Sustainable Ann Arbor Forums 2012: Community

Sat, 06/07/2008 - 2:47pm

When: April 12, 2012 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

This final in a series of four monthly discussions co-sponsored by the City of Ann Arbor focuses on Community and includes discussion on housing, economic development, public safety, recreation, outreach, civic engagement, and stewardship of community resources. The presentation will examine past successes and challenges, and feature a think tank of local stakeholders. The ensuing discussions will help guide the city's sustainability planning efforts.Panelists for this event include, from the City: Jennifer Hall, Executive Director, Ann Arbor Housing Commission; Wendy Rampson, Planning Manager; John Seto, Deputy Police Chief; and Cheryl Saam, Recreation Facilities Supervisor. The panel will also include Richard Norton, Chair of the Urban and Regional Planning Program; Cheryl Elliott, Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation; and Julie Grand, Chair of the Park Advisory Commission.Details of this series are posted online at www.a2gov.org/sustainability. For Ann Arbor's current environmental goals, check out the State of Our Environment Report at www.a2gov.org/soe.

Transcript

[00:00:25.95] TIM GRIMES: Hi. Good evening everybody, and welcome to the Ann Arbor District Library. My name is Tim Grimes. I manage community events and marketing here for the library.
[00:00:35.43] And thank you so much for coming out this evening. This is actually one of many events that we have here at the library. You can find out more about our events at aadl.org or check out one of these brochures just in the back.
[00:00:48.87] And we have a lot of events this month, especially because this particular week is National Library Week. And we've had a full week of activities. Everything from a concert by Peter Madcat Ruth to Saturday's robot wrestling for teens. So it's just fairly chock full of activities.
[00:01:05.90] But what a nice way to celebrate National Library Week, by having an event that concentrates on our community. This is one of a series that we've been holding with the city. It's the last of a series of four. Unfortunately, it is the last one.
[00:01:20.04] We've loved having the city here. We absolutely love it. In fact, our library director is right in the back. She wanted to make sure she came for tonight's event, Josie Parker.
[00:01:30.50] Again, it's been a wonderful series. Tonight we're concentrating on the community. And it's my great pleasure to introduce Wendy Rampson, planning manager for the City of Ann Arbor.
[00:01:45.86] WENDY RAMPSON: Thank you. It's so good to see you all. And I'm a little bit sad that this is the last of the four sessions.
[00:01:52.21] But be of good heart. Because it looks like, because of the success of these sessions, that we are looking maybe to make this an annual type of feature. So we would love your feedback if you think that that would be something a year from now that we could talk about the next iteration of our sustainability framework.
[00:02:11.77] So begin it all with thank yous. Especially for all of you. I know a number of you have come to all four of these sessions, and thank you especially. But for those of you who are new this evening, we hope you take away something of your knowledge and able to have a better understanding of the community.
[00:02:32.30] We'd really like to thank the Ann Arbor District Library. Tim, Josie, others who have been very, very supportive, have done all of the hard work for us, the marketing. We really just need to show up with our ideas and speak to you here. The Home Depot Foundation is a grant funder for the sustainability framework effort that we are working on, so we're very appreciative to them for funding this work.
[00:02:57.74] Jamie, where are you? Jamie Kidwell, our brain for the project, is right here. Project manager.
[00:03:03.93] And Matt Naud. Where's Matt? Oh, right behind. Sorry, Matt. [LAUGHS] Jamie and Matt have been very instrumental in this whole process, moving forward the sustainability framework.
[00:03:15.06] And then last but not least, we have our presenters. Not just tonight, but the three previous sessions, with good representation from the University-- particularly the College of Architecture and Urban Planning-- the Washtenaw County, our nonprofit communities within the city, and others. U of M staff have been involved too.
[00:03:41.32] So tonight we're going to focus on community. A very broad, fairly nebulous area. But to help us understand that in the context of sustainability, we have Dick Norton, who is the chair of the Urban and Regional Planning Program at U of M. He's going to start off and give us a bit of an academic framework for thinking about this.
[00:04:00.48] Cheryl Elliott is here from the Ann Arbor Community Foundation. Jennifer Hall from the Ann Arbor Housing Commission. John Seto, who's our new interim police chief is here.
[00:04:13.69] Cheryl Saam and Julie Grand are doing a team effort for park staff and the Parks Commission. And at the end, we'll give you the opportunity to ask your questions of the panel and they'll come up to the front.
[00:04:28.81] So I think it was a week or so ago, we had a public meeting on our sustainability framework and someone asked right away, how are we defining sustainability? And we had this pregnant pause, because this is a challenge that we've all dealt with over the last year that we've been working on this project.
[00:04:48.25] And I think the response that we came up with is that we chose not to have a single definition of sustainability. What we did is we chose to describe the components of sustainability, because that seems to resonate with people. These are the things that go into sustainability and a sustainable community.
[00:05:07.41] And those are things like people and place and potential. Some use the three E's, the economy, the environment, and equity. But we use people, place, and potential.
[00:05:18.42] And in the four forums that we've had, the themes that we focused on are resource management as a component. And that is goals in this area would aim to protect and conserve the quality of Ann Arbor's natural resources and the environment.
[00:05:37.37] In climate and energy, we have goals that we're working towards that would target reducing greenhouse gas emissions, seek more sustainable uses of energy, and lower energy consumption community wide. So that gives you a sense of what that means in the context of climate and energy.
[00:05:54.74] In land use and access, the areas that we focused on are using land use and transportation and infrastructure systems to deal with the built environment. And how the community lives and uses its environment in the form of built environment.
[00:06:13.01] And then tonight we come to community. And community is where Ann Arbor commits to providing a high quality of life. So this is where really it makes a difference between having all the nuts and bolts of these other three, and having that intangible quality of life piece that empowers community members to foster and steward improvements to our community and to our environment to provide access to basic needs and services. So you'll hear tonight as each of the speakers take their piece of this-- of sustainability-- and explains how it fits into the larger whole.
[00:06:50.38] Very briefly, because I know some of you have seen this, now would be the fourth time, the process, the how that we got to these sustainability goals is we started looking at all of the city's master plans, or plans for certain subject areas. This is just an illustrative way of showing these are the many pieces of plans that we mined for those overarching goals for sustainability.
[00:07:17.27] Then Jamie and others very painstakingly went through each of those plans and they pulled out the goal statements. And some of these plans span 20 years of time. And so pulled those together to start seeing what words, what themes came forward. How do they fit within our concept today of a sustainable community of people, place and potential?
[00:07:43.09] And then after staff dug and mined that and pulled that together, they took it out to the city commissions and boards that have a lot to say about these things and the interaction with the community. So Energy Commission, Environmental Commission, Housing Commission, the Housing and Human Services Board is a relatively new addition to this discussion, Park Advisory and Planning all had a look at these and a chance to weigh in.
[00:08:12.35] So tonight we have these goals up for consideration. An engaged community. In a sustainable community, we ensure our community is strongly connected through outreach, opportunities for engagement and stewardship of community resources. And just so you know, that picture is of a previous forum.
[00:08:34.50] Diverse housing. We provide high quality, safe, efficient, and affordable housing choices to meet the current and future needs of our community, particularly for homeless and low income households. And Jennifer will talk some more about that this evening.
[00:08:50.71] A safe community. We want to minimize risk to public health and property from manmade and natural hazards.
[00:08:58.73] We do active living and learning by improving the quality of life, by providing diverse cultural, recreational, and educational opportunities for all members of our community. We want to develop a prosperous, resilient local economy that provides opportunity by creating jobs, by retaining and attracting talent, supporting a diversity of businesses across all sectors, and rewarding investment in our community.
[00:09:28.88] So that is a pretty big call to move forward with these goals. But the speakers tonight will all speak about their particular aspect of this, and how we as a community can aspire to those goals.
[00:09:44.34] So we will have this information for contact at the back, I believe. We also have comment cards if you have comments from this evening that you'd like to pass on. So I will move forward right now and introduce Dick Norton.
[00:09:58.87] RICHARD NORTON: OK, I was asked to give just a few overview comments to frame the topic of community development and sustainability. So like a good academic, a planner and a lawyer, I'm going to first start by thinking about the words community and development and sustainability.
[00:10:17.22] What do they mean? What images do they bring to mind? Then I'll talk a little bit about the institutions that we use to try to advance some notion of sustainable community development or community development for sustainability or whatever it is we're trying to do, some topics that typically come up as we address those things, and then the challenges that we face in trying to move forward in a sense.
[00:10:38.19] So let's start with terminology. Community. What is community? What community is not.
[00:10:45.12] Community is not I am an island unto myself. Community is not anarchy. Community is not dystopia.
[00:10:53.69] Community is not even utopia. A lot of planners like to talk about creating the utopian society. I think I disagree with that. I maybe get into some trouble with my colleagues, but I think that's kind of a fool's errand.
[00:11:06.66] I do think though that community brings to mind images of the common, the things that we share, of the social aspect of our natures, of a notion of inclusiveness, a notion of community, of a sense of identity or belonging. Are those all terms that you think of? What do you think of when you think about community?
[00:11:27.33] I'm guessing all of you came tonight to talk about community development and sustainability without having stopped to think, what are we really talking about? What does community mean to me?
