AADL Talks To: Liz Brater, 58th Mayor of Ann Arbor (1991-1993)

Mon, 09/16/2024 - 6:36pm

When: June 8, 2023

Elizabeth S. Brater is Ann Arbor's first female mayor, serving as a Democrat from 1991 to 1993. Prior to 1991, she was a member of Ann Arbor City Council. As both council member and mayor, Liz focused on housing and environmental issues, causes she continued at the state level when serving as a member of the Michigan House of Representatives from 1995 to 2000, and in the Michigan Senate, where she represented the 18th district from 2003 to 2010. Brater talks with us about her time in office, its many challenges, and some of her initiatives and accomplishments, notably her campaign to start the Michigan Recovery Facility (MRF).

Transcript

• [00:00:09] EMILY MURPHY: Hi. I'm Emily.
• [00:00:11] AMY CANTU: This is Amy. And today AADL talks to Liz Brater. Liz is a former Ann Arbor City Council member as well as Ann Arbor's first female mayor, elected in 1991. She's also a former Democratic member of the Michigan Senate representing the 18th District from 2003-2010, and a member of the Michigan House of Representatives from 1995-2000. Welcome. We're so glad to have you here. The first thing we usually like to ask is if you can give us a little background on where you grew up and what brought you to Ann Arbor.
• [00:00:49] LIZ BRATER: Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, and I'm very glad you're documenting Ann Arbor history for this great event. When people ask me where I grew up, I often say I didn't grow up, because it's complicated. But I was born in Boston, and my father was in government so we moved around almost every five years, so I lived in New York, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, mostly as a child. As I said, my father was an expert in housing, on city planning, and urban development. In 1960, we moved -- he worked for the City of New York and in housing -- and then we moved to Washington when Kennedy was elected. I got my grounding in politics fairly early. He was part of the Kennedy administration, helped write a lot of the housing policy. So I was very sensitive to a lot of housing issues -- we can get into later on -- when I became a government official.
• [00:01:56] EMILY MURPHY: Then how did you end up here in Ann Arbor?
• [00:01:59] LIZ BRATER: Well, my husband Enoch Brater is a professor of English and Theater at the University of Michigan, and he was hired here in 1975. We came to Ann Arbor at that point and stayed here ever since.
• [00:02:14] AMY CANTU: You were affiliated with the university for a while as well?
• [00:02:17] LIZ BRATER: Well, yes, I worked as a copy editor and writer and I did have the honor of teaching introductory composition and argumentative writing in the English Department writing program.
• [00:02:32] EMILY MURPHY: From there, did you always know that you wanted to dip your toe into politics?
• [00:02:38] LIZ BRATER: Not really. When I came to Ann Arbor, I was just stepping back from all that. I'd been very active in politics in college. It was a tumultuous period during the Vietnam War when I was in college. I was out there in the demonstrations. However, when we got to Ann Arbor, I was pretty happy just enjoying the quietness of the town, and planting a garden, and starting a family. It was pretty quiet for me till about... Oh, it was the mid-80s when I was sitting in my armchair in the living room. At that time, we had the Ann Arbor News as a printed edition, and I was reading the paper and saw that a nearby church was planning to tear down the Henry Carter Adams House, which was a house that was donated -- Henry Carter Adams was a professor at the University, and the house was built in 1890 and it was used by The Ark at that time for its concerts. The house on Hill Street, right at the end of Lincoln. I saw the church wanted to tear it down to make a parking lot and I got really mad. [LAUGHTER] I started organizing in my neighborhood, and from there, one thing led to another and that's really how I got into local politics.
• [00:04:02] AMY CANTU: Now, you eventually became the first female mayor of Ann Arbor, but can you take us back and talk us through the process of getting there? The political journey that got you to that point?
