Vacuum

Public hearing December 7, 2011 to discuss increase of hourly parking rates in Ann Arbor

Notice of Public Hearing

Under Paragraph 8 of the City/DDA Parking Agreement, the public must be provided with an opportunity to speak at a public hearing before changes are made to hourly parking meter rates. A public hearing has been scheduled to elicit feedback on a proposed change to increase the hourly parking meter rate $0.10/hour, from $1.40/hour to $1.50/hour in September 2012.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 12 noon

Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority Office

150 S. Fifth Avenue, Third Floor Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Typepad on iPad, edited elsewhere

No support for rich text editing in safari, but otherwise performant. Kind of nice.

I'll need to really learn markdown for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it descends from setext.

Ann Arbor

A2B3 lunch is Thursday as always. Ann Arbor Parks did trick or treat today, Sunday, noon to 4pm on the Huron River.

Arborwiki makes a good companion as you go for errands around town. Ann Arbor City Council elections and a millage are coming up. The Ann Arbor Chronicle has characteristically thorough coverage of the League of Women Voters forums. Some project, not yet identified, has North Main torn up at Catherine. A second project has North Division down to a single lane. Expect delays.

No one was hurt in last week's fire on Harpst. I'm trying a neighborhood LinkedIn group to see what kind of density I need to get enough people to make a group worthwhile; it might make sense to grab people closest first and then out by distance.

Metro Detroit

Tigers lost in the ALCS, and I'm looking forward to spring training.

Power outages from the Saturday windstorms were worst in Warren.

National

Occupy Chicago has had a lot of protest, via the Chicago Tribune which was on the scene.

Occupy Wall Street took over Times Square.

Living

I am tracking steps with a pedometer again, thanks to Paul Resnick and a research group at UMSI. Statler and Waldorf have taken over the Muppets twitter account. New movie due for Thanksgiving. Cue the Muppets.

Recipes

The wind on Saturday made farmers market blustery. Squash of all sizes and varieties were there, and there's nothing like a big old Hubbard squash to keep the corner of a table down. A farmer was doing the frost dance but said they had none at the last full moon. Traditionally, it's said that the best way to open a Hubbard is to take an axe to it, or to throw it down into the cellar.

Working

It's hard to have great weird ideas when you are closing trouble tickets. My new employer Nutshell has an office where my former employer Pure Visibility used to have it's offices.

Obituaries

Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, Einar Steffrud.

Books

Books moved recently include Kawabata's, Snow Country, to be shelved on the Heikki Lunta shelf to prepare me for winter.

Tech

Pinboard now supports Gopher urls in bookmarks.

Sports

Michigan football lost to State. It was as good an excuse as any to call my aunt who went to East Lansing.

Meta

Wow, I have a lot of categories.

If you are interested in going to public meetings, you must be interested in advance

The Michigan Open Meetings Act requires 18 hours advance notice of special meetings, and even less time (though I am not clear how much less time) for special meetings of committees. Thus, if you were not on a mailing list (with a relatively small number of people on the list), you did not receive notice directly of this meeting which is needed to resolve the City of Ann Arbor and the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority's mutual disagreements over the city budget.

I follow this primarily through the exhaustively detailed reporting of my current coworking group member Dave Askins at the Ann Arbor Chronicle, the timely reporting of my former coworker Ryan Stanton at AnnArbor.com, and the new news beat that my former coworker James Dickson is carving out at the Ann Arbor Journal, and the editorial direction that home town friend John Hilton directs at the monthly Ann Arbor Observer.

From time to time, the autonomous collective of Damn Arbor pitches in, with Ben Connor Barrie most likely to be the townie and grad student voice of civic news gathering. That weblog is in the tradition of previous efforts, notably Rob Goodspeed's Goodspeed Update, the autonomous collective and voice of Julie Weatherbee at Arbor Update, and a long-anonymous Julia Lipman at Ann Arbor is Overrated. 

This is all shorthand to say that I hope you are going to this meeting, if you care about it, and that if you care enough about it to want to know that it exists without me telling you about it you have to ask to be informed in advance.

On knowing about more public meetings than you possibly could attend

Here's an overly simplified description of the process by which you can learn about, and participate in, more public meetings on more topics of public interest than you could possibly attend in person - without ever relying on someone else's account of what transpired at that meeting.

