While Ann Arbor Pols Push Tax Hike, Street Repair Millage Fund Balloons & Miles of Roads Resurfaced Plummets

For more than five years, Ann Arbor residents have had to deal with a mismanaged and heavy- handed city sidewalk program which forced them to pay for repairing sidewalks along their property.   City officials estimate property owners spent more than $7 million to repair sidewalks during the five year program that shifted the cost of maintaining city-owned sidewalks onto taxpayers.  Now the city is offering to take over the responsibility for sidewalk repairs if voters approve an increased millage this November.

The city is doing its best to make voters believe approving this millage means they will never have to pay for sidewalk repairs. Like the increased parks millage that was supposed to pay for better parks maintenance, but instead helped pay for a new police/courts building, the sidewalk millage is false advertising.

First of all, the $563,000 the increased millage is supposed to raise per year won’t fix many sidewalk slabs, especially with the city’s higher costs, including an estimated $170,000 or more per year in administrative costs alone.

In a 2007 mailer sent to residents urging them to repair the sidewalks in front of their homes, city officials estimated a higher replacement cost of $170 for a 4′ slab should the city do the work, compared to a $120 a slab if residents hired the contractor.  The city also added an administrative charge of $225 per property.  When pitching the tax increase to residents, the city claimed that 16,000 properties had repaired 55,000 slabs and spent a total of $7,000,000.  If you do the math, that works out to $127 per slab if the homeowner did the work.

If every dollar of the proposed sidewalk repair millage went to paying contractors to replace slabs, it would buy fewer than 2,400 slabs per year, or just 21.8 percent of of the slabs repaired when residents were forced to make the repairs themselves.

What we know from Ann Arbor City government is that every dollar from millages doesn’t go toward the intended purpose of the millage. There is the ever-growing administrative service charges used to skim money from millages. In May 2011, a member of the city’s Parks Advisory Commission alleged that money from the parks maintenance millage was being diverted through such “accounting trickery.” FOIAed financial documents revealed that, indeed, Ann Arbor’s “green mayor” has been allowing money to be diverted from the six-year parks millage in the form of jacked up internal service charges.

Second, the increased tax does not have to be spent for sidewalks.  The increased tax goes into the Streets Millage Fund.  The proposed resolution just adds sidewalks to the list of things that can be paid from the Streets Millage Fund, which now has a balance, according to the most recent audited financial statements, of about $30 million (the city’s CFO claims the surplus is closer to $15 million dollars).  This just gives elected officials and city staffers more “flexibility” to spend tax dollars.  For example, if the city wants to redo a street and sidewalks to encourage transit-oriented development, they can now get the street and sidewalk money from the millage, not just the street money.

Furthermore, the city already has alternative transportation money that could be used to repair sidewalks and fill in sidewalk gaps. It’s called the Alternative Transportation Fund, and is funded with 5 percent of the gas and weight tax money the City gets from the State.

There is already money to fix the sidewalks, but Hieftje and the current Council Majority have elected to spend it on other things, such as consultants and fantasy train studies, such as the Ann Arbor Connector Feasibility Study. In Fiscal Year 2011 60 percent of Eli Cooper’s time was charged to the alternative transportation fund. Cooper is the transportation program manager, and one of the most highly paid city staffers.

In order to divert money that should have been used for sidewalk repair, five years ago John Hieftje “championed” the move to shift the cost of sidewalk repair onto taxpayers. Instead of repairing sidewalks, city officials chose to use money from the alternative transportation fund to pay for a city manager to sit around and make transportation plans, such as those for the Fuller Road Parking Garage, and to pay for train “feasibility studies.” Now, Hieftje, Taylor and Briere have come out in favor of once again shifting the cost of sidewalk repair onto taxpayers in the form of a five-year millage.

As Second Ward Council candidate Jane Lumm pointed out in her recent debate against incumbent Stephen Rapundalo, much of the additional tax will be eaten up by administrative costs for the sidewalk program, costs which the city estimates at $150,000 per year.  The city administrator’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget message said the city would pursue adding a sidewalk replacement program to the streets millage and discuss moving the costs of administering the sidewalk replacement program out of the Metro Expansion Fund into the Street Repair & Resurfacing Millage.  Finding a new “bucket” for the sidewalk administration costs is essential, because officials approved a budget that moved $212,000 in General Fund expenses to the Metro Expansion Fund in the Fiscal Year 2012 budget.

Finally, voting for this tax increase does not mean taxpayers are off the hook for sidewalk repairs.  It only means they may be off the hook for the 5 years of the millage.  The resolution approving adding this Charter amendment to the November ballot calls for the City Attorney to bring an ordinance change to council if the amendment passes.  The ordinance change would make the city responsible for sidewalk repair, but only for the duration of the millage.

The increased Parks Millage taught the public that Ann Arbor City Council did not always follow through on its promises once the money was in hand. The current mayor and Council have, through accounting trickery, skimmed millions of dollars from the parks millage to pay, you guessed it, administrative costs. A member of the city’s Parks Advisory Commission (PAC) made this public in a May 2011 piece posted to A2Politico. In that piece, a member of PAC said via email, “The PAC member said via email: “When people are lied to, it makes them less likely to trust government. These people who run for local office and say they are ‘green’ and ‘pro park,’ are attacking the very open space I believe voters want protected and were told their millage money was going to pay for. Who would vote for a millage that uses almost one-third of the money to fund ‘internal charges?’ No one! No one should. This is an under-handed attack on our parks that began as soon as the millage was passed and hasn’t stopped.”

The promise to take taxpayers off the hook for sidewalk repairs for five years is a promise made by a mayor and City Council members who routinely break their promises. The Council Majority can choose to ignore this promise, and make no change to city ordinances. Council can change the ordinance, but include a loophole that allows the city to evade the promise just like they did with the Charter change that was supposed to protect parks from being disposed of without a public vote. The Fuller Road parking garage being proposed for the University of Michigan targets riverside parkland, and Eli Cooper, the city’s transportation program manager, whose generous salary is paid out of the Alternative Transportation Fund, told a Council member that no environmental impact study is required before building a 900-car parking garage next to the Huron River.

The best way, perhaps, to judge the reliability of City Council and city staffers when it comes to collecting and then using tax dollars comes from the charts, below. The first chart shows the miles of roads that have been resurfaced since 2000 in Ann Arbor. The second chart shows the amount of tax money parked in the Street Repair Millage Fund that city staffers, and several Council members (First Ward Council member Sabra Briere, Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo, Third Ward Council member Christopher Taylor and John Hieftje) have told the public they think should be renewed at a higher rate—a tax increase.