trips per Revenue Hour compared against FTIS Top 20 peers. Top 20 peers to AAATA based on Florida Transit Information System (FTIS) analysis. Data from Integrated National Transit Database Analysis System (INTDAS), developed for Florida Department of Transportation by Lehman Center for Transportation Research, Florida International University, http://www.ftis.org/intdas.html, accessed Nov. 22, 2013.

AAATA Operating Expense per Trip compared against FTIS Top 20 peers. Top 20 peers to AAATA based on Florida Transit Information System (FTIS) analysis. Data from Integrated National Transit Database Analysis System (INTDAS), developed for Florida Department of Transportation by Lehman Center for Transportation Research, Florida International University, http://www.ftis.org/intdas.html, accessed Nov. 22, 2013.

While there’s been considerable public back and forth between opponents of the millage and the AAATA about the number of managers employed at the authority, the National Transit Database includes administrative employees and total employees (as well as other categories of employees) as variables. For 2012, the database shows 26.5 FTE in administration and 181 total employees. If administrative FTEs are computed as a percent of the total and that statistic is compared to the AAATA’s peer group, the AAATA’s percentage is higher than the peer group median:

AAATA Administrative Employees as a Percentage compared against FTIS Top 20 peers. Top 20 peers to AAATA based on Florida Transit Information System (FTIS)

Historically, the number of administrative employees at the AAATA has trended higher over the last three years, as the organization has added capacity for planning and development of service expansion alternatives and public engagement. At the April 29 meeting, AAATA representatives indicated that if the millage passes, the service improvements would result in 60 additional bus driver positions, but not add administrative positions. That mix (shown in the red bar) would bring AAATA’s administrative staff ratio back in line with the percentage the AAATA has had historically:

AAATA Historical Employees as a Percentage charted with data from the Florida Transit Information System (FTIS)

The AAATA’s higher ridership also means that the number of rides provided per employee is higher than its peer group:

AAATA Trips per FTE compared against FTIS Top 20 peers. Top 20 peers to AAATA based on Florida Transit Information System (FTIS) analysis. Data from Integrated National Transit Database Analysis System (INTDAS), developed for Florida Department of Transportation by Lehman Center for Transportation Research, Florida International University, http://www.ftis.org/intdas.html, accessed Nov. 22, 2013.

Funding Sources for Public Transportation

In addition to questions about millage mechanics, several of the questions from residents touched on various funding sources and why they are not being used instead of a millage.

Funding Sources: AAATA Millage – We Already Pay

Question: The $70 that this millage would cost the owner of a $200,000 house is on top of the city millage of 2 mills that we are paying already – so you’re not just paying $70, you’re paying $270.

MICHAEL BENHAM: That’s a good point, and we have balanced the service with the revenues. While Ann Arbor is paying more for the service – because of these stacked millages – Ann Arbor is getting the overwhelming majority of the service. Ypsilanti is putting 0.7 mills on top of their roughly 1 mill and they’re getting that level of service.

Funding Sources: AAATA Millage – After Five Years?

Question: If this is a five-year plan, does this imply no request for an increased millage for the next five years?

MICHAEL BENHAM: We haven’t really looked that far, to be honest. There’s more need for service out there, there’s no question about it, but we have not made any plans to expand the system beyond five years. You have seen our 30-year plan. We need to be flexible in response to changes: A new employer coming into town, or a new large set of apartments can change a lot of our plans. As long as growth continues, I think it is safe to say there will be more services needed out there. We are aware already that our proposed services won’t serve all of the needs. But we are also aware that the public appetite for providing transit on every street is not there.

CHRIS WHITE: I think an important point of this is that we have tried to be careful in planning the funding so that the 0.7 mills is sufficient to fund the service plan in place. And at the end of that five-year period, that same millage rate would be sufficient to carry it forward. We are not going to wind up in a position at the end of five years where we say that we can’t continue the service after five years unless we get a higher millage. So we tried to be careful in planning. That has been the intention to make sure that 0.7 mills is sufficient pay the service now, and into the future after five years.

Question: If the millage passes – which is 35% more than what we’re paying now – and we’re not happy with it, can we vote it down or do we have it forever?

CHRIS WHITE: At the end of five years, this millage would come up for renewal. [Yes, it could be voted down.]

Funding Sources: RTA Millage?

By way of background, the southeast Michigan Regional Transit Authority was established in a lame duck session of the Michigan legislature in late 2012, and includes a four-county region – Macomb, Oakland, Washtenaw and Wayne – with each county making two appointments to the board, and the city of Detroit making one.

Question: What about concurrent millages? If the AAATA millage passes, and in 2016 when the regional transit authority (RTA) asks for one, is there any guarantee that there can’t be any concurrent millages that will be added on top of this?

