Ann Arbor: A Tyranny of Competent But Mediocre Governance

Writer’s Note: Eighteen months ago I posted an essay on NextDoor about how Ann Arbor is governed. The post was removed without due process and without substantive dispute.

by David Fresco

In November 2024, Ann Arbor voters returned every incumbent to office, renewed the millages on the ballot, and rejected two proposals that would have reformed how we select our elected officials. The result was a vote of confidence in the people currently running the city and a vote of no-confidence in the idea that we should change how they get there. I supported the reforms. They lost. The people running the city are still running it, and they have spent the eighteen months since the election demonstrating, in case anyone was unclear, exactly what they intend to do with another term.

I do not have major disagreements with the decisions our current slate of elected officials has made. They are bright. They are committed. They perform their duties competently. Anyone reading this looking for a reactionary critique of housing, climate action, bike infrastructure, or the general progressive direction of the city should stop reading. The critique is not about what the Council decides. The critique is about how the Council decides, who gets to participate, who gets heard, who gets paid, and what kind of accountability voters are permitted to exercise when the next election comes.

Process matters. Process matters perhaps more than outcomes, because a process that produces a decision you like today will produce a decision you hate tomorrow, and the question of whether you had a voice in either is the same question. The current Council has answered the question. The answer is no.

1. We are led by competent, well-intentioned, but essentially mediocre elected and appointed officials who are far less effective and transformational than they believe they are. They have produced confirmation, and a $146 million parking deck for Oxford Realty’s development near Briarwood.
2. None of our elected officials have taken actions that disqualify themselves from office. They have, in several documentable cases, taken actions that should be answered for at the next election. Credit-claiming for staff and voter accomplishments. Inflated numbers in campaign materials. Failures of liaison duty that resulted in expert commission resolutions being buried rather than voted on. A $146 million parking deck commitment that bypassed normal public process. None of these is disqualifying. All of them are answerable. Whether they will be answered depends on whether the August 2026 primary is permitted to do its usual work of preventing the conversation from happening.
3. The current [Mayoral] slate continues to govern in an insular fashion with little input from the general public unless and until a select few loyalists are identified. The loyalists continue to enjoy a chummy and possibly transactional symbiosis with campaign contributions, supportive PACs, and preferential selection for city contracts. Eighteen months have produced more of both, not less. The symbiosis is now efficient enough that one suspects it could be diagrammed.
4. Progress remains slow, modest to be kind, and mediocre to be honest. The accomplishments claimed are not the accomplishments delivered. The gap between the two is the campaign issue, and the only reason the gap has not become the campaign issue already is that the venues where it would be discussed have been closed by the same people responsible for the gap.
5. Our system of choosing officials continues to provide cover that obfuscates records, amplifies credit-claiming, and protects incumbents from critical scrutiny. The August primary is the central mechanism. A small electorate selects, a large electorate ratifies, and the slate never has to defend its record before the voters whose attention would matter most. The 2024 reforms that would have ended this arrangement were defeated by the coalition that benefits from it. The arrangement continues to operate exactly as designed.
6. The financial backers, the dubious track records, the public-private ventures, and the disproportionate consideration in contracting are still there. They are documentable. They are not being documented in venues the council can suppress, because the council does not control Legistar, the Clerk’s filings, or independent journalism by people the council failed to silence. The people the council failed to silence are doing the work the council prefers not to have done. That is what independent means.
7. In the absence of real change and reform, we will continue to have a Groundhog Day rinse and repeat of uninspiring, competent, mediocre governance, election cycle after election cycle, until enough voters notice. The Mayor will smile from the balcony in St. Peter’s Square. The Cardinals will vote 11-0. The white smoke will rise. The faithful will applaud. The laity will be informed that the deliberations were beautiful, and that they should be grateful for the result.
8. The time is now to end the tyranny of competent but mediocre governance and obligate our elected officials to earn our approval to return to office, instead of perpetuating this unfair advantage with the current primary election system.

Consider Ward 5 Council member Jenn Cornell, whose campaign website lists seven accomplishments. Of the seven, voters authorized two (the Sustainability Energy Utility and the affordable housing millage), city staff designed three (the Office of Economic Development reorganization, the Sustainability Commission consolidation, and the Pauline and Miller infrastructure projects), and Cornell co-sponsored one with three other council members.

That leaves one accomplishment that cannot be independently verified, which is a polite way of saying it does not appear in the record. Her materials also claim 1,200-plus affordable housing units in the pipeline. The Ann Arbor Housing Commission’s own March 2026 presentation shows 1,017 under development plus 199 completed. The difference is units that are already built, which by definition are not in the pipeline, unless the campaign has discovered a new use for the word pipeline that the rest of the English-speaking world is unaware of.

The discrepancies are small individually. They are not small in aggregate, because they are a sample of a method. A campaign that adds completed buildings to a pipeline number to reach a more impressive total is a campaign that does not expect anyone to check. The method is the issue. If the materials lie about housing, they lie about everything.

The Vatican has at least the decency to acknowledge that their own books need editing.