A2Politico: Doing Less for Longer—A Politician’s Dream

by P.D. Lesko

KIRK WESTPHAL CAUSED the political firmament to tremble (convulse, really) when he was just rumored to be prepared to pitch the idea of changing the length of City Council members’ terms from two to four years. The self-employed Ward 2 Council member, who is in his first term, hasn’t said anything officially about any proposed term length change, but rather he has been discussing the issue informally.

I’ve written many times that Ann Arbor has outgrown its quaint part-time City Council and figurehead mayor model. The “strong City Administrator-weak Mayor” model of governance is called for in the Charter, created in the 50s, when Ann Arbor had 48,000 residents total. Today, there are 40,000 U-M students and 70,000 non-student residents. We have a City Administrator who serves at the pleasure of local elected officials who are often elected by fewer than 1,000 people in the August primary elections.

While Council members are civic-minded, they can also be shockingly unprofessional and even uninvolved in the most important jobs they have, such as shaping the city’s $350 million budget and evaluating the City Administrator and City Attorney. The City Administrator went without annual evaluations required by the Charter, and only a handful of the 11 City Council members participated in the most recent evaluation of the City Attorney.

Ward 4 Council member Kraphol didn’t campaign for Council because he was unopposed. He didn’t participate in candidate forums or show up at meetings where candidates answered questions from the public. His website, in fact, a year after his election still says he’s running for office. He has an unused Twitter account with six followers and a Facebook page last updated in Nov. 2014, thanking everyone who voted for him.

Ward 3 Council member Julie Grand, in her first term, has repeatedly complained that it takes Council “so long” to make decisions. Impatience on the part of a local elected official is just about as useful as a tremor in the scalpel hand of a brain surgeon.

While Council member Westphal has a Twitter account with 146 followers, he has used the account to communicate fewer than a dozen times total. Then again, Westphal’s Ward 2 counterpart Jane Lumm hasn’t used social media at all thus far in her current campaign.

Neither has Ward 5 Council member Mike Anglin.

While longer terms for City Council members might please those opposed to terms limits, shorter terms don’t really get the job done when it comes to making sure that local elected officials are doing their jobs. When they neglect to evaluate the City Administrator for years and fail to participate in annual evaluations of the City Attorney, it sends a message that our part-time Council members are, really, superfluous.

While this City Administrator as well as the last one let the roads and sewers go to rack and ruin, costing taxpayers tens of millions in additional repairs and the loss of millions of gallons of water, part-time Council members snipe at each other over $40,000 budget amendments. In this budget cycle, the previous one or the one before that, no Council member introduced a budget amendment that would call for large-scale sanitary and stormwater sewer improvements.

Part-time Council members expect to (and are expected to) leave the big ticket capital improvements to city staff. They, alas, have no shame in collecting their paychecks, auto and phone allowances, vacation, sick and personal day pay from a city with the third worst roads in the state of Michigan.

Keeping part-time Council members in office for longer between elections fixes none of the problems of having part-time politicians. We have high taxes, crumbling sewers and roads because Ann Arbor Council members are busy engaging in political food fights over a non-existent transit station, obsessing over a small patch of downtown and incessantly bloviating about why they’re voting a certain way.

Is it any wonder that Ann Arbor voters are apathetic and uninformed? One could reasonably argue that the part-time City Council is comprised of 11 civic-minded individuals who are equally apathetic and uniformed.

Ann Arbor is ready for full-time Council members who are compensated for their time, given support staff to make sure constituent outreach is of the highest quality possible, and IT support to shape communications strategies and tools to use when communicating with the voters whom they serve.

Right now, Ann Arbor taxpayers and voters are getting exactly what they pay for, part-timers who bring to their elected offices plenty of enthusiasm and wildly varying levels of follow through, skill, time and commitment.