CHRIS WHITE: It’s really hard to say what the RTA is going to do. They’ve been working really hard to get their act together. But it is going very slowly. If there’s anything from the RTA, it will be for the region and for regional service, not for local service within Washtenaw County. If there’s going to be regional service, that will be the RTA’s role and they would have to seek funding from that four-county region.

MICHAEL BENHAM: One of the things that we are concerned about is that the RTA is out there, but we don’t know when they are going to be able to take care of the needs that are out there. The needs are here today. At the earliest, it would be two years before they’re even prepared to request funding. We felt like the needs were pretty urgent.

Funding Sources: State, Federal

Question: How long are the matching funds that you are requesting supposed to last? Are you counting on those funds to remain in place in perpetuity?

CHRIS WHITE: It’s something we worry about a fair amount. It’s one of the reasons we have always had a reserve account – to try to make sure that something doesn’t happen. The state funding mechanism has been in place since 1974, and since that time the state has funded public transit pretty much the same way. Funding as a percentage of operations has been declining over a long period time – but at a very gradual rate, and we’ve been able to manage. The state provides a match for federal capital funds – and that is the first priority for funds that come from what is called the state’s Comprehensive Transportation Fund. So from the state, you have a long history but that doesn’t mean it can’t change.

RESIDENT E: So does the millage increase take that into account or not?

CHRIS WHITE: The budgeting for the millage increase includes a continuation of that state funding that has been in place for 30 years. The second part of it is federal funding – and we also count on federal funding. Similar to state funding, the basic formula for federal funding has been in place for 30 years. The difference with federal funding is that we have seen very steady increases in the level of funding. Part of that funding is based on the population of our urbanized area.

Part of it is based on the amount of service we provide and the amount of service that gets used. That funding has been increasing. We are not counting on further increases, but we are counting on the continuation of that funding source that has been in place for 30 years. So yes, that is something that we worry about in terms of what we could do in the future. But there’s also some pretty significant planning in place. Unlike most places, we don’t spend all of the federal money in the year that we receive it. The feds are nice, they give us money, and they actually let us plan how to use it. The money we get this year we can use over the next three years.

What we do is put together a five-year plan. We bank some of that money, partly for that eventuality that if something happens, we make sure that we can smooth out any change.

RESIDENT E: So you’re asking for more money than you really need?

CHRIS WHITE: No.

RESIDENT E: But if you have money in reserves, you are asking for more money than what you need for operating.

CHRIS WHITE: It is wise and prudent for any organization to have some level of reserves to make sure that they can weather unforeseen circumstances. With transit service, if something happens, we’re not going to just shut the doors. We’re going to be able to do a plan to change. But reserves are something we actually have to have.

MICHAEL BENHAM: Remember the federal shutdown. We need to be prepared if there is a temporary problem. If there is a longer-term problem, this is not entirely out of our control. We do work very closely with our congressional delegation, we work with our local delegation in Lansing, and with the other transit agencies to really push for these funding programs. It’s not that we’re sitting back waiting for something to happen. We work hard to influence those programs. Keep in mind that there are 450 other transit agencies in this country and we work together to push hard for that funding and we have been successful for 30 years.

Funding Sources: Purchase of Service Agreements (POSAs)

Question: What aren’t increases to POSAs being considered as a way to offset increasing costs?

MICHAEL BENHAM: POSAs cost what the service is worth – what it costs the AAATA. If we increase the cost of the POSA, that would not be fair: We would be getting more for the service than what it costs us. We take the number of service hours we are providing and multiply that by the fully-allocated cost for service – that’s the cost. Then we give the POSA community credit for: (1) the fares that are collected; (2) the state share (the state provides 30% of the cost); and (3) the federal share – because some of that is earned for their operation for their riders. The difference between the cost and those three revenue sources is the amount that a POSA community is required to pay to get their service.

Funding Sources: Fares

Question: Why aren’t fare increases being pursued as an option for funding increased costs?

[In response to a different question, AAATA staff explained that $3.36 is the AAATA's cost per rider on the fixed-route system. The full cash fare is $1.50. The average fare paid by passengers is about $0.80. That lower average is due to a variety of factors: transfers are free; and discount fares are provided for seniors and people with disabilities, low-income people and students.]

CHRIS WHITE: We increased the fare 50% in the last five years. There was a 25% increase in 2010 and another 25% increase in 2011. [These two increases lifted the full cash fare from $1 to $1.50.] So that’s a substantial increase. That fare increase is passed through to everybody who pays fares, including the third-party fares that we get from a lot of organizations [such as the University of Michigan and go!pass program].

Funding Source: Fares from Third Parties

Question: Why does the University of Michigan pay only $1.25 million per year for 2.5 million rides. That’s $0.50 a ride.

[The key fact is that UM's reimbursement to the AAATA is made partly in cash, and partly through federal funds. The question assumes that the cash portion is the only reimbursement.]

MICHAEL BENHAM: The university reimburses us $1 for every single ride – we get reimbursed at a rate that’s slightly higher than the average fare.

