AADL Talks To: John Hieftje, 60th Mayor of Ann Arbor, 2000-2014

Thu, 09/19/2024 - 9:00pm

When: December 7, 2023

John Hieftje is Ann Arbor’s 60th and longest-serving mayor, elected first in 2000, then re-elected for six consecutive terms. John grew up in Ann Arbor and discusses how the student protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s influenced his community activism and helped shape his political career. He also talks about some of the challenges he faced in office, from the Great Recession of the mid-2000s to his work on the Ann Arbor Greenbelt, polluter laws, and bicycle infrastructure. He also talks about some of the city's ongoing efforts to address climate change and affordable housing.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: Hi, this is Amy. In this episode, AADL talks to former Ann Arbor mayor John Hieftje. John was Ann Arbor's 60th and longest-serving mayor, elected first in 2000, then re-elected for six consecutive terms. John talks about his community activism and in particular how his interest in environmentalism shaped his time in office. He also talks about some of the challenges he faced during the 2000s, including the country-wide recession, as well as some thoughts about ongoing issues like affordable housing. Thank you so much for coming, John.
• [00:00:45] JOHN HIEFTJE: I'm happy to be here. Thank you.
• [00:00:48] AMY CANTU: Can you first talk a little bit about where you were born, where you grew up, and just a little bit about your early life?
• [00:00:55] JOHN HIEFTJE: I was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, and my family moved here about the time I turned one. I grew up in Ann Arbor. My father was able to buy a home in Ann Arbor, I think for $25,000 using a veteran's loan as he'd been in World War II and as a lot of people in that era certainly had been. All my grown-up memories are here in Ann Arbor.
• [00:01:18] AMY CANTU: Wow. What schools did you go to?
• [00:01:21] JOHN HIEFTJE: I went to Bach Elementary, and Slauson, and Pioneer.
• [00:01:25] AMY CANTU: Any key memories from that? Was there anything at that early stage that would suggest that you might eventually become the mayor of Ann Arbor?
• [00:01:32] JOHN HIEFTJE: There isn't very much, but I was always interested in government classes when I got to high school. It's interesting: When my father died in 2010, someone that the family had known for years -- she had been a neighbor -- came to his service, and she told me that, "Your father told me years ago that you were going to be mayor someday." That was really the first I'd heard of it. He must have seen something in me, that I was interested in government.
• [00:02:07] AMY CANTU: But he never talked to you about that?
• [00:02:08] JOHN HIEFTJE: He didn't mention it to me.
• [00:02:09] AMY CANTU: Wow, that's interesting. What did you end up studying?
• [00:02:16] JOHN HIEFTJE: Well, my college education was over many years because I got caught up in the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, because I was in high school in the late '60s. My older brother had gone into the military during the Vietnam War there. He came back home and had a lot of stories from his buddies. My brother was fortunate enough, he was in the 101st Airborne. But he was fortunate enough not to have served, looking back on it in Vietnam. But several of his buddies did. We had some at our house. Early on, this would have been in 1966, they related these horrible stories and really couldn't see any reason that we were fighting in Vietnam, which the nation came to see much later. I became, early on, pretty activated in joining in with the U of M students in anti-war protests, which, of course, created problems in my family, because my father had served in the Pacific and just didn't understand that. It was a different mindset. The country, and Ann Arbor, was going through a whole lot because it had been this small very set in its ways Midwestern town, and pretty conservative, actually. Then you had this big student movement going on. I was caught up in that. It caused problems in my family. I left home as soon as I got out of high school. There was just this barrier and that really did start my path on being an activist.
• [00:04:01] AMY CANTU: Were your parents conservative? Were they Republican?
• [00:04:06] JOHN HIEFTJE: Yeah, my dad was. You know, conservatives used to have maybe a different slant to it. My dad voted Democratic. He had thought that Roosevelt had basically saved the country. Because my father was born in '15, he would have been 15 years old in 1930. He had the Depression going on, and he really respected the steps. He was born in Holland, Michigan, my father was from the west side of the state. He really respected Roosevelt. He was a lifelong Democrat. My mother voted Republican, but they were still conservatives, both of them.
• [00:04:37] AMY CANTU: Sure. You're right, it was a different thing back then. So you witnessed some of the upheaval here in town?
• [00:04:44] JOHN HIEFTJE: Yeah, I was right in the middle of it sometimes. The upheaval that happened on South University.
• [00:04:52] AMY CANTU: Were you there?
• [00:04:53] JOHN HIEFTJE: I was there. I wasn't right there on South U, I was a few blocks away. That was interesting. Up by the Union, there was a little demonstration going on and just the normal stuff, a couple of speakers on the steps of the Union. We could hear this tumult going on down on South U. I wasn't down there to see what was going on. I look back at the changes that the city went through, and they were quite amazing, and it was a real shock to the citizen.
• [00:05:27] AMY CANTU: It was.