• [00:04:14] LIZ BRATER: Yeah, well, first, I probably should point out that I was on city council representing the Third Ward for several years before I ran for mayor. It didn't just happen. [LAUGHTER] At that time, the city council was majority Republican. We had city elections in April, which were very low-turnout elections. That favored the Republicans in getting elected and it was really interesting for me to get involved with the Third Ward because it was a very... The way we have our city organized into pie-shaped wedges, radiating out from the center of the city makes each of the wards very diverse. We start with a chunk of students, and then we move into different neighborhoods all the way out. I met a lot of people I never knew before in Ann Arbor. It was very interesting. It was very important for me as a learning experience. Yeah, I worked a lot on environmental issues, and we had a problem with our landfill at that time. We owned a landfill, and it was leaking into the surrounding neighborhoods, and we had to close it. That's what motivated me and others on the council at that time to get very involved with recycling and composting. I will get back to answering your question, but this is important to know as a background. So in 1990, I helped lead a campaign to raise $28 million to address solid waste and recycling issues. We used some of the money to remediate the damage, the pollution at the landfill. And some of that money was intended for the MRF, the Materials Recovery Facility which we started planning in the late '80s.
• [00:06:13] EMILY MURPHY: At this point, you were on City Council, or was this what spurred you to run for it?
• [00:06:17] LIZ BRATER: No, I was on council. I was first elected to council in 1988. If I could backtrack from there. How I got onto council was when I was organizing, as I was saying, with the Henry Carter Adams House, we weren't successful but I saw that it was very important to know your council people and be involved. I started going to Third Ward meetings, and I started making suggestions. The next thing I knew they said, Well, would you like to be Ward chair? Because if you opened up your mouth and [LAUGHTER] there were there's plenty of work to be done. That's what led me to run for council in 1988. Then I worked on counsel on these environmental issues and housing issues and other human services issues and also basic services -- because when you're on council, you just have to deal with garbage, you have to deal with wastewater 00 I found I was interested in it all. But coming back to Amy's question, I don't really remember how I decided to run for mayor, but it was a bold move at the time because we'd had a Republican mayor for quite some time, very few Democratic mayors, even though the city voted Democratic in national elections in November.
• [00:07:46] LIZ BRATER: As I said, the April elections tended to go Republican. We had some serious policy disagreements. We would agree on 80% of the votes we took that had to do with roads and bridges and parks. But when it came to some of these human services issues and the way that downtown was being managed and things like that, there were some policy disagreements. I wanted to have a more liberal progressive voice heard and be in leadership and I decided to run for mayor.
• [00:08:23] EMILY MURPHY: Wow. What was the campaign like?
• [00:08:27] LIZ BRATER: Well, it was fun. We knocked on a lot of doors. We talked to a lot of people and we had a lot of energy because we were really motivated and I think people thought it was a real long shot that I was going to win.
• [00:08:42] EMILY MURPHY: What did you think?
• [00:08:44] LIZ BRATER: I felt like pretty confident, not overconfident. But I just felt if I had got out there and met people and talked to them that's how local government works. It's very personal.
• [00:08:59] AMY CANTU: You're knocking on doors and you're hearing what people are concerned about. One of the criticisms of Ann Arbor is, over the years, is that it thinks it's more liberal than it really is, and that's been tossed around a lot. Did you feel that that was the case or did you feel that you were finally hearing voices that said, Wait, people really do care about these issues and that... What was it like for you in the late '80s and early '90s?
• [00:09:25] LIZ BRATER: Well, there's a great spectrum even within the Democratic Party. One of the most controversial issues was affordable housing and homelessness. Well, we were definitely not doing enough. We never have been. We never will be because one of the reasons we have such a problem with that issue is, as I said, in the '60s a lot of housing programs were passed under the Kennedy administration. Then Johnson, to provide subsidies for building affordable housing. But in the '80s, when Reagan became president they began dismantling all these programs and the federal money totally dried up and traditionally it's been a federal responsibility. It's very hard to get enough money on a local or even a state level to fund affordable housing at a meaningful level. I was very sensitive to that problem but I still felt we needed to try to address it at the local level. But there were people that felt we never were doing enough and as I said, I agree, we never were, but it's pretty hard to replace all the money that was coming from the federal level and it's never really come back. When I was on council, I worked with Kathy Edgren and Anne Marie Coleman, and Thais Peterson, I think, was with us, and all the Democrats on council worked together on these issues, and we had a housing task force, and we had some ideas of how to improve the situation because it's a problem when people that work in the city as teachers or police officers or whatever can't afford the housing, and that was a problem then as it is now. We had some proposals. We always thought we should try to get a millage passed and that's always been a perennial challenge. We also had an idea to do what's called inclusionary zoning which meant that whenever somebody built new projects a certain percentage of the project had to be affordable housing. Well, that, of course, wasn't too popular with the developers. But that was one of the things we tried to do. And we did set aside some money in the city budget for housing and the homeless -- a shelter for people who are homeless.
