What is it that you love about Ann Arbor?
Oh my God. It’s an obvious question, but it’s such a big question. So I grew up in Ann Arbor, and so what I love, I think fundamentally most about it is that this place feels like home, and that it is a place where I can walk down the street and see people that I know that feel like family to me, that you know that that I can give a hug to and talk to, and you know, build communities, and I think that’s really fundamentally what I love about this place so much.
I think it’s also all the other obvious things too, like our beautiful and amazing park system, you know, there’s always places to go and recreate the outdoors and experience nature. I love the many, you know, cultural amenities that the community has to offer. You know, you can hear music from all around the world and food from all around the world and interact with people from all over the world. It’s just, it’s a global city that attracts, some incredible people, and it is also a place with a deep history of activism and people working for social change, and I think that’s also what inspires me.
That’s been a big part of my life and a big part of who I am in my upbringing. You know, I remember as a kid marching downtown against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I remember organizing around environmental issues around the Diag, doing, you know, a sit-in against sweatshops in support of workers, and this is part of the fabric of our town, part of who we are as a community, and I just absolutely feel at home here for all of those reasons, and I feel like this is the place that I want to be, at the place I want to raise my family. You know, and when I had an opportunity to obviously leave town like,, everybody does at the end of their high school experience, I made a conscious decision to go to school here; and when I graduated from U of M, I made a conscious decision to look for jobs here, because I just, you know, I love this place so much, like I said. It just feels like home.
What are the three most pressing problems that you care most about fixing?
Okay, so number one issue is affordability. Ann Arbor has become completely unaffordable, and I have been the way that I’ve been framing it is that Ann Arbor has become a country club town, where you must have to, you know, have enough money to buy a membership to live here, and it’s like, not acceptable. This is not the town that I know Ann Arbor is, having grown up here. We are a town that welcomes people from all backgrounds and all, you know, walks of life, all income levels, all job types, people you know that are working class should be able to live here, and that is just not the case anymore for our town, and it’s moved so far away from that as a community that it’s, you know, and it’s moving in the wrong direction.
I mean, more and more people that are, you know, working in our community can’t afford to live in our community. You know, and I feel that the policies that have been implemented, you know, over the last 12 years have not worked to make Ann Arbor more affordable, and so what I’m pushing is an agenda of, you know, affordability for the working class.
That means affordable housing, and in my opinion, and so, you know, which is seems like an obvious thing. But it’s apparently a controversial thing to say. But I have focused my platform on saying that we need to make historic investments in publicly owned, permanently affordable housing.
That’s important to me for a number of reasons, because you know, when, the way that we’re doing investment right now is that you know a lot of the housing is not publicly owned, which means that it is often not permanently affordable, which means these developers that are building some of these affordable housing areas only have to keep them affordable for a limited period of time, and don’t actually, you know, and that does not create permanent affordability in our community. The public also loses control, especially when things happen like the sale of public land to private developers. That means that we’re losing control from the community, and we don’t have a say in ensuring that, that that land, you know, is used for a public purpose into the future, as it pertains to that affordability piece, too.
You know, we are also in a world where there are so many other things that make people’s lives difficult. We are in a system that is not meant to uplift the average working-class person, it is meant to keep them down. It is meant to keep them, you know, running from one bill to the next in terms of survival and not thriving. And so, how do we create a city and a community that supports our people, that builds a strong place for the working class that they’re not having to just survive, but that we can all thrive together as a community? So, that’s the issue of affordability.
I would say the second issue is privatization. We’ve seen Ann Arbor become more and more of a corporate city through the privatization of public services. We’ve seen our garbage collection downtown privatized, we’ve seen tree trimming services privatized, we’ve seen our compost services privatized, our compost yard privatized, so many services are being privatized. I am just ideologically opposed to privatization.
But further than that, I believe that the privatization process has led to a deterioration in the quality of service. I believe that we’ve also lost, you know, when we, when we privatize services, we lose a sense of civic pride, we lose a sense of knowledge that, you know, the services that are being delivered with our tax dollars are actually being delivered, because we don’t see city workers, we see private sector workers out doing what should be public work. So the fundamental line there is public work for public workers, and that’s something that I strongly am going to be campaigning on, and the addendum to that, too.