• [00:05:27] JOHN HIEFTJE: That the whole country was changing. Then there was an explosion at, I think, the ROTC office and some different things like that that happened. So people were shocked and going through a lot. I started out... You know, I was planning on going to college, I was accepted. I was going to go to MSU or something. At that time, a lot of the young people in Ann Arbor, we didn't apply to go to U of M, because we knew it, we grew up with it. Then I'm not sure I would have gotten into it, back in that day. But you could go to college back in that day and work the summers and pay for your school. That's what I was doing. I was going to Washtenaw. My girlfriend was at MSU, and I could have gone there, but I think it would have been a strain on finances to do that. I ended up doing that, and then I started at Eastern. But then my other activities caught up with me and I didn't finish school at that time. I later went back to school as an adult and finished when I was 47 years old.
• [00:06:30] AMY CANTU: Amazing. What did you major in?
• [00:06:33] JOHN HIEFTJE: Well, I ended up interestingly majoring in political science.
• [00:06:38] AMY CANTU: I guess that worked out for you. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:06:40] JOHN HIEFTJE: Yeah, I never thought about that when I was young, though. But that's what I ended up doing.
• [00:06:45] AMY CANTU: Now, I think I read that you had some interest in forestry? Can you talk a little bit about it?
• [00:06:52] JOHN HIEFTJE: That's one of some of the things that got me away. To this day, I have a huge interest in being in wild places. I go to wilderness places, and I still do it. I will kayak into wild areas. Lately, I've been going north of our cottage a couple of hours up into... There's some giant parks on the Canadian side where you can go 100 miles on Lake Superior and not see a light. It's nothing. I yearly go on adventures like that and sometimes into the backcountry. But back then I had a buddy, a friend of mine, who knew someone, and he had worked for a summer for a survey company that was doing some subcontractor work for the Forest Service. I went to the UP for a summer and a half. Basically, you camped out in some remote spot, and I was the really trained, talented guy that was holding that stick in the air for a survey team. That was my job was to be the guy out there so they could take measurements and do sightings and things like that. I had a lot of time off, and I went trout fishing and really explored the UP. I had done that a lot, and that's I think what drove me into Canada, which... I've been all over Canada exploring and fishing, in Manitoba, Saskatchewan. I love going out West and being in the mountains, but my home base is up on the North Shore of Lake Superior.
• [00:08:32] AMY CANTU: Well, so your interest -- your enthusiasm for the outdoor spaces and environmentalism -- was a huge part of your legacy here. Can you talk about how you campaigned and how you brought these issues to your constituents and how Ann Arbor embraced it, or didn't initially?
• [00:08:54] JOHN HIEFTJE: But the time I started to get back involved in what was happening, it was in the '90s, actually the late '80s. I was very interested in the whole pantheon of different environmental issues, I was doing some recycling work with the Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors, I don't know if you knew this, but you probably remember it. They used to have these great big thick books, the multiple listing books, and every real estate office was just full of them. They had reams and reams of copy paper and everything. I started a recycling program for that industry, and they noticed that over at Recycle Ann Arbor and asked me to serve on the board. After a couple of years, I was the chair of the Board of Recycle Ann Arbor for a while. They were going through a whole lot of things, as you can imagine. Then I served for a period later on with the Huron River Watershed Council, and I was active in some environmental activism, campaigned for a millage -- I believe that was in '99 -- to renew the parks millage, so the city would use that to buy park land.
• [00:10:10] JOHN HIEFTJE: Prior to that, I was involved in another neighborhood issue on the north side of town -- I lived at a house on Traver -- about an expansion, and it was kind of a reverse environment--"Wait a minute, why are you against this big expansion of Leslie Science Center?" The proposal for the building there was massive. The neighbors didn't like it at all. Nobody did in the whole neighborhood. I started talking to people and talking to people. We put together a little campaign, and it had to be passed by the voters to fund this. It was called Proposal B that year. It was defeated in 1997, I believe that was. Then in 1999, a seat was open on city council and my neighbor said, "You should do this. You need to run." Because I had then served on the task force that put together the current buildings and we went back to Dr. Leslie's will and followed that, and he had never intended for very much development on the property. The caveat that the whole board of people that were supervising the building of the Leslie Science and Nature Center buildings were that we would keep everything on the footprint of his original buildings. We did that. It's something that I stayed engaged in and was working with that group until the building was complete. It went very well. It continues to be a building where they can pretty much power themselves. All of their wastes are handled right there on site. It's just great It's still a great example, and it's held up very well.
• [00:11:52] AMY CANTU: You must have then had a lot of name recognition at that time among those groups of people.
• [00:11:58] JOHN HIEFTJE: Yeah, I did, and I had worked with The Ecology Center and the Sierra Club and a lot of different folks along the way. Ran for city council in 1999, and then there was an opportunity to be the Democratic candidate in 2000. I took it and ran in that election.
• [00:12:17] AMY CANTU: What was that like?