[00:11:35.95] I hope those are concepts. They all play out in our historical setting, in our physical setting, in our cultural setting. So it's the common, it's the inclusiveness, it's our identity.
[00:11:47.98] With me so far? Strong disagreement? Yes? No? Am I in line here?
[00:11:52.91] How about development? What does development mean? Not decline, not stasis. It doesn't even mean growth, per se.
[00:12:02.25] There's a lot of rhetoric and terminology today. It's all about growing. I had a local official tell me once, if you ain't growing, you're dying. I'm not sure I would go that far.
[00:12:11.24] But development does imply, I think, some kind of qualitative improvement over time in the things about community that we value. So it's a bit amorphous. It's maybe not easily captured by numbers.
[00:12:26.85] But it's a sense of improving the human condition, improving our flourishing, improving qualitatively the quality of life Wendy mentioned in a sustainable way over time. So community development or developing a community is expanding our notion of community.
[00:12:47.18] Sustainability. There's a good reason for not trying to define sustainability, because it's hard to define. And it's used by a lot of different people in different ways. I'm going to break it apart a little bit.
[00:12:57.61] I think we want to be focusing on sustainability and social justice and happiness. And let me explain that a little bit. At its basis, sustainability is the idea of perpetuating a community or society. If we sustain it, we keep it going in some meaningful sense over time, keep it stable.
[00:13:17.73] I think we also want to have just communities. Just in the sense of fairness.
[00:13:22.54] We want our government to treat us fairly. We want each other to treat us fairly. We especially want folks who have power to treat those who don't have power in a way that's fair.
[00:13:31.38] Some folks include that notion within the concepts of sustainability. I like to tease it apart, because they're not necessarily coterminous. You can do things for sustainability that aren't especially just, and vice versa.
[00:13:42.68] And then the final thing is happiness. We also want to develop communities that we love, that are desirable places to be, to live and work and play.
[00:13:53.00] And so part of the trick as we think about sustaining communities, or developing communities so they're sustainable, is to figure out how to do all of these things simultaneously. How to improve our common experiences, our inclusiveness, our socialness, our identity in a way that is sustainable and that is just and that leads us to be happy in a sense of happiness.
[00:14:14.04] And by happiness, I don't mean the trivial smiley face. We've kind of trivialized don't worry, be happy with the smiley face and everybody smiling.
[00:14:21.96] I mean happy in more the classical sense. We're part of a community, were engaged. It's a notion of human development. So those are some ways to think about those terms.
[00:14:32.06] What are the institutions that we use to get there? We'll probably talk mostly tonight about government, and to some extent about markets. And those are the institutions a lot of folks think about, especially in this political season.
[00:14:45.76] The big battle is what's the role between private markets and governments? But there are other important institutions as well. There are non-profits, non-governmental organizations that have a huge impact on the way we approach community and the way we experience community.
[00:15:01.05] And there are also religious institutions. Our churches and our temples can play an important role.
[00:15:06.33] The point I want to make here is that there are multiple institutions that go into making up a community. And they each have a role to play and they each interact with one another, which leads to some of the complexity that I'll talk about in a minute.
[00:15:19.74] So keep in mind it's not just the City Planning Department that determines what community is. It's also the housing, Avalon Housing, and all of the other institutions we have in place that feed into our notion of community.
[00:15:34.63] So what are the topics that we typically address to get at community development? Wendy's already laid out a lot of them. Citizen participation. How can you engage in community if you don't actually engage the community? You need to have the community engaged.
[00:15:49.44] We often talk about housing, especially fair and affordable housing for the folks who are less able to provide for themselves. We talk a lot about jobs. Usually that's in the context of economy.
[00:16:01.19] We typically today talk about economic growth. The economy is really an institution, it's a mechanism to get at what we're trying to get at, which is employment, jobs, livelihoods, things along those lines. So those concerns.
[00:16:13.49] Public safety is a big part of community. Both in the sense of police safety, but also hazards. If you believe in global climate change and the increased storminess that that's going to bring, then we have to start worrying about safety from flooding events. Those kinds of things are important for communities.
[00:16:31.15] Landscapes and the environment are an important part of community. Quite often, planners break them apart. They have community development and they have environmental protection. We need to figure out how to reconnect the environment into the city, and through community development.
[00:16:47.72] Amenities and services. A lot of what the city does is worry about the services that it provides and the amenities it creates.
[00:16:53.78] Historic preservation. A big part of community is our sense of where we've come from, what's important to us culturally and historically.
[00:17:02.32] Connectivity. One of the sessions was all about transportation. That's an important part of community.
[00:17:07.55] How do you get around? How accessible are things to people? How can they interact with one another?
[00:17:13.14] Redevelopment. Especially in communities that are older, some parts of which might be flagging a bit and we want to redevelop them set against concerns about gentrification, where maybe we're redeveloping in ways that are leaving the less provided for out in the street, so to speak.
[00:17:33.03] And then issues like race and class and social inclusiveness are all important parts of community. Who's the community we're talking about? How inclusive are we as we talk about the range of people that we want to include in our notion of community? So those are the topics that quite often come up as planners and others struggle with the idea of promoting community development.
[00:17:56.42] I have five big challenges for how we promote community development. The first is we're individuals. Every one of us. But we're also social creatures. And we exist in that ongoing tension.
[00:18:11.43] By gum, I want to do what I want to do and I don't want anybody telling me what to do! Until my neighbor does something they want to do and it's bothering me. And then I want them to do what I want them to do!
[00:18:21.31] And then we need to come together as a community. We're always in this kind of tension. You public officials, is this ringing bells?
[00:18:28.37] And that's just human nature. That's the dynamic that we have to live with. We're individuals but we're also members of the community.
[00:18:35.26] And added to that, we're a community of individuals who experience variation in terms of our abilities and our ambitions and our circumstances. So we're not all the same. We all behave differently. We all have different concerns. We all have different abilities.
[00:18:51.73] So somehow, we have to figure out how to make communities work, given that variation in what people are interested in and what they're looking for and what their capacities are. That's the second challenge, our variation in us. And then therefore, the variation in our situations.
[00:19:07.70] Some of us do very well in societies. Some of us don't do so well. Sometimes it's because we don't have the ambition to do well. Sometimes it's through no fault of our own. So there's a lot of variation there to have to struggle with in terms of figuring out our society.
[00:19:21.44] All of that leads to the third big challenge, which is a huge plurality of viewpoints and values. So not only do we come from different situations, we all have very different viewpoints about what's important and what's not important and what's valuable to us and what should be valuable to the community.
[00:19:37.87] And we tend to want everybody else to see the way that we see things. But we can't, because we're all different. There's a great plurality in how we approach problems.
[00:19:46.49] There's even different preferences for how much we want things to be planned versus how much we want them to just unfold organically. And that speaks then to how much role we want government to have in shaping all of these things. So that plurality of viewpoints and values is a real challenge for coming together.
[00:20:05.96] The fourth challenge is just plain old uncertainty and randomness. Life is a complex system.
[00:20:12.50] Human societies are complex. There's a lot of randomness, a lot of uncertainty. It makes planning especially difficult, 'cause you just don't know how things are going to play out. The best laid plans can change pretty quickly as situations change.
[00:20:25.48] And then the fifth challenge is even if we start to understand what's going on, huge measurement problems and lots of arguments over how do we measure what's happening? And what are the measures that we hone in on to use to make arguments about how we ought to proceed?
[00:20:38.30] So I hope that wasn't too academic of an overview. I think the point I want to make is community is important to us. It's vital to us.
[00:20:49.39] In the American ethos, we tend to have this kind of cowboy mentality. It's all about me and it's all about I'm going to pull myself up by my bootstraps and make it on my own. And that is just so untrue.
[00:21:02.50] We are so much part of the community. We depend on our community to provide the support we need to thrive. If we've thrived, it's certainly been because we've had a lot of community support.
[00:21:12.32] There's a lot of room to discuss here then how do we make communities thrive for everyone in a fair and a sustainable and just way? And in the context of sustainability, how do we move forward? And so maybe then this will just get you thinking and see if this fits into the comments that the other presenters will make and see if I made any sense after all of that.
[00:21:35.43] Thank you. I hope I'm on time.
[00:21:41.34] WENDY RAMPSON: So it really does, compared to the other topics when we're talking about geothermal energy or some other things, the messiness of human behavior enters in. But that's what makes it so exciting. So Cheryl, would you like to come up and give us a sense of how the Ann Arbor Community Foundation is a part of all of this?
[00:22:01.53] CHERYL ELLIOTT: Sure. I love following academics. OK.
[00:22:08.97] Well, it's very nice to be here tonight. I appreciate being included. I love talking about community.
[00:22:15.35] Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation has been in this community almost 50 years. How many of you have ever heard of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation? Ooh, that is above the norm. That's great. And I'm not here to talk about the Community Foundation, but want to give you a little context.
[00:22:33.68] The mission of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation is to improve the quality of life in the community that we serve, which is Washtenaw County and Plymouth. And we do that through working with donors to build a permanent endowment, which is all about sustainability.
[00:22:48.53] Our tag line is "For good. For ever." So we are here to play an important role in this community, today and tomorrow.
[00:22:55.06] We have a very broad, flexible purpose. Our tentacles are really everywhere in the community.
