Ward 5 Resident Leon Bryson Decides To Run for City Council: “We need to get citizens more involved in decision-making.”

LEON BRYSON, a Ward 5 resident,  has taken out nominating petitions, and is gathering signatures to have his name put on the ballot for the August 5 primary election. Bryson, a Democrat, earned his undergraduate degree in engineering from Wayne State University and owns a small company that sells electronics.

Leon, an outgoing man, came to his decision to run in January 2014. Shortly thereafter, he says, he was button-holed by several local politicians and encouraged not to run for Ward 5 City Council. More specifically, Bryson alleges that city, county and state-level politicos all told him the same thing: “Don’t run against Chuck.”

While such a tale might seem exaggerated, political insiders say it’s par for the course in Ann Arbor politics, where a tight-knit group of political insiders have, until recently, been able to control who ran for elections at the local level.

“Contested races are viewed by the insiders as personal affronts in Ann Arbor. There are people here who actually believe that elected seats are ‘passed’ on person-to-person—a kind of hereditary democracy,” said one City Council member.

Like Leon Bryson, Ward 4 Council member Jack Eaton alleges that he was approached and encouraged not to run for City Council. Eaton alleges he was offered Margie Teall’s seat on City Council (after she stepped down in 2015) in exchange for agreeing not to run against Marcia Higgins in 2013. Eaton ran against the 14-year incumbent and won handily.

“I was offered a spot on any city board I wanted,” said Leon. “Just like that a county official offered to call John (Hieftje) and have me appointed.” Bryson also said, “I was told by a county commissioner that I should run for his seat instead of running against Chuck,” said Bryson. “He said, ‘I probably won’t run this year. You run for my seat.’ It was bizarre.”

“When Rebekah Warren ran for the Michigan Senate,   she anointed Jeff Irwin for her seat in the State House,” said an insider who asked to remain anonymous. “Everyone knows that. Jeff wants Rebekah’s seat in the State Senate, and Yousef (County Commissioner Yousef Rabhi) will run for Jeff’s seat in the House.”

Unless, of course, more Ann Arbor and Washtenaw county residents, like Eaton and Bryson step forward and upset, seat-by-seat, what has been described by political insiders as a “cozy” political applecart.

Leon Bryson had never been involved in local politics prior to volunteering on Ward 1 candidate Jeff Hayner’s 2013 Council campaign.

Bryson says that Warpehoski’s October 2013 vote in favor of placing Al McWilliams on the Board or the Downtown Development Authority shocked him and was one of several votes that got Bryson thinking about running.

McWilliams’s candidacy was almost derailed by his photos of large-breasted, scantily clad women on his personal website. Council members and the public took offense at McWilliams’s  Tweets which encouraged Ann Arbor residents to shove ice cream cones up their asses on election day. The vote to approve his appointment was 6-5, with Warpehoski voting in favor of the appointment.

McWilliams then complained on his blog that he had been “bullied” during the draw-out discussions about his readiness to serve on the Board of the DDA.

Then, in February, Leon Bryson sent out an email in which he explained that he had decided against running for City Council. Several people who’ve run for local office explained that it’s not uncommon for would-be candidates to decide against the endeavor.

However, what Bryson didn’t say in the email is that his partner, a city-employee, had been fired shortly after Bryson had make it known he was going to run for City Council. While the facts surrounding the firing remain unclear, the timing of the dismissal and the alleged reasons for the dismissal raise questions.

Terry Holman, a former customer service representative for the City of Ann Arbor, alleges that in the Fall of 2013 his supervisor began asking why Holman was attending City Council meetings. Then, after allegedly incorrectly answering one question on a 4-question test, Holman says he was summarily fired and immediately escorted out of City Hall.

Holman alleges that he answered each of the four questions correctly, but that his supervisor—along with three others who’d corrected his test—had marked one of the questions as having been answered incorrectly.

The Ann Arbor Independent has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to Holman’s employment with the city.

It was several weeks after Holman lost his job that Leon Bryson sent out the late-February email in which he said he would not be running for City Council.

Shortly after that late-February email went out, Terry Holman says he received a call from city officials with an offer of a job in a different city department. Holman is working with his union representatives to resolve the dispute, but to date he has no job with the city after more than a decade of continuous full-time employment.

In April, Leon Bryson finally decided to move forward with plans to run for City Council.

He says the city’s infrastructure will be one of the main focuses of his campaign.

“Just the basic things that people expect, we need to have those taken care of really well,” Bryson said.

Those “basic things” include well-maintained roads, water and sewer systems.

Bryson believes that Ann Arbor needs to increase the number of police and fire fighters to meet the needs and expectations of residents. He also believes city officials need to work more closely with the MDEQ to clean-up the dioxane plume that has contaminated the groundwater in his ward.

In September 2013, Council member Warpehoski co-sponsored a resolution that urged the MDEQ to “…use the best science now available from EPA, including but not limited to the classification of 1,4-dioxane as a non-threshold carcinogen, to set cleanup criteria that are protective of public health and the environment for 1,4-dioxane and other chemicals.”

Since that September resolution, Warpehoski has not mentioned the mile wide three mile long 1,4 doxane plume at any council meeting nor has he asked city staff for a public reporting on the directions given them by the resolution.

A former EPA staffer suggested that Warpehoski’s proposed resolution read as though “all the phrases related to dioxane that someone could think of were thrown together without much thought. It requests multiple actions without acknowledging the past history.”

Vince Caruso is a member of the county’s Coalition for Action on Remediation of Dioxane (CARD), and a long-time activist who has tried mightily to get local officials to take an interest in this issue. He commented in response to the AnnArbor.com article about Warpehoski’s resolution. Caruso writes, “The resolution is something after years of inaction by the city, but it would have been more effective to have done a better job vetting the resolution. It has some errors and really doesn’t ask for much. Would have helped to have reached out to others in the effort.”

Council member Warpehoski spent six months working on a resolution that would allow the City Administrator to prohibit outdoor smoking in Ann Arbor within “20 feet of bus stops and the entrances, windows and ventilation systems of the Blake Transit Center and any city government building.”

That resolution, which has not been brought back for a second reading, took a beating in the comment section of The Ann Arbor News:

• This is a textbook case of what is wrong with government today.
• How will this fix the roads?
• This is just plain stupid!

Insiders expect Leon Bryson to run a competitive campaign.

Bryson said: “I know I can really be an asset for helping govern the city.”