Who’s in the Running to Run Ann Arbor?
On the August primary ballot: Three mayoral candidates and many more seeking council seats
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Government
Kratom Invasion
Kratom is a natural pain remedy and pick-me-up with a wide following. But a dangerous lab-made version is hitting the health care and recovery communities hard.
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Sheriff’s Battles Stretch Into Second Year
In late February, when I started researching Alyshia Dyer (Washtenaw County’s first female sheriff) and her first year-plus on the job, there was already much to unpack and discuss.
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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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Roundabout Rejuvenation
After over a dozen years of crashes and complaints, the State and Ellsworth roundabout will be revamped in 2027.
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Comprehensive Plan: What Happens Now?
In mid-April, Ann Arbor’s planning commission held its first working session aimed at figuring out zoning and other legal language changes based on the city’s new Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP). Planning staff arrived with three proposed outlines of implementation steps the commission could take, including a set of seven priorities the planners recommended.
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The Road Less Travelable
Those tire-swallowing holes are created during the weather’s freeze and thaw cycle where subfreezing temperatures are quickly followed by fifty-degree days. Moisture like snow and ice melt seeps into the pavement, freezes and expands, and then thaws to create gaps.
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Mamady Camara Petitions for Release
On April 1, 2026, Mamady Camara, an asylum seeker from Guinea living in Ypsilanti, “celebrated” his twenty-first birthday in a cell at North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan.
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Tax Imbalance
A new U-M study highlights inequity in metropolitan tax bases. How does Ann Arbor stack up?
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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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When Home Isn’t There
A recent report by the Washtenaw County Continuum of Care (CoC), a major player working to coordinate local efforts to end homelessness, paints an urgent picture: as of December 2025, at least 842 people in the county are experiencing homelessness—a 42 percent increase since 2024.
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Menopause Matters
Menopause and the menopause transition “remains one of the most overlooked and underserved areas in medicine,” according to the Menopause Society, a nonprofit focused on educating health care professionals.
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Arbor South Moves Ahead
He was referencing Arbor South, a $588 million plan to build more than 1,000 apartments and condos, as well as a hotel, services, and public spaces, on the parking lots around the 777 Building on Eisenhower Pkwy. (“The Litmus Test,” June 2024). Proposed by Ann Arbor’s Oxford Companies and Ohio developer Crawford Hoying, it was the first response to council’s rezoning of the area for high-density development, and councilmembers had been weighing whether to support it financially for almost a year.
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Weathering ICE
“You see vehicles that look suspicious with dark windows and [when] you look inside you see [people] in bullet-proof vests and you know, it’s them: its ICE,” says a community advocate who wishes to remain anonymous. “It’s happening in our lovely county. It’s here.”
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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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Second Chances
After forty-three years, eleven months, and twenty-three days, Billy Cole was released from prison. It was 2019 and he found himself scrambling, trying to find his footing. He took on factory work, delivery work, anything he could find to bring in money and avoid returning to prison.
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Rode To Hell
It was a bright autumn morning for the more than 100,000 people driving to the Big House for the University of Michigan’s October 4 homecoming game against Wisconsin. Some sixteen miles west, about 250 others gathered at Chelsea Community Fairgrounds for a very different athletic contest: the annual Rode To Hell gravel bike race.
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Slippery Sidewalks
With the recent snowfall and cold weather, it should come as no surprise that A2 Fix It, Ann Arbor’s online system for reporting community issues—from potholes to broken streetlights to missed trash collections—has been inundated with complaints about ice-clad sidewalks. What is surprising is that some of these uncleared sidewalks are maintained by the city.
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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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Squeezed Out
The Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation 2025 Washtenaw County Housing Study revealed what Ann Arbor’s working class has long known: if you make less than $50,000, you can’t afford to live here.
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