Um, every member of the public has been provided with access to its preparation and every member of the public has been provided with opportunities to speak and be heard on the plan and the broader issue of development and land use regulation in Ann Arbor, which I should note has been a central issue in every election that we've had over at least the last three to four election cycles and perhaps longer than that. those elections um which supply the council's democratic legitimacy to initiate, direct and approve this work product and the plan specific public engagement process which has been far more rigorous than what state law requires have provided voters and residents with innumerable and ongoing opportunities to participate in the process, provide their input, and be heard. And that will continue to occur until the plan is done. But that public access and transparency has come at a cost.
and it's a cost worth paying and I want to be clear about that. But I think we also have to be cleareyed about the bill. Anyone asking to further delay the plan has to have an answer for that. While we've worked on it, the city's elected legislature has remained largely out of due respect for this process and the need to include the public in that process. Largely frozen on the comprehensive land use reform, arguably the most pressing public policy issue facing the city. The voters who elected these leaders to act to address the city's housing crisis have been asked to wait. The democratic legislative process is nearly frozen. The mass exploitation of renters and home buyers throughout our city continues unabated and we've heard from several of them as part of this process. We outsource 80,000 daily commuters and the destruction that activity creates outside of our city.
Economic and racial segregation and displacement continue in many of our neighborhoods. the I would urge the individuals who are urging us to pause to go back and revisit Professor Leavine's comment tonight about the connection between housing policy and social justice and to reconcile their request to wait with those costs, the human costs. My family's per my personal story, my family story is the story of migration, moving towards economic and educational opportunity. I did it. My parents did it. My grandparents did it and when we all did it, we moved into houses built in a period in America in which you could build legally a lot of housing and so we could move towards that opportunity. The longer we wait on the plan, the longer we wait to legalize more housing types, the longer we deprive the next generation of the opportunity that I know I took for granted.
Thank you, Commissioner White. Uh just a few things. Um and unfortunately the the commenters aren't here in the chamber to hear. So hopefully you will uh hear these comments on uh YouTube later or maybe if they get captured in the paper. So uh the first thing that I wanted uh to note is no one is forcing anyone especially single family home owners to sell their properties. Uh there is no mandate from the city. There is no mandate in this plan. I think people can uh stay housed uh if they choose uh to do that. The other thing is we hear often that the only people who get to speak in this uh process are those who pay taxes. And I think what is trying to be uh communicated here is that renters don't pay taxes, which is false. Uh renters actually pay often times more taxes than single family homeowners.
By my own calculations, most renters pay between $500 and $700 per door in the city of Ann Arbor. And uh depending on when they move into those dwellings, they might be in an uncapped uh environment. So they're paying the highest possible taxes that are present in our city. Uh we heard comments about the loss of the tree canopy. I do want to remind Ann Arborites, there are one over 1.4 million trees that are present. Uh that was as um recent as a uh 2012 study uh that the city of Ann Arbor commissioned to count the tree canopy. And uh I think we would be open to increasing the tree pan uh canopy and as I said last week we could do that by exchanging um car storage for uh planting more trees in our city. Uh the other thing that I just wanted uh to note is often times I sit at the table and I hear my neighbors uh talk about our city as if only those who live in single family uh detached dwelling units are those who live in neighborhoods uh or have neighborhood character.
And I just want to remind us that the the bricks, the stone, and the wood of those dwellings do not make our neighborhood character. It's the people who dwell in them. And everyone who lives in Ann Arbor, that lives in a residence, they live in a neighborhood and they often are proud of the neighborhoods that they live in and their voices shouldn't be diminished uh at all. And so I'm grateful for those who have come out to share with us this evening and I look forward to continuing this process. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner W. Well said. Um, Commissioner Weatherbe. So, um, one of the things that I think people are really scared of is how how much their neighborhoods could potentially change and how quickly. And I just wanted to um make a statement about my neighborhood where there have been 11 multifamily projects that have gone in and uh it has somewhat changed the tenor of the neighborhood.
There's a lot more dogs. There's less traffic actually uh more parking spaces because uh we got rid of some of the curb cuts. Uh more trees. The buildings have been required to plant trees and many of those single family houses didn't have trees and I've lived there for 29 years and there's been 11 new projects. So, this doesn't happen quickly. I live on Main Street. I live in an area that was zoned commercial and multif family near campus, relatively inexpensive. So, even in an area with that's very sort of ripe for development, um you don't get a lot of projects. And I think people need to understand that these things don't happen. This isn't going to happen tomorrow if we pass any zoning reform. It's going to take a while. I also spent uh some my lunch hour today looking at old uh copies of the Michigan Daily Archives, which are very easy to search, lovely to find uh issues.