• [00:12:20] JOHN HIEFTJE: I had had some campaign experience in that previous campaign about Proposal B. Then of course I'd run for city council. I took my seat on city council in November, and by March, I decided I was going to run for mayor.
• [00:12:35] AMY CANTU: That's a pretty short time between those two.
• [00:12:38] JOHN HIEFTJE: Yeah, and the election coming up the next November. But I had seen a lot of things at the city. I had developed some opinions. I'd talked to a lot of people, spent a lot of time... I think it's important if you want to know about what's going on there -- back in that day -- was to spend time at City Hall and go around and talk to people. Nowadays, you go into an office, and there may not be anybody there because still a lot of people are doing remote work. That was important to me. I was worried about the city's finances. The city had seen an expansion of the number of employees throughout the '90s. If you remember the '90s -- kind of a boom time -- tax dollars were rolling in. Everybody was doing well. Crime was going down in this period because it had been up in the '80s, and just a lot of things were happening. I began to be a little worried about it -- that hey, what if things weren't going so good?
• [00:13:35] AMY CANTU: You've described yourself as a fiscal conservative.
• [00:13:39] JOHN HIEFTJE: And so when I was elected mayor, one of the things that I wanted to do was, Let's take a look at the city organization and see if we can save some money somewhere. The city had I think1,004 employees in 2000. By the time I left office, we were down to about 700.
• [00:13:55] AMY CANTU: Did you then attract a whole different group of people?
• [00:14:00] JOHN HIEFTJE: No, I talked to the city council members. At that time, we had both Republicans and Democrats, and I found some allies among people and just kept talking and working on it and got some agreement that hey, we need to do something about this; maybe we can take a look at making some trims. It turned out I was worried that what's going to happen when we have a recession. Indeed a recession came right along. Michigan entered the Great Recession a few years before the rest of the country. We had a leg up because we had already begun, we'd given orders to the city administrator -- we had to hire a new one of those -- and to staff that we were going to make these trims. We had already made about 20% of the cuts that we eventually had to make. We were well ahead of the game. A lot of cities when the Great Recession came and hit really hard, they were playing catch up the whole way, and they had to take an axe to trimming the employment and cutting expenses, whereas we were able to do it with a scalpel, and had reorganized, and a lot of the people that worked at the city, I think we were happier. They were qualified to do more jobs and reorganize. We also used technology a lot. Technology came in. For instance, there were people that would go around and read your water meter. Go to your house and read your water meter. That all changed pretty quickly as technology came along. Your water meter reports its own usage. You're able to monitor that. We took advantage of that as well, and we were able to make some significant cuts. Then I'll never forget -- we're getting ahead, I'll go back to a few things -- but I'll never forget the Director David Canter, the director of the local Pfizer Unit, who had been expanding in Ann Arbor. I think they had put hundreds of millions of dollars into their facility up there by North Campus and said, Hey, John I wanted to call you and let you know ahead of time -- which was like the day of -- that we're going to be closing this facility. That word just came down. The governor was in town, and there was a headline that made every paper in Michigan and probably way beyond, Governor Granholm said, "This is like a punch in the gut."
• [00:16:23] AMY CANTU: That was a big day. How did you feel?
• [00:16:27] JOHN HIEFTJE: It was a big day for us. We were all up on a podium, on a stage together and talking about this and trying to assure the public, but the governor was there. This was a time when business was really down in Michigan. Really down. The automotive industry had been retrenching for a number of years, and the state was looking for any bit of good news. Here this came along, and they were about 5% of our property tax revenue.
• [00:16:55] AMY CANTU: That's a lot.
• [00:16:56] JOHN HIEFTJE: The state had begun cutting revenues to the city way back in 2002. What's called revenue sharing from the state, that was going way down. It was the double whammy. You had the state money going down, and now you had 5%, and it really hit when the University of Michigan bought the Pfizer property -- which I don't regret at all -- they've made good work out of it, But the University of Michigan doesn't pay taxes. That's a theme that has run throughout Ann Arbor's history, that U of M doesn't pay taxes. They've recently made some more purchases of land in the city. Obviously, the university is good for the city, I'd never argue that, but it can make it a little more difficult, particularly when you have a 2,000-acre park system, when you have a lot of expenses that maybe some other cities don't have. One of the things that I pushed in my time in office was quality of life. I pledged to continue to work on our quality of life. One facet of that was probably the Green Belt campaign.
• [00:18:02] AMY CANTU: Yeah, talk about that because I'm interested in that.