[00:22:59.75] We fund arts and culture and historical preservation. We fund economic development. We fund health and human services, education, the environment, young people, old people. So we interact with community in many, many ways.
[00:23:16.67] Our partners-- and partnerships is very important when you're talking about sustainability and building community. So we partner with donors. That can be individuals or families, businesses.
[00:23:25.99] We partner with the University. We partner increasingly so with the public sector. We partner with other funders.
[00:23:34.01] And we are here to help people who love this community and want to make a meaningful difference, not only for today but for tomorrow. So we have scholarship funds. We have funds for all the different areas that I've talked about that we support through our grant making. And it's a wonderful opportunity to work for people who want to give back, which is very important to sustaining communities.
[00:23:59.92] We have about $60 million in assets. We awarded $2.6 million in grants last year. We manage over 425 different funds, all set up to help sustain the Ann Arbor area.
[00:24:13.77] For tonight one thing I wanted to focus on was quality of place. As I looked at what other folks were going to be talking about, and something the Community Foundation is extremely interested in getting more involved in, is about place and the economics of place.
[00:24:30.42] And I know the mayor has had, I think, everybody in City Hall read The Economics of Place: The Value of Building Communities Around People. So I'll be taking a few of my remarks tonight from this book that was put out by the Michigan Municipal League.
[00:24:43.35] So if you're talking about place as a concept, it plays a vitally important role in shaping our economic future. So when I came to Michigan in 1969 as a freshman, I think you could have shot a cannon down Main Street, not killed many people on a Friday night, on a Saturday. It's very different today.
[00:25:03.23] And that didn't just happen. Building that, that took cooperation, collaboration among a lot of people, not just the City of Ann Arbor. In order to sustain what we have here and to build on that quality of life, that quality of place, we need to, in a knowledge based economy, have this wonderful community to attract and retain talented people that we need. Increasingly so in a knowledge based economy.
[00:25:33.15] So how do we do that? So how do we build a place that people want to live, work, play learn and live?
[00:25:43.21] So there's someone on our board who works for IBM. Could live anywhere in the country because of technology, chose to come here to Ann Arbor to live. Now certainly there were some connections through his wife and family, but could have lived anywhere. And one of the reasons, he often says, is because of the quality of place.
[00:26:01.63] I don't think we really used to think about place so much in terms of economic development. But today you cannot have an economic policy without having a place making policy. It's no longer just about being safe and is it a functional community? But is it a place that inspires people, that encourages creativity and innovation? That is increasingly important in the economy that we all live in today.
[00:26:31.62] Specifically, the dimensions of quality of place fall across these eight dimensions. Part of what you touched on. And what I would like to focus on a little bit that I don't think the other speakers will be talking about is cultural economic development.
[00:26:50.78] Certainly, quality of place depends on all of these interacting with each other. None of this can be done in a vacuum. And also I know this is about Ann Arbor, but in order to really achieve quality of place, we need to look broader than just our own city limits. And I think that's a challenge for all of us, to think more regionally and also how we collaborate with others to achieve these eight dimensions of quality of place.
[00:27:22.38] Looking at cultural economic development, what are we talking about when we're talking about cultural economic development? We're talking about arts and culture as an essential component of a knowledge based economy. We're talking about a healthy creative sector that attracts and retains residents and businesses. Pfizer, when they were here, many times talked about the fact that one of the reasons they located here was because of our very diverse cultural environment.
[00:27:52.33] A strong cultural and economic plan helps create jobs, a stronger tax base. It can help with downtown and neighborhood revitalization and tourism. Every public dollar that's invested in the arts and cultural area brings a $51 return on investment. That's critically important.
[00:28:17.64] And we know that because of place, because of the quality of our community, we're making lots of top 10 charts in a variety of ways. And many of times, it's among the best places to live. Whether it's for women, whether it's for retirees, whether it's for raising a family. And again, a lot of that has to do with place.
[00:28:37.40] And a lot of that has to do with cultural and arts in our community. So whether it's the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, whether it's UMS, whether it's Festival's Parade I'm sure some of you went to, whether it's the art fair, all of that has to do with one of the things that makes this community really, really special and why people want to live here and the importance of sustaining that. It just doesn't happen.
[00:29:04.73] The nonprofits can't do it alone. They need partnerships from their donors. They need partnerships with the University. They need partnerships with the public sector.
[00:29:14.10] One thing that I don't think that's getting touched on tonight, and just want to make a comment on-- 'cause I think Mary Jo Callan was supposed to be here from the Office of Community and Economic Development-- we have a very creative and entrepreneurial nonprofit community. And one example of that is in the health and human service area, where the Office of Community and Economic Development-- which is a city, county, and urban funding sources-- the United Way of Washtenaw County, and the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation are collaborating in our funding. We're making our funding decisions about the health and human services sector area together. There is no community in the country that is doing that.
[00:29:53.07] And so we're looking at sustainability, we're looking at some of our neediest citizens in a time of great need and increasingly rare and harder to seek resources. So I wanted to just touch on that. And I know later we're going to hear a little bit more about housing.
[00:30:10.27] So that is it for me for right now. I look forward to questions from you. And also just wanted to point out there is some information about the Community Foundation on the table outside. So thank you very much.
[00:30:21.54] [APPLAUSE]
[00:30:27.75] WENDY RAMPSON: So we move from economics to safety. So John, do you want to speak about sustainability and safety?
[00:30:38.94] JOHN SETO: Well, thank you and good evening. It's great to be here. When I was first asked to speak about public safety or the police department's sustainability, I had a little bit of a pause to see what I was talking about. But as I thought about it some more, my problem was really trying to condense it within the five minutes.
[00:30:52.58] So I'm going to try to give an overview and give some slides. And hopefully it will generate some thought and some conversation at the end, 'cause that's what we're hoping to get out of this.
[00:30:59.75] So we'll jump right into this. Sustainability and the Ann Arbor Police Department. What does that look like for public safety? A vibrant downtown and safe neighborhoods. Disaster preparedness.
[00:31:13.05] And to sum it up, I think sustainability is partnership with the community. We see this theme going about, and it's no difference for public safety. So it's a partnership with the community.
[00:31:22.29] And how do we do that? How do we make it convenient for the community to interact with the police? Well, this is one way, the presentations. I was just at a committee meeting yesterday.
[00:31:30.48] So these are the kind of things that we like to do. So it's community involvement.
[00:31:34.24] One way you can all get involved is Neighborhood Watch. I hope some of you out there are a part of Neighborhood Watch. Currently there are over 300 Neighborhood Watch block captains.
[00:31:44.11] And how does that work? We have a police Neighborhood Watch coordinator that disseminates the information and crime alerts. So that's one way of getting information out to the neighborhoods. We want to partner with community, 'cause you're our eyes and ears.
[00:31:57.03] What's another way here? Crime Stoppers. Everybody heard of Crime Stoppers?
[00:32:01.32] It's very, very popular out in the Detroit area. You see in the news stations. Here's the phone number.
[00:32:08.44] And the police department is partnering with Crime Stoppers of Michigan. And in fact, the coordinator for Washtenaw County is housed at our police station. So we have a great interaction with them.
[00:32:17.69] And just in case you do have a tip out there, I will put out there they do have cash rewards out there. But once again, it's the whole theme about community relationship and partners.
[00:32:28.37] The next theme of how we interact with the community is how do we make us more approachable? I am a people person. When I make a call, I hope to get a person. When I go somewhere, I hope to speak to a person. But there is another segment of society that likes to deal with convenience in other ways.
[00:32:44.40] So there are some things that you may not be aware of. We have a police e-desk kiosk that's right in front lobby of the Justice Center. If you've been up there, you may see it up there. It's just been active lately.
[00:32:55.08] And I'm just going to scroll through these, but these are some of the things that you can do on there. Make police report, freedom of information, traffic crashes, complaint or compliment-- I hope it's the latter-- about a police officer, satisfaction survey, make payments online-- 'cause if you've been to the front desk, sometimes it does get backed up depending on the time of day especially on a football Saturday or something-- get other types of applications. And the list goes on.
[00:33:20.01] So if you go up there and you want to visit, it's much like an airport kiosk that gets your automated ticketing. So it's something that we would like to have people utilize. This is just the screen that you'll see if you get on there.
[00:33:32.45] Another way, online police reporting. I'm not sure if anybody's familiar with it. We also kicked this off so that it's more convenient for people to make police reports.
[00:33:39.40] One of the things that we have found that there are many types of police reports that do not necessarily need the police follow up. And those are types that you do merely for filing purposes or for insurance purposes.
[00:33:51.49] So some of the types of things that you can do, first of all, you get on it from the Ann Arbor Police home page. There's a link right to it. All of these, you'll find a common theme. They do not involve suspects or any follow up.
[00:34:04.59] So what will happen is you file a police report online, a police officer or a civilian will review the report, and if there's anything that we need a police follow up, it will get assigned to somebody and they'll re-contact you. It's just another way to make it convenient for the people to interact with the police department.
[00:34:23.09] Another interesting for information sharing and dissemination of information is crimemapping.com. Has anybody seen this before? Very few. There's a few people here.