And it turns out that we've been complaining about ne neighbors, new neighbors development, out of town developers for at least a hundred years. Uh I was able to find some references from November of 19 of 8 uh sorry so 103 years ago of people saying what we really need is zoning reform because there wasn't zoning at the time and that that would solve everything if we had zoning and it would prevent out of town developers from coming into our city. So, I just want people to know that this is something that we talk a lot about and we will continue to talk a lot about and there will be people on all sides, but this is nothing new and it's nothing um it is not this body or city council that is trying to do this wild new thing. This is a a struggle and a conversation in cities and has been pretty much since cities started.
So um I think we should give each other some uh grace and understand that there are uh comment um points on all sides but that this is not but also remember that we are all neighbors and we are all trying to do the best for the city. And I think sometimes people uh conflate sitting behind a dis with um trying to ram something down somebody's throat or change a neighborhood when really it's just we're all trying to work together and to have the best city possible. Thank you, Commissioner Weatherbe. Do we have other commissioners? Um Commissioner Wait, wait, who? Let's go with Commissioner Aprons. and we'll go with Mills and then I can be relatively fast. Um I yeah I many things I wanted to say have already been said by uh my eloquent co-commissioner. So um but I just wanted to I think I continued to be disheartened by the amount of misinformation that continues to circulate and a lot of the people who spoke tonight and were upset about the plan quoted misinformation.
So I just want to set the record straight on a few things. It seems that some people are still uh circulating an idea that low-rise residential is going to be four stories with un no limit on units and no limit on lot combinations. That is not true. Um we have agreed against the will of some of us uh to limit low-rise residential to three stories. Uh if you walk around neighborhoods, you'll see existing three-story buildings all over every residential neighborhood in this town. um it's well within the kind of existing uh fabric of those neighborhoods. Um and we have talked about ways to limit lot combinations and um units or density I should say. Another uh thing that I heard was that we're ramming this plan through in a very short timeline compared to other municipalities. So, I just want to put it on the record that this work started uh almost two years ago and by the time we're done, we'll probably be approaching almost three years.
Um, Commissioner Dish already addressed this, but parks are public land. They're not part of any of the reasonzoning that we're do or any of the um they will not be part of they're not on the on the slate to be reszoned as part of this plan. There are no parks that are suddenly going to be um available to be developed with high-rise development or housing at all. Um the the person from Almondinger Park who spoke about their fear of 618 South Main the yard Hoover and Green I just want to reassure them that all of the area around Almondinger Park will still be zoned residential. It'll be part of low-rise residential. It'll allow things like threetory um duplexes, triplexes. Uh currently you can have ADUs and multi-units there. It will not change the character in the way that you're imagining of your neighborhood. Um, and the last one is that somebody talked about UDC changes or zoning ordinance updates that that were not that just were hit in the dark of night um, past with no public notification.
That's illegal. We always have a public hearing for every change to our zoning ordinance. Um, and that will continue to be the case. Thanks. Thank you, Commissioner Mills. I also had some of the things that I know we've talked about in the last couple of meetings, few meetings because we've been taking public comment and um talking about this for a while on the list, but most people kind of covered the things that have already changed. If anybody wa goes back and watches this, right, I want to recognize that different people come at this at different times and learn about this at different times. And I want to thank the people who showed up and also like that they don't all show up at the same time cuz like goodness we would be here many many many more hours. Um so if you if this was your first time coming thank you.
If you came back and said something new awesome thank you. Um I also just want to reiterate we've talked about this and again if people are just tuning in now you might not know about this. This is all part of the public engagement process. Um, I certainly hope that we are not taking hours of public comment and it not doing anything with it. I'm expecting that our final draft will reflect the idea that we are hearing that that there's shared values in this place of loving this town. A lot of people love this town and I think like this is why they care. This is why they come here. Um, I also hear lots of shared values or shared goals that it's expensive and like we need to think about affordability and also share goals that we need to think about sustainability and those in terms of where we have put where voters have put their pocketbooks.