• [00:18:05] JOHN HIEFTJE: The Green Belt campaign... There had been a county-wide ballot back in the late '90s to preserve farmland and open space around the county. The Builders Association had spent a tremendous amount of money, and they brought in outside funding to make sure this didn't pass. The weekend before the election that year, it was the Michigan State game, and they had commercials on that. Everybody saw it, a farmer sitting on a truck saying, "This is bad for farmers." When In reality, it's turned out to have been great for farmers. But that's what they said and so it was defeated. But it won in Ann Arbor, and it won in Ann Arbor Township. Working with some environmentalists from the Sierra Club and Ecology Center, we thought, maybe we can get this to pass in Ann Arbor. What we did, it was a millage, but it wasn't technically a tax increase because if you went back to the late '90s, something I'd worked on was renewing that parks millage, which was a half mill. What we did was expand that millage. We lengthened it from five years to 30 years and changed its mandate to say that you can use two-thirds of this money to buy the development rights of property outside of the city. This was a time when sprawl was rampant. Every piece of farmland that you'd drive by and you'd go by a couple of months later, and they were building a strip mall there, or a subdivision of huge houses on huge lots, which from an environmental point of view, really bad for the watershed, for instance. Actually suburban land is much worse for our streams and rivers than farmland, because farmers are very judicious and scientific in their application of fertilizers and whatnot on their land because it's part of their bottom line. They need to save money. Whereas the suburban homeowner just comes out and spreads it all over. Then you don't get much absorption in a subdivision. You've got a lot of pavement, you've got a lot of roof. Your water is not dispersing very well. You have a lot of impervious surface, and lawns are not nearly so good as woods or farmlands. The idea was that we can help to preserve our watershed because we do after we get our water out of the Huron River. We can preserve local agriculture.
• [00:20:32] AMY CANTU: How do you sell that, though? How did you sell that? Because I would imagine it was difficult to even explain what the benefits were.
• [00:20:41] JOHN HIEFTJE: It took a little bit, but I think the previous campaign in the late 90s had gotten people to think about this. You know, I grew up in Ann Arbor, but that doesn't mean I wasn't constantly... My father, we were going fishing twice a week, or we were going out to one of the lakes. We were out in the countryside a lot, and you would see this going on. You didn't just live in town, you lived in this region. You began to see, Where did this come from? Things were changing in the countryside. I think everybody noticed that. Most people did. We were successful in that election, despite a lot of money spent. We raised a lot of money, too. We went to the Nature Conservancy and they helped. In a way, this was national news for folks who were paying attention to that niche, because the builder community was really worried about it: They're going to take land. As it turned out, there's plenty of land. People were saying, Oh, this is going to hurt affordable housing. Well, it's not going to hurt affordable housing. They were building huge homes out on giant lots. Affordable housing doesn't--it's not near transit. To be out in the countryside you need some other components for affordable housing. I don't think it impacted that at all. I've discussed over the years, I get invited to go to some class or debate that issue. But so it passed. Ann Arbor's a fairly environmental community. The Green Belt passed, and I think they're up over 7,000 acres preserved now. If you go to the farmers market, you will see folks there who are growing what they're selling in the Green Belt lands. It's really taken off in that way. I think local agriculture is important. In decades to come, we'll be in a time when people begin to consider how much carbon was involved in getting that food here from South America when you can have local food. Then, of course, as the climate changes, our growing period of the year is going to continue to expand. Our growing season. I think it's turned out really well, but that's what we told people back then. We campaigned hard, we went door to door. We worked hard, had some people who were helping me, and I was helping them, and we all made this happen. Mike Garfield from the Ecology Center was instrumental in helping to make this happen. Folks at the Sierra Club as well.
• [00:23:07] AMY CANTU: What years are we talking about?
• [00:23:08] JOHN HIEFTJE: This was in 2003.
• [00:23:10] AMY CANTU: You were elected first in 2000?
• [00:23:12] JOHN HIEFTJE: Yes.
• [00:23:13] AMY CANTU: Then you're the longest-serving mayor, is that correct?
• [00:23:17] JOHN HIEFTJE: I expect that now... Yeah, I used to have to run for office, as did previous mayors, every two years. Now it's every four years. I suspect they'll be a new longest-serving mayor before too long.
• [00:23:27] AMY CANTU: You served as mayor through the 2000s and into the 2010s.
• [00:23:34] JOHN HIEFTJE: 2014, 14 years.
• [00:23:36] AMY CANTU: Do you feel like the era was ripe for somebody with your vision? Do you feel like that has continued, or that it would be more difficult now?
• [00:23:46] JOHN HIEFTJE: I think at that time in a lot of places, if you had a good eye on the budget and you were being careful with taxpayer dollars, which I think a lot of people don't resent paying taxes if they believe that their money is going to be used well, efficiently.
• [00:24:04] AMY CANTU: You feel that you were successful in communicating that to the voters?
• [00:24:09] JOHN HIEFTJE: Yep, I think so, and then having an environmental side.
• [00:24:14] AMY CANTU: It's like both...a bit of both worlds.
• [00:24:16] JOHN HIEFTJE: Then, of course, I had grown up being part of civil rights protests, as well as anti-war protests. Certainly was aware of those issues as well, and social issues. And I've taken... and something, in fact, I continue to work on: I continue to serve as the co-chair of the Continuum of Care. It's a county board that is mandated by HUD. We oversee the HUD money that comes into Washtenaw County. I've been doing that ever since I was mayor. I just continued in that position. I serve as Ann Arbor's representative until the mayor decides he wants somebody else to do it.