• [00:12:05] EMILY MURPHY: Going to that election night, what was that like for you?
• [00:12:09] LIZ BRATER: Well, it was exciting. It was fun. We were pretty happy. That first one, when I first ran for mayor.
• [00:12:18] EMILY MURPHY: In the moment, were you thinking about what a historical thing it is to be the first female mayor of Ann Arbor or with that?
• [00:12:26] LIZ BRATER: Yes, I was. I was very proud of it. I was aware it was history and I thought it was time though.
• [00:12:34] EMILY MURPHY: Seriously. [LAUGHTER] Talk about, Here you are, you've been elected mayor. What did you do first?
• [00:12:43] LIZ BRATER: Well, really, we were continuing all these environmental initiatives that I've been working on on council. Oh, one of the things we did which was really historic was we passed the Domestic Partnership Ordinance, which Emory Coleman shepherded and that was a very meaningful thing that we were able to do, to provide... Before marriage was available to people in same-sex relationships officially, we passed this ordinance to recognize what we call domestic partnerships, and I think that was very meaningful. It's one of the things that meant a lot that I was able to accomplish.
• [00:13:30] EMILY MURPHY: Absolutely.
• [00:13:30] AMY CANTU: What else during those few years are you proud of? Obviously, the environmental initiatives, the affordable housing, and the partnership that you just mentioned. But were there other moments that stand out as significant in those years?
• [00:13:52] LIZ BRATER: One of the things I tried to do is improve communications with the university and with other local governments in Washtenaw County and we had a lot of, like I said, a blue ribbon commission to study university city relations, because at that time, when I first became mayor, the University of Michigan had just decided to form its own police force. And this is kind of a good story. At that time, we had this separate marijuana ordinance in Ann Arbor that started out as $5, but by then with inflation it was a $25 fine for smoking pot in the city. As soon as I was elected as mayor, about the same time the university decided to deploy its own police force, and one of the first things they were going to do is patrol Hash Bash. I tried to get them to agree to enforce the Ann Arbor ordinance rather than state law and they didn't commit to that, and so I decided to refuse to send Ann Arbor police to work with them, because I didn't want them involved with enforcing this more rigorous state penalty. And they got annoyed about that. I think that it was partly a gender issue right there because they were saying, "Liz we're not very happy with you" in that avuncular tone of voice. But I realized that wasn't a very good way to start out things. [LAUGHTER] So we set up this blue ribbon commission and we had a lot of conversations about how... You know, because I always used to say, Being the mayor of Ann Arbor was -- vis-a-vis the University of Michigan -- was being the Mayor of Rome vis-a-vis the Vatican.
• [00:15:51] AMY CANTU: There you go.
• [00:15:52] LIZ BRATER: Because they have no accountability to the city yet we wouldn't be Ann Arbor without the University of Michigan. It's what makes us a great city in many ways. But they do have this huge amount of land that's not on the tax rules and often they want to vacate streets and so there were a lot of challenging conversations that we had to have and try to persuade them because we couldn't really stop them from buying up land and taking it off the tax roles. It's still happening. But just to try to help them come to some decisions and be more sensitive to the city needs because you don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. One of the things that attracts students and faculty at Ann Arbor is this wonderful, vibrant, beautiful city that we have.
• [00:16:43] EMILY MURPHY: Absolutely. They really go hand in hand. So at this time, as you were mayor, and then as you were running a re-election, going back and looking at it, it seems as though the coverage that you got was not always very fair. The Ann Arbor News at that time was a very conservative paper and it also seemed like they struggled a little bit with a woman being in leadership.