CHRIS WHITE: For 2.4 million rides, the amount that we see from the university is about $1.2 million in cash. It’s a little complex. Part of the federal formula for determining funding allocations is based on riders, passenger miles, and vehicle miles. The University of Michigan provides a public transit service [through its blue bus system.] One of the things the AAATA did 15 years ago was convince the university to start filing a report with the feds – an actual transit database report – which brings in the federal funds for the University of Michigan’s bus operation.

The agreement we have with university for their faculty, staff, and students – which allows them to board AAATA buses without paying the fare to get on – turns over to us the federal funds that are earned by the University of Michigan bus system. We got $1.35 million in federal funds last year from that, and every year it’s going up. And if the ridership goes up, they will pay more. But for every university rider, we get a dollar.

It sounds like something is wrong there because the full cash fare is $1.50. But the AAATA board of directors looks at two things. First, university employees live in this community, and they pay taxes in this community, and they are entitled to public transit services as well. That’s one thing that gets lost. The second thing is that we do sell passes to anyone at a volume discount. You can buy a monthly pass and it costs $58. When people use those monthly passes, we count how many times they use it.

It works out on average to about 90-91 cents per boarding. We charge the University of Michigan $1 per boarding. So we’re actually charging them more – about 10% more – than the least expensive fare that anybody in the public can get. We don’t give away service to people. We have partnerships and we use them. One of the advantages is that it gives us the fare revenue and also gives us the productivity to allow us to look at expanding services. We feel pretty strongly that we have an obligation to provide comprehensive transit service to allow people who live in this community who do not drive – a lot of them choose not to drive. So having a public transit system is an important thing that we feel are required to try and do. The nice thing is that we can add ridership from some of these riders of choice, and that helps us to expand service that benefits the entire community.

Funding Sources: Fares – National Stats

The farebox recovery ratio is the percentage of costs covered by passenger fares. Using the same kind of peer group comparison as above, it’s possible to analyze AAATA’s farebox recovery ratio with its national peers. The AAATA has about the same farebox recovery ratio as the average of its peer group:

AAATA Farebox Recovery compared against FTIS Top 20 peers. Top 20 peers to AAATA based on Florida Transit Information System (FTIS) analysis. Data from Integrated National Transit Database Analysis System (INTDAS), developed for Florida Department of Transportation by Lehman Center for Transportation Research, Florida International University, http://www.ftis.org/intdas.html, accessed Nov. 22, 2013.

The AAATA’s farebox recovery ratio has trended upward in recent years, attributable to fare increases implemented in 2010 and 2011 ($0.25 both years for a total increase from $1 to $1.50).

AAATA Farebox Recovery Historical Trend with data from Integrated National Transit Database Analysis System (INTDAS), developed for Florida Department of Transportation by Lehman Center for Transportation Research, Florida International University.

Farebox recovery is also influenced by ridership. All other things being equal, more riders means a higher farebox recovery ratio, because more riders generate more fares. Ridership on AAATA fixed-route buses has trended upward:

Fixed-route AAATA ridership by year. (Data from AAATA, charted by The Chronicle.)

All other things being equal, increasing ridership also pushes the cost per ride downward:

AAATA Farebox Operating Expense Per Passenger Trip with data from Integrated National Transit Database Analysis System (INTDAS), developed for Florida Department of Transportation by Lehman Center for Transportation Research, Florida International University.

Funding Sources: Restricted – BTC Construction

Question: The AAATA spent a great deal of money on a new transit center. Why? Why was that money not spent on moving people?

CHRIS WHITE: The money we spent on that was 80% federal funds and 20% state funds – that we received by making a competitive application for it. Those are federal funds that were brought into the community that would not otherwise have come, in order to improve that transit center. The old transit center was for a variety of reasons undersized and was 25 years old, so it was time for a new facility.

That new facility provides a much better waiting area for riders. But it also allows us to provide information to those riders so that they can see what buses have arrived. If you’re familiar with the arrangement we have downtown, we have a transit mall where we have six buses, and we have the east side of Fourth Avenue where we have eight buses. The farthest buses towards Liberty Street are out of sight, and it’s a little hard to see when the buses arrive. So part of the idea is to provide a new facility that allows us to provide electronic information, much as you would see at transit centers in other cities.

Funding Sources: Restricted – Planning

Question: I’ve heard that in the 2014 AAATA budget that there is a planning category that includes $2 million just for three things – WALLY [north-south commuter rail], the Connector [a high-capacity link from US-23 and Plymouth down through UM campus, downtown southward to State and I-94], and something called “urban core” planning. Now if this is true, why shouldn’t that $2 million be used for improving services rather than expanding into newfangled, improbable, grandiose schemes? You’re talking about service and the need for service for handicapped people, etc. In the budget apparently is WALLY – to subsidize people who live in Ann Arbor and work here to move to low-tax Livingston County so they can get the best of all worlds. Or the Connector, that largely benefits the university but won’t pay for it.