[00:34:33.75] It's a very interesting feature. crimemapping.com, if you go on there, it looks a little busy right now because it's capturing for a time frame of it looks like about six days there of all the crime that's been reported to our system. And it's automatically uploaded into the crimemapping.com.
[00:34:46.09] But on the top, you'll see the thing. Right now, it's highlighted by agency. But you can also go there for crime type. So you can specifically get on there and talk about specific types of crimes. You can even get on there for a specific address, and it could just narrow down the focus of your neighborhood.
[00:35:02.01] We also have Office of Emergency Management. Disaster preparedness, such as what we experienced during the storm.
[00:35:10.02] C.E.R.T, Community Emergency Response Team. It's a community resource of trained volunteers that helps us deal with disasters.
[00:35:17.01] It is county wide. It's coordinated by our emergency manager. And there's currently 25 to 30 members. So it's something that we can all get involved in.
[00:35:26.46] Code Red. Anybody know about Code Red? You can sign up for Code Red notifications. Automated phone notification system. Has the ability to handle 1,500 calls a minute.
[00:35:35.85] If you sign up for that, we can also narrow the scope. We've used it many times for different types of situations. From a police related incident, it's about ongoing police incidents. If we have a critical incident, might tell you to stay inside. We can also put it out for missing people, and you can sign up on the city web page.
[00:35:58.37] Regional collaboration. We've talked about this about a little bit of regional collaboration. Sustainability also means collaboration of resources. In policing that's no different. We have to be smart about how we collaborate to do that.
[00:36:10.11] So what we do in policing, there's collaboration in both specialized units and everyday operations. We have combined our SWAT teams. We have combined our negotiating team. And we also have everyday operations where we use mutual aid to get the resources of other communities to be involved. And we have information sharing that's county wide in the dissemination of information.
[00:36:31.71] So I am going to close, because I am being signaled here. And I think the timing was good.
[00:36:36.25] So how would you like to see the Ann Arbor Police Department continue its partnership with the community for sustainability? That's the type of question I hope that we'll get some thought behind that to ask questions later, or even afterwards on a one-to-one conversation with me. So thank you.
[00:36:50.46] [APPLAUSE]
[00:36:57.14] WENDY RAMPSON: I think it was great when we did our prep work as a team about the presentations and I think John was like, how do I fit in this? And exactly how you did in terms of the things that you talked about. Happiness in a community, justice, these are things that are really important.
[00:37:15.86] Sometimes we take for granted until there are budget cuts proposed, I suppose. But it is really an essential piece of our community.
[00:37:23.34] Next up, Jennifer Hall is going to speak about housing and being able to have housing available for all parts of our community. Come up.
[00:37:38.59] JENNIFER HALL: Good evening. I greatly appreciate our opening speaker's remarks, because whenever I talk to a group of people about community, I never know how people feel about people who are more socioeconomically disadvantaged. And when you have a lot of rah-rah about the community, a lot of times we forget about the people who aren't as successful in the community and need our help.
[00:38:01.69] I also appreciate John. The Ann Arbor Police Department is a great partner for the Housing Commission. And thank you, Cheryl. You've been a great partner for us as well.
[00:38:10.79] I'm going to start out by talking about sustainability in housing, which could be a four hour long conversation. But we'll start with, what is affordable housing? It can be rental housing or it could be owner housing. It's not necessarily just a shelter.
[00:38:27.14] The general definition that we use in our area is if you're paying more than 30% of your income on your housing costs-- of your gross income-- then you are paying too much. And it's especially harder for people who are renters or people who are at the lowest income, because you don't have as much disposable income. After you take that 30% of your income, you still have to buy food, you have to take care of your kids, you have to deal with transportation.
[00:38:54.71] This includes all. It's not just your housing, it's utilities, taxes, insurance, et cetera. Otherwise, you're considered cost burdened.
[00:39:04.25] Quickly, this is a chart for our county. The real number is the blue number, $87,400. The red numbers are the ones in our community that is generally the high end of low income housing programs. That's usually the high end. But the vast majority of people served in the housing community or in human services are at the very bottom end, at the extremely low or people making $10,000 or $15,000 a year.
[00:39:33.02] There's a whole continuum of housing starting with having no housing. You could be next going into a shelter. Then you could be going into transitional housing where you have a lot of intensive services. And if you go down the list and down to the bottom, all these are considered affordable housing. But there are various levels of services that people might need or assistance they may need while they're living there, all the way down to you may be out in the market without any assistance, but you just happen to be in an affordable housing unit.
[00:40:07.32] This is just a little statistic on Ann Arbor. It is much more affordable now than I bet if I pulled this chart up 10 years ago. We are ranked last year 87th out of 209 metro areas in expensive housing, which is right in the middle of the high end middle.
[00:40:26.02] But you can see that in 2009 for home ownership, we're ranked 132nd. So we're getting less affordable on the owner side, which makes me happy as a homeowner, but makes me unhappy as somebody who's trying to provide affordable housing. On the other side, we're getting more affordable on the rental area, which is a good benefit for the people that we're trying to serve on the rental end.
[00:40:50.96] So in an ideal world, every household lives in a unit that they can afford. So if 30% of your gross income means you can only spend $200 on your rent, then wouldn't it be great if there was a unit for you at $200? But that is not the case.
[00:41:08.60] I won't go into detail on this, 'cause it's complicated. But you can see if you look all at the very end people making $100,000, maybe 30% of their income means they should be spending $2,000 a month on their rent. But they can live in a household that's $200 or $300. They can choose to live in those kind of units.
[00:41:28.88] But when they do choose to do that, that means somebody else who needs that unit can't afford to live there. So if you just look at your community, at all the different rental prices, it doesn't mean that everybody can find a rental unit that they can afford.
[00:41:44.71] This is a quick chart on the increase in homelessness in the community between 2004 and 2010 in all kinds of areas. People with families, a big increase in homelessness. Mental illness, unemployed, all kinds of areas.
[00:42:02.37] This is an example of at the Housing Commission, the incomes of the people who are currently on our waiting list. So we can see the vast majority, like I said, are in the very lowest incomes. Although up to 80% could actually move into our households.
[00:42:18.54] The thing I want to focus on is fair and equitable housing. This is a map of poverty. If I were to expand this map to the whole county, the vast majority of the county would actually be the yellow, which is the least amount of, quote, poverty. And the darker you get down to green is the areas that have the highest number of people by census that are considered at the poverty level.
[00:42:46.06] And when I look at this map, I'm like well, this is very strange because the downtown, if you look at Ann Arbor and you look at that purple area, what area is that? It's the U of M campus.
[00:42:58.42] And so when you have students that are saying what their income is and their income is $1,000 a year or $500, it looks like we have a very high poverty rate in Ann Arbor. Which is actually a good benefit for HUD, because HUD actually gives Ann Arbor more money based on its high poverty level than it would have otherwise gotten.
[00:43:19.90] But it doesn't reflect what's really in the community and where the low income households really live. And when I think of the housing and the Ann Arbor Housing Commission, I came from a community development background. And you can't just think about the city of Ann Arbor, you really have to look at the rest of the community.
[00:43:36.47] And so if you look at a different map, which is who is on public assistance, you can see this map is very different. It actually shows that a vast majority of people on public assistance are actually in Ypsi City, Ypsi Township, not as much in the City of Ann Arbor.
[00:43:54.49] And one thing about housing is we like to focus on urbanized areas because of transportation costs. And when you look at both your housing and transportation, the public transit is really in the urbanized areas.
[00:44:08.92] And there's a new movement toward looking at is it just 30% of your income? But also people tend to move farther and farther away, thinking they're going to get more and more affordable housing. And then you have to add on your transportation costs. And if you really add those together, it isn't always necessarily not only a cost savings, but a time savings.
[00:44:27.87] I believe this is my last slide. Oh, and I just wanted to-- this is my last slide-- it's to show that even though the need is increasing in the community, HUD is the main funder on a national level for affordable housing. And its budget when it started was twice as much as it is today, and that's not even considering inflation.
[00:44:47.88] So it is not a good time on the federal level for support for affordable housing. Thank you.
[00:44:56.58] [APPLAUSE]
[00:45:02.04] WENDY RAMPSON: I think Jennifer did a pretty good job covering a very dense topic. So I hope you have questions for that.
[00:45:08.55] I would also mention that in addition to the H plus T, the housing plus transportation, the H plus T plus E is another component now, which is energy. And so that fits in with some of the discussions that we've had about the increasing cost of different types of fuels.
[00:45:24.90] Next up, we have Cheryl Saam and Julie Grand. And they are going to be speaking about-- I'll let you take it from here. But they felt that their efforts could be best combined.
[00:45:38.97] JULIE GRAND: And we get 10 minutes that way.
[00:45:41.60] WENDY RAMPSON: That's really their motivation.
[00:45:44.74] JULIE GRAND: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm Julie Grand. I'm chair of the Park Advisory Commission. I'm with Cheryl Saam, who's the fabulous facilities supervisor for our Canoe Liveries here in Ann Arbor.
[00:45:56.88] And we're going to be talking about meeting the goals of a sustainable community. And Cheryl and I thought that we really could have been here for any of these forums, because parks encompass all of the goals. Not just of a sustainable community, but of land use and climate and energy and all of them.
