Setting The Record Straight

■ On April 5, Ann Arbor voters will select five City Council members and decide whether incumbent mayor, Democrat Liz Brater, should serve two more years at City Hall. Her electoral opponent will be Republican Ingrid Sheldon. The following interview with Mayor Brater was conducted by AGENDA editors Ted Sylvester and Phillis Engelbert on Feb. 23. The text is an abridged version of the 90-minute talk.

AGENDA: Many called the council election a year ago a referendum on your leadership, having been in office for a year as mayor. And recently, in the 5th ward primary, in another election billed as a referendum on your leadership, the results were the same: The candidate allied with Liz Brater won. The votes have added up in your favor. In general terms, how do you account for this unparalleled power surge of the Democratic party and/or you personally in city politics? BRATER: I have attempted to bring ethics and honesty and hard work to city government. When I ran for mayor two years ago I promised to deliver basic services at the least cost, to protect the environment, to enhance downtown vitality, and to improve intergovernmental cooperation. And in all of those areas I've kept my promises. I've done that through hard work and some interesting initiatives, and by understanding that the purpose of city government is to represent the public interest, not special interests. I've tried to bring in as broad a range of people, to increase the diversity of representation on citizen boards and commissions, to not just be answering to one segment of the population, but to make sure that everybody is being heard. That starts with the electoral process and we have to make sure that we can build a broad base of voters and encourage people to participate in the election process. That's been something that I've worked hard at coming out of the ranks of the Democratic party, where I started out as a precinct worker and ward chair in the third ward. When I actually got into politics myself, I was doing it based on the neighborhood organization work and the networking I had done. I've been able to expand that to work city-wide with community organizations, being sensitive to the needs of individual citizens and their community organizations. I try to listen and I try to be open-minded. I try to accept criticism when I get it, which I get a lot of, and process it and respond as well as I can.

AGENDA: At the same time the Democrats are experiencing a surge in popularity, as seen by their overwhelming elected majority in Council (9-2),there seems to be a great deal of diversity within its ranks. i.e. the Democrats on council do not always vote as a block. Is this perceived as a problem within the party? BRATER: The Democratic Party, locally and nationally, has always had a wide tent. I regard disagreement on council as a healthy thing. We are elected in a democratic process and if we all were going to agree about everything all the time, there wouldn't be any point in having elections. You could have some kind of benevolent dictatorship. Obviously, there are some people that think it's bad when people disagree. They get upset by disagreement. I think that we have to learn to tolerate and respect disagreement. I think there's a way to disagree - to agree to disagree. I think it's important when people disagree that it be done along the lines of issues, and not along personal lines. I try as best I can around the council table to encourage people to restrict themselves to discussing the issues.  That's not always been the case, unfortunately, but I wouldn't ever want to try to have a monolithic caucus or council, because that wouldn't be healthy.

AGENDA: You mentioned that you do have your share of critics out there. I want to bring up the subject now of the animosity that is apparent between The Ann Arbor News and the Democrats, sometimes you in particular. It's no secret. It's been openly acknowledged and reported on in the pages of The News itself. It was just after the city elections of 1992, a year ago, that the editor of The News, Ed Petykiewicz, wrote an editorial on the subject, as a response to charges of racist and sexist journalism leveled against The News by council member Larry Hunter. Petykiewicz wrote: "Although at times very vocal, our critics almost always understand that the sporadic friction between a newspaper and elected officials is part of our political process." Later in the editorial. Petykiewicz said, "We want to be even handed..." Do you think The News has been even-handed? BRATER: That's a difficult question for me to answer. I'm probably not the right person to answer that question. It's my impression from hearing citizens' communications with me that a lot of citizens are disturbed by the coverage of city issues in The Ann Arbor News. I am always trying to work with The Ann Arbor News reporters to give them full and accurate information. I make every effort to be accessible to the reporters and it sometimes frustrates me that what is going on here is not being accurately reported. Sometimes it's just by errors in the reporting and sometimes it's through omission of major things that are happening that don't get covered in the newspaper. For example, we launched a tax assessment limitation initiative, which almost nobody knows about. It did get one little article in the paper but it was below the fold in the local section and it just didn't really explain what we were doing. The latest project that I've been involved with - working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on framing a national solid waste research and development strategy - I thought was a pretty major thing of interest to the citizens of Ann Arbor. That really wasn't mentioned, except for a little paragraph under the fact that I had proclaimed it to be "condom week." So it is frustrating, but I am ever optimistic that The News will be evenhanded and I hope that that is the objective of The Ann Arbor News.

AGENDA: You gave a couple of examples of inaccuracy by omission, perhaps. I have a couple of articles here which were printed in The Ann Arbor News. I wonder if I could get your response to this one in particular. It's from Dec. 28, 1992 and it's called "Issues Come Home, Mayor Defends Low Income Housing Policies." Do you remember this article? BRATER: Yes AGENDA: Do you have any reaction to the publication of the information contained in the article? BRATER: I didn't respond to that article at the time because I didn't think it deserved a response. I didn't want to dignify it by a response. Obviously, they pulled out information from 1976 or so. It was not accurate information. The article claimed that I opposed the Parkway Meadows project [a 350 unit subsidized senior and family housing complex on Nixon Rd.], which was false. I did work with the neighborhood organization there to modify that proposal as I have done consistently, to try to protect natural features and to try to make the project blend in with the neighborhood. I felt at the time that there were too many units being proposed for the amount of land that it was being built on. And I still, frankly, think that it would be a better development if there were more open space there. But obviously that's a good example of a distortion of the facts, the way that information was presented.

AGENDA: I just have one other example that I would like you to comment on. lts a short article in which Ed Petyciewicz apologizes for an Ann Arbor News article written when city attorney Elizabeth Schwartz was hired by council ["News coverage draws fire," Jan. 7, 1992]. A previous article referred to Schwartz as your "neighbor" and implied a connection between the two of you. Even though they apologized for making a "mistake," do you feel that this is an example of the kind of coverage you've been receiving? BRATER: It's a problem because newspapers have a very big obligation to present accurate information. Sometimes you can create a false impression by aligning a series of statements which may or may not have logical consequence from one to the other, and I think that there's been a lot of examples of that kind of reporting which has created false impressions. Unfortunately, the result of it is that a lot of people just don't trust what they read in the daily newspaper anymore. They don't know what is actually going on at City Hall but they don't think that necessarily what they're reading in the newspaper is what it is. And it's very much a disservice to the citizens of Ann Arbor. Now we do have the benefit of cable - community access television - which covers our council meetings. We have done surveys that show that a very large percentage of our cable audience does, at least once a month, tune in to a council meeting. Even if you're just flipping channels and you happen to catch a discussion, that helps people see for themselves what's going on around here and I am glad about that. But I want to emphasize that I am very hopeful that we can continue to help The Ann Arbor News get accurate information out to the readers. I believe in people's ability to change and improve and I hope that they will.

AGENDA: Many of the functions that the city performs - like trash collection and disposal, recycling, regulating development and growth, or water and sewer services - are areas where the city needs to act with concern for the environment. What kind of environmental issues or challenges have you faced in the past two years? BRATER: The biggest one probably was the Gelman clean-up issue. There was a proposal to pump and dump the polluted ground water out of the ground and through the city storm sewers and into the Huron River. I was vehemently opposed to that proposal for a number of environmental and public health reasons. I do feel that the proposal that we ended up with, with the help of David Stead serving as a mediator, was much better from the point of view of the environment - in terms of the level of dioxane that will be discharged into the Huron River. That issue isn't over because we now have to monitor that cleanup. So that will be an ongoing concern. We've been trying to get on with the cleanup of the contamination at the Ann Arbor landfill. We have presented a plan to the DNR and we have been pumping and treating groundwater out of the landfill area. The fact that our landfill closed is an environmental issue in itself. We've had to transport garbage to the BFI facility in Salem Township and that's why we want to build our Materials Recovery Facility (MRF), so we could reduce our waste stream as much as possible. Right now I'm talking with the EPA about possibly piloting a wet/dry composting sort experiment here in Ann Arbor. In this way we would recover even more of the waste stream than we can now through our composting program - putting in food waste and perhaps soiled papers. I've worked very closely with [Drain Commissioner] Janis Bobrin on other issues regarding Huron River sedimentation control . We hired an additional inspector in the building department to try to keep an eye on erosion, because one of the major problems with pollution in the Huron River is the sedimentation of runoff that occurs from construction projects. We've also been working to reduce the phosphorus discharge into the Huron River which is promoting algae growth. I'm currently getting involved with the Envotech situation and obviously that's an issue of major concern to people in Ann Arbor and all over Southeastern Michigan because it would be a facility that would be creating overcapacity in incineration and burying of toxic wastes. It would discharge dioxins, through the incinerator, into the atmosphere that would then end up not only causing air pollution, but also settle into the Great Lakes and create further pollution in the Great Lakes. We certainly want to do what we can to intervene in that situation. I'm very disappointed that Governor Engler has not signed an executive order, as he could, to prohibit this facility from opening.