CHRIS WHITE: The budget figure is correct but your observation does not reflect the revenue sources that support it. The Connector is an initiative that came out of the city’s transportation plan. The AAATA is the lead agency for that, and we have a $1.2 million grant from the federal government for that specific purpose. So we made a competitive application and we got money for that. There’s another $300,000 that has to come from partners. The University of Michigan is paying half of that $300,000. The AAATA is paying $60,000 and the city and the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority are splitting the remainder. The amount the AAATA is paying is $60,000.

MICHAEL BENHAM: WALLY is a joint project with the state. The state got $650,000 to study WALLY and it is a research and development project. There’s also some local money, but it is not our money – those are contributions by other organizations within the county and from Livingston County to pay for the local match.

Transit Service

The evening led off with a presentation from AAATA staff describing the historical background of governance changes to the AAATA over the last year, and a description of the 5-year service plan the new millage is supposed to pay for. A number of questions dealt with operational aspects of specific types of service.

Transit Service: Description of Improvements: Fixed Route

Chris White gave a description of the fixed-route service improvements the millage would pay for.

CHRIS WHITE: One of the points I want to make up front is that the proposed millage is to fund additional service. We provide a pretty extensive suite of services now. Our fixed-route service, A-Ride (for people with disabilities), Good as Gold (for seniors) – those will continue regardless of what happens with the millage. The vote is to provide additional service.

There is a schedule book that we put together that we call the Ride Guide of the future that we brought to all the public meetings – specific schedules for all the routes that we are proposing, so that people could know what we’re proposing to do, so that you can give us input on and make comments on it, and we could go back and make revisions to that plan and respond to that. A number of revisions got made that way. Overall, what we’re proposing to do is about a 44% increase in our fixed-route service hours. There also increases in our A-Ride service – the service for people with disabilities and seniors.

The first element of that we would do in August 2014 – a few months from now, if the vote is successful – is to extend the end time of our service on weekdays on most of the routes. Most of the routes would go from 10:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. There are a couple of routes where we don’t have evening service on now that we would extend into the evening, and one of them is the route that serves this area – Route #2C that comes down Green and goes to Glacier Hills. Another one is the Route #14 route that serves Arbor Hills. Those routes would be extended to between 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.

The second element of the plan is later evening service on weekends. It’s one of the very specific requests we get – to have Saturday evening service. Service currently ends between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. on most routes on Saturday. Service would be extended about an hour on all the routes in the first year if the millage passes, starting in August 2014. And then in August 2015, service would be extended essentially on all routes to between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Saturdays.

That would also lead to an extension of our A-Ride and Good as Gold services. So if someone is out for a play, a concert, or on campus, they would be able to get home easily.

There’s variety of routes where we’re extending service by adding more frequent trips. A lot of people know that on Route #4, which is our Washtenaw Avenue route, our busiest ridership, we doubled the weekly frequency in January 2012 as kind of an advance implementation of this plan. That service was acutely successful and a year later we added more frequency on our Route #5, because we were having problems with capacity and on-time performance on that route.

As part of the service plan that we’re proposing, we’ve increased frequency and capacity on a number of routes in Ann Arbor. Route #2 is the route that serves the Plymouth Road area and north of Plymouth Road. We’re adding a bus midday to take care of problems we’re having with crowded buses on that route. We’re not able to accommodate the loads on that route at that time. We have service on a route that goes down to Briarwood and then out Ellsworth. That service is going to be doubled in frequency in 2017 in the plan. And we have a number of routes on the west side of Ann Arbor, where we’re redoing those routes. [White also described the reconfiguration of routes – converting some loops to out-and-back routes, which allows flexibility to extend service farther out in the future.]

Transit Service: Description of Improvements: Paratransit

Question: How are the paratransit and dial-a-ride services [A-Ride for people with disabilities and Good as Gold for seniors] being improved and how do people request this?

CHRIS WHITE: Every place we are increasing service hours, those service hour extensions apply to our door-to-door, paratransit services as well. It applies to new destinations as well. Our coverage in Ann Arbor is already such that the fixed-route improvements don’t mean a lot of new areas are served within Ann Arbor – improvements inside Ann Arbor are mostly in terms of frequency and time of day. But some locations have been added – the Pittsfield branch of the Ann Arbor District Library, the Costco on Ellsworth, the Quality 16 movie theater and the Meijer on Jackson Road. The AAATA is a little hesitant to talk about the Jackson Road locations, as an agreement would still need to be worked out with Scio Township on that. In Ypsilanti, the Ypsilanti District Library and the District Court are actually important destinations even for a lot of people from Ann Arbor.

MICHAEL BENHAM: The weekend and night service expands for paratransit service whenever we extend fixed-route service. That’s a huge expansion of service, if you don’t have to be in by 6:30 p.m. and can actually take in a movie and dinner.

