After sorting through thirteen candidates, voters last month returned twenty-year vet Susan Baskett to the Ann Arbor Board of Education along with newcomers Jacinda Townsend Gides, Rima Mohammad, and Susan Ward Schmidt. During the campaign, Baskett and Schmidt generally supported the board’s recent direction, including the pandemic shutdown, while Mohammad and Townsend Gides were more critical. All three new members were endorsed by dissident trustee Jeff Gaynor, who’s clashed with his colleagues over issues of transparency and privacy, so there could be conflicts ahead.
In the six-way race for library board, ten-year vet and board chair Jim Leija reclaimed his seat and will be joined by Cat Hadley and Aidan Sova, who ran with him as a slate.
Their most important work, Leija says, will be “to figure out what kind of a downtown branch we can really give the community that gives them the space that they deserve.” Trustees have been “slowly and diligently working our way through research and feasibility,” he says, before developing a plan and deciding whether to take it to the voters.
The four-way race for the circuit-court seat vacated by retiring judge Archie Brown was narrowed to two in the August primary: deputy city attorney Arianne Slay and private attorney Marla Linderman Richelew. Slay claimed the seat decisively in November, with 71 percent of the vote.