Like I think we've heard that again and again. I also think that people recognize that like what we have right now is not if we just put a bell jar over the city of Ann Arbor, we can't achieve either of those goals effectively. And so things will there will be change. And while I would love for them there to be win-wins all of the time, sometimes there are trade-offs. And that's what actually a couple of weeks ago we talked about the comprehensive plan needing to talk more about those trade-offs and how we how we envision um dealing with those. And so I'm expecting that because of the public comment that we have, we're going to see even more of that in the next draft. And I think that that's good and that's important because the reality is there will have to be trade-offs. Period. Um, and so, uh, I look forward to continuing the conversation, and I may say this again for the people who are new next week, right?
Like, because I think that's important. We know that people come in at different times, and they are all welcome. Thank you, Commissioner Mills. We'll go to Commissioner Norton. Um, a lot of what's been said are things that I would have liked to have said or I'm happy have been said. I'm not going to repeat them. Um, I am concerned um that we stay faithful to this goal of asking people to come and comment and then to meaningfully respond to comments. We'll be in much worse shape if after all of this is said and done, we don't really listen to people and and and acknowledge their concern. So, I I'm just going to I hate myself for saying this, but I was talking to the planning staff here suggesting maybe artificial intelligence, oh my god, is a way to go to take all of this feedback we've been getting.
AI is actually not too bad in terms of summarizing lots of material and pulling out themes. Um, I don't like the way it works with the web web and scour the web and pulls stuff out, but for summarizing published comments, it's maybe a useful tool and they assured me they've already been playing with it to see testing it to see if it would work. I would thought I would convey that to you all. I think that would be a useful way to pull out what are the key things we're hearing over and over again because we are pretty much at this point hearing some things. We're also hearing some new things that I want to explore more like the water supply questions that came up tonight and water contamination. There's some issues that are popping up that we definitely should pay attention to. I'm not sure how or when to fold those into the conversation.
Um, and then I want to make sure that we I don't want the plan to be a tit for tat. Someone said this. Here's our response to that. But but we do need to acknowledge I think for the sake of trying to produce a plan that was accessible, it was a bit thin on detail and kind of discussion of the background justifications and we've been called to to task for that and and we need to rectify that. So, and and I'm not pointing fingers, but we need to acknowledge that and and do a better job of laying that stuff out so that at the end of the day, folks who feel like they came and and spoke were actually heard. That'll be really important um for the outcome of all of this. And I think I'm probably just saying thing everybody already knows. Um I will point out I've been teaching planning for 30 years.
Oh my gosh, does this really drive home how complicated this whole process is. and how difficult it can be to understand where different kinds of decisions get made. The plan is a guidance document. It's not going to have overnight effects. That's going to make some folks who want to see immediate change unhappy. It's going to make folks who are really scared to death of change maybe relieved. Um, but it's an important document and we need to take care and what policies we establish because they'll they'll provide important guidance and and so it's worth taking the time to work that through. The really difficult things that I think folks are really concerned about are the design guidelines. I think a lot of the concerns are much more about design than they are about density per se and we'll need to really noodle on those carefully as the follow on.
Um the goal there will be to provide enough guidance to make sure that whatever changes are happening to neighborhoods are conversant with the neighborhood and not overly disruptive but not give so much ability to neighbors to complain that they have an automatic veto um on everything. That so much of this effort is going to have to be walking the line between allowing effective change that really isn't the benefit of the community while listening to folks but not giving them veto powers to stop everything. Um, that's all stuff that I think we're all familiar with. Now, I'm speaking to the folks who are watching the late night videos. Um, those will be those will be the challenges that we confront going forward is how to strike that line. Where's the right place to put the detail? Where's the right place to strike strike that balance? Okay, I'm on a soap box.
I'm going to stop. Thank you. Gotcha. Thank you, Commissioner Norton. Do we have any other commissioners that would like to respond to any of the comments that they heard? Um I think actually everyone spoke. So um there was only one thing that I wanted to mention. Um I've heard about infrastructure concerns and I want to say that during the actual site plan process um it goes to every division to review these items. And one of the things I've heard consistently is about storm water. And I do want to address that. So the county water resource commissioner publishes storm water standards and actually the vast majority of Ann Arbor properties do not comply with current standards because they were developed prior to 2014 when the latest set of code revisions came out. So the storm water retention requirements um has to do with the first bankful flush.