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?

A Cancer is Destroying What used to Make Ann Arbor a Desirable Place to Live

There is Cultural problem pervasive in the way City staff bring matters to Council. In the past year I have seen a number of projects that use up countless hours of staff time paid for by our tax dollars and that also waste the time of local businesses who have been mislead into thinking a proposed project is welcomed by the City. This problem is a cancer that is eating away at what has in the past made Ann Arbor an admirable place that should attract both citizens and businesses to want to live here.

• The Elks lodge wasted a great deal of time and effort being led to believe that their project would get approval. But, a large number of citizens made their voices heard and Council voted unanimously to turn down the project.
• The hotel site proposed by First Hospitality Group on Division was voted down by Council after a large number of citizens voiced their discontent about problems with the traffic changes that would be necessitated by the project.
• Citizens concerned first about the possible closing of Huron River Drive and then about the lack of information regarding how traffic will be rerouted during resurfacing have complained to me about the difficulty in getting information out of the city
• 42 North” project was voted down by Council after countless citizens voiced their concerns for a project that City staff had been leading the developer to think was a plausible project.
• Even as a member of Council I have been trying to get information for over a year regarding what people are thinking about doing with 415 West Washington and meeting great resistance from staff.

What all of these circumstances have in common is that a few people think that the experts should make plans in secret and then wait as long as possible before letting citizens or even Council members get involved. Even when we have many public hearings, more often than not, the complaint I hear from citizens is that these are “feel good” meetings that at best offer lip service to citizens and at their worst spread misinformation (e.g. if it is true that there was never an intention of closing Huron River Drive).

Hiring Experts vs. Listening to our Citizens
The City is constantly spending tens of thousands of dollars on this or that expert to advise us. We spent about $40,000 for the golf consultant to come from Colorado to tell us (among other things) that we should buy a liquor license for the Leslie Golf Course. I am not saying that we should never hire an expert, but the pendulum needs to swing back in the direction of listening to our citizens more. Countless local golf “experts” were not consulted in the recent data gathering by the city.

“Crowd Sourcing” Data Shows that Listening to the “Crowd” is Effective and Cheaper

• Proctor & Gamble employs more than 9000 scientists and researchers in corporate R&D (research and development) and still have many problems they cannot solve. Now in order to solve those problems they post them on a website which is called InnoCentive, offering large cash rewards to more than 90,000 “solvers” who make up this network of backyard scientists.
• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk - is a website in which people post assignments that anyone can complete and receive monetary payment for. The tasks are as simple as finding a storefront image or writing a product description.
• L’Oreal Paris had users post video clips up to five minutes long and have people leave comments and vote for which one should be aired. They chose a clip made by “spicytuna” (a user on the website) and paid her $1,000 for her efforts. If they had produced the commercial in-house they would have ended up spending close to $164,000. They saved about $163,000 using crowd sourcing.
• Getty Images paid $50 million to iStockphoto, a website where thousands of amateur photographers upload their photographs for any type of uses.
• Cambrian House & Threadless are two other examples of companies that are using crowdsourcing model. Cambrian House applies a crowdsourcing model to identify and develop profitable software ideas and Threadless is an Internet-based clothing retailer that sells t-shirts which have been designed and rated by its users using crowdsourcing.
• These bulleted items obtained from the Crowdsourcing web site.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
I highly recommend reading “The Wisdom of Crowds” by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki who “explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future. This seemingly counterintuitive notion has endless and major ramifications for how businesses operate, how knowledge is advanced, how economies are (or should be) organized and how we live our daily lives.” The opening anecdote of the book relates Francis Galton’s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox’s true butchered weight than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts).