Sabra Briere meets a reporter at the downtown Sweetwaters. Two people at the next table stand to give her hugs when she comes in and hug her again when they leave, with accompanying “I love you”s.
“People here believe we should take care of our brothers and sisters and have courteous and civil disagreements,” says Briere afterward, visibly touched. “We may even be rational.”
But Briere, who resigned from council in December after representing Ward One since 2007, has also seen the town’s dark side. “I get attacks on the elite–that’s city council–on email,” she says, “that we’re all rich and doing it to get more rich.” She shakes her head. “Self-preservation so often overrides altruism.” Naming no names, she mentions people who support affordable housing only until it’s proposed in their own neighborhoods.
That won’t be her problem any longer. “My son bought us a house in California, and we’re moving,” Briere says. “I’m so happy my son was able to buy us a house and that I’ll get to live near my kid.”
For reasons she’s never fully understood, Briere says, she was ostracized by the other children in her hometown, Knightstown, Indiana. In contrast, Ann Arbor, where she moved in 1973, “was always cosmopolitan and very accepting of me. I was never judged as a person and found wanting. I was judged on my intellect, energy, and commitment, and I was accepted.”
When Briere joined the local Democratic Party in 1977, “Ann Arbor was a Republican town. There were times when there were only two Democratic city councilmembers, and it stayed that way until 1982. Then the Republicans redistricted and determined that there would be one Democratic ward, Ward One, and two guaranteed Republican wards, Wards Two and Four, and the Third and Fifth would swing Republican.
“But they screwed it up,” she laughs. “The Fifth now included Water Hill, and they turned it into a Democratic ward. And the Third Ward turned Democratic. The Fourth and Second remained Republican, but they were now in a minority.
“Then in 1992 a charter amendment passed to move elections to November, and because a Democrat is more likely to win a general election, council is now predominantly Democratic. That doesn’t mean the Second and Fourth Wards are any less conservative.”
She doesn’t think the newly adopted city charter amendment extending city council terms from two years to four will change things much. “There will still be people running for council who have a sense of community,” she says, “and people who are self-promoters, and people with ambitions.”
In city politics, what troubles Briere most is the angry division between supporters and opponents of the deer cull (see above), because “neither side accepts the humanity of the other. It’s heartbreaking that neighbors can’t see each other’s point of view.”
She’s also worried about “the impact locally on cuts in national funding. We can’t anticipate what [the new Congress and president] will do, and there’re so many places where federal funding has a significant effect on our budget. There will be demands for services we can’t deliver.”
Though she worries about the country’s future, Briere is nevertheless cheerful and optimistic about moving in January to live near her son and daughter-in-law in Santa Rosa. “John wanted to be a librarian, but someone advised him he should learn about computers first, and he became a computer nerd. He worked at Adobe, got a job at a start-up, and the rest is history.”
In early December, council voted 7-3 to appoint Jason Frenzel, runner-up to Sumi Kailasapathy in the August Democratic primary, to serve out Briere’s term. As for Briere and her husband, lawyer and fellow Democratic activist David Cahill, she says “this is the time to make new relationships in a new community.” Will they go into politics? “I’m sure we will,” she smiles.
The city will miss Briere’s patient intelligence and deep passion for her adopted town. So will council. She’s always made up her own mind, never looking over her shoulder to see how her colleagues voted. And she has the best constituent newsletter in town.
Will she miss Ann Arbor? “I’ll miss the roots and relationships,” she says. “I’ll miss the younger me. But I’m prepared to change.”