CHRIS WHITE: Another thing that a lot of people don’t know about is that we have a tentative arrangement with the University Michigan so that the A-Ride service and the Good as Gold service goes to the East Ann Arbor Medical Center and Domino’s Farms. The University Michigan is actually paying for the additional cost of those trips. We have not been able to get an agreement to do fixed-route service yet.

Question: Can you talk about the LAC?

CHRIS WHITE: For a long time, we have established a group called the local advisory council (LAC) – a group of people with disabilities and seniors that is an advisory committee to our board, which meets monthly. A number of years ago we had a number of people who were agency reps on that. But we found that it’s actually much more effective to have people who are actually using the service. It’s been a very, very important group to us, because in essence there is mutual group training going on. We’re learning more about how they use the service and they are learning more about how transit operates and what some of our limitations are. So we get a group of people who have some expertise to give us really quality advice about what we can do to improve the service – door-to-door services, as well as how we can provide our fixed-route service. The LAC has been a real benefit to us over the years.

Transit Service: Why Large Buses?

Question: Why do you run such large buses, and why do you use such large buses all the time?

MICHAEL BENHAM: The peak hours do tend to be the busiest, but even off-peak tends to be pretty busy, particularly on certain routes. It’s only in the very off-peak routes that we have the less-used buses. We could switch to smaller buses during those off-peak hours, but then we would have two separate, duplicative fleets of buses to maintain. We’d need a larger bus garage. And we would have to maintain a whole different fleet and would have to buy that fleet. It is a trade-off. We do have a van ride program – that’s a fleet of small vehicles, 6-8 passengers, where the driver is actually one of the users of the bus. That is one of our answers to what we call low-density transportation, where you don’t have a lot of people traveling down a specific corridor. Demand-response service is another way we do that. And we’re also thinking about the possibility of smaller vehicles in some of the starter services on new routes where we would not expect to fill up a large bus on day one.

CHRIS WHITE: It’s particularly pertinent in this neighborhood. If you live on Earhart and Green road in this area, the bus that you can see most of the time is going to be empty: It’s near the end of the route. That bus may have been very full and probably was very full during other parts of the route. But as it gets to the end of the route, it’s emptying and emptying.

RESIDENT F: I was on the Route 2C six weeks ago, and there were five people when I got on, and there were 60 by the time I got off on campus.

Transit Service: Ward 2 Service

Question: Are there any plans to increase the frequency of buses for Route #2B on the weekends? Why are there no new bus routes in the northeast corner? What are my taxes going for? Will you consider route reorganization to improve crosstown transit time, if you are not heading in and out of downtown?

CHRIS WHITE: It’s about balancing demand and the level of services. The Saturday morning service on Route #2 is once per hour. But it increases to every half hour on Saturday afternoon. There are quite a few routes in the system that are just hourly service all day on Saturday. One of the things that we’ve seen some change in over the last few years is ridership during the off-peak hours. That’s what this service plan is supposed to address – some of that demand.

We’re seeing an increase in demand in the evenings and on Saturdays. Route #2 is not scheduled for an increase except for the fact that we’re going to do one earlier trip – that’s the only increase on Saturdays for Route #2. This area of town has changed significantly. Historically, this is a pretty low ridership area. But demand has grown significantly and we have seen a lot of increase in demand for service in this area. We provide service every 15 minutes all day on the trunk of the route, and then it divides into three alternatives that provide service less frequently in this area.

Question: Route 2 has three variants right now. Can’t that be split up and have a separate loop? I can speak from experience that part of the problem with lower rider volume is that people had taken the bus, but now they can’t depend on being able to go back out on the route they came in on in a timely manner – especially if they’re under a time constraint or they got delayed at their appointment or something. It can be an hour between buses – and for me that’s not acceptable. You can’t wait at a school or library for that period of time.

CHRIS WHITE: Yes. And part of this five-year service plan is to try to reduce those places where we just do hourly service. But there’s a limit to how much we can do. One of the things that we try to balance is that demand for service and the quality of service that we’re providing. On a fairly regular basis we look at low productivity service. There’ve been high levels of service provided in an area, and we have reduced it some if we did not generate the ridership to justify it.

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From left: (1) a puzzle with counting numbers, which was completed multiple times during the meeting by Ann Arbor city councilmember Chuck Warpehoski’s daughter; (2) the voting credential that had to be held aloft at the Dems meeting in order for a vote to be counted; and (3) Robert’s Rules of Order held aloft as the authority determining that a 2/3 majority of votes would need to be counted, in order for the endorsement of Kirk Westphal to be rescinded. (Photos by the writer.)

The party’s executive board had voted on Wednesday to endorse Westphal. But at Saturday’s meeting of the general membership, Jack Eaton – the Democratic nominee for Ward 4 Ann Arbor city council – brought forward a motion to rescind that endorsement of Westphal. His motion was defeated by a vote of the general membership.

