The following post, on the subject of our City’s proposed transit millage, comes from our friend Richard Murphy, Ypsilanti’s former city planner.
Just one short week from now, Ypsi voters will have their chance to vote on the City’s Charter Amendment for Public Transit, providing secure and dedicated funding for transit service in the City. (Sorry, Township voters – I’ve heard from a few of you asking for the chance to vote for transit funding, but this is just the City for now.)
Around budget time in the city, we always hear a lot of talk about “core services” – and I’d argue that public transit is one of those. I assume most readers understand the environmental reasons to support transit (or else don’t care) and focus on the economic:
Transit keeps people getting to their jobs, or to school, or both, bringing dollars into the community. AATA’s ridership surveys show about 35% of riders using the bus to get to work, and 40% to get to school – from Ypsilanti, both those types of trips are primarily into Ann Arbor, and those riders come home to Ypsi and pay their rent or their property taxes, patronize the bars and restaurants, etc. Anecdotally, I’ve talked to a number of riders who said that, without transit service, they wouldn’t be able to live in Ypsi. If we lose the bus, we lose these neighbors, and have to deal with more vacancies in our neighborhoods.
On the upside, transit service is a draw for new residents, especially the young, skilled, “creative class”, “Millennial”, whatever-you-call-’ems. A survey of young metro Detroiters, released this weekend by the Millennial Mayors Congress, found that good transit service is one of the most important things this demographic looks for in a place to live – and that 70% of respondents were unhappy with the level of transit service available to them. (Transit access was a bigger issue than job availability!) This is certainly why I’m involved in the campaign – we would never have moved to Ypsi if it didn’t have AATA, and I’m not interested in giving it up.
On top of attracting new residents and keeping the ones we’ve got, add in things like allowing older residents to age in place, reducing the cost of living, and helping address traffic congestion for everybody who’s still driving, and public transit service is a pretty clear win for the community.
But it’s not something we can take for granted. Despite all of Ypsilanti’s benefits, it’s still a city in Michigan, which means we’ve got budget troubles. Thanks to 30 years of anti-tax policy at the State level combined with deindustrialization and now the foreclosure crisis, the City Council has had to make a lot of tough choices and a lot of cuts over the past several years to keep the city afloat. Our transit service has not been immune from those cuts. Last year, the Council worked with AATA to secure Federal recovery funds to cover the gap in funding for a two-year contract, with the understanding that this was a temporary fix.
The Charter Amendment is a more permanent fix. It’s a Headlee override of about 0.98 mills that would provide just about what our AATA contract costs, with language that would ensure the funds couldn’t be siphoned off to something else. As has been mentioned, yes, it’s effectively a tax rate increase – “Headlee override” means that we charged this millage once, we had to reduce it according to a formula in State law, and now we’re voting to override that formula. If it passes, we raise our tax rate back to 20 mills, where it used to be. (Though most of us can expect the actual tax bill to be lower next year anyways, based on what property values are doing.)
Over on the City Charter thread, I saw the assertion that the Charter Amendment’s dedicated funding was the wrong way to go – that “good public policy” would just put transit in each annual budget. The problem with this is that it requires a (political) decision every year at budget time, making it impossible to plan for. There are a lot of transit improvements that have been in the works for some time, from reworking AATA’s existing routes to adding late night or express service to Ann Arbor to the commuter rail to Ann Arbor, DTW, Dearborn, and Detroit. For Ypsi to see any of these things happen – even on others’ dimes – there has to be stable funding that can be relied upon from year to year to sustain the basic service. Even setting aside Ypsi’s current budget situation, providing a stable and dedicated funding source would be a good idea – and is how most transit funding is done, both in Michigan and nationally.
As was discussed here on MM.com over the summer, this is a do-over – the Charter Amendment appeared on the August ballot and won 70% of the vote at that time. Unfortunately, due to a technicality, that vote didn’t count, so we have to win it again: a Charter Amendment can only be put on a “General Election” or “Special Election” ballot. I understand this would only have required a resolution by Council declaring the August ballot to be a special election, but it wasn’t caught in time. To be very clear, this is not an issue for pinning blame on one half of Council or the other, as some have tried – I was working on the language with both Mayor Schreiber and Councilman Murdock up to the day of the Council vote, and the “special election” requirement managed to slip past the City Attorney in the process.
So remember – on November 2nd, vote “yes” for public transit. We expect a little bit of drop-off from that 70% number next week, as there’s a lot on the ballot, but think it’s a pretty good sign that Ypsilantians think transit is important and worth preserving. Take a snack to the polls, so you can make it through everything else on the ballot and show your support for transit.
Finally, everybody in Ypsi should make sure to participate in the “Moving You Forward” transit master plan process for Washtenaw County. As I said, there’s a lot in the works around transit, but this planning process will help determine what gets prioritized, and we need to make sure Ypsi is represented in the process.
