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Warning you could be fined $110!
When this issue was raised in our Council meeting on May 5, 2008, the mayor asked: if this is true (obviously questioning the veracity of the report), then I’d like to know about it. Well, I’d like to know more about it also.
I have asked our City Staff to answer this question and I will follow up as I get answers.
Last night the Ann Arbor City Council sent a clear message to the business community: “If you, as a private business, ever consider competing for something connected with the City, make sure that no City entity is on the list competing with you.”
For about a year I have been a member of the Liquor Committee, along with Councilman Rapundalo and Councilman Johnson (until November 2007, when replaced on the Committee by Councilman Anglin). First Councilman Johnson and I both supported the selection of Everyday Cook, then Councilman Anglin and I both supported the selection of Everyday Cook. Councilman Rapundalo was unwavering is his selection of the Leslie Golf Course as his choice and this was apparent at every step of the way as he and various parts of the City acted like a steamroller to keep Everyday Cook from having any chance of being awarded this license. First the Fire Department decided that it would not be “cost effective” for Everyday Cook to come up to code and Councilman Rapundalo tried to use that as a reason to knock Everyday Cook off the list. Had I not raised the question as to whether anyone had asked the business owner about their willingness to spend what turned out to be a few hundred dollars, this email from the Fire Department would have been used by Councilman Rapundalo to eliminate Everyday Cook from consideration. Then various questions were raised by the Building Department and many hours of staff time were consumed in reconstructing histories of permit applications along with innuendo from certain Council members that Everyday Cook may have not been honest and would we want to award a license to such a person. I am totally disgusted with the behavior I witnessed, as an upstanding member of our community was caused to needlessly waste her time and money competing in a process where she never had a chance, because she was brought down by the City machine which seeks to feed itself and ignore the hundreds of citizens who supported Everyday Cook. What is perhaps the most disheartening is the charade that was played to portray this selection as if it were a fair process. We as a State and a Country are in an economic crisis, when our time needs to be spent creatively in an attempt to devise better and more efficient ways of running our businesses and our government. We live in Michigan, which has the worst economy in the United States and I put a good part of the blame for that on the lack of imagination of those who have been leading us in both the business and government sectors here in Michigan. Our political leaders even managed to keep our votes from counting in the Democratic Primaries. I just returned from a business trip to Europe where I had to pay $165 for 100 euros. Our dollar is dropping and we need new leadership with vision to save us from falling farther into what could bring on a world wide recession, as the rest of the world is intertwined with our own economy.
The Case for the Golf Course
Saving the Leslie Golf Course some $47 to $77 thousand dollars (depending on market forces) for a liquor license is a myopic perspective that fails to see a larger picture of what makes Ann Arbor distinctive as a community. The argument is that with a Liquor License the golf course could stop losing money. The problem with Golf is that there are too few golfers for the number of courses that have been constructed around Michigan in the past few decades. So, is the goal of government to compete with private golf courses by copying their services or is the role of government to create a golf course that differentiates itself from private courses and offers something that private courses do not, as in public service of some sort. For example, many in our community who supported spending millions of dollars for the Greenbelt would surely support subsidizing a municipal golf course, if it did things like create programs for youth or provided other activities that were not available at a private course. The argument for a liquor license is that leagues would be more likely to play at Leslie if beer could be sold. Where would those leagues come from? Would new leagues form because beer is being sold? No, those leagues, if they come, would be taking their business away from other golf courses. There would be no net gain to our community or economy as a whole.
