Letter to the Editor: EV Rebates
The city’s plan to spend $500,000 to give qualified residents about $4,000 to $7,500 to buy a new or used EV shows poor judgement at the very least.
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Does This Landfill Project Pass the Sniff Test?
Jenna and Jim Tenzillo moved to Northville Township from Ann Arbor to shorten their commutes, but the move came with a trade-off: the smell of the Arbor Hills landfill, located just across the county line in Salem Township.
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Sirens’ Song
As the sky spasmed with lightning in the early hours of April 15, smartphones throughout Washtenaw County shrieked: TORNADO WARNING. Mournful wails could be heard outside, even above the thunder and bullet-hail of rain. Ann Arbor’s twenty-two outdoor warning sirens were sounding an emergency for the first time since the bow echo thunderstorm in July 2023.
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Queens of the Monarchs
How two friends, and their families, are doing their part to support pollinators.
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April the Cruelest Month?
Students at U-M Law School’s Civil-Criminal Litigation Clinic are campaigning on behalf of Saline resident Changming Fan, who has been ordered to scale back his community garden.
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A2Zero, Six Years In
“The system is the problem,” says Missy Stults, director of the Office of Sustainability and Innovations (OSI), which is why A2Zero focuses on institutionalizing change. Unwinding entrenched policies that have shaped development patterns and limited community choices for decades takes time—so why did A2Zero set a ten-year timeline? Stults insists that the plan’s ambitious pacing was necessary to maintain a sense of urgency about climate impacts.
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Lisa Brush and Jim Frey
Brush and Frey fell in love nearly twenty years ago. They first met less than a mile from the Longshore building, while collaborating on Leslie Science & Nature Center’s shift to an independent nonprofit.
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Something Blue
In October, the city began accepting applications from property owners for the Bluebelt program, a new effort designed to safeguard the sourcewater that feeds Ann Arbor’s drinking water system.
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Growing Pains
Barbara Gamm watched, worried, as nine trees fell in Scheffler Park near the construction site for Fire Station 4, touted as the city’s first net-zero facility.
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HERD Mentality
“I’m so glad you asked about HERD,” Ann Arbor’s Home Energy Rating Disclosure Ordinance, says Julie Roth, energy manager for the city’s Office of Sustainability and Innovations. “It’s safe to say that Ann Arbor has one of the most robust residential consumer protection programs in the country.”
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Don’t Call It a Data Center
In December, U-M announced its plans to partner with the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to create a $1.25 billion “state-of-the-art” computing and AI research facility. Construction is expected to begin in 2027 and wrap up in 2031. The facility is tentatively sited on nearly 150 acres of land on Textile Rd. in Ypsilanti Twp.
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Fixing Barton Dam
When I lived in Ann Arbor back in the 1980s, Barton Dam was barely on my radar. The Huron River was scenic enough from the road: a heron or hawk here and there, maybe a deer ambling just off the shoulder. The dam itself, tucked out of sight from Huron River Dr., might as well have been invisible.
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Park #163
A sunny weekend in mid-September saw the grand opening of Broadway Park West. Sitting on seven acres of new green space on the Huron River just north of the Amtrak station, the park connects to the Border to Border Trail via a new pedestrian bridge—eliminating the need for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the less-accessible Argo Dam.
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A Pond Restored
“It will be heartbreaking for a lot of people if it is allowed to dry up and die.”
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Lyme Disease Alert
Chelsi Preuc at the Washtenaw County Health Department says that through June, the department received reports of eighty-five cases of Lyme disease, up from fifty in the same period last year.
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Big Book Sale
“It’s probably the biggest sale in town,” says bookseller Gene Alloway. He plans to line up early on Friday, September 5, when the three-day event begins at WCC’s Morris Lawrence Building. “The books are in fine shape,” says the owner of Motte & Bailey Booksellers, “and they have lots of different subjects.”
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The New MRF
On December 1, 2021, Recycle Ann Arbor unveiled Ann Arbor’s revamped materials recovery facility (MRF). Their predecessor, ReCommunity, had trashed it back in 2016, and the upgrades came with a hefty price tag. RAA secured two grants but still had to take out $5.9 million in loans.
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Salty Streams
It was a snowy winter, and Ann Arbor used a lot of road salt to clear its streets: 4,057 tons as of March 19, according to city communications specialist Robert Kellar. That’s 656 tons more than last winter, though still around 1,800 tons shy of the most recent high in the winter of 2021–2022. Along with ice-melter applied by contractors and homeowners, some of it ends up in storm sewers and the Huron River tributaries they feed.
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Target: Farmers
At risk are dozens of conservation easements, grants, and farm programs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In Michigan, 90 percent of USDA funding is allocated to commodity conservation, leaving new farmers and small agricultural businesses particularly vulnerable.
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Target: Environment
The Trump administration’s plan to slash payments on research grants has put thousands of U-M jobs at risk. But other local researchers are in even more immediate jeopardy: those who work directly for the federal government, at the EPA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL).
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