AGENDA: So your position is clearly that you're against it? BRATER: I am totally opposed to that facility. We are already a state that's a net importer of toxic wastes. Clearly the numbers of the MCATS [Milan-based Michigan Citizens Against Toxic Substances] people have shown that this would create excess capacity. What we should be doing is reducing the amount of toxins that we are creating in our manufacturing process, not finding ways to make it easier to incinerate them. Because they don't go away, they just get converted into other poisons that then go off into the atmosphere and the water and the food chain.

AGENDA: You mentioned that since the Ann Arbor landfill closed, Ann Arbor has been taking its waste to the BFI landfill in Salem Township. In light of BFI's dismal record on the environment and price-fixing, why is the city taking its waste there? Is this the only option available to the city? BRATER: That landfill is the major landfill in Washtenaw County. Basically, we took bids from various landfills in the area and that was the lowest bid. What we're trying to do now is minimize the waste we do send there. By setting up a transfer station [the MRF] we'll be pulling out as much material as possible. But I do share your concerns about that because waste disposal has become a virtual monopoly among two or three major companies. There's not a lot of choice in the matter. Obviously our preference would have been to continue to operate our own landfill but that option was not possible because of the geology of our landfill site. I think the remedy for the situation is - and I've asked for this to be explored on the state level - is to have landfill and disposal companies regulated as a utility because there's all sorts of issues regarding price fixing and other things that need to be regulated by the state.

AGENDA: The issue of civil rights protection is a very important concern in this community. That certainly proved to be the case in Nov., 1991 when 500 people showed up at what was called "the biggest public hearing in a decade" in support of a domestic partnership ordinance. Since gay and lesbian couples cannot legally marry, the ordinance passed by Council allows gay and lesbian couples to register their relationship with the city clerk. Ann Arbor became the 19th city in the U.S. to take such a measure. Do you see Ann Arbor taking a leadership role in any other areas of civil rights protection, or have there been any other examples of that over the last two years? BRATER: We have sexual orientation defined as one of our classes of nondiscrimination. That's pretty much a pioneering thing in the state of Michigan. There aren't many communities that do that, unfortunately. I think that the city of Ann Arbor needs to continue to improve on a human relations front within our city workforce. We need to turn our attention first to what's happening in City Hall and make sure that we have sensitivity trainings. It's not enough to have a diverse workforce, you have to have a workforce where people respect each other and work alongside each other productively. At last night's council meeting we passed a resolution asking the city administrator, for example, to reinstitute the sensitivity training that had begun in the fire department. We did take steps to increase the diversity of the hiring pool in the fire department shortly after I became mayor by updating a written test that was being used. But change comes slowly and it's a lot easier to hire a diverse workforce than to help people learn to work together productively sometimes. So we all have to be patient and respectful of each other and try to, in a non-threatening way, go forward on improving that situation.