Eaton had contested the August primary in Ward 4 with incumbent Democrat Marcia Higgins, and he won the race decisively. He is supporting incumbent independent Jane Lumm against Westphal in the Ward 2 election, as are Democratic councilmembers Mike Anglin (Ward 5) and Sumi Kailasapathy (Ward 1) and some other local Democrats. Lumm served on the council in the mid-1990s as a Republican. Except for Lumm, the entire 11-member council consists of Democrats. The Ward 2 race includes independent Conrad Brown in addition to Lumm and Westphal.

Anglin and Kailasapathy attended the Democratic Party meeting, as did several other councilmembers who have not endorsed Lumm: Sabra Briere (Ward 1), Sally Petersen (Ward 2), Christopher Taylor (Ward 3), and Chuck Warpehoski (Ward 5). Taylor and Warpehoski have endorsed Westphal.

In rising to express her support for Lumm, lifelong Democrat Jane Michener indicated that she felt Westphal was working toward making the world “safe for developers” instead of on behalf of residents, and that’s why she’s supporting Lumm. Westphal is chair of the city’s planning commission.

To vote on the question of Westphal’s endorsement, attendees held aloft squares with a Democratic logo  – a voting credential issued that morning. With 56 people voting against the motion to rescind – that is, to leave Westphal’s endorsement in place – and only 21 voting to rescind it, a simple majority was not achieved. So the required 2/3 majority was also not achieved.

The question of Westphal’s endorsement came in the context of a meeting that had been billed as “Endorsement Saturday” by the party. Representatives for 2014 campaigns at the state and national level were on hand to deliver remarks and to receive the Ann Arbor Democratic Party’s endorsement.

Not every candidate was on hand in person, but the general membership of the Ann Arbor Democratic Party gave its endorsement to the following: Mark Schauer (governor), Mark Totten (Michigan Attorney General), John Dingell (U.S. House District 12), Pam Byrnes (U.S. House District 7), Gary Peters (U.S. Senate), Gretchen Driskell (Michigan state house representative District 52), Jeff Irwin (Michigan state house representative District 53), and Adam Zemke (Michigan state house representative District 55).

Not every candidate who attended the meeting was seeking an endorsement. Ward 1 Democratic incumbent Sabra Briere addressed the meeting, but explicitly stated that she was not there for an endorsement. The fact that she was the Democratic Party nominee was a sufficient endorsement, she said. Briere faces a challenge on Nov. 5 from independent Jeff Hayner.

Briere’s statement helped break a pattern of first hearing remarks of a candidate, followed by an endorsement vote. Washtenaw County commissioner Andy LaBarre also told the group he wasn’t there for an endorsement. But the previous pattern had led some in attendance to expect the same sequence – remarks, followed by a vote – to unfold after Westphal spoke. However, his endorsement had been handled by the executive board a few days earlier.

The motion to rescind Westphal’s endorsement came after Nora Wright, who presided over the meeting, declined to entertain a different motion from Eaton while other business was being considered. Later, after Westphal had spoken, Wright declined again to entertain a motion – that the party not make an endorsement in the Ward 2 city council race – because there was no such motion on the meeting’s agenda.

But when Eaton then put forward a motion to rescind the executive board’s previous action of endorsement, Wright put that question to the membership.

Some back-and-forth between Eaton and David Cahill drew out the fact that a 2/3 majority would be required – as Cahill cited Robert’s Rules of Order on the issue. Cahill is one of the party’s two vice chairs for resolutions, bylaws, and policy. Cahill responded to a question from Eaton about the ability of the executive board to make endorsements, by citing the group’s bylaws that provide for the board to carry out the business of the party between general meetings of the membership. [By way of background, Cahill is married to Sabra Briere.]

The meeting had begun with a misunderstanding about who would be allowed to participate in the endorsement votes. Democratic Party chair Mike Henry first seemed to indicate that only those who were on the party’s list seven days earlier would be allowed to participate. Cahill rose to appeal Henry’s apparent ruling.

The potential disagreement proved to be moot. Graham Teall – who’d assisted in issuing the voting credentials earlier in the morning – pointed out that anyone who had asked to be added to the list that morning had been issued a credential. The party’s bylaws state that: “Residents of the Ann Arbor area who are in sympathy with the general aims and policies of the Party are considered members of the Party and are eligible to participate in Party activities and to vote at Party meetings.” [Teall is married to Ward 4 city councilmember Margie Teall.]

Supporters of both Lumm and Westphal had rallied people to attend the meeting to vote on the Ward 2 endorsement. It led to the observation by several speakers that it would be nice to have that kind of attendance on a regular basis. Democratic Party chair Mike Henry told attendees: “We would love to see you here all the time!” About 80 people attended the meeting.