When it comes to public spaces, is I’m a firm believer in protecting our public spaces, protecting our parks, protecting all public land. As mayor, I pledge to never sell any public land. All public lands should be used for public purposes. I – part of what inspired me to run is that the city allowed for a park, which actually I’m going to call it a public space, actually not even called a public space, I’m going to call it an open space – called a what the city allowed for an open space to be funded with taxpayer dollars, but ultimately kept in private ownership, so the Broadway, Broadway Park, or the Broadway, whatever it’s called – near the Broadway Bridge – that big brownfield site. The state and community spent millions of dollars of taxpayer money to fix that site up, but it’s being owned and held by a private company, and a private, it’s privately held, and so instead of making a public park on that site, the city allowed for a private company to use public money to build a park that is not publicly owned.
And I think that’s just wrong on so many different levels. I don’t like stuff like that, and so I guess fundamentally on this topic it would be public work for public workers, public land for public purposes, and then the third and final on the list of things is I want more public accessibility, more public accountability.
I’m a strong believer in the Open Meetings Act, and that the Open Meetings Act does not need to be just, you know, limitedly limited in our interpret. Education, we don’t just need to comply, we need to comply with the spirit of the Open Meetings Act, and we need to create opportunities for the public to better engage with our government. We need to put the people to give them a seat at the table of government decision making, so often right now at the city, again, the corporatization of our city, they rely on consultants, out of town consultants. They spent millions of dollars to hire out of town consultants. Then we have over 100,000 consultants in our own community. It’s our residents who know how this community operates, who know, who have, you know, firsthand knowledge, you know, who have experiences from all different backgrounds that can, you know, share that knowledge and that passion and that experience with the city to help move our city forward. Why did we spend all this money hiring out of town consultants? We have so much talent here locally, so it’s about putting citizens and residents at the decision making table.
It’s about engaging people, and you know, there’s all these surveys that always come out from the city, but the surveys are always like – it’s like they already know the outcome, and they’re just sort of asking pro forma questions in the check the box, and sometimes the boxes that are available to check aren’t even, don’t even cover the gamut of potential solutions, but they’re trying to sort of like hurt public opinion towards a certain outcome rather than actually allowing the community to have, you know, input and differences of opinion. It’s sort of like a pre-determined conversation, and I just.. that bothers me. I don’t. I really don’t like that approach, and I want to open up the approach of how we engage the community.
The last thing I’ll say here, too, is around the issue of public engagement and public comment. We need to listen to our public when they come before us at the county commission. I’m very proud that we have unlimited public comment. You know, anybody can come and speak for three minutes, and sometimes our public comment is an hour, sometimes it’s three hours, sometimes it’s four hours. And I know that that’s annoying for some elected officials, but for me it is a sign that our democracy is healthy and strong, and as an elected official, you know when I ran for office, part of the job that I ran for is that it’s about listening to the public – say whatever they want to say.
We work for them, and I think fundamentally this on this topic, the issue is there’s a sense I believe in in local, state, and federal government, that once you’re elected, you’ve somehow been knighted into a role as the steward of, you know, public resources; but you know, I think for me the reality is you are a steward of public resources, but you, you work for the people ultimately, and the people are your boss, and the people deserve to be listened to, and the people deserve to have the seat at the table, and the people deserve to have a voice in the decision making process, and that’s what I want to bring to this to this race, and that’s what I want to bring to City Hall. It’s about stewarding public resources, while the public also has a voice at the table. I don’t know better than the community. The community knows better than me.
How would you go about fixing those problems?
Okay, so on the first one, the three primary areas that I want to focus on is expanding the housing commission’s footprint, you know; building more publicly owned permanently affordable housing that is available for rent to the community through the housing function.
I want to create and build housing cooperatives that the city, where the city owns the land and maintains the underlying property, but that allows for democratic control and management through the cooperative process. So I want to build co-ops, unlike the co-ops that we currently have in town, which were built using federal dollars that ultimately allowed, after a certain period of time, for those co-ops to go market rate rather than state co-ops. I want to maintain public ownership of the land, so that we can maintain permanence in the affordability and in the cooperative nature of those developments.
