A2POLITICO: Proposed City Budget Should Focus on the Results of the 2013 Citizen Survey

by P.D. Lesko

IT’S USUALLY DEATH and taxes that define the inevitable. However, in the city’s 2013 National Citizen Survey, comments about roads and taxes dominated the open-ended question responses. Respondents were asked to record their opinions about City priorities by the following question: “What should be City leaders’ top three priorities to maximize the quality of life in Ann Arbor?” The verbatim responses were categorized by topic area with  the percent of citizen responses given in each category.

A total of 778 surveys were completed by Ann Arbor residents; of these, 567 respondents wrote in responses for the open-ended question.

The responses are presented in a 28 page document available on the city’s website. In that document, 57 percent of responses focus on the “worst,” “unsafe,” “abysmal” and “terrible” roads. The responses dealing with roads, transportation, traffic, traffic enforcement, bikes and pedestrians account for the largest number of responses.

A small number of responses, only about 7 percent of the total, have to do with homelessness and services for low income residents. An even smaller number of responses identified community events and culture as top priorities for city leaders: exactly four comments. Sixteen percent of the responses given  focused on issues related to land use, planning and development.

While Ann Arbor’s mayor, a handful of City Council members, as well as members of the Board of the Downtown Development Authority, push to have City Council focus on land use, planning and development, resident responses to the National Citizen Survey show that those who were surveyed want to see exponentially more attention paid to roads, basic services such as police and fire, parks and the city’s high cost of living.

City Administrator Steve Powers’s proposed budget includes adding three full-time employees (FTE) to the police department ($287,000) and one FTE in the fire department ($93,000). This in a small step in the direction of rebuilding both the police and fire department. However, with the addition of one FTE in the fire department, it’s unlikely this will resolve the serious problem of response times that still don’t meet national standards. The long and short of the matter is that the longer it takes the fire department to respond, the larger a fire will grow and the more property damage that will be done.

Our city has been without a Fire Chief since January 2014. While this may be convenient for those who would prefer to muzzle fire department malcontents who would harp incessantly on the fact that the AAFD can’t get firefighters to fires in the amount of time recommended by industry experts, a fire department without a Chief means Council members and citizens are effectively kept in the dark about fire service problems.

The City Administrator’s budget memo to City Council includes this: “Over the past decade, every service area of the City has been restructured and reorganized. The goals of restructuring were to reduce costs and maintain services.” Services have not been maintained: programs and services have been cut, fees sharply increased and administrative costs are ballooning. For instance, when Powers was hired in 2011, the amount spent on his own Administrative unit was $2.62 million. In his proposed 2015 budget, his own department’s allocation is set at $3.61 million. Meanwhile, the cost of a summer pool pass has risen 50 percent over the same period.