Ann Arbor City Council Voting Chart for the Meeting of May 20, 2024

Here’s the agenda.

The Consent Agenda had 11 items, 9 of which were street closings for events. The other two were CA-10, an a millage grant agreement between the city and the Ann Arbor Housing Development Corporation, and CA-11, the ADA transition plan for making city parks more accessible. All were approved unanimously.

There was one ordinance at second reading: PH-1/B-1 was a simple annexation of a two-lot township island.

There was one ordinance at first reading: C-1 modifies fines for failing to remove snow, generally increasing fines for multifamily and commercial properties. The redlined version is available here which shows the changes clearly.

The first five resolutions were mayoral appointments which passed unanimously.

DC-6 was amendments to the council rules that were quite long but there are two particular items of note that modify public comment rules. First, if there are more than thirty people signed up to speak for public comment, each person’s time will be reduced from three to two minutes so as to accommodate as many speakers as possible. Second, there will be an area around the podium reserved exclusively for the person speaking, so other in-person attendees don’t crowd or otherwise interfere with the speaker.

DS-1 was a resolution to issue up to $9M in capital bonds to fund the affordable housing project at 121 Catherine.

DS-2 through 4 were fee adjustments for city services.

DS-5 was the city budget. There were several amendments, the text of which are here.

The following amendments passed:

• $100k to hire someone to help with zoning changes. It’s part of city council’s new focus on accelerating the development of housing, to address the housing crisis. The money comes from the general fund’s reserve balance.
• Change a level 1 planner to a level 5 planner. The budget called for three new junior planners. Two of them have already been hired. For the last one, we will hire an experienced planner instead of a junior one. They expect this to be revenue neutral because an experienced planner will get more planning done, so the city will get more revenue from permit fees and so forth.
• $500k from marijuana tax for eviction prevention and low income youth services.
• $500k from marijuana tax to continue funding for the Rising Hope for Housing program for returning citizens; a project of A Brighter Way.
• $100k to send out a mailer of factual information. The idea is to help out people who have a hard time using the internet. Let them know who their council members are, and about city programs people can take advantage of, and have phone numbers of who to call for what. The money just covers printing and mailing. The council intends to write this themselves, at the Administration Committee. They haven’t decided exactly what will go in it yet.

One more amendment, to prioritize flashing warning lights at an individual crosswalk on Stone School rather than have it go through the normal prioritization process, failed.