And then the third one is community land trusts. I want the city to basically be a community land trust and use public land to build homes for people that are for sale, so that people can build equity, but that the prices would be artificially lower than the market rate, and they would be maintained in basically more affordable in the long term. It would allow people to build some equity in their homes, but the equity, the rate of increase of the value of the homes would be limited, just like the Ann Arbor Community Land Trust is doing. But I’d like the city to engage in that as well to build more housing, so we need to again, if we want affordable housing, need to build housing that is affordable, you need to build affordable and attainable homes for people that folks actually want to live in. So it’s, it’s about meeting that.
Follow up on the land trust. By that, do you mean you want to take the land trust idea and have just have the City do it? Or do you want to have the city work with land trust to take their idea and run with it?
I think it’s both. I think obviously supporting the community land trust, as you know, in what they do, but also the city basically creating its own land trust to build on city properties and develop city land using the financial backing that the city has.
Let’s say that your solution meets resistance or some part of your plan doesn’t work. What do you do next?
Ask the community. I think there’s – the power that we have as a community, is again – so many different people from so many different backgrounds that know this stuff and that can share ideas and solutions. A lot of what I’ve learned I’ve learned from the community. So ,it’s about engaging the people again in the decision making process.
Ann Arbor already has an incumbent mayor. What is motivating you to challenge your fellow Democrat?
I think I’ve outlined a few of the things that definitely come to mind. Again, it’s pivoting towards corporate solutions rather than pivoting towards community-based and grassroots solutions.
I would like to democratize our government and democratize our decision-making process. I think that a big part of that is, I don’t want to see, I don’t want to see every decision be unanimous. I think there should be disagreement. I welcome disagreement. I think that’s part of the democratic process, and so I want there to be opportunities for debate, opportunities for ideas to be fleshed out in public before the media and the public, so that folks can see how the liberations occur to get to the decisions that are ultimately, you know, come to.
Again, there’s some of these decisions that I’m seeing – things like selling off public land, or proposing to sell off public land, or actually selling off public land – that just really bothers me. I think. Well, I don’t think I know. It really bothers me. It really bothers me to see public assets that are held in the public trust be turned over to private profits.
That is really revolting to me, and something that I stand firmly against, and again, I would never, as the Mayor, sell support the sale of public property to a private developer, especially. Like, so I see what’s happening on the Klein’s Lot, for example. You have a private developer who’s going to build market rate for-profit housing using public land.
That’s wrong! I stand firmly against that, any proposal or conversation that’s floated around out there about selling off public properties is something that I want to put my foot down and say “that’s not going to happen again.” I talked about this too, privatization – we’ve seen a trend over the last 12 years of privatization, and that has to stop, and has to be reversed, and we have to in-house more of our services. Public work needs to be done by public workers. We’re seeing entities like the DDA, for example, take more and more public resources that would otherwise be going to democratically elected bodies like City Council, and they’re taking those resources and using them to privatize public services, and do deliver those services as an unelected entity, deliver those services to the downtown area.
But they’re services that are public services that the city workers should be delivering. That’s wrong, and I want to stop that process from happening as well. And then again, like we talked about affordability and the trend, you know, I always ask people, has your housing become more affordable in the last 12 years or not? And the answer is no, it’s gotten more expensive, and you know, things have gotten to a point where the cost of living is beyond anything that folks that are working class can handle in this community, and it’s just got to change. We need, you know, I’ve talked to so many people across this community that are saying, you know, we need new voices at the table, and that’s what I’m trying to deliver here.
One other thing I’d like to say, too, and this is sort of like item four on that platform, which I think is really important, is like we are living in a time not just of a fascist president that is bearing down upon our community, but a rising oligarchy of wealthy billionaires that are accumulating more and more wealth and resources, and the division between the rich and the working class is becoming so acute, and that is what’s contributing to this rising cost of living. We need a mayor that is going to be willing to not just say that we are opposing the Trump administration, but to do to take actions that may put us in an uncomfortable position that may require us to go to court and spend public resources to defend those decisions from the Trump administration, and I’m proving that as a county commissioner the county passed the strongest anti-ICE free zone resolution in the state, and as a result, we are being sued by the Trump Administration.
