EDITORIAL: Hiding Behind Electronic Masks In Order To Sway Voters

SO-CALLED FRONT GROUPS are common. The Koch brothers have put together a network of 17 financially interconnected PACs and nonprofits. On the surface, the 17 entities appear independent from each other. It took an investigation by the Washington Post which involved the scrutiny of thousands of pages of income tax filings to fully flesh out the Koch-funded network—a network that spent $400 million dollars in the 2012 election cycle, more than all of the country’s union PAC spending combined.

Front groups are legal, but non-partisan campaign finance watchdog groups make it their business to ferret out front groups in order to keep voters informed. When a ballot question campaign such as Partners For Transit claims grassroots support, but is controlled by paid lobbyists who don’t identify themselves as such, voters are not being treated respectfully or honestly.

It didn’t take a lengthy investigation to discover that the Ann Arbor Ecology Center is controlling both Partners For Transit and More Buses Now in order to win voter support for a $22 million AAATA transit millage when voters go to the polls for a May 6 special election.

It’s no surprise that Ecology Center’s Executive Director Michael Garfield and his staff support alternative transportation; mass transit is ecological. The Ecology Center has been using email blasts to openly lobby its own membership and supporters. We do not object to the Ecology Center openly lobbying the public on a ballot question. Non-profits are allowed to do so according to IRS regulations.

We object to the use of political tactics which groups including the Center for Media and Democracy call “deceptive” and political “hanky panky.” We object to political trickery as practiced by the likes of the Koch brothers being used to persuade Ann Arbor taxpayers to support the AAATA’s proposed tax increase.

The Ecology Center controls Recycle Ann Arbor, and since 2009 Recycle Ann Arbor has been paid $5.72 million by the City of Ann Arbor under the auspices of a 10-year, multi-million dollar no bid contract. Mayor John Hieftje nonetheless appointed Ecology Center employee Charles Griffith to the Board of the AAATA. In October 2013 Griffith was elected Chair of the AAATA Board. In February 2014 Griffith voted in support of the proposal under the auspices of which AAATA would ask the voters of Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Ypsilanti Township to fund a $22 million tax hike.

The relationship between the City of Ann Arbor, AAATA, the Ecology Center and Recycle Ann Arbor is a tangled web. Voters have the right to know who the players are and what, if anything, those players stand to gain. The Ecology Center’s creation and/or control of multiple websites, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts—with different names but all in support of the proposed millage—could confuse a prospective voter into concluding that the Ecology Center is uninvolved in the control of all of those resources.

AAATA Board president Charles Griffith’s involvement with the Partners For Transit group in his capacity as an employee of the Ecology Center has been hidden from the public. We question why the Chair of AAATA’s Board is involved with the Partners For Transit planning group. We also question why this fact is not acknowledged openly by either AAATA or Partners For Transit.

Ann Arbor voters are steadily turning out in larger numbers and that is good news. We look forward to the debate between those who support transit in all its various forms. If the Ecology Center and its political supporters insist on using tactics such as front groups in order to sway voters on behalf of AAATA, we urge voters to look elsewhere for information about the millage request.