• [00:24:53] AMY CANTU: That's great. Continuing with that same legacy. Can you talk a little bit about any thorny issues that you had to face? Like, for example, the Gelman dioxane spill. I imagine that was one of the thornier things...
• [00:25:10] JOHN HIEFTJE: And it was so frustrating because the judge had determined that Ann Arbor... we didn't have standing to be part of the case that this needed to be... And then the DNR, there was a legacy under Governor Engler. They really hadn't done anything. I mean, they never turned the screws on them, so to speak, to say, Hey, you've got to deal with this. This is getting bad. That was a real frustration and something that we could talk about until we were blue in the face, but...
• [00:25:41] AMY CANTU: It's still ongoing.
• [00:25:42] JOHN HIEFTJE: We couldn't do anything about it at that time. Now there's been some changes legally, and the city has a little bit more of an entree into it now, to have a stake in it. But it was a tough issue, and it just continued to expand. It's just entrenched, and I don't know that it'll ever be cleaned up. But it needs to be contained. It needs to be stopped. It just can't continue to spread like this. Somebody's got to, hopefully, something that's going to make this work. That's always been a thorny issue. I think one of the hardest parts were when the recession really dug in and just like every other city in the state, we had to make some significant decisions. We did our best to shield the essential services like police and fire. But I also noted that the incidence of fires was way down from what it had been back when the fire department had reached its staffing level that it had. So there was room there. And we didn't lay people off throughout this whole thing, very few people who lost their job throughout the whole downsize into the city workforce. It was mostly attrition, almost always. The same is true in the police department. The staffing of the police department had really expanded in the 80s to respond to crime, and it had continued to expand in the 90s. But then you saw the university bring in their own police force. University has, 50, 60 sworn officers, which means they're sworn in by the state. They can carry a side arm. Ann Arbor no longer really had to patrol the campus anymore.
• [00:27:26] AMY CANTU: That helped a lot.
• [00:27:27] JOHN HIEFTJE: That helped too. Yeah. When you step back and took a look at it, you could see, Well, maybe we can make some changes here. Then the city worked -- city administration and worked with a consultant, as well -- worked with the AFSCME Union, which is the city's largest union. They worked with the city, and so people were trained, cross-trained in other jobs, and I think employees began to see themselves as more valuable, and indeed, they were more valuable to the city. But it really cut through a lot of red tape by having, I think we had something like 23 job classifications in AFSCME and we ended up with four. People could do other jobs. If you're on your job and you're only doing the same thing all the time, it's nice to go to something different. They dug in and worked with the city on that, and I appreciate it. But the hard part was when you had to make some difficult decisions. I could tell you a little anecdote. One of them was...we were trying to make a decision about the pool over at Mack School that the city owns and operates, but pools heated all winter long indoors are expensive. And when you're having to make some difficult decisions, you need to make a decision about this. So the city had slated to close that pool. This was happening all over the state. People were having to make tough decisions and close things down. Police and fire were being laid off all over the place because there just wasn't much money. We had a public hearing, and this group came, and they were called the Dawn Ducks. The Dawn Ducks would swim every morning because the city kept that pool a little warmer. It also had a ramp that you could walk in and do your jazz exercises in the water. The Dawn Ducks had about 15 or 20 people there, and about four of them spoke and city council melted. [LAUGHING]. I melted because you were going to take this social activity... Because they would go there, and then they would have coffee, and then go there two, three days a week. It was part of their life. It was like saying no to your grandmother. Nobody was going to do that. But they were constantly appeals -- "Oh, you can't cut this, you can't cut that." These were tough times. I was very fortunate to serve with a bunch of council members who were on the same wavelength and understood. Republicans, Democrats, we all understood that we needed to get this job done.
• [00:29:59] AMY CANTU: Who are some of the key people that you worked with that you'd like to give a shout-out to?
• [00:30:04] JOHN HIEFTJE: There were several, early on, I enjoyed working with Mike Reid and Joe Upton, Republican representatives on the city council. We worked through some things. Then later on, as time evolved, that Leigh Greden was instrumental and knew the budget really well. Of course, Jean Carlberg was a stalwart at the time and a constant voice for affordable housing, for instance. But also recognized the fact that we need to get this in order. Need to get our house in order. I think we were also doing our very best. I know we were to shield the citizen as much as we possibly could from these financial realities. The city staff really stepped up and became much more efficient in their work so that you could do the work with 30% fewer people. Actually, as time went on, the work expanded, but the workforce didn't at that time. That's one of my big cautions for people in the city or anywhere now. There's going to be a downturn at some point.
• [00:31:13] AMY CANTU: Again.