The Case for Everyday Cook
Everyday Cook in Kerrytown is an exemplary business that has served the community by using the restaurant and space it occupies to host events that are impossible or very difficult to find elsewhere. Over 600 people signed a petition supporting Everyday Cook’s application for a liquor license. Countless non-profits have benefited from the space at Everyday Cook. There is no other space like Everyday Cook in Ann Arbor. It is an example of a business with the imagination to create new ways of doing things that benefit our community as a whole. All of the people who have been trying to run for president have emphasized the importance of change. Everyday Cook offers a unique space that is an example of how business and communities can change to produce benefits that ripple throughout our local economy. Unique spaces like Everyday Cook attract the creative class, which we want to promote in Ann Arbor. Michigan’s best hope for an economic recovery is to nurture the creative class and Ann Arbor could be the nexus of a creative revolution in Michigan that makes people want to consider living here and locating their business here versus the east or west coast. Or maybe we can attract people to move to Ann Arbor because they want to drink beer at a golf course. How unique is that? Read the complete article »
On December 23, 2007, the Ann Arbor News printed an editorial about Ann Arbor City Council salaries. This is perhaps a lesson for me about quotable sound bites. I should stay away from them, as Big Media in general likes quotable sound bites regardless of the facts. At our last City Council meeting I said that the new raise for City Council members amounted to a Latte a week (actually it is closer to two Lattes). This was interpreted by the Ann Arbor News as troubling that “the working poor are unable to count a few hundred dollars in terms of Lattes.” My attempted point was this: While many selfless citizens have performed public service, there are few people who are able to consider this time demanding position for $15,000 a year. I do think we’d increase diversity of all sorts including age and economic background by increasing the salary and/ or redefining the roles and responsibilities of Council. Perhaps we could focus on the larger picture and do less micro management to reduce the time commitment. It would not be as simple to calculate the cost of the new ~$50 Million police court facility being planned by Council in terms of Lattes. I just find it hard to swallow the genuineness of a proposal to “save the city money” by giving up a $300 annual raise, while simultaneously pushing our community to spend $50 million on a facility where more than one current Council member could end up with a fancy new multi-million dollar courtroom and chambers, if a Council member were to run for judge. I am purposefully not naming Council people here because I have no way of knowing people’s real motivations. But, I can say that on a purely statistical basis, the lower we keep the salary for City Council members, the greater is the likelihood that future Council members will have other motivations for joining Council than public service.
Last Monday, City Council voted to approve the next phase to pay the architect to begin drawings for a new City Hall, Police, Courts Facility project, which I argued had not been sufficiently specified.
Arbor update paraphrases EASTHOPE: “nobody objected to costs of maintenance facility; courts and police are important; citizens rate them as more important than anything else, including parks”
I have to believe that there are many costs to which we should object, based on what I have seen. Unfortunately, many people seem to not really care if things end up costing tens of millions more than they should or could.
“New Orleans-style “second line” procession in honor of Shakey Jake Woods (the most popular person in Ann Arbor).
Meet at Muehlig’s Funeral Chapel (in Ann Arbor) after 1 pm Sunday Read the complete article »
Should we be subsidizing more automobile transportation? How do we balance that with encouraging alternatives such as light rail and a downtown that requires less automobiles? These are tough questions to ask in a state that manufactures autos. The University is planning more parking structures around the hospital. Read the complete article »
On July 31, 2007, as part of Cities for Peace, I joined locally elected officials from around the country to present our resolutions against the war in Iraq to the Whitehouse and to speak before the Progressive Caucus in Congress. No money from the City of Ann Arbor was used for this trip. Read the complete article »
I’m seeking help from citizens who are concerned about how the City spends money and how we communicate about it. I have previously said that if there were bad people trying to hide information, the City couldn’t be doing a better job of obfuscating information. I don’t really believe there is anyone evil trying to hide information and in fact Dan Rainey the head of IT is interested in looking into better ways of handling information, so there is hope. But, I am still waiting for some interested citizens who would like to participate in helping to make information more available and digestible. To this end I have been pushing the importance of each person trying to learn one thing new and I have picked shareable calendars, in particular Google’s calendar as a simple first step that people could use as a way of getting on the same page. Read the complete article »
We are cutting money from programs for kids, while inefficient systems are wasting our taxpayer dollars. As the State of Michigan faces a deepening economic crisis we have tough decisions to make about cutting budgets and whether to raise taxes to cover the shortfall. In the business community, I’ve been pushing the message that what our economic recovery needs most is a mindset change and I’m recruiting business and technology thought leaders to blog about this on MiBizTools. What we need most is, not so much venture capital, but rather, less backslapping about what a good job everyone is doing (under the circumstances of loosing manufacturing to China) and more of a willingness to learn new tools and approaches to becoming more efficient and productive. At the local government level, I am concerned about issues like the need for better cooperation between Washtenaw County and the City of Ann Arbor that would create efficiencies to save money in our budgets.
With a number of constituents emailing me about various issues I thought it was important that the conversation be able to go in all directions, not just up the hierarchy and back down with a decision, but laterally among citizens as well. Thus, a blog like this helps to serve such a purpose. However, while our institutions remain organized in hierarchies, it continues to be important to push your message up that hierarchy and organize others to help get your voices heard.
As such, I am advising people to form groups around issues that concern them and utilize tools like Citizen Speak. Full disclosure, my company does not make any money from Citizen Speak, but one of my lead developers, George Hotelling, won a $10,000 prize last year for his contributions to the Open Source code for the project.
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