Will Unpopular Highrises Help Jack Eaton Unseat City Council’s Zoning Czarina Marcia Higgins?

by P.D. Lesko

Today, Jack Eaton announced his candidacy first via email to a loosely-organized group of neighborhood activists, city and county politicians. He wrote, “I wanted all of you to hear it from me, because so many of you have encouraged me to do this.” The email listserv came alive with electronic cheers. One of the group’s participants wrote in response to Eaton’s announcement: “YAAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!!!! You might as well be official, since you’re doing all the work anyway.” Another chimed in quickly: “Bravo!”

Eaton discusses his desire to run on what he called a pro-neighborhood agenda. “I don’t think a neighborhood should have to submit a petition to the City Council just to get their elected representatives interested in resolving neighborhood problems. Elected officials need to be responsive to the interests of City residents.”

Ward 4 Council members Marcia Higgins and Margie Teall take regular and brutal electronic drubbings in AnnArbor.com’s comment sections. Both of the women are mocked, characterized as out-of-touch, and taken to task for their poor attendance records at Council meetings. Marcia Higgins, like Margie Teall, is known to have a poor track record in returning constituent email messages and phone calls. When she ran for re-election in 2011, Higgins did not  put up a web site and, unlike most of her Council colleagues, has no web site. She does not send out any regular constituent communications, unlike other Council members, including Ward 5 Council member Mike Anglin and Ward 1 Council member Sabra Briere. Her 2009 campaign website, HigginsforCouncil.com, is offline.

The question, of course, is whether Jack Eaton (right) can muster enough votes to unseat the city’s Mayor Pro Tempore. In November 2009 Higgins was opposed by a young University of Michigan graduate Hatim A. Elhady in the November general election. Elhady, a political newbie, captured almost 40 percent of the vote, 1,299 of the 3,482 ballots cast. In the 2012 primary election another political newbie, Tim Hull, captured 40 percent of the vote against long-time Ward 2 incumbent Stephen Rapundalo. It was, in part, this strong showing by Hull that led political insiders to believe that Rapundalo could be unseated. He went on to be trounced by Independent Jane Lumm in the November 2012 election. Lumm drew on a city-wide coalition of supporters and donors; Eaton will, no doubt, have the support of many of the same politicos and donors who help put Lumm in office.

In 2012, Democrat Eaton captured 49.42 percent of the vote against Margie Teall; he came 20 votes from knocking off long-time Ward 4 incumbent City Council member. Teall, a loyal drone in Borg Queen John Hieftje’s shrinking Hive Mind Collective, had been unenthusiastic about running for re-election, but had done so nonetheless. That Eaton came so close to unseating her came as a nasty shock, no doubt. After Teall’s close call, Council member Marcia Higgins told several City Council colleagues that she would not run for re-election in 2013. Then, Higgins began cozying up to Eaton, chatting him up during breaks at Council meetings he attended. It was an obvious and ham-handed ploy to neutralize an increasingly powerful political opponent. In early 2013, Higgins pulled petitions to run as a Democrat in the August 2013 primary election. She was first elected to Ann Arbor City Council in 1999 as a Republican and re-elected in 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2011 as a Democrat.

In 2002, Republican Marcia Higgins ran against John Hieftje for mayor. In fact, the last time a Republican won a city office in Ann Arbor was when Marcia Higgins won as a Republican in the 2003 Ward 4 City Council race. In 2005, she switched parties, and Council became dominated by Democrats. Former Ward 2 Council member and current DDA Board member Joan Lowenstein told the Ann Arbor News an all-Democratic council would still have “differing views.”

“I don’t think it is a concern,” Lowenstein told reporter Tom Gantert in 2005. “When you have everybody with one party, it is almost like having it nonpartisan. We don’t always agree on everything. There are a lot of differing points of view, even among people of the same party.”

What happened, instead, is that City Council became a Hive Mind Collective of drones who voted in virtual lock-step, and who recruited candidates for Council who would also vote in lock-step with the Hive Mind Collective.

While Marcia Higgins (left) has voted a little less in lock-step with John Hieftje as of late, she has, like Margie Teall, voted repeatedly to slash police and fire, and other city services. In fact, in 2009 Marcia Higgins chaired the Council’s Budget and Labor Committee that pushed for cuts to services in order to squirrel away money from the General Fund to finance capital projects such as the new city hall. Like Teall, Higgins was caught up in the 2009 email scandal that led to the ouster of powerful Ward 3 Council member Leigh Greden. The scandal resulted in the city being forced to settle an Open Meetings Act violation lawsuit. The local media caught Higgins and Greden vote-rigging. In response to a 2009 Freedom of Information Act request, it was revealed that Marcia Higgins and Leigh Greden had exchanged emails during an open meeting in which they discussed how they planned to vote on a site plan. Similarly, Higgins participated in email deliberations concerning how to best script the vote on raising salaries for Council members. Unlike her Ward 4 Council colleague, Marcia Higgins never apologized. Instead, she told those present at a 2009 candidate forum that “the voters will decide.”