• [00:31:13] JOHN HIEFTJE: There always has been. You don't want to be unprepared for that. You need to be constant, don't have more staff than you need. Don't overstep your finances. I think by the time I left, you see the city's millages are going down a little bit every year just to shave because of Headlee. But the millage was lower, I think, when I left office than when I got there. We didn't add to the tax burden, which I think is really important. Taxes become just another expense that affected affordable housing. People who rent don't realize it, but they're paying taxes. It's just reflected in the rent. This actually had a higher rate than a homeowner. Those things. I'm just hoping that people in the future... And we'll keep an eye on that, I'm pretty sure they will. But the Great Recession was a real lesson for everybody.
• [00:32:10] AMY CANTU: How do you think we're doing right now?
• [00:32:15] JOHN HIEFTJE: There's been some big millages passed. I'm a total fan of transit. I always have been. I was a pioneer and pushing some of these issues. I wanted to see commuter rail. I was pushing on rail because it would take cars out of the city. There were 75,000 people at that time that were coming in to work in Ann Arbor every day in their cars. There's been expansion of transit, and that's a good thing, but it was a big bite, a big millage that passed a few years ago. People in Ann Arbor have open hearts, and they passed the affordable housing millage, which I think was needed, it's an issue I've been working on for a long time. But you need to be cognizant of... All these things add up. We need to keep an eye on that tax line. Ann Arbor is expensive because so many people want to be here, and there's limited housing, which there's a lot of work that'sbeen going on. We started it back when I was mayor, and that brings me into another issue that was very contentious, and that was development. Development, as I see it today, is not nearly as contentious as it was at the time, but back when we rezoned downtown, that discussion went on for about three or four years with incredible public input with a lot of meetings, some of them right here at the library. Big round tables and people could make their choices about what they wanted to see. Many people were involved and excited about it. I teach about nationwide affordable housing. If you look across the whole country, NIMBYism, the "Not In My Backyard" has been a major factor -- in California and in a whole lot of other places -- as the reason that more housing was not built. People trying to protect their neighborhoods. Totally natural. We all want to do that. I've done it myself. There was a lot of pushback on taller buildings downtown. Having grown up in the city and been here for a long time, I look at it. I can walk down Main Street. If you compare Main Street now with a picture from 1920, you still see the same buildings. The streets have changed a little bit. There's more trees. The bumpouts, the sidewalks are a little wider.
• [00:34:39] AMY CANTU: Main Street. Not Huron so much.
• [00:34:43] JOHN HIEFTJE: Huron is really not at Ann Arbor Street. It's US 23 / 94 business route. The state actually controls most of it... It's a different street. Much of Washington, much of Liberty. The historic districts are big downtown. If you begin to look around. Wherever you're walking around and you see... These look like older buildings. Well, you're probably in a historic district. Those extend quite a long ways. Then, of course, State Street is protected as well. I'm seeing a lot of changes in the city. There's a whole lot of building going on. That started back with the council and myself-- that were on the council in the early 2000.
• [00:35:22] AMY CANTU: Still really hard to convince people that we have to keep growing up. What can the current administration do to help spread this message?
• [00:35:32] JOHN HIEFTJE: Well, I think they do a pretty good job with it. I don't see nearly the upheaval going on. Then again, when you're proposing a rezoning of Briarwood--I think anybody who's paying any attention understands that area needs work. It's not the time that it was. When the malls first came to Ann Arbor, if you look back at the history of Ann Arbor, that led to the emptying of downtown, the department stores that were downtown. When I was a child, my mother...we shopped downtown. In fact, she liked to go shopping during the football game because you could go downtown. Nobody there back in those days. And then downtown had to be rebuilt. The Downtown Development Authority had a huge role in that. I served on that while I was mayor. The mayor can choose to have the city administrator serve or to serve themselves. I always wanted to serve there and really keep my fingers on the pulse of downtown.
• [00:36:26] AMY CANTU: You've also been really involved in bicycle infrastructure, is that right? How are we doing with that? 'Cause that's changed a lot?
• [00:36:33] JOHN HIEFTJE: It's coming along. It's moving along really well. We started to...back when I was a mayor, we began to work on all this stuff, and that again was a contentious issue. There's this nationwide fight. It's all about the real estate, really. It's the real estate of the street. If you go back far enough, Ann Arbor had street cars, cities across the country had street cars. When automobiles came along and the auto industry came along and began to push-- there's a whole movie about how they did this conspiracy to get rid of streetcars so that automobiles could take over the streets. The later version of that is, Wait a minute, we need to cut back on the real estate given to automobiles to make room for bicycling. With the e-bikes, that is a game changer around the world. People are able to come in and out of cities and around within cities to move about, even if they don't want to pedal. I like to pedal myself. I can see myself in a few years on an e-bike. That can make a difference: You can get to work without working up a sweat, which is one of the advantages I guess. But yeah, that was contentious. And putting in bike lanes. I remember the changes we made to Jackson Road. Jackson Road used to be four lanes, and they were pretty tight lanes. Coming into town, once you came across Maple, and moving that to three lanes with bike lanes, Whoa, my gosh, people didn't like that. There were all sorts of people coming to city council. It was a tough vote for council members to take, but they did. As it turns out, if you look at the science of it, just as many cars get through. They're closer together because they're moving at a slower speed. They arrive at the light at about the same time they would have had it been four lanes. Now it's much safer and you have room for cycling. I live off of Packard a few blocks and those bike lanes are full morning and afternoon, and rush hour anywhere. There's folks in those bike lines all the time. Interestingly, for me, when I got into office, the city had started to do some cycling stuff back in the 90s, and they sort of let it fade away. There was a study by University of Michigan Professor Johnson Levine that showed that in Boulder, Colorado, and Madison, Wisconsin, pretty similar climates, people were cycling at a much much greater rate than they were in Ann Arbor. Then of course it's because they had infrastructure. If you have bicycling infrastructure, people ride. People would say, Why do we need bike lanes? I never see anybody riding. They don't have anywhere to ride. If you give them a safe place to ride, maybe they'll take off. I'm just really happy to see the city continuing on that because I think that's going to continue to grow. I teach a class at the Ford School of Public Policy, just one semester, usually a year. A lot of young people don't even want a car anymore. Cars are expensive. They want to live somewhere where they can get around, walking, biking, using transit. It's a changing world, and I think the cycling, the bicycling lanes, are just helping to prepare the city for new generations.