AGENDA: Have you, as a woman mayor, faced gender discrimination? BRATER: I think that some of the reaction to my leadership style has been gender-related. It's like on the one hand, there's something wrong if people are following my lead, one in my caucus agreeing with me was criticized at one point, which was never in any way thought to be unusual when there was a male mayor. It was only commented upon if there was disagreement. And now that there is some disagreement in the caucus, I think some of it is related to these accusations of the male members of the caucus lacking independence and that they now have to prove that they are independent. I think that is gender-related.

AGENDA: The average price for a home in the Ann Arbor area is $128,000. Average rents for two-bedroom apartments exceed $560 a month. More than 35% of the city's renters spend more than 30% of their gross income for housing. Ann Arbor is an expensive place to live. It's so expensive that many of the Ann Arbor's workers, the bank tellers, U-M clerks, fast-food workers, cannot afford to live in the town they work in. As the number of wealthier people who live in Ann Arbor continues to increase and the number of poor who live in Ann Arbor continues to decrease, at what point does the city government step in to stop this trend, to maintain diversity of residents in the community? BRATER: The city government needs to do whatever it can to maintain diversity in the community. But there are some limits on what city government can do about this, given the market forces, the value of property in the city. Obviously, in adopting the city housing policy, which I co-authored (actually before I was a council member), it was our effort to try to establish, as a goal of the city, diversity in housing options. We've been in a position of facing major federal retrenchment in the housing area where 70 percent of federal funding for housing disappeared during the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush administrations. Hopefully, that's going to start to turn around, but still, the money coming out of Washington is pretty meager for housing. So what we need to do on the local level is leverage this year's federal dollars that we have with other revenues sources. It's one of the reasons that I've been working to establish what I call the Ann Arbor Credit Enterprise, that would be an opportunity for banks to provide loan pools that would help us finance affordable housing projects. One thing we're very fortunate about at this juncture, is that we do have a couple of non-profit corporations, such as Avalon and Washtenaw Affordable Housing Corporation, which are in a ready position to build housing. Avalon is very actively going around, seeking out rehabilitation opportunities. The more funding available, the more they can do. So I'm optimistic that we're moving in the right direction. We've also got the Lutheran Social Services 202 Project which is going to provide 56 units of well-designed senior housing. And we're working with the county which has shown a lot of interest in working with us on some of these projects.

AGENDA: What can the city do to make it easier to site future low-income projects? BRATER: One of the reasons that public housing is sometimes not considered a good neighbor is that you have to go ahead with the lowest bid. The amount of money that HUD provides to build a public housing unit may not be enough to make it nicely landscaped and with nice architectural details. There's no reason why a unit of public housing can't be a good addition to a neighborhood. The Council of Mayors has a program called the Mayors' Institute for City Design, which Mayor Joe Reilly of Charleston, South Carolina founded. He has shown that you can build public housing such that you can walk down the street and not know that it's public housing. They have beautiful historic preservation in Charleston. He said that you don't have to build a building out of cinderblocks - you can build it on a frame, you can rehabilítate one of these nice structures and that can be our public housing. And he has shown that it can be done. I think it can be done here in Ann Arbor and that's why we set aside money to augment the money that we'll get from HUD. Then when we do site these units, we will be able to landscape, we will be able to provide extra storage space per house - all the amenities that are needed to make public housing a good neighbor.

AGENDA: Some of your critics in this area would say that finding funds for affordable housing is a matter of priorities. I would like you to respond to a statement local housing activist Larry Fox made in The Ann Arbor News last June. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, "The city is spending $4 million in 1992 to do sidewalk improvements between Huron and Miller- two blocks worth. My understanding is that $4 million would have renovated the Ann Arbor Inn for low-income housing. The Ann Arbor Inn can be acquired for zero dollars and renovation cost is all the cost that there is. In terms of doing something about the problem of homelessness, the city's priorities are wrong in terms of how it's spending its money." Is there a problem with city priorities? Is there money to use? BRATER: Well, first of all I'm not sure if those figures are correct - they don't sound right to me. Mr. Fox has a tendency to throw around numbers that often are not correct. And I would like to have these numbers verified before commenting on them. AGENDA: What about the question of priorities regardless of the numbers? BRATER: Well I think I've been talking about this for the last 20 minutes or so.