[00:46:13.53] But today we're talking about community. So Cheryl's going to talk about what sustainability means for the park system, give an overview. I'm going to talk about some of the goals. Cheryl will also discuss one about how we feel the park system is meeting the goals of a sustainable community. And I apologize if I have some of the older goals up there.
[00:46:34.61] We're going to give you three specific examples to give a little more detail about some of our park projects and how they meet some of these sustainability goals. And then just look at future directions from a park advisory perspective.
[00:46:51.68] CHERYL SAAM: Good. So the Ann Arbor Parks & Recreation has facilities from playgrounds to expansive green spaces. And how we care for our park spaces and the recreation opportunities we provide impact the quality of life of our citizens.
[00:47:06.79] So our properties include so many different, diverse uses such as turf acres and buildings and ball diamonds and tennis courts and soccer fields and playgrounds and swimming pools and golf courses and ice rinks and hiking trails. Really a lot of different uses. And then we have 72% of the land is open space, which includes woodlands and green spaces and wetlands and of course, the Huron River.
[00:47:40.00] JULIE GRAND: So the first of the five goals of community is an engaged community. And one of the ways that we engage with our community is in our neighborhood parks.
[00:47:51.00] So how many of you define your neighborhood based on a park that's close to you? We are a really engaged community with our parks. And parks provide an opportunity for engagement with your family, with your friends, with your neighbors, and help us just within that neighborhood park.
[00:48:10.63] We also have the senior center. We have two community centers that provide opportunities for engagement. And perhaps most importantly, we have many volunteer opportunities. Here's a picture of one, our new Give 365 program for facilities.
[00:48:25.08] But we also have volunteer opportunities through our natural area preservation, through Adopt-A-Park. And the thousands of volunteer hours obviously benefit our parks. But what we feel is most important, the equal or greater benefit of those volunteer opportunities, is providing a place where people can really become stewards of their parks, where they can feel connected to their community and an opportunity to give back in a way that's meaningful for them to create that personal connection to the park system and then to their greater community.
[00:48:58.72] Believe it or not, parks also do contribute to diversity in housing. Maybe not obviously in some other means. But we do have some partnerships with community development. A recent one was an expansion of the Bryant Community Center.
[00:49:14.52] And every neighborhood in Ann Arbor, our goal through parks is to have a neighborhood park within a quarter mile walking distance without having to cross a busy street. So where we prioritize those areas is especially in our middle and lower income housing area. So we want to make sure that every neighborhood in Ann Arbor has a wonderful park, and that the parks help each neighborhood become a better neighborhood.
[00:49:45.15] Safe community. Parks are always interested and always cognizant of best practices for storm water management. We'll see more of that when Cheryl gives you an example of what's happened in West Park. But we're always looking to build rain gardens, to have porous pavement where available, always looking for those best practices.
[00:50:04.33] We aim to protect as much land as possible along the Huron River, and to really protect that ecosystem. And we're always looking to non-motorized transportation. And as Cheryl showed you, we have 52 miles of paths.
[00:50:17.18] We're looking to build upon and connect the Border-to-Border Trail. And so to provide areas for active recreation through that trail system to the urban core and out to the river, out to our parks.
[00:50:34.87] If we look at economic vitality, people want to live in communities with a vibrant park system that provides opportunities for both passive and active recreation. We also have facilities within the park system that draw people in from the outlying communities. So our golf courses, our liveries, our farmers markets, events that happen in the parks, those are all things that are destinations that create additional revenue for our park system and for our city.
[00:51:04.69] And parks also not only improve safety, but add value to the neighborhood. So how many of you purchased a home or chose to live in an area because of its proximity to a park or natural area? Anyone? So hopefully a lot of you.
[00:51:20.31] So parks don't just enhance our value of our quality of life, but they also actually add value to our homes and to our general community as a whole. And if we look--just one more slide before I turn things over to Cheryl-- here's our recently Audubon certified golf course that was rated the number one municipal golf course in the state of Michigan by Golf Digest magazine last year.
[00:51:50.57] CHERYL SAAM: So our goal is to provide both structured and unstructured opportunities which lead to improving the quality of life through recreational, educational, social, and cultural enrichment services. People value the time they spend in parks. Parks provide measurable health benefits, from direct contact with nature and cleaner environment to opportunities for physical activities and social interaction.
[00:52:16.13] Because of the different ways people experience parks, our city needs to provide all types, from neighborhood facilities to large natural areas to formal learning-- such as the ice skating classes here-- to outdoor recreation opportunities, such as our disc golf course. That is the other slide.
[00:52:32.34] So we strive to help people in our community discover our parks and promoting physical and emotional well being. And really, they provide venues for fitness and relaxation as well.
[00:52:43.34] So we have summer camps. So here's the Argo Canoe Livery, the Gallup Canoe Livery and Fuller Pool and Buhr Pool and the Leslie Science and Nature Center all provide summer camps for our children.
[00:52:56.07] Over 1,000 children each year attend our camps. And they offer children the daily benefits of direct exposure with nature, a chance to explore, discover, and learn and engage. And our parks do this as well and give the children a sense of place and shared experiences with their peers.
[00:53:15.43] There's a little park right outside my house, and just today I was cooking dinner, just all the moms and the little children and everybody gathering in the park. It's always a joy to see. And of course the Leslie Science Center showcases and educates the community on living lightly with the Nature House and its solar power and its compostable toilets, which is always a hit with the children to discover all that.
[00:53:38.20] And then our scholarship program provide city residents access to our park facilities and programs regardless of economic situation. This program provides income eligible families exposure to positive experience, active lifestyles and mentors, as well as opportunities to gain and experience these life skills.
[00:53:58.52] With a scholarship, a family's awarded summer and winter pool passes, ice arena passes, children can attend summer camps and educational programs throughout the year. It provides wonderful opportunities for children of all ages to build the skills and strengths they need to live full and rewarding lives.
[00:54:18.26] Well, so the mission of a public park, perhaps even its definition, is to provide an open space that is free and accessible to all. So we strive to provide a broad spectrum of services that are accessible to everyone-- both with our recreational programs and our facilities-- just to meet the changing needs of our community.
[00:54:38.88] The Parks Department is continually making improvements in accessibility for people with disabilities. And accessibility is a vital part of the park construction and our park planning takes this into account when they're building and renovating new parks.
[00:54:53.09] So for example, this is steps in Buhr Pool And then the Gallup Park and the canoe livery received a $300,000 grant from the Michigan Natural Resource Trust Fund for improvements in Gallup Park. And that includes accessible pathways and restrooms and patios and fishing.
[00:55:10.53] And we're going to build a kayak dock. If you've ever tried to get in and out of a kayak, it can be really difficult. And so you roll right up onto a dock and it just eases the transition in and out of the boat.
[00:55:22.35] So and then Buhr Park here has accessible sidewalks and parking spaces. And this spring, there are pervious pavements and other storm water improvements.
[00:55:31.99] So West Park is a park that many of you may have been following that it has had lots of improvements. And it really incorporates diverse recreational activities, such as urban park and then the water quality of the storm water as it goes to the Huron River.
[00:55:48.48] So of course, band shells, softball field, and lots of different types of recreation. And recreation improvements were made as well. And then two branches of Allen Creek combine and run under there and the storm water improvements were made with the hydrodynamic separators and wetland areas, et cetera.
[00:56:06.69] And then the Argo Cascades. We're all really excited to get this open this spring. And it's certainly an example of sustainability in the parks.
[00:56:14.90] So the community was involved right from the beginning in what to do with the Argo dam and with the Argo millrace here when it needed improvements. So ever since 1830, this was a millrace that powered [INAUDIBLE]-- it was a lumber mill and a flour mill.
[00:56:30.42] And so this has been changed to take the portage out. And we've built all these drops and steps, so we're going to increase our river recreation opportunities with rafts, tubes, all sorts of fun things. And then also the Border-to-Border Trail will be paved and this section will be completed.
[00:56:48.98] JULIE GRAND: OK, so our last example of sustainability in the parks is land acquisition. And we're so close, Jamie!
[00:56:56.58] And so one of the jobs that we do as parks advisory commissioners is use about 1/3 of the green belt or preservation open space monies to buy land within the city. And that's land for both open space and recreation. And our priorities include land along the Huron River, linkages and connectivity, and improving access to our existing parks.
[00:57:23.96] So one of the questions that we always ask, and it's important for sustainability, is if we are taking on this new property, can we take care of it with the resources that we already have? We looked at West Park. One example of a property that was purchased as part of those renovations was a house that was in a floodplain way, and it addressed safety.
[00:57:46.40] So if you can imagine this house, it deals with storm water issues. And then it was hiding a parking lot. And you can imagine if there's a house in front of a parking lot, there may be some undesirable activities in terms of safety that might take place there. Removing the house helped improve safety, it opened up the park, it maybe provided a possibility for an expansion of other activities. So there's an example of a very small amount of money that was used for a park and maybe provided land acquisition in a way that might not be familiar to you.
[00:58:17.66] So in conclusion, just some future directions. We're going to continue to look at growth of our volunteer opportunities, expansion of non-motorized pathways and connections between the urban core and the Huron River and throughout the city, continued attention to best practices in storm water management.
[00:58:39.22] And this last one is probably the most important. If we're going to be talking about sustainability, we on the Park Advisory Commission always want to make sure that we're improving what we already have. So we're always looking to, before we build something new, can we maintain and improve upon our existing infrastructure?