After the meeting, Westphal responded to a question from The Chronicle – about whether he’d taken an affirmative step to request the endorsement of the Ann Arbor Democratic Party. Westphal said he wasn’t sure he’d taken such a step to request an endorsement of the group, beyond having implicit endorsement of being the Democratic Party nominee. But he allowed that he’d conveyed that he wouldn’t mind having that additional endorsement.

Westphal’s Endorsement

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Kirk Westphal, the Ward 2 Democratic nominee in the Nov. 5 general election. He thanked attendees for all their support with his campaign. “It’s a big fight. It’s all about getting out the vote,” he said. “The city is at a critical point where we may be going into an era of missed opportunities and going backward instead of forward.”

Signs for both Ward 2 Ann Arbor city council candidates were placed at the entrance to the Ann Arbor Community Center on North Main Street, where the Ann Arbor Democratic Party held its Oct. 12 meeting.

From left: Ann Arbor Democratic Party chair Mike Henry and David Cahill, who’s one of the two vice chairs for resolutions, bylaws, and policy. They were discussing the issue of membership and who would be entitled to vote that morning.

Graham Teall assisted with the issuance of voting credentials.

Jane Michener described herself as a life-long Democrat, and spoke in support of Jane Lumm at the meeting.

Peter Eckstein took a photo of Jack Eaton. Eckstein and Eaton are supporting independent incumbent Jane Lumm in the Ward 2 city council race. Eaton is the Democratic candidate in Ward 4.

Nora Wright, one of the Ann Arbor Democratic Party’s three vice chairs for programs. She presided over the endorsements portion of the meeting.

David Cahill held aloft a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order.

David Cahill thumbed through a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order.

Attendees held their credentials aloft to vote.

Graham Teall counted the votes of those who were in favor of rescinding the executive board’s endorsement of Westphal.

Other Endorsements

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Pam Byrnes is running to represent the 7th District of the U.S. House for Michigan. That’s a seat currently held by Republican Tim Walberg. “Tim Walberg is definitely beatable,” she said. “He epitomizes the gridlock that is in Washington. We are calling it the Walberg Shutdown.”

Stephanie White, political director of the Michigan Democratic Party. She spoke on behalf of gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer who was campaigning in the northern part of the state. Wherever he goes across the state, she reported, good crowds are showing up to “meet the next governor of Michigan.” “He has incredibly progressive values,” she said. When asked if he supports gay rights, “he’ll say, ‘Hell, yeah, I support gay rights,’” she told the Ann Arbor Democrats.

Michigan state house representative Gretchen Driskell (D-District 52). She’s running for e-election in 2014. She called her first two years frustrating, because the Michigan legislature is controlled by Republicans.

Travis Gonyou, who’s U.S. representative John Dingell’s field representative for Washtenaw County. Dingell was “stuck in D.C.” he reported, with votes scheduled over the weekend. “Whether that yields us any progress, I’m still not sure,” he said.

Debbie Dingell, who’s married to U.S. Rep. John Dingell (D-District 12) also delivered some remarks to the audience. She’d just come from a breast cancer fundraiser, she said.

Alma Wheeler Smith attended the meeting to promote the candidacy of Gary Peters for U.S. Senate. Peters is running in the 2014 election for the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Carl Levin. Smith said the answer to the question of “Who’s that guy?” is someone with progressive values, who knew how to use his experience in business to work across the aisle.

Mark Totten is running for Michigan attorney general in 2014. He holds a PhD in ethics. He asked the group: “Who is the attorney general supposed to represent?” The response from the members of the Ann Arbor Democratic Party who were assembled Saturday: “The people!” Totten called the position of attorney general “the people’s lawyer.”

From left: Michigan state house representatives Jeff Irwin (D-District 53) and Adam Zemke (D-District 55). Irwin called Gov. Rick Snyder’s policy one that lowers taxes on wealthy people and raises them on low-income people, which is “wrong for the future of Michigan.”

From left: Michigan state house representatives Jeff Irwin (D-District 53) and Adam Zemke (D-District 55). Zemke called Lansing “a horribly partisan place.”

Elected Officials Not Seeking Endorsement

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Washtenaw County commissioner Andy LaBarre (D-District 7) told the members he was not there for an endorsement. He was there to encourage people to attend the next meeting of the Washtenaw County board of commissioners, on Wednesday, Oct. 16 at 6:30 p.m. to help support a resolution calling for the repeal Michigan’s Stand Your Ground law.

Incumbent Democrat Sabra Briere (Ward 1) faces a challenge in the November general election from Jeff Hayner. “I’m unopposed as a Democrat. What that means is that I have the Democratic nomination. I have your endorsement. I don’t need anything else, except for you to tell me if I step wrong. And for you to tell me when I step right. Because it’s important that I listen to you.”

Other Faces in the Crowd

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From left: Ann Arbor city councilmembers Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) and Mike Anglin (Ward 5).

From left: Ann Arbor city councilmember Sally Petersen (Ward 2) talked with Ann Arbor District Library board member Nancy Kaplan.