• [00:17:07] AMY CANTU: Comments? [LAUGHTER]
• [00:17:14] LIZ BRATER: Well, there used to be an expression, 'You don't pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.' But that was one of the things that I learned -- but the hard way. But I was young and a little feisty. Yes, the publisher and editor of the paper were both on the conservative side and favored... They weren't too happy when the Democrats took over the council and the mayor's office. That was a challenge... Because now with social media and everything on the internet, it's easier to put your own points of view out there.
• [00:17:53] EMILY MURPHY: Now, what were your strategies then, if you couldn't necessarily count on a story in the newspaper saying your platform?
• [00:18:02] LIZ BRATER: Well, there were other sources, the Ann Arbor Observer there were other small papers.
• [00:18:07] AMY CANTU: Agenda.
• [00:18:08] LIZ BRATER: Agenda, Metro Times. And the radio stations. I used to go on the radio a lot, directly talk to people. That was one of my favorite things to do.
• [00:18:19] AMY CANTU: In hindsight sight, what would you have done -- now, after all this time, if you could go back -- what would you do differently?
• [00:18:27] LIZ BRATER: I'm not sure. Because you know we made some waves. We made some changes that weren't too popular, and it would have been easier for me personally to avoid some of those things. But I don't think they were the wrong things to do, and I would probably do them all over again. One of the things that made them really mad was there was plan to build a parking structure on the Klines lot, which is the lot between William and Liberty on Ashley. It's named the Klines lot because there was a department store called Klines on that block adjacent to the parking lot. There were people in houses that had to be moved along William. Also, I felt surface parking was an important thing for some older people to have and women at night aren't that comfortable going to parking structures. It just wasn't... Plus, we had three or four parking structures all ringing the downtown. I always said, If you had a downtown that's easy to park in, it's not a downtown you want to be in. But the downtown merchants were convinced that all we needed was more parking and that would solve all their problems. They wanted this structure built, and the Democrats, when we got control of council, we canceled the plans that had been approved, and that created a lot of consternation. Both among the press and some of the business leaders.
• [00:20:07] AMY CANTU: I'm really struck by how many topics that you've already raised are still...are hugely important right now. Have we progressed? What's your view on where we've come since you were mayor?
• [00:20:22] LIZ BRATER: Well, I think a lot of work has been done. I think we've had some great leadership in the city, and there's been a lot done with both Mayor Hieftje and Mayor Taylor working on the green -- and their councils -- making...greening Ann Arbor, sustainable energy, and making the city more bike and pedestrian-friendly. And they've done a lot of work on that. Parks, and support for parks, has always been something that Ann Arbor supported.
• [00:20:54] EMILY MURPHY: So following your tenure as mayor, you moved on to represent the area in state politics. Can you talk about your decision to run for that?
• [00:21:03] LIZ BRATER: Well, what happened was I was actually not in office at the time, because when I ran for reelection in 1993, I was not re-elected, partly because of what you were saying about the lack of support in the press. But also I have to take responsibility. Obviously, I could have communicated better, perhaps. But anyway, and also it was these April elections. During the time I was mayor, we also changed the Ann Arbor City Charter to have the November elections. So it became a lot harder to get elected as a Republican after that. There was an incumbent mayor who was able to get re-elected, but after that, it was all Democrats. I was out of office. I went to work at the Ecology Center as land use -- no, that was later. That was between when I was in the House and the Senate. I worked there -- but I worked as Land Use Director. But I guess I went back to teaching writing and editing, and then Lynn Rivers, who was our state rep, decided to run for Congress. I said, Well, I'll run for that seat because I missed working in public policy and working in government. People were very dubious about it because I just lost this election, and I just went back to square one and started knocking on doors and organizing and talking to people, and I was, again, feeling very positive about it. I think there was a primary election that I won, and once I won that, I did have a Republican opponent, of course, but it wasn't that easy to win if you weren't a Democrat in the legislative districts that we had at that time around Washtenaw County.
