Apr 26, 2012 | News |
Drive north on Maple Road past M-14, and you can’t miss Skyline High School, a postmodern monument in brick, glass, and steel. After two roundabouts at the freeway ramps, visitors turn in at a third for the main entrance...
Read MoreApr 17, 2012 | News |
Just how clever are the new electrical and gas meters that DTE is installing on homes and businesses throughout Ann Arbor? They’ll tell the utility when a customer suffers a power outage. In the future, they’ll...
Read MoreApr 8, 2012 | News |
“When the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund announced their grants last November and the Gallup Park canoe livery project scored number two and the Vets Park skate park was number eleven, it was unprecedented in my...
Read MoreApr 5, 2012 | News |
The ghost of the Ann Arbor News is haunting AnnArbor.com.The latest redesign of the website’s twice-weekly print edition added more state and national news and brought back travel and business sections–all staples in...
Read MoreMar 31, 2012 | News |
The good news is that more people are finding jobs lately. That’s true in the nation, in Michigan, and especially in Washtenaw County.After cresting at a painful 10.1 percent in October 2009, the nation’s...
Read MoreMar 30, 2012 | News |
The city plans to resurface or reconstruct 11.3 miles of road from April through November at a cost of $27 million. That’s almost triple 2011’s total of 5.1 miles for $8.6 million.Thank Uncle Sam, specifically,...
Read MoreMar 17, 2012 | News |
Art Brandt’s belly laugh peals through the first-floor hallway of the Michigan Union as he describes a dance that linked hundreds of people at the 2004 Dance for Mother Earth powwow at Crisler Arena: “It started on...
Read MoreMar 3, 2012 | News |
“I am instructed by my dean to have no communication with the press.”That was the response of the usually chatty Steve Ball when the Observer asked about the response to a widely circulated Associated Press...
Read MoreFeb 27, 2012 | News |
Since the Western Washtenaw Recycling Authority was launched twenty years ago, it’s recycled enough paper, glass, metal, and plastics to fill eighty football fields fifty-six feet high. But general manager Phil Bolyard...
Read MoreFeb 17, 2012 | News |
“The housing commission needs to change if we’re going to survive,” says Jennifer Hall.Ann Arbor Housing Commission board chair Marta Manildi says they had a pretty good year last year: “We brought in a...
Read MoreFeb 7, 2012 | News |
Six local women plan to swim the Channel this summer.The “A2A3 Relay Team” is the brainchild of local attorney Amanda Mercer, a board member of Ann Arbor Active Against ALS. Local residents Kristin McGuire and Dave...
Read MoreFeb 5, 2012 | News |
According to the list of street closings on the city’s website, Fifth Ave. between Liberty and William reopened the day after Halloween. The Downtown Development Authority website has it carrying traffic in December. So...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2012 | News |
In the early hours of June 15, 2004, a couch caught fire on the porch of a house on Oakland Avenue. Fed by the sofa’s stuffing, the blaze quickly engulfed the structure, putting two of the U-M football players who lived...
Read MoreJan 28, 2012 | News |
From the east side of the Broadway bridge, a sidewalk winds down into Broadway Park, a peaceful pocket of lawn and trees tucked between the train tracks and the Huron River.From the bridge’s west side, there’s also a...
Read MoreJan 3, 2012 | News |
Since its founding by fusion two years ago, the Ann Arbor / Ypsilanti Regional Chamber of Commerce has supported the election of Republicans Rick Snyder and Mark Ouimet and opposed a city income tax—all predictably conservative...
Read MoreDec 31, 2011 | News |
Partly because redistricting is about to reduce the number of Ann Arbor commissioners from four to three, and partly because they’re in their seventies, Barbara Bergman and Leah Gunn are retiring at the end of 2012 after a...
Read MoreDec 29, 2011 | News |
This past summer, two men sexually assaulted seven women in and around the U-M campus. A rash of burglaries last year enraged folks on the near northwest side. And just a few weeks ago, a thief or thieves broke into four cars in...
Read MoreDec 27, 2011 | News |
“It shouldn’t necessarily be easy to become a city,” says Dexter’s assistant village manager Courtney Nicholls as she rifles through a large box of papers in the village offices in downtown Dexter....
Read MoreDec 21, 2011 | News |
In their radical reinvention of Michigan, governor Rick Snyder and the Republican-controlled legislature have passed plenty of laws that have riled local governments, including expanding the power of emergency managers to take...
Read MoreDec 16, 2011 | News |
Hard times make for hard choices.When jobs are lost and family income drops, it can force parents to choose between feeding their kids or their pets. And when property tax income drops and state revenue sharing all but...
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