 

Identify the public body which has oversight or jurisdiction over the issue in question. There may be multiples of these, at the local, county, state and federal levels, plus occasionally a treaty organization or two that gets involved.

Identify the governing board of the body, and the individual members of the board. Your direct questions about agenda items will go to them.

Identify the staff member who is board secretary. They are your best contact for details like board minutes and notices of upcoming meetings.

Ask the board secretary that you be notified of upcoming board events, per the Open Meetings Act. Put any future dates on your calendar. Note that meeting times can change on short notice.

Ask for copies of board packets for upcoming board events, per the Freedom of Information Act, and probably because it's as easy as cc'ing you on an existing email list.

Determine if there are audio and video recordings of board meetings, and if they are streamed live online. Ask for details about access.

Identify a member of the public whose affairs are affected by the public body who needs assistive technology to participate in meetings, and work on their behalf to gain access to meeting materials in machine-readable formats.

Read minutes of past meetings. If those minutes are not online, request of the board secretary that copies be put online. Note that in most cases draft copies of meeting minutes should be available before they are approved at the next meeting.

Read agendas of upcoming meetings. In some cases, detailed agendas will be available, complete with supporting records which are intended to to help the board members make decisions. Ask the board secretary for information about any details which are not obvious from the published agenda. Note that agendas can change on short notice.

Contact individual board members in private regarding items on current and future agendas. If you are brief, concise, and narrowly focused, you can provide them with assistance in their work in upcoming meetings.

Contact the board as a whole in public to make a public statement about a topic. Note that although I leave this at the very end, this is what most people think about when they go to public meetings - standing up, all shaky, in front of a microphone and giving their opinion. By the time you have gotten to the mike, it's always best that your message (however popular or unpopular) is at the very least not a surprise.

 

Ann Arbor DDA revised committee meeting schedule, March 2011

Details? See http://a2dda.org or call 734-994-6697. 

Edward Vielmetti seeks out public meetings which also serve a light snack.

a2b3 non-summary for Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010

Attendance: 19. I had the udon noodles, which are new on the menu at Eastern Accents and quite good.

My list of things to note from the day includes, but is not limited to:

• Google's proposed fiber to the home project, and how to get it to Ann Arbor
• Susan Crawford is back in Ann Arbor from a stint in DC and teaching cyber law
• I'm not sure that I wouldn't rather have a Droid phone than a Blackberry
• There is a super-nifty Droid app which is an exercise tracker w/maps
• Searching for low RPM motors that run on 2 AA batteries
• Next Tues.at Dow Aud. at UMHS a meeting on FDA regs for social media and medicine
• Census is hiring and training workers, $14-18/hr
• a2geeks
• Ignite 3 is coming up
• Earth Day is Garlic Mustard Day; I need your recipes
• next Tuesday is Paczki Day, I need your jelly donuts
• Ann Arbor Government Documents Repository continues to collect local govdocs
• Gelman Sciences has released some new docs on their pollution plume & cleanup
• Google Buzz is out
• the DDA is doing a survey on parking
• the hot pepper flakes are called "Ichimi Togarashi"

This list deserves hyperlinks; when I get them I'll go back and edit them in.

Thanks to everyone who came, see you next time.

on the media and government - watching the DDA, day 3

day 3 notes

I ducked out at the end of the second day of MT training and headed off to the DDA meeting downtown.  The meeting had started on time, but I didn't get there on time, so I missed some of the initial public commentary.

In addition to the usual crowd of developers, city staff, and other interested parties, there were three reporters in attendance: Dave Askins from the Ann Arbor Chronicle; Andrew Cluley, a news reporter at 89.1 WEMU FM; and Dave Gershman from the Ann Arbor News.  Some part of the DDA meeting was also recorded by video cameras; I haven't figured out yet how to replay that.

It's instructive to see the different viewpoints that these three media channels provide, and to figure out what added perspective you could get from it.

Dave Askins was twittering out notes on @A2ChronicleMeet with a running play by play.  I'm certain that it will be part of the raw materials for a long, descriptive, detailed account of the meeting, complete with bits of reflection on logos on garbage cans and the ins and outs of what roles and responsibilities flow to the mayor pro tem.  Dave gave a great talk at Ignite Ann Arbor 1 the previous night about how the extremely descriptive style of news that the Chronicle publishes serves them well in reviewing things long after the fact, even if wading through 7000 words seems like a bit long for right now in a world where reporters are used to publishing 500 or 1000.