The City needs to pass the same ordinance -even if it puts the city in a legally precarious position, as it has the county, because it’s the right thing to do, because it defends our residents. And instead, what we’ve seen is sort of actions that more legally safe, but that are not as protective. And in my opinion, that is falling short of this moment, and it’s falling short of what we’re called to do to stand against this fascist regime. And that same thing needs to happen when we’re looking at the corporate oligarchy and all these corporate interests that are bearing down on our community. And at the end of the day, instead of pushing back against it, we’re inviting them in, we’re spending millions of dollars on these consulting firms, on these companies, on these contracts for services rather than hiring city workers to do City work, we’re privatizing and we’re giving more money to the corporate elites that are just out to screw us.
On the anti-ICE, anti-Trump Administration point, would you want to do a copy and paste of what was done with the county commission, or are there more steps you’d like to take?
I’d like to do more. I’d like to do more than that. Even I want to mobilize the City’s, you know, the full weight of the City, you know, and all the services and assets that the city has to protect against ICE enforcement activities in our community. And so I think that it needs to not just be defensive, I think it needs to be proactive in terms of protecting our community members that are under assault by these armed thugs that are attacking our community and attacking our community.
On the Downtown Development Authority point: is that a part of the City that you would like to reform, or are you more in the opinion that it should be abolished?
I think that there needs to be some significant reform. I see the the reason that the DDA was created was to create more attention to our downtown. So what I would not want to do is to cobble the ability of our downtown to advocate for itself, but I have some serious concerns about an entity that is not, does not, does not, i elected, that is collecting as much tax revenue as they are. So, I would like to further limit the amount of tax revenue that they can collect now. With that, though, there needs to be a commitment on the city’s side that we are using a significant amount of our revenue and resources to support and fund services to the downtown. It has to be a two-way street, right? I’m not going to say you can’t capture, you know, revenue to serve the downtown, and then you’re just, you know, you’re just screwed, you don’t have money. It has to be that. No, the city should collect it, because it’s, it’s, we’re the democratically elected body, and the city should then spend money, spend that money to serve the downtown community using public workers to do the public work. So that’s that’s what I would say. would also like to see the DDA deprivatize its services and maybe even contract with the city to do more work.
The way that we do politics in this country has been changing rapidly via Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Zohran Mamdani. What are your thoughts on this decade + evolution in how we do politics in this country, and how has it changed the way that you approach running for office and delivering for the people?
Our politics has become severely captured by the corporate class. Corporations and corporate America have created a scenario where, regardless of what party you sit in, the impact and the influence of corporate money is severe, and I saw that as a state representative for six years in Lansing.
I saw that as the Democratic floor leader in the State House of Representatives, and it is a problem in our country. Money in politics is a severe problem in our country. And it is the kind of thing that needs to be solved by bold action, and as long as the corporate class and corporate America can buy politicians, we’re not going to see serious and substantial change for the working class, for the poor of this country and the state and the city. It’s just not going to happen, and so I am running in the vein of Zoran Mandani, I’m running in the vein of people like him that are pushing against the party class and a corporate class that has decided that it is more interested in supporting its large donors than it is in supporting the people of this country.
And unfortunately the electorate do not feel heard, do not feel that the political parties or the economic system that we are under is serving them in any way, shape or form, and they are seeking alternative solutions. So now is the time to put those alternative solutions on display, to try things out, and actually, one of the things I will say on this is that sometimes, in order to move forward – well, usually in order to move forward – you have to look at the past and the things that have worked in the past to serve the working class and the poor of this country.
I think one of the main examples that I would point to is the FDR Administration and the New Deal. And I think that is an example that we can use of how to move forward. I think this country needs a new New Deal – where it is going to take government investment in people, programs, services, buildings, infrastructure – in order to take our community to the next, to the next level, and to be able to serve the people first and foremost. What that doesn’t serve is the profits of corporate America. The only thing that serves is building the people up and creating opportunities for folks to lift themselves out of poverty, to lift themselves out of, like I said, just living from one paycheck to the next, and be able to live more happy and positive lives that are not, you know, consumed in that day to day grind of having to survive, but giving them the opportunity to giving us the opportunity to thrive as a people.