• [00:39:57] AMY CANTU: What's the name of the class that you teach?
• [00:39:58] JOHN HIEFTJE: I teach a class called Local Government Opportunity for Activism. We look at the issues that are facing cities, which are immense. Housing probably being the number one right now, everywhere. Housing is in short supply. We look at climate change. What are cities going to do? How are they going to cope when the water keeps coming up? Miami is spending millions and millions of dollars to keep the water out. Basically put up barriers to it and then pump the water back into the ocean. They don't have other solutions. You're going to have to... The folks in the Netherlands have been doing this for a really long time, and we need to learn a lot from them because it's going to happen. The climate is changing. In Ann Arbor. We get about 20% more rainfall than we did back in the 90s. It comes down in much more intense events. You may not have any rain for three or four weeks and then you have an intense event, and you get a month's worth, a 100-year flood. The 100-year floods happen every five years now. You have to deal with these issues, and across the Midwest, people are having to deal with that issue. So climate change is affecting everybody. In the West, it's fires and smoke and water shortages, which are really digging into parts of it and they're having to face up to. So we teach about that, and we often speak with professionals in Ann Arbor to give them an up-close look at what's going on even in a city -- even though we don't compare size-wise with what's going on in New Orleans or San Francisco -- we do have people that work on those same issues here. There's a particular interest in policing, of course. Has been for a long time. Particularly after George Floyd, people began to be even more interested. So Ann Arbor is very progressive in that way. We were back when I was mayor. We were doing studies of traffic stops and beginning to take a look at all that stuff, which this Council has continued to do. It's a little bit like, people paying taxes and wanting to know that their money is being well spent. People are paying taxes to fund safety service, and they want to know that safety service is not overstepping and that it is respecting everybody. I think the Ann Arbor police are very good at that. I think that Ann Arbor Police officers tend to be more highly educated than other forces. They've had more training, and I think that that's something that needs to continue, but that ethic has been there for a very long time.
• [00:42:29] AMY CANTU: John, as the longest-serving mayor, you obviously had quite an expanse there. Was there anything at the end when you finally left office that you wish you had known at the beginning?
• [00:42:40] JOHN HIEFTJE: I think one of the shocks was that things in government take a lot longer than in the private sector. You have to have a lot of patience, and you need to stick with something. You can't come out and say, "Hey, we're going to do this. I'm really excited about this, we're going to have it" and then not follow it.' I think someone in office needs to stick with that issue if you really want to see it done, because new things come up, and staff are pulled in a lot of directions.
• [00:43:11] JOHN HIEFTJE: To move the ball somewhere and actually make a big change, you need to stick with it and have patience. I originally said, "Ooh, I'm going to have to work on this for a while" and kept working on it. And some of the things like the reorganization of the city: Keep talking about that. Keep pushing that issue with staff, with the public, on the city council. Bike lanes: Keep moving on that. The other thing that I was really interested in was energy, and that's another example. Back in, I think it was '05, I issued the Mayor's Green Energy Challenge. I originally said we would have a reduction of 20% in our fossil fuels within city government, of our carbon production. The Energy Commission, which I also sat on at the time, those guys, they went back -- the men and women there -- and said, Well, wait a minute, let's do 30%. I've always been cautious because I look at these governments nowadays, who say, Well, we're going to do this by 2030. In Ann Arbor, it might happen, but in a lot of places, there's no... Or corporations are saying, We're going to meet these standards by 2035. Well, what are you doing now? Well, we're not doing anything, yes, but you need to. I was worried about that. We didn't hit 30%, but we did hit 20 in 2011, which was just a year after I had hoped that it would happen. I kept talking about energy all the time.
• [00:44:37] AMY CANTU: Is there anything you had to just give up?
• [00:44:42] JOHN HIEFTJE: No, not really.