Andrew Cluely from WEMU was in the back taking a few notes, and he had his recorder out front at the end of the meeting with one of the board members.  I looked online really hard for where the story might have been posted already, and came up at best with this page where it might be, buried deep on a search string.  There's some wasted opportunity here, since the same-day audio clip is going to give you a perspective on decisions later - if, and only if, you can find it again.

Dave Gershman filed two stories from the Ann Arbor News - one on how the DDA's decision on public arts funding impacts the murals proposed by Fire Up Downtown, and one on how federal stimulus money will save $1.5 million in financing costs for the Library Lot underground garage.  The mural story attracted MLive's usual crowd of incredibly lame, rude, and anonymous commenters - people who didn't add any value to the story.

Now I know that there were a lot more stories to be told out of that event - the continuing saga of somewhat confused people figuring out how e-Park meters work, the continuing series of anecdotes about how the Maynard St structure is always full without any supporting data or analysis, and the parliamentary maneuvers about whether Leigh Greden should be able to vote in the seat reserved for the mayor as mayor pro tem. 

Where do you start with news?  Small town politics of parking meters.  I'm told that new employees at the New York Times and returning international correspondents once worked the sanitation beat as their first stint (and I can't source that quote, even though I'd like to, because I didn't bookmark that link).

records request: ann arbor downtown development authority parking data

update: broken links fixed to interview, thanks John Balogh for the heads up

as sent by postal mail and email

March 14, 2009

 

Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority
150 South Fifth Avenue
Suite 301
Ann Arbor, MI 48104

 

     RECORDS REQUEST

 

Dear Records Request Officer:

 

Pursuant to the state open records act, I request access to and copies of the continuously updated information about the current availability of parking structure occupancy and free spaces, as currently provided to the general public on the web page

http://www.a2dda.org/parking__transportation/available_parking_spots/

For your reference, this system is described in this interview

http://www.homelessdave.com/tt20080411stephensmith.htm

conducted by Mr. David Askins of the Ann Arbor Chronicle, in which a representative of a contractor for the DDA says:

"SS: Oh, okay! Yeah, no, I haven't had a lot of time to pay attention to our statistics yet, but I will at the end of this month. It just rolled out April 1st. Our area associations, I imagine, are going to want to embed this--and we encourage them to--in their own webpages. For instance, Main Street Area Association, and State Street Area Association. There are a lot of them, these associations and other organizations, who could really benefit from it, especially if you're going to have an event, you're telling your attendees to come downtown. "

Despite these assurances, our current requests are met with this error message:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /parking__transportation/available_parking_spots/
on this server.

---

Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7a DAV/2 mod_jk/1.2.20 PHP/5.2.1 Server at a2dda.org Port 80

.

 

I am willing to pay up to a maximum of $20 in fees associated with the fulfillment of this request.

As the release of this data is in the public interest - indeed, is within the primary goal and charter of the DDA - I ask that these fees be waived.

 

If my request is denied in whole or part, I ask that you justify all deletions by reference to specific exemptions of the act.

 

Thank you for your assistance.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Edward Vielmetti

DDA meeting, downtown, today; I have 4 minutes on the agenda; here's what I said

Thanks all for your suggestions; I gave them my 4 minutes. Here's what I said.

1.  Not going to talk about the Link Bus and how bad the signage is; I did my own pocket schedule and now I'm OK.  This is not the right board to give that feedback to.

2.  Not going to talk about how the AATA Ridetrak is down and how it's been down for a month; that's a message to the AATA board, not this board.

3.  Not going to talk about Rob Goodspeed's article showing that structures are on average half empty (which got an immediate response from Rene Greff), because I don't generally drive to town.

What I did talk about:

Sidewalks are not promptly cleared after snow storms, to the detriment of pedestrians.  In particular there is a dangerous part at the curb, where the property owner (who is responsible for the sidewalk) and the city (who is responsible for the street) share responsibility for the failure to clear the curb, resulting in huge puddles at corners.

I showed the DDA my pair of Yaktrax (http://bit.ly/yaktrax) and suggested that someone could make good money selling them from a cart on the street on icy days. (thanks to John Hritz for that timely holiday present).

Look for more coverage from the Ann Arbor Chronicle.