[00:59:01.97] So with that in mind, if you are looking for information on the upcoming millage renewal for the parks and capital improvements millage, you can go to the parks website. And we'll be having a couple meetings, on April 23rd at Leslie Science and Nature Center, and on the 26th at the Traverwood Library. So if you're interested in learning more about the millage renewal process, you can go to the city's website or come to those meetings or talk to me. Thank you so much.
[00:59:32.99] [APPLAUSE]
[00:59:39.92] WENDY RAMPSON: So as the screen will go up-- Tim, is that? And I'd like to invite the panel up to the table behind the screen. So if you would please come up here so you can respond to questions.
[00:59:57.05] I will just use this moment to reiterate some of the things that Julie had talked about in terms of the land acquisition. I think it's a point of pride in this community.
[01:00:08.76] Matt Naud and I just had the opportunity to spend two and 1/2 weeks in Indonesia. And we met with a non-government organization that is representing a lower income neighborhood along a river in Yogyakata, Indonesia. And they are fascinated by what we have been able to do along a river. In particular, the Argo Loop and the area on the Border-to-Border Trail.
[01:00:37.37] And so it's interesting, when we came back from Indonesia, some citizens sent a clipping from the late '70s I think it was. About how this community has been talking about the river and acquisition of land and making that a resource for the community. So our advice to our Indonesian friends was patience. And commitment of people.
[01:00:58.01] I know the [INAUDIBLE] are here and others who have been involved many, many years in making that happen. So that's a really important asset for this community.
[01:01:05.93] So with that, we have our panel ready to go. Are there any questions that you have?
[01:01:10.86] SPEAKER 1: And if you have a question, just please come back to the mic that's here.
[01:01:15.71] WENDY RAMPSON: And if you want to queue up also, that might help.
[00:00:00.00]
[01:01:41.80] THOMAS PARTRIDGE: My name is Thomas Partridge. I'm here to ask the question that I've asked at numerous Ann Arbor City Council meetings and Washtub County Commission meetings over the last decade and more. And that is, how do we prioritize, how do we make improvements, and how do we make improvements without a sustainable, progressive tax base?
[01:02:15.90] I've called on county and city councilpersons and commissioners to place on the ballot a Headlee Override amendment and apply that to the Ann Arbor District School and all the school districts in the county in the area as well. And a related question is how do we give so much attention to buying up what's termed open land and land for parks, and so much money in terms of dedicated tax dollars going to a city only park system-- not a county wide or region wide park system as I would advocate-- at the same time we have homeless people living in our parks, living in and under freeway bridges, on park benches all over the city? We are not giving priority to human values for housing, health, education, human rights and adequate fire and police protections.
[01:03:36.14] So those are my concerns. I'd appreciate if any and all of you would address them. Thank you.
[01:03:42.99] WENDY RAMPSON: So let's take the first question, which deals primarily with how we finance services, the tax base. Anyone want to weigh in on this and sustainability? And there are microphones in front of you if you care to grab them to speak.
[01:04:01.97] RICHARD NORTON: [INAUDIBLE].
[01:04:03.68] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
[01:04:06.21] WENDY RAMPSON: This is a good group for discussion. So I think that thoughts to stimulate discussion would be fine.
[01:04:18.29] JOHN SETO: I think I was volunteered to speak a little bit. It's such a broad question, but I'd like to answer it in a general term. It goes back to, I believe, what every panel member has been speaking about. It talks about a community and how we all work together.
[01:04:32.82] I think in many of the discussions that we have, we talk about collaboration and the like resource and combining those things. I don't think it ends with our own individual activities or our own individual departments and organizations. As we sit around the room, and as we listen, I learn more about how we can improve our own services by listening to the others.
[01:04:51.13] So in that regard, I think the focus for all of us to respond to how we do sustain the services that we have, with either the same amount of resources we have is to continue these types of discussions and learn from each other as a community. Not only within Ann Arbor, but within the region as well, all of Washtenaw County. So with that focus, I think we can progressively get better at doing what we continue to do strongly, but to continue to improve on that.
[01:05:17.73] So I hope that helps a little bit. Maybe it will spur on some other discussions.
[01:05:21.83] CHERYL ELLIOTT: Is this on? Yeah. I think-- and I touched a little bit on it-- I think our community-- and I would agree with what you said-- we're very fortunate in the relationships and the collaborative way that many in both the public and private sector work together.
[01:05:38.71] And so whether it's coordinating funding of human services, whether it's the task forces that came together to deal with the whole issue of the homeless, whether it's an arts and cultural plan, I think we have a lot of not just financial resources, even though these are challenging times, but we have a lot of resources in the universities that we have here in this county and in the community college we have.
[01:06:08.56] And so compared to a lot of communities, in fact, when people come from other communities and see what we're doing and hear about what we're doing, often their mouths hit the table. And so I think we certainly appreciate and understand some of what you've talked about. And I think that not working in silos and trying to be more efficient and effective with the resources that we do have, and open and willing dialogue and getting input from the community.
[01:06:38.61] That can take time. Sometimes it can drive people crazy how long it can take. But I think we come to the best answers possible for our community.
[01:06:48.19] JULIE GRAND: I think I can also speak to some of the collaboration that we do in the parks. We actually do partner with the county quite a bit. I spoke about community development.
[01:06:58.46] If we look at the skate park that's set for construction next year, the funding came from-- I've got you. A lot of it came from the county. But the group that actually helped the skate park, those that were interested in building the skate park was the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation.
[01:07:15.92] CHERYL ELLIOTT: Friends of the Skate Park.
[01:07:17.22] JULIE GRAND: Friends of the Skate Park. And they used the expertise of some staff from the Community Foundation to help with their efforts.
[01:07:23.96] And I can speak to land acquisition. The first question that we always ask when looking at a proposed piece of land is how much would this take away from the tax base of the city, if someone is paying taxes? And if the answer is too much and we don't think that the exchange is worth it, then we don't even consider the property. So we do think about that.
[01:07:47.02] I don't know if anyone wants to speak to Headlee. I know for Headlee in terms of the millage, we've looked at that over the course of six years. And it hasn't been a substantial enough difference over the course of each year to make a big enough impact to be of concern to us.
[01:08:04.63] JENNIFER HALL: Can I add? Tom, I greatly appreciate seeing you at all the various meetings. Tom's always advocating for the same group of people I'm advocating for, so I do appreciate that.
[01:08:16.74] I don't know anything-- I don't know very much I should say--about Headlee, so I don't want to speak about that. But there's another tax issue that is a problem, which is that we live in a home rule state. And we have broken up communities by cities and townships and villages. And the tax rates for the urbanized areas and the cities is much higher. And Ann Arbor provides all kinds of different services that you can't get in a lot of townships.
[01:08:43.84] People want to move the townships because they have a low tax base. And so you have these really weird dynamics of where housing is and where taxes come from and who has money and who doesn't have money.
[01:08:55.59] Ypsi City has one of the highest tax rates in the state. They also have a lot of very low income folks as well as EMU and a lot of non-taxable land. And so they're in quite a quandary on how to deal with their tax base. Much, much, much worse than we are.
[01:09:11.79] I always feel like we need more money Tom, for housing and human services, as you know. But I also can say that this community-- I do go out and check with other communities to see who puts general funds into the types of projects and programs that we have here. And very few other communities do.
[01:09:30.81] CHERYL ELLIOTT: [INAUDIBLE] state.
[01:09:32.34] JENNIFER HALL: Yeah. And very few across the United States. So as far as where priorities go, I always want more for the areas I care about. But I do know that Ann Arbor actually is very generous with the funding that they do have for housing and human services.
[01:09:50.88] WENDY RAMPSON: Any other thoughts? Next question.
[01:09:54.72] EUNICE BURNS: You all don't need to answer my question. Just one or two of you.
[01:10:00.92] I'm Eunice Burns, and I wanted to say something about housing. Several years ago-- I think Wendy was in on this-- we tried to get a law passed in Ann Arbor which would allow people to add units to their own house, which we did.
[01:10:24.98] I live in, I always say I live in the old garage. Because what happened was, my daughter and her husband bought my house. We remodeled. I have an architect daughter, my youngest. She did the design.
[01:10:42.06] And I live in the old garage. Because it was single family zoning, nobody else can go in there when I am gone. So we need to get some laws that allow people that are able to do this.
[01:11:04.82] There's more and more seniors coming all the time. And I'll tell you, some of us cannot afford the senior housing like Glacier Hills, places like that. They're wonderful, but I couldn't afford to live there.
[01:11:20.94] So we need to allow where there's too much housing for a family, we need to allow them to do something with that space so that either seniors or I would keep it with a single person or a two person place. There are some laws that you'll have to have, rules and regulations. But I'd like to see us work on this again and see if we can get it through this time.
[01:11:56.06] And can I just say one other thing? Huron River Day is July 15th. Put it on your calendar!
[01:12:08.90] WENDY RAMPSON: So Eunice, I will just make a few comments, if I may. Yes, we did have an effort a number of years ago to change the zoning rules for accessory apartments. At that point, I think there was a concern about density, in particularly areas close to campus. And that's why it didn't move forward.
