Ed Steinman holds a petition next to Kristie Shaffer outside the Ann Arbor Farmers Market.

Ed Steinman explains two petitions to Kristi Shaffer at the farmers market. One would make elections nonpartisan; the other would provide public funding. | Photo by John Hilton

August will see the first city council primary in at least twenty years with just one contested race. Six folks pulled petitions to collect signatures but only one turned them in: Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, who is running for a third time in the Fourth Ward.

The anti-Israel activist got 10 percent of the vote in 2020 and 4 percent in 2022. As local support grows for Palestine in the Israel-Hamas war, she’s likely to do better than the 215 votes she got last time, but it’s hard to see her winning: In 2020’s three-way race, incumbent Jen Eyer got 3,883.

“I knew that someone [else] had pulled petitions,” says Eyer, “so I was just waiting to see if that person turned them in.” But Matt Parker didn’t file by the April 26 deadline. He didn’t respond to emailed questions from the Observer, nor did three other would-be candidates. Curtis Dean, who pulled petitions in Ward One, says he changed his mind after deciding that a campaign and council service would be too all-consuming.

With no viable Republican Party in town, Democratic primary winners inevitably win the November general election—and with candidates backed by mayor Christopher Taylor winning every recent Democratic primary, his allies’ dominance of city council seems secure. But Taylor takes nothing for granted: “I’m expecting a full race in the Fourth Ward, and I myself will be knocking doors accordingly.” So will Eyer: “I love knocking doors because it’s an opportunity to talk to people.”

Incumbents Lisa Disch (Ward One), Travis Radina (Ward Two), and Erica Briggs (Ward Five), plus first-time candidate Jon Mallek in Ward Two, also are “eager to communicate with voters and community members,” says Taylor. Since “there will not be a council ballot in four out of the five wards,” he expects their efforts to concentrate on “community outreach” and “connecting with residents.”

Taylor believes the lack of challengers “ratifies our work to improve basic service and enhance quality of life for residents in a manner consistent with their aspirations and values.” Eyer concurs. Since Taylor supporters took full control in 2022, “I think council really has been working very well together [and] leading Ann Arbor forward on a number of fronts: housing, climate action, economic and social justice. And I think what’s important is that we’ve done it by respecting residents, staff, and each other …

“It’s not that we don’t disagree,” she adds, citing last year’s proposed Sports Illustrated hotel on the Kline’s parking lot on Ashley as “a great example. But we do it in a way that’s respectful of each other and we move on from it.”

“We’re not triumphalists,” says Taylor. “We are here to do the work.” He sees their biggest challenge as “a housing crisis [due to] decades of artificially constrained supply. We need more housing in the city at all income levels.” In May, they voted unanimously to approve a “planned unit development” for a seventeen-story apartment building on Church St., effectively expanding the high-rise zone around campus. Next they’ll consider a fifteen-story building at Packard and State.

The city is in the process of revising its comprehensive plan, and with their majority secure, Taylor and his allies will be free to change height limits and remove other obstacles to development. But two late-breaking ballot proposals could make future races more competitive.

“A grassroots campaign has begun to make Ann Arbor’s elections more inclusive and to strengthen our local democracy,” opens an early May email from John Godfrey, a retired assistant dean at the U-M’s Rackham grad school. “One would amend Ann Arbor’s city charter to make elections for City Council and mayor nonpartisan, and the second seeks to establish public campaign financing for these races.”

“Volunteers are scrambling to get 7,000 signatures for each petition by June 14 when we expect to submit them to the City Clerk’s office,” Godfrey adds in another email. Asked if the candidates who didn’t turn in council petitions might instead direct their time and money to the ballot proposals, he writes that the “initiative is wholly independent from any policy perspective that a prospective office-seeker might have. It is completely agnostic about whether or not a development & growth advocate or a supporter of ‘go slow’ runs for office and succeeds. We’re better as a community when all voices and viewpoints are heard and residents have a choice at the polls.”

Dean says that former First Ward councilmember Anne Bannister has approached him to work on the proposals. And Taylor—who helped defeat Bannister two years ago—sees a factional agenda. The opposition’s last majority was elected in 2018 with help from another ballot issue—one that blocked a high-rise project atop the Library Lane parking structure.

This time, “I have every reason to believe it’s Elizabeth” Nelson who’s behind the initiatives, the mayor says.

In 2019, Nelson and her allies voted to place a nonpartisan charter amendment on the ballot, only to have Taylor veto it. The former Ward Four councilmember also has talked about “campaign finance before,” he says, and “it is in line with prior public statements.”

Nelson didn’t respond to emailed questions. However, in May, an amended filing by the ballot committee “Voters Not Money” listed its physical address as 1319 Ardmoor—which the city assessor’s website identifies as Nelson’s home.

Taylor says he’s against the nonpartisan proposal because “I’m a proud Democrat and I believe there is a great deal of importance in party identification.” Previous nonpartisan election drives in 2007 and 2016 failed to earn enough signatures to get on the ballot. If this one does, Taylor says, he will hit the doors in November to defeat it.

He also opposes the campaign funding proposal. “The protestations of perennially losing candidates aside, the barriers to entry in local government here in Ann Arbor are extremely low,” he says. “A committed candidate and their volunteers can knock every door in the Ward (or the City) more than once—talking to voters, leaving literature. This is the magic of Ann Arbor campaigning. You can’t just flood the zone with TV spots and be done.” However, that didn’t deter the mayor and his allies from outspending their opponents more than two-to-one in 2022.

Even with public support, “A self-funded candidate with access to big donors and PAC money would, of course, be able to raise far larger amounts of cash,” Godfrey emails. “But a small-donor matching system would enable a candidate without these private resources and connections to mount a viable campaign and communicate with voters about their priorities and ideas.

This article has been edited since it was published in the June 2024 Ann Arbor Observer. John Godfrey’s identification has been corrected to identify him as a retired, not current, assistant dean at Rackham.