• [00:23:05] EMILY MURPHY: How did the work you did at that level compare? Obviously, you're working with a lot more people and perhaps have less individual power, but more collective power. What was that like?
• [00:23:17] LIZ BRATER: Well, it was different because first of all, it's not as close and personal. I mean, you're still close and personal to your constituents, but a lot of it is also working with your colleagues in the legislature and... I used to say that going from Ann Arbor to Lansing is like interplanetary travel. The City of Lansing itself is a Democratic area. But most of the time I was in the legislature, except for one two-year term in the House, it was Republican in both houses. I was in the minority. Basically, my role was to introduce legislation, promote it, try to educate people about things that I thought needed change.
• [00:24:10] LIZ BRATER: I worked a lot on mental health issues because I was very concerned about criminalization of people with mental illness. At the time we held the task force, we went around the state, and this is still another example of something that's still a problem, although we have now a mental health court was adopted, which was some legislation I worked on. We do have more sensitivity among the prosecutors and judges and police about interacting with people with mental illness. But it was heartbreaking to go around -- and this has not changed -- to hear the stories of people, for example, parents of children with mental illness who came in contact with the criminal justice system, instead of getting mental health care, they were being put in the juvenile justice system, which can be extremely cruel. I could go on about that for another hour, but that's one of the things I focused on as well as the environmental issues. One of the things that happened under Governor Engler when I was there was the weakening of the Polluter Pay Law that my predecessor Lana Pollock had shepherded, greatly weakening our environmental laws in the State of Michigan. Hoping now with the new Democratic control we can put some of those protections back.
• [00:25:43] AMY CANTU: I was just thinking about the dioxane spill and all that we're dealing with right now. It had been going on all through that period.
• [00:25:52] LIZ BRATER: Well, I did work on that on council, and as mayor, and as a legislator. But it's been a very intractable problem. It's been very sad because if that had been cleaned up at the time it was found, it could have been sucked out and cleaned and reinjected and we would be fine. But because the owner of the property was very resistant to the remediation steps that needed to be done. His first idea -- actually, I think I had just become mayor -- when he proposed pumping the untreated wastewater, the dioxane 1,4 dioxane, through the city's waste -- I think it was the storm drains or the wastewater system, I can't remember.
• [00:26:45] AMY CANTU: This is Gelman you're talking about.
• [00:26:48] LIZ BRATER: I said, No, we can't do that. We wanted him to clean it up to drinking water standards and he didn't want to do that. We eventually got him to agree to some better cleanup and agreed to let him pump some of it through our storm drains or a wastewater system, I can't remember which. But that's been an ongoing tragedy that the state could have done a better job. The city didn't have that much control over it, but a lot of the problem we had was with the judicial system finding in his favor. When there were clear things we could have done to clean it up along the way.
• [00:27:37] AMY CANTU: One thing I'm really struck by is -- twice you've mentioned, when you were campaigning for Mayor and then at the state level -- that talking with people really was something you enjoyed doing. But I imagine as you're knocking on the doors, you occasionally run into the people that just...they are not your fan. [LAUGHTER] How did you deal with that? What's your strategy?
• [00:28:02] LIZ BRATER: Well, I just sucked it up and said, Go to the next door. The funniest thing that ever happened to me when I was going door to door was this little girl opened the door and she started crying and her father came to the door and she was saying, "I don't want a babysitter!" [LAUGHTER] But that was okay. But she was probably the least happy to see me of anyone I ever saw. But no, obviously, there were people mad at me for this or that that were happy to have a chance to vent and I tried to listen. But most of the people were pretty supportive and happy to see me.
• [00:28:44] AMY CANTU: Happy to see you making that effort as much as also just whether they agreed or not with your political position?
• [00:28:50] LIZ BRATER: Yeah, they're happy that you're out there listening.
• [00:28:53] EMILY MURPHY: You were in the House until you were term limited out, correct?
• [00:28:57] LIZ BRATER: Right.
• [00:28:58] EMILY MURPHY: And then?