[01:12:29.39] AUDIENCE: There's also [INAUDIBLE].
[01:12:31.10] WENDY RAMPSON: Yeah. But I will say with the latest census, what we're finding is that even though we keep creating new units in this city, our population is stable, which is great. But what that means is each household in the city is getting smaller. And so from the standpoint of some of our existing neighborhoods where there may have been concern about density in the past, those neighborhoods actually have fewer people than they did in the '60s and '70s.
[01:13:02.59] And so the question then is, is it appropriate to have small units that are attached to those to bring back some of the density, particularly the close in neighborhoods so that they have the advantages of being close to work, being close to downtown, university? So point well taken. I don't know if any of you want to weigh in.
[01:13:21.35] RICHARD NORTON: Can you hear me now? The last two questions prompt the academic in me to comment a little bit that like sustainability, the concept of community is a difficult term to work with. Because it means something to everybody, but it doesn't mean the same thing to everybody. So we bandy it around as if we all are talking about the same thing, and quite often, we're not.
[01:13:44.36] Folks who live in gated communities think of themselves as living in communities. But I hazard a guess it's not the kind of community that you think about when you're thinking about a community. So that creates a whole lot of difficulty.
[01:13:58.06] In our society, if I can paint with broad brush strokes, a famous sociologist almost a century ago-- Max Weber-- talked about the Protestant work ethic. We very much in this society believe in the idea of rigorous individual making your way through society. And if you succeed, it's because you merit it, you're worthy. If you haven't succeeded, it's because you are somehow not meritorious. It's your own fault.
[01:14:26.86] That complicates a lot of efforts to try and help the folks who are less well off. Because the American inclination is to think, well, if you're homeless on a corner, it's because you lack the ambition to pull yourself up and go get a job and work. So we're constantly fighting that kind of-- I say we're constantly fighting. If you're promoting notions of an expansive, inclusive community, you have to engage that kind of American ideology as well.
[01:14:56.32] I think in our society, we very much have the mindset if I'm better off, we're all better off. And that very much plays nicely with our economic system, which really promotes individual, do it on your own, and then we'll all be better off because the economy will thrive.
[01:15:10.83] We probably need to figure out how to think through if we're all better off, I'm better off. If we can figure out how to make situations such that the folks who are least well off are also doing OK, and have the opportunity to do better. And at the least we're addressing the folks who are in bad circumstances not through any fault of their own, but because they're in bad circumstances, that's a more expansive notion of community that we can then use to make us all better off.
[01:15:38.80] But the way to really get at those kinds of problems is to come out to these kinds of community engagement sessions and open your mind a little bit. And be willing to think through, well, maybe we would all be better off.
[01:15:51.56] And this again, I commented about the neighbors who come out when anybody proposes anything. It can be threatening when someone wants to try and do something differently, especially when they're trying to do something for folks who don't look quite like us, and that kind of fear of change.
[01:16:07.73] But that's part of community too. Changing communities, community development over time. If we're developing the community, we're not staying the same.
[01:16:16.87] So I point all of this out to say, there are no easy answers. But there's some really deeply embedded ideological perspectives that we have as Americans that we probably need to be rethinking and figure out how to better balance those kinds of concerns. And I completely am preaching to the choir here, I suspect, because you're the ones who took the trouble to come out to this community forum to think about stuff. But maybe think about this as you engage with others throughout our community on these kinds of topics.
[01:16:44.17] WENDY RAMPSON: OK. Anyone else.
[01:16:48.63] AUDIENCE: Hi. Can you guys hear me?
[01:16:50.61] WENDY RAMPSON: Yep.
[01:16:50.97] AUDIENCE: So my name is Pete. I am a student at the University of Michigan, and I work on the Student Sustainability Initiative. And so I really appreciate the opportunity to engage on a community level.
[01:17:03.63] So I used to be working a lot on environmental sustainability, and I've recently shifted my focus a lot to happiness. And so I'm really glad that Professor Norton brought that up, and even [INAUDIBLE] metric and really paradigm shift, because I think that's really important right now.
[01:17:18.93] So I have a comment and then a follow up question about that. So my shift from environment to happiness really is because I realized that we talk so much more environmental sustainability, but we are this community, but how do we reach out to other people who still doesn't care as much as we do?
[01:17:41.38] And I started thinking about really right now, the people in the United States aren't happy. Our happiness level has stayed steady even though our GDP has been increasing and increasing. And so how do we get people to take care of our life, as well as our communities?
[01:17:56.15] And also another thing, everyone cares about happiness. So it has the potential to be very bipartisan and an issue that everyone can rally around. So I'm very interested as well in uniting people, uniting communities. And so as long as we think about GDP a lot, and if you think about GDP, people will be thinking about economy alone.
[01:18:16.30] And so there's a new concept called gross national happiness, and really looking at new metrics and new indicators to have happiness be a main consideration of public policy. And so that's really what I want to advocate today, to have a more proactive and a more direct approach to thinking about happiness and social sustainability.
[01:18:35.93] So I'm working with a nonprofit that's based in Seattle, who's trying to bring this concept nationwide really to provide indicators that measure happiness and quality of life, and to use that as the main tool instead of just looking at GDP and economic growth alone. So then my question is in this community, what has been done in terms of well being and quality of life? And what more can we do to really make sure that happiness of the people is taken care of?
[01:19:08.48] JENNIFER HALL: Can I take this one?
[01:19:09.32] WENDY RAMPSON: Yes.
[01:19:13.52] JENNIFER HALL: I don't know where everybody's from. I'm gonna assume most people are from Ann Arbor that are here. Not necessarily? Maybe not.
[01:19:24.09] There's interesting new studies in the area of public health. We've been working a lot with the Washtenaw County Public Health. And they're looking at how your environment can make you depressed or happy or unhappy.
[01:19:38.32] And we've been working together in low income neighborhoods, because things like having cars that are sitting on your street with the wheels popped or windows that are boarded up or garbage that's not picked up or broken lights, they've done all these studies of people's well being and how that makes them feel. And they have more depression and things like that in those kinds of neighborhoods.
[01:20:00.73] And the reason I said I don't know where people are from is Ann Arbor-- if you're thinking of the community as Ann Arbor as a whole-- doesn't have those kinds of problems like a lot of other communities that I've worked in. I brought some out of town developers in to look at some affordable housing projects, and they wanted to build in Bryant neighborhood. And I said, well, I really don't know if that's a good idea, because that is our lowest income neighborhood with the most problems. Let me just drive you through it and you'll see when I'm talking about.
[01:20:30.48] And I drove them through and they're like, what? This is a low income neighborhood? They were shocked that I would even consider that a low income neighborhood. There wasn't any of the obvious signs you see in other really, really distressed communities. But if you think of yourself broader than Ann Arbor, it's a huge deal.
[01:20:50.24] I was in Detroit today. It was depressing just driving through Detroit, and having to live there on a regular basis would be devastating, some of the neighborhood problems that are there.
[01:21:00.56] That's my two cents on it. I think Ann Arbor is doing a lot that contributes to happiness. I hope we expand our view to other neighborhoods.
[01:21:13.63] CHERYL ELLIOTT: A couple of comments. I think one thing that this community has embraced for more than 20 years is the idea of youth as community resources, and getting young people involved in meaningful ways. Through volunteering, experiential learning, understanding how to leverage their enthusiasm, their creativity. They're not jaded yet.
[01:21:44.94] So I think one thing that this community is in many ways different from a lot of communities is how it does value its youth and does respect their opinion. I know the library, for example for a long time, has had a youth advisory group. I can look at a lot of public institutions as well as private that do.
[01:22:02.32] So I think more engaged people or populace who are giving back does bring a sense of happiness back to them. They benefit more than those they're trying to help. I think FestiFools Parade is a great thing that brings lots of smiles to people's faces and so forth and so forth.
[01:22:27.31] So I certainly have heard of the GNP, or whatever, the Happiness Index. I think there is something to it.
[01:22:32.59] I think the Ann Arbor Public Schools did a great thing when they looked at Roberto Clemente, which was a pretty tired school, and kids that weren't doing well, and decided they need a place that's a positive place that shows they're worth something. So kind of following on what you're saying. So those are my comments.
[01:22:54.51] WENDY RAMPSON: John?
[01:22:55.90] JOHN SETO: Yeah, I was just going to comment very quickly, it really brought to light about what happiness is. And within our Ann Arbor community, a lot of times when I get complaints about quality of life, it's not the big things that you would think when it deals with public safety. It's not the big things you would see in some of the big cities. A lot of times it's the smaller things that some people may find insignificant, but to the person that's complaining, we have to be understanding and realize to them, that is the most important thing.
[01:23:18.99] So the complaints I get with public safety really involve things that we can deal with on a smaller scale. It's a neighbor's dog, it's somebody that doesn't cut their grass. It's stuff that we see that's nuisance community standards based and quality of life things that we deal with.
[01:23:32.83] So to answer your question, how do we keep the happiness, is to make sure we focus and not lose sight of the smaller things that could be very big issues for other people. We don't have to live like in a big society or that big city that says it only rises to this level before we take care of it. Any complaint, whether it's small, is important to other people. And as a community, I think Ann Arbor does a great job of that.
