A2Politico Notes: This is filed under “Scoops & Scores” because you read it here first!

There are now two challengers running to unseat Third Ward Council member Stephen Kunselman. The first to throw a hat into the ring was Marwan Issa. He pulled petitions to run for City Council in 2009 against then-incumbent Leigh Greden, but Issa didn’t collect the necessary 100 signatures to get his name on the ballot. He told the Ann Arbor News that, “he spent time talking to the incumbent” then decided to “get involved on a committee or commission and then see what’s happening.”

Between 2009 and 2011, Issa was not appointed to serve on any Ann Arbor city government committees or commissions. That doesn’t mean he didn’t apply. The application process is notoriously and deliberately veiled.

The most recent candidate to pull petitions was Ingrid Ault. She’s the more interesting of the two challengers. She’s the one with the direct connections to John Hieftje, the challenger he appointed to the groovy-sounding-on-paper-do-little-in-practice Housing and Human Service Advisory Board in March of 2010. Ault is the Executive Director of Think Local First (TFL) an Ann Arbor 501(c)6 entity that exists to, according to its 2010 990 form filed with the IRS, “provide learning, teaching, resource sharing and community building opportunities for locally-owned independent businesses and increase community awareness.”

Tax documents, however, show that TLF spends the bulk of its money on overhead, not programming. In 2009, TLF took in $62,673 and spent $32,888 on a salary for Ault, who works 24 hours per week, another $3,222 on professional fees and independent contractors, $2,638 on rent, $1,024 on sending Ault to conferences and another $1,004 on office expenses. The previous year, TLF took in $44,122 and Ault’s salary was $24,701. That year TLF spent $1,558 on travel expenses, and the entity ended up with a net loss of $1,292. In short, since its inception, IRS tax forms show that Think Local First has spent 65-75 percent of the money it takes in on overhead expenses, and spends a small percentage of the money it collects providing “learning, teaching, resource sharing and community building opportunities for locally-owned independent businesses and increase community awareness.”

TLF is Ingrid Ault’s own little cottage industry at the moment. However, on paper, Ingrid Ault is just the right kind of candidate, much like Scott Rosencrans was when Hieftje persuaded him to run against Fifth Ward Council member Mike Anglin. Hieftje, of course, wasn’t the only person on Council who wanted Anglin gone. It was revealed in Council emails released in response to a 2009 FOIA filed by a citizen group that Fifth Ward Council member Carsten Hohnke, John Hieftje and former Third Ward Council member Leigh Greden traded emails during a Council meeting about finding a candidate to oppose Anglin. Rosencrans, a former member of the Ann Arbor Park Advisory Commission, alas, lied via email to members of the Ann Arbor Rowing Club about Anglin’s meeting attendance record. In his email, Rosencrans claimed that he “sat across from Anglin’s empty chair for a year,” — that Anglin had missed all of the meetings of the Park Advisory Commission on which he sits as a member of Ann Arbor City Council. It was an ugly lie, but certainly not out of character with how Hieftje and candidates he recruits choose to run their campaigns.

Will Ingrid Ault be persuaded to play a similar game in her attempt to unseat Steve Kunselman? Let’s hope not, but to be sure Steve Kunselman was dispatched in 2008 using a similarly dirty tactic helped along by the editorial board of the now-defunct Ann Arbor News.