From left: Kirk Westphal, Ward 2 Democratic nominee in the Nov. 5 general election, and Ann Arbor city councilmember Chuck Warpehoski (Ward 5).

Washtenaw County commissioner Andy LaBarre (D-District 7) talked with resident Kathy Griswold.

Linda Lombardini, who is newly wed to Sandi Smith, former Ann Arbor city councilmember.

From left on the sidelines: Ann Arbor city councilmember Sally Petersen (Ward 2), Washtenaw County commissioner Andy LaBarre (D-District 7) and Michigan state house representative Jeff Irwin (D-District 53). LaBarre is not sending Irwin in with a play called “Dems Huddle.”

Former Ann Arbor Transportation Authority board member Ted Annis.

Clockwise from left foreground: Mike Allemang, former Washtenaw County water resources commissioner Janis Bobrin (who’s married to Allemang), Ward 2 Democratic nominee Kirk Westphal, Ann Arbor Democratic Party officer David Cahill, and former state representative Alma Wheeler Smith.

From left: former Ann Arbor city councilmember Eunice Burns, current councilmember Sabra Briere (Ward 1) and a longtime Ann Arbor Democratic activist Doug Kelley.

Anne Bannister, past chair of the Ann Arbor Democratic Party.

Resident Kathy Griswold talked with Michigan state representative Adam Zemke (D-District 55).

Ann Arbor resident Peter Nagourney.

Ann Arbor city councilmember Chuck Warpehoski’s daughter Camille completed a puzzle several times during the meeting.

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Joining Ward 1 incumbent Democrat Sabra Briere on the Nov. 5 general election ballot will be independent Jeff Hayner. Briere is unopposed in the Democratic primary and no Republican candidate filed to run – in Ward 1 or in any other of the city’s five wards. According to city clerk’s office records, Hayner took out nominating petitions on July 3, submitted them on Aug. 2, and they were certified by the city clerk’s office that same day.

Also in Ward 1, independent Jaclyn Vresics submitted signatures on Aug. 1 but the clerk’s office has been able to validate only 68 of them, which falls short of the 100 necessary to qualify for the ballot. If she submits 32 additional valid signatures by the Aug. 7 deadline, that would set up Ward 1 for a three-way race. Vresics is affiliated with the University of Michigan student Mixed Use Party.

A three-way race for Ward 2 is already assured, as independent Conrad Brown submitted 101 valid signatures on Aug. 1. He’ll join incumbent independent Jane Lumm and Democratic challenger Kirk Westphal on the Nov. 5 ballot. Lumm filed her petitions on July 23, and Westphal is unopposed in the Democratic primary. Like Vresics, Brown is affiliated with the Mixed Use Party.

In Ward 3, the winner of the Democratic primary – either incumbent Stephen Kunselman and Julie Grand – could face an independent challenge from Sam DeVarti. He filed his petitions on Aug. 2, but the city clerk has been able to certify only 97 of them.

In Ward 4, Noah Weber took out petitions in mid-May, but as of noon on Aug. 5 he has not yet filed signatures with the clerk’s office. If he does not file at least 100 valid signatures by the Aug. 7 deadline, then the winner of the Democratic primary – either incumbent Marcia Higgins or Jack Eaton – would almost certainly be unopposed on the November ballot.

In Ward 5, Thomas Partridge took out petitions to run as an independent on Aug. 2, but has not filed signatures yet. Partridge also took out petitions to run in the Democratic primary, but did not submit any signatures. Incumbent Democrat Mike Anglin is unopposed in the Aug. 6 primary for Ward 5.

Update on Aug. 6, 2013 at 4:35 p.m.:  DeVarti submitted supplemental signatures and now has 103 valid signatures. That sets up a choice for Ward 3 voters in the fall – between DeVarti and the winner of the race between Grand and Kunselman.

In Ward 1 Vresics submitted supplemental signatures today that city clerk staff are still verifying. And even though he already submitted enough signatures, Hayner also submitted supplemental signatures today to guard against the possibility that some people might have signed both his and Vresics’ petition. Signing both petitions would disqualify the signature for both candidates. 

Update on Aug. 7, 2013 at 4:10 p.m.: According to city clerk staff, Vresics did have sufficient signatures to qualify for the ballot. With the deadline now passed – without Partridge or Weber filing petitions – that finalizes the field of city council ballot candidates on Nov. 5. (Kunselman and Eaton prevailed in the Ward 3 and Ward 4 Democratic primaries, respectively.) Ward 1: Briere, Vresics, Hayner. Ward 2: Lumm, Westphal, Brown. Ward 3: Kunselman, DeVarti. Ward 4: Eaton. Ward 5: Anglin.

According to a letter sent to the city earlier this year by school principal Brad Massey, the decision to stop offering St. Paul Lutheran Church and School as a polling place to the city was based on “recent events affecting the safety of school children.” [.pdf of April 16, 2013 letter]

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]