A2Politico: But, Soft! What Hare-Brained Budget Allocation Through Yonder Fiscal Prudence Breaks?

by Bryan Kelly

IT IS OPEN season on the public purse. Budget negotiations for the 2016-2017 fiscal year are nigh. The City Administrator’s plan has been submitted to City Council. In the current forecast, a $1.7 million deficit in the General Fund is expected to accrue.

No matter. At this theoretical stage, no idea is too harebrained to escape a $20,000 earmark. If you’ve an idea for improvement—anything from haberdasher to homeless shelter to hot dog stand—now is the time to stand and seek thy tax dollars.

But move quickly; loopholes are closing (unless you’re one of the fortunate few for whom the right wording of complaints, some legal muscle, or Uncle Dennis’s business connections keep municipal pursestrings…perpetually loose).

Of chief interest in the City Administrator’s budget proposal is the $200,000 set aside for movement on the Allen Creek Greenway. This is a plan for a walking and biking path that connects Ann Arbor along the route of the train tracks and Allen Creek, an underground body of water which runs north-south through town. (It is said that drinking from this enchanted stream leads to everlasting life, but you lose both big toes in the process.)

After false starts, double faults and balks sufficient to load the bases, walk a runner home, get both head coaches fired and overwhelm even the most versatile sports metaphor, movement on the initiative has, with this earmark, kinda sorta started to begin. The $200,000 will go towards consultant fees to develop a master plan for the Greenway. Said master plan will make it likelier that the city can secure a grant from the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund for further—and more expensive—development.

If past trends continue, the next thing to occur will be public backlash, followed by denial, anger, aspersions cast on the City Administrator’s character, the formation of committees and counter-committees with increasingly positivist titles, and a lot of conspiratorial talk in parlors and mosquito-screened porches of the ulterior motives regarding this recreational thoroughfare.

And all for naught. Opposing this earmark indicates one is out of touch with realities in the arena of grant-securing, which boil down to, “Measure once, cut twice.”

Nevertheless, I expect an unusually loud outcry from ruin porn connoisseurs whose chief delight in town is ogling the decrepit road commission building on 415 W. Washington Street, just beyond the train tracks. That tumbledown structure will be demolished to make way for an “anchor park” servicing the Allen Creek Greenway.

I respect the porn connoisseurs’ argument. After all, it is useful, in a town like ours, to protect derelict structures from demolition and keep property values artificially suppressed. (Not to mention the fallen state of that building helps keep memberships at the neighboring YMCA affordable.)

But I kid. Movement on the Greenway would be most welcome if it spelled the end of 415 W. Washington, that sebaceous cyst of a building, and any other open sores along the path. The Road Commission is an embarrassment, an atrocious eyesore, something every slumlord in town can draw inspiration from as they neglect to make improvements on their own offenses to architecture.

“The realization of the greenway,” summarizes Mr. Bob Galardi of the Allen Creek Greenway Conservancy, a group formed in support of the project, “will require serious partnerships with other governmental units, Washtenaw County, the University of Michigan, entities both public and private, with nonprofits, the railroad, and with individuals who believe in this community and are willing to contribute their time and dollars to giving life to this vitally important goal.”

If there’s anything that makes me nervous, it’s the notion that regional cooperation will be integral to the Greenway’s success. Regional anything is so often the death knell for good ideas that fail (or the excuse, often used around election time, to explain why things like the Greenway never get off the ground) that I get gun-shy every time it is espoused.

After all, in spite of having a thespian at the helm, City Council does not always execute the most well-choreographed version of that classic musical “Thoroughly Modern Millage.”

One wonders if there will be too many cooks in the kitchen by the third act of the Greenway’s development—or not enough.

But above all, one mustn’t be too critical, or too impatient. It is impatience and hypersensitivity, after all, that make the city timid in its movements—and timidity is what’s kept 415 W. Washington erect long enough for bats to become a problem in the neighboring area.

In other words, $200,000 for consultant fees is just the tip of the iceberg—and if it’s an amount that makes you queasy, just tune out for the next ten years until the pathway is complete. If the Lord is willing and Allen Creek don’t rise, it will be worth it. And if it does rise, well, we’ll convert it to a canal, and start tapping the General Fund for $800K for a consultant to study the purchase of gondolas….