• [00:44:43] AMY CANTU: You stuck with it, then.
• [00:44:44] JOHN HIEFTJE: We tried to stick with things and the time I was there, pretty much everything got done. I wanted to make sure that, having been through the Great Recession, that the city... It's easy to say, we need more people if we're going to do that, and to say, we got to figure out another way. I think the city and the administration, the administrator, Roger Fraser was very good as a city administrator throughout this reorganization and working with staff and everybody. Again, a great counsel to work with Joan Lowenstein throughout my time on city council. There's just so many people, I don't want to start mentioning them because they were all good.
• [00:45:29] AMY CANTU: Now, you've been out of office for about a decade?
• [00:45:33] JOHN HIEFTJE: Yeah, it will be a decade in November.
• [00:45:36] AMY CANTU: If you were suddenly thrust back into the mayor's office, what would be the biggest headache? What would you be excited to pursue?
• [00:45:48] JOHN HIEFTJE: Well, they are going to keep needing to really continue to pay attention... They have money now for the first time on affordable housing. I look at this issue a lot because of my other role at the Continuum of Care. They need to do everything possible to get the most housing possible out of that. I'm hoping there's going to be partnerships with people in the development sector so that they can get this done so that you can leverage this money.
• [00:46:17] AMY CANTU: That's the trick.
• [00:46:18] JOHN HIEFTJE: That's going to be the trick, is to leverage this money to build as many units as possible. I want to see some big goals here, but reachable goals of what you can do with this, because I would think that we need to have a place-- Washtenaw County is pretty darn good. Although there's a nationwide...there's been a huge increase in homelessness and a lot of it has to do with drugs, a lot of it has to do with Fentanyl. But there just isn't enough housing. We need to have housing for people who have jobs and they go to work there 40 hours or more. Some of the people who are working 60 hours. They should be able to afford to live in Ann Arbor. There should be a place for people to live. There can't be a place for everybody and surrounding areas -- transit is doing a very good job to work with people who want to live in Ypsilanti, which is somewhat less expensive but going up, and a great little town, I like Ypsilanti -- that's going to be an issue that the people in office are going to have to really continue to focus on. Not just taking things at face... but how can we leverage this money? Are we getting enough units for these amounts of dollars? Because most communities don't have those dollars, and we do. We can make it happen, but we need to keep our nose to the grindstone and get this done.
• [00:47:44] AMY CANTU: What are some of the other issues that preoccupied you during your time in office?
• [00:47:50] JOHN HIEFTJE: People in office...there's all these things that come up daily. You need to deal with this question or that question. I know during the reorganization, I was in constant communication and going to different meetings. I was in City Hall a lot and I used the mayor's office a lot, and was there making things happen and working with the staff and administrator, just keeping pushing. I think that needs to happen with city administration now with, as I said, the housing issue. That really needs a push. Parks in Ann Arbor are beautiful and there's a huge constituency for them. I was always a huge fan and continue -- I use parks there almost every day when I'm in town, I'm in a park. That needs constant work, but it's easier because there's so much interest in our parks in Ann Arbor that people are not going to let that go by the wayside. They're just too beautiful, and they're used. People love their parks and I think that's great. These quality of life issues, one of the ones I didn't mention that I continue to see all the time: Around 2000, I remember being in town and unless you see pictures of it, you don't realize it... After a football game, for weeks after the game, there would be parts of the city that were covered in trash--the campus area, Burns Park, Hill Street, State Street, going out past the Athletic Campus. One of the issues that I took up early on--I hate trash. To this day, I go around and pick it up a lot of times. It was the Clean Communities that we started. That continues now, there's an app that you can get and you can call in when you see trash. But the cleanup... We began to find people if they didn't clean up their property. And landlords, of course, "Well, wait a minute, that's not our fault." And I said, "But it's your property." We had a big conversation about that, but then they came around, and they just put it in the lease. if the property's trashed, you, the tenant, will pay for the cleanup. Because the city goes out and issues you a ticket if you don't clean it up -- back then, I think it was 24 hours -- we're going to come back and clean it for you and send you a bill. That was a big quality of life issue. I think, in speaking about what focus needs to be, those quality of life issues. Because that's kind of the bargain that I made with people, was, I'm going to keep the budget under control. I'm going to work to expand the Green Belt. I'm going to be as environmental as I can be across the board. We need a clean river. I've been a huge believer; there's a whole lot of things that we need to do environmentally. We're going to work on these quality-of-life issues. That's my promise to you, and this is what we're going to try to do. For my time in office, people really liked that. There were bumps along the way in different times, but I was fortunate. I never had any problem being re-elected. Things progressed in that way and I trust that people in office now are still feeling the same way. Quality of life; we're going to keep an eye on the budget; and we're going to continue to move forward on these issues that are important to citizens.
• [00:51:03] AMY CANTU: Thank you so much, John.
• [00:51:04] JOHN HIEFTJE: Thanks for having me.
• [00:51:09] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.