• [00:28:59] LIZ BRATER: At that time, we had a limit of three, two-year terms in the House. I was elected to the House in 1994, I think. Then I spent six years there and then I was term-limited, and Alma Wheeler Smith was still our state senator. But she was going to be terminated too in two years. That's when I went and worked for the Ecology Center, because one of the things I've been working on in the legislature was land use issues like trying to protect farmland from urban sprawl. That was something the Ecology Center's always worked on. I went out and I had a great time, I went around Washtenaw County talking to farmers, and there were some supportive farmers that the program was to try to protect land from development by compensating farmers with money that they might have gotten if they sold the land for housing for development, and try to concentrate and give developers benefits for more dense developments closer to the city, where we already had sewer and water, so to prevent eating up the green areas. I did that for two years and then I ran for the Senate. That was in 2002, I started in the Senate. Then I was there till 2010 because we could have two four-year terms in the Senate at that time. That was the max.
• [00:30:27] EMILY MURPHY: While you were in the Senate, did you have particular issues that you focused on or continuing more the same work?
• [00:30:35] LIZ BRATER: A lot of the same. A lot of environmental issues. We did try to do a little work on housing, voter protection. I'm pretty proud of the voters of the State of Michigan for having adopted amendments to the Constitution to increase access to the ballot and protect voting rights and same-day registration. Those are all things Gilda Jacobs and I -- [she] was in the Senate with me -- we proposed all those things as legislation but we couldn't get it passed. It was just wonderful when the citizens took matters into their own hands and got all that adopted.
• [00:31:17] EMILY MURPHY: It is. Now, here we are. You're a retired politician. But are you ever a retired politician?
• [00:31:25] LIZ BRATER: Good question. No. [LAUGHTER] No. It's impossible. But, I was very sensitive when I left office to not being intrusive and interfering. I wanted people to have their space so I took a step back and took some time to catch up with my family. I have two grandsons who live in New Jersey, so I spend a lot of time with them.
• [00:31:51] AMY CANTU: But some people come to you to seek your advice?
• [00:31:55] LIZ BRATER: Yeah, once in a while. No, I try to keep in touch with people and be supportive when I can. The history is sometimes useful to people, and finding out some of these issues, like being a woman in politics. The gender issues really haven't changed that much, and it's sometimes helpful to people to talk it through and hear how it's not new, and you're not imagining it.
• [00:32:23] AMY CANTU: Can you talk about a couple of examples of when you had to deal with specifically -- how you dealt with your gender issues?
• [00:32:30] LIZ BRATER: Well, I think the biggest problem as a woman in politics is the perception that if you're outspoken, if you speak up and assert yourself, that you're being aggressive or belligerent in some way. One of the stories I love is when I first was elected to council, I was quiet. I sat back and listened when I was new. Then after a few months, I decided it's time to try to take a little more leadership role at the council meetings and I started speaking more during one meeting, and afterwards, one of the council watchers came up to me and said, ''Liz, you had a lot of interesting things to say, but you have to be careful not to be seen as hogging the meeting.'' [LAUGHTER] And you know, the council meetings are recorded, so I went back and counted how many times everybody had spoken. I'd spoken 12. It was a 5-hour meeting. We had very long meetings, lasting to 1 in the morning. I had spoken maybe 12 or 13 times during those 5 hours, but then so had almost everyone else. I just don't really know how you can... You just have to be constantly vigilant about trying to educate people about gender issues and gender equality.
• [00:33:56] EMILY MURPHY: The city of Ann Arbor has changed quite a bit since you first became involved in politics. It's always changed, some for the better, some for the worse. Do you have any perspective on some of those ways the city looks differently?
• [00:34:10] LIZ BRATER: Well, the city is growing, and I know there's a lot of controversy about it. First of all, the city of Ann Arbor cannot stop all this development that's going on, it's illegal. That was one of the things when I was first on council... There was some development -- I can't remember what -- that we didn't like, and we might have voted against it. But then they go right to court and if the land is zoned in a certain way, you really can't stop the development. If you're going to save green space, have farm-land, and natural areas around the city, you do have to allow for some density in the city. That's a constant trade-off and I told you I got into politics with historic preservation. So I'm extremely sad when these big buildings start crouching over, crowding out these beautiful old houses we have along Division, these huge monstrosities that are being built along Huron. But there's not that much a city can do to stop it and so it's a constant tug of war. But I totally understand the discomfort that people have with it.