AGENDA: The reason I bring it up again is that you've been talking about the ability of the city to be able to have sites ready, plans ready, when that money becomes available, and that money comes from a variety of sources. One of the sources is the city. The question is, does the city spend enough money on affordable housing? BRATER: The source of the money for pedestrian improvements is the Downtown Development Authority (DDA), which is a separate fund from the city. It is not controlled by city council. The "DDA Plan" was established in 1982 and what that plan called for was to build five parking structures and to make a certain amount of pedestrian improvements. Those were the major objectives of that plan. I have tried to appoint people to the DDA that have the objective of directing some DDA funds into housing. I think that that's a legitimate use of DDA funds. But it's a long process - when I became mayor the DDA was dominated by people that were interested on spending the money on parking and pedestrian improvements - so it's taking some time to build up enough people on that board. We're beginning to get to the point where I'm optimistic that when a feasible proposal does come forward regarding the Ann Arbor Inn, that the DDA might want to be a partner in that proposal.

AGENDA: Without seeing any particular proposal, are you in favor of the Ann Arbor Inn being used for affordable housing? BRATER: Yes, I think that's a legitímate use for it. I think some kind of mixed use building is appropriate given its downtown location - the ground floor should remain public space and meeting rooms or retail perhaps. Maybe some reconfiguration of the parking needs to be done because the adjacent parking structure needs some major repair. But I think that downtown housing is a very legitimate goal.

AGENDA: When you won the election in 1991 you said that the Kline's lot parking structure was an important factor in your victory. You were quoted in the newspaper as saying, "some people based their decision to support me on that issue." Is it fair to say that the Homeless Action Committee (HAC) deserves credit for the Kline's lot parking structure having been an issue at all? BRATER: Definitely. AGENDA: It is also fair to point out to readers that you deserve the credit for that parking structure not being built. The council and HAC finally sat down to a meeting last February, ten months after your election. HAC was not happy with the limited format of the meeting as well as what they perceived as the council's lack of action on behalf of the homeless. Speaker after speaker subjected you and the council to what an Ann Arbor News reporter called "the harshest public criticism" of your time in office. Yet, at that time, you said the following about HAC: "I think it's really important that they've been out there. Anyone working so consistently and persistently to keep one issue in the public eye is doing very important work." As recently as Dec. 28, you were quoted in The News as saying that housing activists are "radicals." The full quote is, "It's very convenient for radical groups to focus on the city and rant and rave and make themselves feel good." Is HAC one of the groups you are referring to in that quote? Were you taken out of context? BRATER: First of all, I did not say that all housing activists are radicals. I was asked a leading question by an Ann Arbor News reporter to the effect that all the housing activists were criticizing my policies. What I said was I didn't feel that all the housing activists were criticizing my policies, but there were some people, and I did use the term "radical" because the technique of demonstrating - working outside of the mainstream - unfortunately, is sometimes the technique that some people think is productive. That's not my style. I think that if we're going to accomplish meaningful change that it needs to be done through the system. And that's why I'm working within the system. Now I still continue to think that the work of all the housing activists, including HAC, has been very valuable in keeping attention focused on this problem. But what needs to be realized is that there's a wide range of people working on housing issues. There's people from Avalon and Washtenaw Affordable Housing Corporation, the Shelter Association and the Tenants Union, the Southeastern Michigan Legal Services, S.O.S. Community Crisis Center and on and on and on and I have a very, very productive relationship with all of those groups. So it's really out of context to focus on one group's reactions because obviously what their purpose is, is to use theater. It's convenient when you've got a sitting mayor and council, to come before council every week and use us as a show and tell - which is fine, you know, but my feeling is it doesn't really move us forward. That's why I asked Larry Fox to serve on the Housing Policy Board. I thought he had some objectives, that it would be nice if he would work with the city. I've been a little disappointed in his continuing to misrepresent some of the programs that the city has, even though he has access to the information through his membership on that board. I don't think, at a certain point, that politicizing this issue is helpful. I think we do have some shared goals of creating more housing but there are certain constraints in the situation that have to be acknowledged.