WEEKLY WHOPPER: In Ann Arbor Just 21 of The City’s 300 Miles Of Roads Are in Poor Condition (It’s Obviously Local Drivers Who Are Cracked)

The Street Repair Millage is up for renewal in 2011, and the city staff want to ask for a tax increase to have the City pay for sidewalk repair, something Ann Arbor did for many years using, yes, the City’s own money. Then, John Hieftje’s administration got the bright idea that Ann Arbor citizens could just pay to replace their own sidewalks. That was five years ago. Since then, thousands of sidewalk slabs have been replaced costing homeowners, on average $125 per slab. Not to put too fine a point on it, but City Council and city staff are scared that voters will refuse to renew the Street Repair Millage. How scared? Scared enough to try to bamboozle residents into thinking that paying higher taxes to have sidewalk repair rolled into the Street Repair Millage “seems to make sense from a monetary standpoint,” according to Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo. Rapundalo, you may recall, as Chair of the Ann Arbor City Council Labor Committee, has for many years thought it “made sense” to give unionized employees over-sized benefit packages, to not require insurance co-pays from city employees, to allow city staffers to enjoy meals out costing thousands of dollars on the taxpayer dime, to give car allowances to city managers with desk jobs, and to have taxpayers fund health benefits for retirees working at jobs elsewhere that pay them six-figure salaries.

So what have city officials been doing with the millions in additional Street Repair tax dollars? Using less and less of the money to pave, repair and rebuild our city’s crumbling roads. City staffer Homayoon Pirooz pitched the idea of raising taxes to cover the cost of sidewalk repair to City Council. Pirooz is the same city staffer who told AnnArbor.com that federal TIGER II grant money for the replacement of the Stadium Bridges would be:

1.  coming slowly because Ann Arbor had to deal with state and federal authorities (he said that three days after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to end the TIGER II grant program.)

2.  definitely coming in May 2011 (no word yet from Hieftje, Representative John Dingell, or Pirooz on where the $13 million in federal grant money is, alas.)

3.  dispersed in “stages” (a claim a U.S. Department of Transportation staffer called “absolutely incorrect.”)

Now, Homayoon Pirooz is pitching the idea that the “responsibility for sidewalks” should be assumed by the city—as long as taxpayers are willing to pay higher taxes to have the city do it. Pirooz, for whom English is not a native language, may have had some confusion over the definition of the “responsibility.” He seems to have adopted the deadbeat parent version of the word “responsibility” as in: “I take care of my kids. I just don’t pay child support.”

The City of Ann Arbor is sitting on $28 million dollars in its Street Repair Fund. Meanwhile, citizens are, according to data compiled by the Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association (MITA), driving on the third worst roads in the state.

On June 14, 2011, AnnArbor.com’s reporter, Ryan Stanton, included two handy graphs (below) from, one has to assume, city officials, to accompany his piece in which he helps Homayoon Pirooz get the word out to frazzled drivers everywhere that Ann Arbor is ready to “take responsibility” for sidewalk repair—but not to pay for it out of existing revenues. The graphs, which carry the logo of the city, but no other attribution, had nothing to do with sidewalks. Instead the graphs represented information about the condition of the city’s roads, and the miles of roads that are repaired each year. According to information from city officials, just 21 miles of roads in Ann Arbor are in poor condition. According to the two graphs, Ann Arbor city staffers are doing a fantastic job improving the city’s roads, even while repaving fewer than seven miles of roads each year over the past seven years.

According to the information Stanton presented in his article, city staffers have done a spectacular job of significantly reducing the number of miles of Ann Arbor roads rated in “poor” condition over the past half a dozen years.

Too bad the claims aren’t true, and Stanton didn’t bother to check the archives of AnnArbor.com for previous reporting done by the news site.

Had Stanton checked the archives of his employer’s own web site, he would have come across a November 9, 2009 piece by Amalie Nash (who left AnnArbor.com to work at the Detroit Free Press). In that piece, Nash writes, “Washtenaw County was fourth in the state for miles of poor roads at 977 miles with a poor rating. Among Michigan counties, it was 14th in overall percentage of poor roads at 43% of its total 5,773 miles of federal aid roads. Ann Arbor ranked third out of nearly 1,800 municipalities in the state with 189 miles in poor condition. Overall, 55% of Ann Arbor’s 342 miles of federal-aid qualified roads were deemed poor, the report shows.”

In November 2009, then, AnnArbor.com reported that 189 miles of roads in Ann Arbor were found to be in poor condition. According to the graph that accompanied Stanton’s June 14, 2011 piece, between 2009 and 2010, Ann Arbor resurfaced 11.5 miles of streets, including both major and local streets. That would, of course, mean that there remain at least 178 miles of roads in poor condition, perhaps more if roads that were in only fair condition deteriorated further. Yet, Ryan Stanton and AnnArbor.com included information from city officials that purports only 21 miles of roads in Ann Arbor are in poor condition. Both graphs  from Stanton’s piece appear below.

It is clear that the information in the graph concerning the miles of roads in poor condition, information supplied to Stanton by city officials, is inaccurate and misleading. The Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association released data in November of 2009 that show Ann Arbor as having the third worst roads out of 1,800 Michigan municipalities, some 189 miles of roads found to be in “poor” condition. Roads in poor condition require reconstruction, as opposed to resurfacing. According to officials from MITA roads in “poor” condition cost seven times more to repair than roads in fair condition.

“City officials who allow roads to deteriorate to poor condition when money is available for repair are needlessly increasing the cost of repairs,” said a representative of MITA. “It’s obviously best to keep streets, roads and bridges in good condition, whenever possible.”

Not only are city staffers not caring for the city’s roads, despite the additional Road Repair Millage, city officials are attempting to deceive the public concerning the condition of the city’s roads. That fewer than a dozen miles of roads have been resurfaced in the past two years, is explained away by “increased asphalt prices.” That doesn’t, however, explain why $28 million dollars (tip o’ the keyboard to Karen Sidney) have been accumulated in the Street Repair Fund while city streets deteriorated to the point where 1,797 other cities in Michigan could honestly claim to have roads in better condition than those of Ann Arbor—many cities that do not ask citizens to pay an additional tax.

The Weekly Whopper goes to Ryan Stanton, AnnArbor.com, as well as Sue McCormick, Public Services Administrator, who oversees street resurfacing, repair and replacement. The wildly exaggerated and inaccurate information concerning the condition of our city streets came from McCormick’s staff. Ryan Stanton (tip o’the keyboard to Ed Vielmetti) and AnnArbor.com editors, of course, did not verify the accuracy of the information before posting it.