The $12 Million Quarterback
The 2024 Michigan Football season is likely to be remembered for two things: After a tepid start, the Wolverines upset the Ohio State Buckeyes. And Bryce Underwood upended Michigan athletics.
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News
Parting Gift
“Law enforcement tows” by the sheriff’s office and AAPD generated $436,500 in fees in 2023, not including extras like storage. “They make so much freaking money off towing,” says Clayton. “And we regulated how much they could charge for this and that. Enough for ’em to make money—they’re all making a ton of money—but they’re not gouging the people” whose cars are towed.
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Gifts of Life
Dorrie Dils became president and CEO of Gift of Life Michigan in 2016. At the time, she says, the Ann Arbor–based agency was “averaging about 280 organ donors a year.” The number has since more than doubled, to 578 last year.
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Magic Mushrooms
In 2020, Ann Arbor became one of the first cities in the country to decriminalize the sale of “magic mushrooms.” Now Hosanagar is coinvestigator on a study of psilocybin, the fungus’s psychoactive ingredient, for treatment-resistant depression.
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A Better School Board?
“I feel pretty good,” says AAPS board president Torchio Feaster of the November election results. “We elected a lot of good people in this community.”
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Jim Toy Center Is Back
This month, the Rainbow Readers Book Club will hold its first meeting at the center’s new home at 560 S. Main St. The blue house across from the Union Rec restaurant is owned by Greyfort Development, Wickfield’s real estate holding company.
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Revolution Rejected
Prop C, which would have eliminated partisan labels and primary elections, earned just 28 percent of the vote. Prop D, to create public funding for council and mayoral candidates, went down 30–70 percent.
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Beavers Are Back
The first signs were subtle but undeniable: last November, Matthaei Botanical Garden staff began noticing trees stripped of bark or cut down entirely, leaving only a pointed stump behind, and a pile of leaves and sticks along the edge of the creek slowly growing into an unmistakable dam. Those efforts soon raised the level of the creek by more than a foot for several hundred yards upstream.
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Burns Park Buzz
When the postcards arrived at homes in North Burns Park this summer, residents were understandably curious. The owner of 1015 Olivia Ave., one of the largest homes in the neighborhood, had applied to the city to divide the parcel into two lots.
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Mind Your Step
More than ten years after the first complaint on A2 Fix It, a sidewalk on Third St. will finally be fixed next year.
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The Volunteer Vanishes
The decline in volunteers adds to the challenges facing the Ann Arbor Public Schools, which are reeling in the wake of a budget deficit and staff cuts. “It’s not like there’s a parent at home anymore,” says Gina Maksimchuk, who teaches kindergarten oung fives at Abbot. And that means “fewer people are available to volunteer.”
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Running for Judge
The 22nd Circuit Court’s Tim Connors’ term expires in January and the 15th District Court’s Joseph Burke plans to retire at the end of December. Both seats are for six-year terms, but the job usually winds up being for life or until mandatory retirement at seventy, because sitting judges seldom face challengers. When they do, they almost never lose.
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Market Reenvisioned
Wilczewski, a vendor at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market, was responding to a question about the latest plan to “reenvision” it. Indeed they have.
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Football Families
At dusk, on fall Fridays across the county, the world of high school football comes back to life, like a prep sports version of Brigadoon. The marching bands. Singsongy cheerleader chants. An announcer’s booming voice. Armored athletes crashing into each other. And the bleacher crowd’s claps and jeers at the action unfolding before them, on 100 yards of astroturf.
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A Vital School Board Vote
The November 5 election is about the schools’ past, present, and future—the current board’s firing of superintendent Jeanice Swift last summer, the discovery of a $25 million hole the budget in March, the hiring of Jazz Parks as the new superintendent in June, and the need to grow enrollment to keep the schools financially sound in the future.
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Election Revolution?
The historic contest between Democratic vice president Kamala Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump at the top of the November 5 ballot is expected to draw huge numbers of voters on Election Day. But with no city council seats contested, the most impactful items locally are proposals near the end of the packed ballot—particularly Ann Arbor proposals A, to create a city-owned “sustainable energy utility,” and C and D, which would make city elections nonpartisan and provide public funding for council and mayoral candidates.
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Conservation Voters
Wozniak is executive director of the Michigan League of Conservation Voters. It was founded in 1999, she says, “to address some of our state’s most egregious problems regarding the air we breathe, the water we drink, and protecting public health and the natural environment.”
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The Last Holdouts
In the end, even Julie Welch accepted the inevitable. Back in June 2023, she defiantly told MLive that she hoped never to sell 730 S. Division St., a 1,064-square-foot Cape Cod built in 1901. Her parents bought it in 1962 as a student rental, and she said, as far as she was concerned, “Build around me, and let’s coexist in peace.”
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Gracie’s Odyssey
After a contentious lawsuit, Gracie the Bernedoodle is back with the teacher she lived with during her stint as a therapy dog at Wines Elementary School.
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Noah on Hoover St.?
The U-M’s $631 million dorm complex on the old Elbel Field isn’t even finished, and Evan Pratt is already worried about its future. That’s because Allen Creek flows underground beside the property—and with Ann Arbor getting wetter, the county’s outgoing water resources commissioner says, it’s getting harder to keep it there.
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