[01:23:52.87] WENDY RAMPSON: I would just add that as a part of this sustainability framework, we're going to be establishing some goals. Hopefully council will see fit to adopt those as guiding for the community. But the next step is to create some actions and also some metrics.
[01:24:07.82] So if you could, on your comment card, just provide us with some resources, maybe some websites or whatever, or even your name, we be happy to take a look at that. Happy to look at happiness.
[01:24:18.47] [LAUGHTER]
[01:24:19.44] WENDY RAMPSON: Thank you.
[01:24:20.73] RICHARD NORTON: Wendy, can I just do one quick thought?
[01:24:23.45] WENDY RAMPSON: Oh, sure.
[01:24:24.84] RICHARD NORTON: Happiness is having stability and a sense of safety. It's also a lot about relationships. It's refocusing your life and worrying about cultivating and building relationships.
[01:24:34.79] And one of the problems with our governmental systems right now is we've honed in completely on gross domestic product, especially at the national level, which is really just a measure of economic throughput, activity. And if we go out and spill oil and then we hire somebody to clean it up, that adds to GDP, and in a governmental framework, that's good.
[01:24:53.89] So there's a lot of room to get governments to rethink the metrics that we're using to measure happiness. But a lot of that is focusing on building relationships. And a lot of that is resisting the temptation of the constant bombardment of advertising we get, that says you're only happy if you're going out and buying stuff. And those are [INAUDIBLE] social issues.
[01:25:12.36] Another thing I'd recommend is get chickens for your backyard. Because they're very calming and fun to watch.
[01:25:18.55] [LAUGHTER]
[01:25:19.00] RICHARD NORTON: They just kind of make you happy.
[01:25:20.79] WENDY RAMPSON: The chicken index.
[01:25:21.21] RICHARD NORTON: So there's a nice thing that Ann Arbor did--
[01:25:22.02] WENDY RAMPSON: How many people have chickens in Ann Arbor?
[01:25:23.70] RICHARD NORTON: There's a cool thing that Ann Arbor did to increase our gross domestic happiness.
[01:25:28.84] WENDY RAMPSON: Great. Doug?
[01:25:31.68] AUDIENCE: Doug [? Kell ?]. I'd like to pick up on actually about three speakers, including the last one. This Happiness Index sounds maybe a little frivolous and even flaky, but in fact, it's getting a lot of serious attention as a metric. It's getting serious professional and academic respect. And there are countries that actually have a Gross Happiness Index.
[01:25:57.52] However, if it's unsustainable happiness, which I think is closer to our theme tonight, it's not good enough. And there are plenty of happy people in our community who don't live very unsustainable lifestyles. We know that. I'm certainly among them.
[01:26:13.77] But the ecological footprint, or the environmental footprint, or the carbon footprint, whatever you want to call it, as Dick knows, is considerably higher for people who live in the suburbs than in the city. Dramatically, in many cases.
[01:26:28.91] And so anything we can do to increase density is maybe the single biggest lever we have. It has everything to do with water runoff, energy to heat and cool the houses, which get smaller in denser areas, to the amount of driving you do, to amount of land you consume. It's pretty across the board that American suburbanites have the biggest ecological footprints really on the planet. And it would take four or five planets to support them if everybody lived like that.
[01:27:03.92] So as important as parks are-- and I love our park system-- I bike around a lot and I sometimes think, maybe we have too many parks, too much park land, and we really need more people living downtown. And maybe better maintained parks and so on.
[01:27:20.33] I love our park system. Don't get me wrong. But to the first speaker, for prioritizing, I wonder if we're over prioritizing them and not dealing enough with increasing density.
[01:27:29.77] And that leads me to you, I forget your name. The lowest hanging fruit for density and affordable housing and sustainability is accessory dwelling units. I think it's time to visit it again. I couldn't agree more.
[01:27:45.83] It was shot down last time by a relatively small, relatively wealthy, relatively politically connected group. I don't think it was a fair measure of community sentiment. So there are many states now that require its legalization. So I would urge that.
[01:28:10.37] But we really can't have too many people living downtown. You cannot have too many people living downtown. The more the better. We are so far from hitting the upper limit that we don't have to worry about that. So density, accessory dwelling units, and happiness, go forth.
[01:28:30.15] WENDY RAMPSON: Thank you.
[01:28:30.99] JULIE GRAND: Can I respond to that?
[01:28:32.56] WENDY RAMPSON: Yep, and then we'll take one more question, because we're getting to the end of our time.
[01:28:35.84] JULIE GRAND: Sure. I guess I would argue that you can't have downtown density if you don't have green space to get out of those little spaces and breathe and recreate. And then even if it's not downtown, we talk about this in thinking, well, do we need more green space downtown or less green, or what kind of green space? And we think about those things all the time on the Park Advisory Commission.
[01:28:59.87] But one of the things we also think about in bringing people to the core is to make sure that we have, even if it's not right at your doorstep, that within the city and within access to public transportation, that we have lots of opportunities for recreation that are attractive to what you think of as people that will increase the downtown density. So to young people and to older people. I don't want to call them elderly, but to--
[01:29:29.29] WENDY RAMPSON: Empty nesters.
[01:29:30.29] JULIE GRAND: --to the aging population as well.
[01:29:34.85] WENDY RAMPSON: Yes, please.
[01:29:37.15] AUDIENCE: I'm Ann Larimore. And I would just like to make a quick comment about density. And that is that I think just to speak about density in general is not very helpful. Because making a neighborhood denser with young families with small children is very different than making the same area dense with single people or with low income people or with dwelling units that are used as places for football weekends and are empty a good deal of the time.
[01:30:21.03] So there's a great diversity of quality within this single word that we've talked about. Or where we have density of students in high rises, which is an enormous change in our community over the last two years.
[01:30:40.10] But my question is really about being proactive and the possibilities of being proactive about changes that come to us from outside. The increase in private student high rises was fueled by a national movement, a fashion for this across the country. And in many cases, by outside development money.
[01:31:11.76] Pfizer leaving Ann Arbor and the purchase of the Pfizer property by the University took significant acreage off the tax rolls and also led us to a crisis in people being quickly unemployed and leaving the city. We've seen more severe weather because of global warming, and more severe weather events that we have to react to. So it seems to me that as a community, we're very often put it in the reactive position. And my question is, what ideas about how to make the community more proactive about these outside events that come in and really impact our lives enormously?
[01:32:06.51] WENDY RAMPSON: Great. Anyone want to tackle that?
[01:32:14.11] I will just say that my experience is that this is such a smart community that we usually-- like the gross national happiness-- we have students here that introduce us to new ideas all the time. And that is one of the wonderful things about having that young, very energetic group of people in our community, is they push us to think beyond our current understanding. So I don't know if there's anything else that you would want to add from your experience?
[01:32:45.29] RICHARD NORTON: I think a lot of the things you talked about, almost by definition you can't predict. So there's not very much you can do to anticipate them and deal with them before they come. But you can try and create a society that's adaptive and resilient, that has the capacity to respond in a fruitful and prompt way when those things happen.
[01:33:08.43] And a lot of that is community engagement, the diversity of the community, trying to diversify your economic base so that you're not relying just on Pfizer or the University of Michigan, I suppose. I see a fellow shaking his head now. Did I say something wrong?
[01:33:25.64] WENDY RAMPSON: Or even, I would say, finding the sweet spot in density. Because clearly, there is a question, what is that sweet spot for this community that is a sustainable density that is a density that people feel comfortable with and enhances community? And I think we keep trying to get there, but it's hard.
[01:33:44.30] RICHARD NORTON: Yeah. So I teach in a planning program. I believe in planning, not for the sake of planning, just to have a plan. But you have to take stock of where things are, where you're headed, where you want to go, lay out some principles.
[01:33:57.49] But then you never think of your plan as a blueprint that's going to fix the way the community is. Because almost by definition, tomorrow something's going to happen that you didn't see coming. So you use the plan to think through what you're doing and where you're headed, but you also have to build on that resiliency and capacity to respond when things hit you.
[01:34:14.74] And that's maybe an unsatisfying answer, but I'm not sure how else, in a complicated and contingent world, how else you would try and approach problems. I'm really curious why you were wagging your head no. Oh, OK.
[01:34:30.79] WENDY RAMPSON: OK, quickly Jennifer. Because I know that we need to finish up and allow for the library to close up.
[01:34:35.65] JENNIFER HALL: Well, when it comes to density in housing, the planning piece of it is for the building, it's not for the people. And so you can't plan for the people. You can't say you could have a certain density and a certain height and certain size and then say only elderly people can live here. Or unless you have affordable housing, you have to be elderly. Or you can't say you can't be students or can be students.
[01:34:59.47] So that's more of a fair housing issue. And that ends up always being a problem in my arena, is you have certain types of people you want or don't want. But that's not what planners can do. You can't discriminate against the type of people who move in. You only can plan for the type of housing, the density and that kind of thing, or the zoning and that kind of thing.
[01:35:21.07] WENDY RAMPSON: What I'd like to do is close up and encourage you to talk to our speakers on the way out, to put in comments about this session, about the whole series to the library for feedback for their purposes. And thank you so much for your attendance.
[01:35:36.05] [APPLAUSE]

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April 12, 2012 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Length: 1:36:00

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Environment
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Sustainable Ann Arbor