• [00:35:33] AMY CANTU: Affordable housing, obviously, is still an issue. Do you have any thoughts on what we might be able to do going forward, say, the next couple of decades?
• [00:35:42] LIZ BRATER: Well, that's another thing that you can't -- you know, unless you increase density, it's hard to increase affordability. That is one thing that I think this council is sensitive to, this mayor and council. We've had some success with some millages and some supportive living situations for people with mental illness and homelessness. The program I mentioned would still work, this idea of inclusionary zoning, that would give more of a carrot than a stick to give density bonuses to developers that guarantee a certain amount of affordable housing. One of the big problems with a lot of the federal housing programs was they were finite, like their developer got a subsidy if he or she built the subsidized housing, but then it ended in 20 years. We need some longer... We have to go back to working on this at the federal level. That's where I started talking about. I think the city's working hard on it, and there's always more we could do.
• [00:36:59] AMY CANTU: But you're pretty hopeful, we can yet find the right balance?
• [00:37:03] LIZ BRATER: I'm hopeful that we'll continue to work hard on it because I think the councils and the mayor are sensitive to it. As I said, it's not an easy thing to deal with at the local level.
• [00:37:16] EMILY MURPHY: Looking back at your legacy of politics in Ann Arbor and Michigan, what's something that you are most proud of?
• [00:37:26] LIZ BRATER: Maybe the MRF [LAUGHTER]. The MRF, the Materials Recovery Facility. As I was saying, we passed a bond when our landfill had to be closed, and we had to divert as much waste as possible because we were going to have to start shipping our solid waste to other communities, which is a very unpleasant idea. It's a very unattractive solution. Well, one of the things we did was we found out some huge percentage of the landfill was being filled up with yard waste, it was 20% of the materials going into the land fields was yard waste. We decided to start diverting yard waste from landfills and have a composting facility. That also was controversial because people hated the idea that they couldn't put their leaves and grass in the garbage. Of course, we used to be able to rake our leaves into the street. I don't know if either of you remember. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:38:35] AMY CANTU: I do.
• [00:38:37] LIZ BRATER: Then we started requiring it be bagged in paper bags so that we could compost it. People got extremely upset about that and came to council and complained. Now everyone's used to it, but at the time, it was quite a radical thing. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:38:54] EMILY MURPHY: I bragged to people who don't live in the city about how great our compost program is. It's so interesting to get the perspective that it was not always thought of that way.
• [00:39:04] LIZ BRATER: Nelson Meade is another person I served on council with. He's a great gardener and he had a really big yard. When the people were complaining about what they were going to do with all these leaves, he said, ''We just can't get enough of that good stuff. You could rake it into your flower beds, and it disappears over the winter, becomes really good stuff for your plants.''
• [00:39:28] AMY CANTU: Sometimes ideas are just out there a little bit before their time. It takes a while.
• [00:39:32] LIZ BRATER: But yeah, and in terms of the Materials Recovery Facility, the MRR, which lately has had another iteration, that was something we worked really hard on to get that set up. We went around studying how other communities were doing it. We had a lot of decisions to make about whether or not to make recycling mandatory because that was another thing that alarmed people. But we did pass a mandatory recycling ordinance and require people to separate their recyclables from their other waste, as well as the yard waste. We've managed to divert quite a lot of materials from landfills that way also. I'm very happy that the council recently decided to support repairing, rebuilding, and reopening her own MRF here in Ann Arbor because we were always a leader statewide on recycling issues.
• [00:40:36] AMY CANTU: Well, thank you so much for that. [LAUGHTER] Thank you so much for all your years of service.
• [00:40:41] LIZ BRATER: Well, thanks. It was my honor, and I was very lucky to be able to do it.
• [00:40:52] EMILY MURPHY: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.