Is it fair to say then that you’re in addition to being a Democratic Socialist, you’re a Green New Deal Democrat?
Yeah.
The nation is at an extremely low ebb in democratic participation, trust in institutions, and feeling truly connected to a community. I want to give you the chance to make your case to AA Observer readers that you really care about them, and that you are the right person, with the right talents and strategy, to make meaningful changes that will improve their economic lot in life, safeguard the rule of law, make sure that they won’t be left behind, and that you can ensure their inclusion and dignity in Treetown.
I think, I think my answer to that would be like – I hear you, because I feel the exact. The same, and I feel that government has completely and totally failed the people of our, of our community all the way up to the federal level, and is continuing to be, you know, doubling down a system that has failed time and time again and again, like I just was talking about the, you know, the corporate capture of our political parties, of our politicians, has led to an ignoring of the plight of the poor and working class of our communities, and that cannot go on.
It’s completely unsustainable, and it has led to a situation where the mass pop, you know, the vast majority of the people in, in our communities don’t believe in government anymore, because every time there has been an opportunity to do what’s right by the people, they have chosen to do what’s right by the corporate interests, and unless those two things somehow align – which is very rare – they will not do the right thing. They will do the right thing for the corporate class, and it’s always under the guise of this argument that if we just help corporate America, it will lift the rest of us.
That is what’s called trickle-down economics. That is Reagan 2.0. It is a failed policy, and it has failed us since the time of Ronald Reagan, and it will continue to fail us as long as we continue to double down on that mindset. And so that’s I think what I would say. I am running against machine politics. I’m running against status quo/ I’m running against a system that has not delivered for the people to say there is a different way forward. I’m outlining that way forward, and I hope that the public will give me a chance to show them that you know the policies that we’re outlining will work for our community, will work for the people who have been left out, and have not been heard by the system.
Do you consider Ann Arbor to be a machine politics town?
Definitely! You kidding me? Is that even a question? [Chuckles]
Zingerman’s, Ahmos, No Thai, Fleetwood, or Le Dog. Where would you rather go to lunch?
I will say: I endorse and support all of those places. I love all of them, you haven’t mentioned a place I don’t like. The most recent place I went to lunch was Le Dog. That is the most recent place that I’ve went. It’s hard – I mean, that’s the toughest question that you’ve asked my friend! That is the toughest question! I’m not going to pick a favorite because they’re all really good. But the most recent one I went to was Le Dog.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
One other quick thing I want to say, that’s relevant and important. And it ties into all these different areas, but it is a key part of my platform that I didn’t get to really talk about. One of the things I want to do is – residents in this community pay a ton of taxes. And we’re not getting the services that we deserve, and that we’re paying for right now. Again, we’re spending so much money on consultants, and money is flying out the window in that way, and it’s just not going to boots on the ground services in our community and I want to squeeze that tube from the top end of the organization to the on-the-ground end of the organization, so that we’re delivering services where the community lives, we’re fixing our roads, we’re ploughing our streets, we’re maintaining our sidewalks, we’re doing the things that serve our community. So it’s’ not just about de-privatizing services, it’s not just about saying we want to in-house more things. It’s also about saying: what else can we do as a community? What else can we do to serve the people of our community? And that ties into that piece of affordability because if you think about there’s so many things in our day to day grind that we have to do. You have to pay your bills, then you have to mow your lawn, then you have to go clean off your leaves, and then you have to do this, you have to do this, and at the end of the day, you don’t have enough time to do the things that you enjoy. Or maybe you have a massive bill from your day care – because daycare costs are going up through the roof – so we have to identify the areas like child care that are draining people, and we need to provide programing at the City level, that serves the community, and helps to alleviate those day-to-day burdens on our residents. It’s like everybody’s carrying around this heavy backpack. And the whole reason that government exists that if we all pitch in a little bit, then we can all alleviate our loads collectively even more than we can as individuals. It’s about bringing the power of community together to make all of our standards of living better. And that’s fundamentally why I’m running, and one of the things I’m so excited to deliver for the people of Ann Arbor.