As for the issues, Higgins’s has an interesting relationship with the city’s unpopular Percent for Art program. She has been frequently critical of the program and its funding. In 2011, her efforts to reduce the percent for art to a half a percent for art were shot down by her Council colleagues. In 2012, after the city’s voters—including those in Ward 4—turned back a proposal to tax themselves in order to fund the Percent for Art program, Ward 2 Council member Jane Lumm proposed a resolution to repeal the Percent for Art ordinance. Higgins refused to support Lumm’s resolution, and instead pushed to establish a committee of Council members to further examine the Percent for Art program.

The move was derided in the comment section of AnnArbor.com, and Higgins, as well as Ward 1 Council member Sabra Briere were lambasted for ignoring the will of the voters.

In her 2009 campaign Marcia Higgins took credit for working with residents on the deteriorating Georgetown Mall,  leading the downtown rezoning process, and chairing the city’s A2D2 Steering Committee, which created what are now seen as seriously flawed design guidelines for downtown. Higgins, like defeated former Council members Leigh Greden, Tony Derezinski and Stephen Rapundalo, came out in favor of a city income tax and pushed to put the question of a city income tax to the voters between 2009-2011. After the November 2012 defeat of a bond to build a new downtown library and a tax to fund the Percent for Art program, Marcia Higgins might not be so keen on pushing for voters to decide whether to impose a city income tax.

The blighted Georgetown Mall, however, is Higgins’s Achilles tendon. The development mess, the long-term blight, the waste of tax dollars, rest squarely on her shoulders.

In 2001, Harbor Cos. developer Craig Schubiner paid $6.1 million for the aging mall. By Fall of 2007, Schubiner had devised a $30 million dollar scheme to demolish and redevelop the Georgetown Mall—to build 90,000 square feet of retail and residential space. Never ones to pass up the advances of a developer with kinky redevelopment ideas that involve financial S & M  (with taxpayers playing the role of the blind-folded and ball-gagged masochist), Council jumped into bed with Schubiner.

Schubiner’s $30 million dollar plan to redevelop the Georgetown Mall hinged on two details: First, the Kroger executives had to play ball and commit to leasing 45,000 square feet of space in the new development. They balked and left the site.

The other part of the Harbor Cos. plan revolved around persuading Marcia Higgins to have the Georgetown Mall site rezoned as a TIF ( tax increment financing) site. When done, Ann Arbor taxpayers would finance the debt for the redevelopment of his property. The TIF funding would go toward the private improvements. Improvements that Harbor Cos would profit from. The Ann Arbor public  would ‘invest’ in Schubiner’s redevelopment of the Georgetown Mall, and Schubiner would receive the financial return.

Why did Schubiner have to woo Marcia Higgins to get his parcel rezoned as a TIF site?

Marcia Higgins is the self-appointed zoning Czarina on Ann Arbor City Council. No one touches zoning issues without the permission of the Dowager Duchess of Ward Four.  How do I know this? Third Ward Council member Leigh Greden told me in an email that was coughed up in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Greden typed an email to a hapless newly-minted Council pup warning the newbie to stay away from zoning issues. Greden’s email turned up in a batch of those FOIAed by the Ann Arbor News.

Craig Schubiner of the Harbor Cos. got Czarina Marcia Higgins to propose a resolution to rezone the 6.5 acre Georgetown Mall site as a TIF district. Higgins got her colleagues on Council to vote for the resolution. The Ward 4 Georgetown Mall neighbors got years of blight and empty promises.

If this sad tale of the Georgetown Mall sounds familiar. It is. It is an example of history repeating itself.

I recently came across a story about the “groundbreaking” ceremony at the 7.9-acre Lower Town site. By 2007, when Craig Schubiner of the Harbor Cos. had come to Council to ask for his TIF, the Lower Town redevelopment project had been stalled for 18 months. Lower Town is still-undeveloped—a haven for Canadian geese at the corners of Wall Street and Plymouth Road. That property was rezoned as a TIF site in 2003 so that the developer, Strathmore, could give unto Ward 1 a 773,000 square foot “urban lifestyle” mixed use redevelopment of an old Kroger site. The delusions of development came complete with retail, residential and new urbanism chic.

Guess who represented the City of Ann Arbor at the Lower Town groundbreaking ceremony held years before Craig Schubiner of the Harbor Cos approached Council with his plan to “redevelop” the Georgetown Mall through a TIF site plan?

The Grand Duchess of Czoning herself: Czarina Marcia Higgins.

No doubt Jack Eaton will give Marcia Higgins credit for all of her  zoning “accomplishments,” including the loss of two neighborhood shopping centers, her leadership of the A2D2 Committee, and the resulting zoning mess that has Old Fourth Ward residents protesting a large proposed development on a small parcel at 413 East Huron. It remains to be seen whether Ward 4 voters will toss yet another long-term Council member out of office in favor of a candidate who favors funding services, police, fire and zoning regulations that protect the city’s neighborhoods, as well as its downtown from ill-conceived and poorly funded development schemes.