A2POLITICO: Mayor’s Race: Looking Past the Platitudes to the Voting Records
By P.D. Lesko
IF A PLATITUDE falls from the lips of a political candidate and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? The local media are breathlessly reprinting the platitudes offered up at the many mayoral forums sponsored by well-meaning groups. There was the local bookstore forum (focused on what the candidates are planning to do for the “downtown”) and there was a forum sponsored by a religious group that focused on “affordable housing.” The local Dems sponsored a forum and turned out 60-70 of the city’s 90,000 registered voters. The League of Women Voters organized a CTN televised forum. No one at CTN measures how many views that entity’s programs get.
The Hieftje appointee/bloggers are talking the usual trash, including a long-time member of the Downtown Development Authority Board of Directors and a member of the Planning Commission. The Planning Commish was parading as an “objective” observer and writing anonymously, until outed by a local online news site. This paper outed that news site for secretly writing a mayoral candidate’s constituent surveys then reporting on those same surveys without fessing up to their authorship thereof.
The candidates themselves—the ones with long voting records—have fielded a variety of softball questions at these various forums. If we weren’t talking about a city whose mayor and council decide how to allocate $1 billion dollars every three years, softball questions might be no problem.
Chris Taylor, in particular, is running a campaign that is disconnected from the reality of his six years on City Council. Candidate Taylor is “protecting our drinking water” from the 1,4 dioxane plume. In six years, he has never sponsored a resolution to “push for meaningful cleanup.”
Chris Taylor is planning to “preserve the high-quality natural and recreational spaces we’ve worked so hard to create.” He voted to zone parkland for transit use and repeatedly voted in support of using fragile riverfront property for a 900 car parking garage. In his campaign, he’s promising to “focus on the top-notch maintenance our residents expect and deserve.” He voted in support of reducing the parks maintenance schedule and didn’t protest when the city’s snow plow dispatch policy was changed from sending plows out after 3 inches of fallen snow to 4 inches of fallen snow.
, a Michigan nonpartisan transit organization, the entire time Taylor has been Council, Ann Arbor has had the third worst roads in the state. It was Ward 2 Council member Jane Lumm in May 2014 who proposed a resolution to instruct the City Administrator to find a way to get the roads repaired and rebuilt more quickly.
Then we have Taylor’s attendance problem. The Ann Arbor News reported last year that after Mayor Pro Tempore Margie Teall, Christopher Taylor has the worst attendance at regular sessions of City Council. It was also reported last year that Council member Taylor had the worst attendance record at Council work sessions. Seven Council members attended 90 percent or more of the work sessions scheduled between 2011 and 2013, and four members of Council had perfect attendance records at work sessions.
If Christopher Taylor doesn’t attend City Council meetings, work sessions and/or special sessions as a Council member, why should he be elected to higher office? So he can earn a larger paycheck ($45K per year) and not attend meetings?
Council members with voting records and sponsored resolutions need to be judged not by what they claim they’re going to do, if elected, but by what they actually did and did not do as City Council members over the course of their time in office.