Margie Teall faces Jack Eaton, first opponent in 8 years, in 4th Ward Ann Arbor City Council race

The two Democrats will face off in the Aug. 3 primary for a chance to represent Ann Arbor's 4th Ward residents for the next two years. It's one of four contested council races this year, including the mayoral race, and their collective outcome could chart a new course for city government.

Teall is promising to guide the city on a steady course during a continued period of economic turbulence. And she's stressing that Ann Arbor, more than anything else right now, needs the continuity only the city's current leadership can provide.

"I am proud of where the city is," Teall says. "I think there are a lot of people who see the city as somehow failing in its own efforts to operate, and I think the city is doing great things. Going back to the basic services that government provides, we haven't faltered at that in this economy."

Eaton has aligned himself with an unofficial slate of candidates hoping to overthrow the current council majority in the name of fiscal responsibility. That slate includes mayoral candidate Patricia Lesko, 1st Ward candidate Sumi Kailasapathy and 5th Ward candidate Lou Glorie.

For the past several months, they've held joint fundraisers, issued joint press releases, and showed up at city meetings together. They say they share a desire to wrestle control over the city's budget, reprioritize spending on basic services, and bring a level of transparency they believe is lacking in the city's decision-making processes.

"I mean, to have learned that the conference center was a point of discussion for 18 months before it broke into public is kind of alarming," Eaton says, referring to talks of a hotel and conference center on the city-owned Library Lot downtown. "There's just this undercurrent of distrust because of these secret communications and these elaborate plans that don't become public until they're a done deal, and I think that's kind of the common thread that we share."

Teall acknowledges her greatest regret on council is contributing to the so-called e-mail scandal in which it was discovered last year that she and other council members regularly traded e-mails during meetings — some quietly discussing business that was before the council. The council eventually took action to ban e-mailing during meetings, but Eaton still cites it as proof of long-suspected, back-room deliberations.

"They e-mailed during meetings and made decisions about how votes were going to go out of the view of the public," he says. "And what we are suggesting — beyond prioritizing services — is that when we deliberate, we'll deliberate in public, in front of the public."

Eaton has closely aligned himself with Lesko, who has been criticized for her combative style and inaccuracies in her campaign messages.

"I without reservation support Pat Lesko," Eaton says. "She is a strong woman and, even in this day and age, strong women are characterized as 'angry' or 'mean' or 'dangerous,' and certainly those who would risk losing their favored position in city hall are going to attack her as such. I continue to support her and I think that she would provide us with the strength of leadership that we currently lack."

Eaton also offered his take on the inaccuracies in the campaign messages.

"We have to keep in mind that the city keeps two sets of books," he says. "And so anytime you cite a number or talk about expenditures, if you use one set of books, they can use the other set of books and call it into question."

Teall is running on what she considers her record of achievement as a leader on council and in the community. Her campaign literature highlights her efforts to protect neighborhoods, while looking out for the city's future and taking charge on environmental issues.

Among the accomplishments Teall cites are that she sponsored an initiative to down-zone the Lower Burns Park neighborhood to prevent more single-family residences from being broken up into multiple-family rental units. More recently, she sponsored a resolution to create a neighborhood task force to work with city officials to provide oversight and input into the redevelopment of the Georgetown Mall.

Much of Teall's work this year focused on the city's budget. She chaired a task force that found ways to cut costs and keep the city's senior center from closing. She also helped negotiate a $2 million transfer from the Downtown Development Authority to help close a gap in the general fund, saving 30 jobs in police and fire, avoiding cuts to human services, and halting plans to reduce park maintenance and allow cars to park in two city parks on football Saturdays.

Teall says she looks forward to seeing multiple city projects come to fruition in the next two years, including the Stadium bridges, which are expected to see repairs start in the spring, and the police-courts building, which is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

"We have been able to accomplish some pretty amazing things since 2002," Teall says. "What makes that even more significant is the fact that the challenges have been and continue to be enormous. We have been faced with the sharpest economic decline since the Great Depression."

Eaton acknowledges Teall has been a hard-working council member and says he has nothing against her personally. In fact, during a debate last week, he thanked Teall on behalf of his neighborhood for helping to protect Dicken Woods by stopping a developer and turning the land into a city park.

"I don't dislike her," Eaton says. "I'm not going to say mean things about her. We just simply disagree about some issues. I'm running for City Council because I disagree with the current council's vision for our city and I disagree with the current council's budget priorities."

The neighborhood activist

Eaton, 57, has lived in the Ann Arbor area for 25 years. For the last 12 of those, he has resided on the city's west side. He has been active with the Friends of Dicken Woods neighborhood group and is a known face around city hall, never shy about publicly speaking his mind.

A native of Saginaw, Eaton lived in Alma and Kalamazoo before deciding to attend the University of Michigan in the mid-1980s. After graduating with a degree in political science in 1987, he went on to earn his law degree from Wayne State University in 1991 and stayed in Ann Arbor.

"This town is unique and special," he says. "With some care and maintenance, we can protect those things that are unique and special about this town, and it doesn't take a lot of demolition and replacing what we have with high-rise buildings and shiny new things to improve our town."

Eaton currently practices law with a Southfield firm that represents public sector labor unions in education and transit. His job involves working to resolve disputes between unions and employers, experience he believes would be an asset on the City Council.

He met his wife, Cecile Lamb, shortly after coming to Ann Arbor. She works for U-M, and together they have two adult children, Dan and Rachel.

Eaton says his activism in his neighborhood allows him to bring a unique perspective to the table. He recalls when his neighborhood organized to oppose the development of a "massive student dormitory three miles from campus." He formed the more politicized South Maple Group, a collection of a couple hundred residents and others interested in stopping the project.

"I found that it takes more than just one neighborhood to get City Council to be responsive," Eaton says of that experience. "And so, after the City Council approved that out-of-character development for our neighborhood, I set about with another neighborhood activist to organize a group called the Alliance for Neighborhoods, an informal group that just helps foster communication between neighborhoods."

Eaton says he's sympathetic to the plight of residents in Germantown, a neighborhood just south of downtown Ann Arbor where two controversial developments, the Moravian and Heritage Row, threaten to bring new high-density apartments. Both projects have been supported by Teall, but so far have lacked the eight votes needed to pass council.

"If we allow massive development in a near-downtown neighborhood like Germantown," Eaton says, "that sets the precedent for the Old Fourth Ward or any other neighborhood that borders the D1 and D2 zoning districts."

Teall's road to politics

Teall, 52, is married to Graham Teall, a federal prosecutor and former head of the Washtenaw County Democratic Party. They have two daughters: Clara, who is studying vocal performance at DePaul University in Chicago, and Gillian, who attends Community High School in Ann Arbor.

Teall comes from a strong Christian background. She grew up in Birmingham, where she attended a large Presbyterian church. Her mother was an elder and both of her uncles are Presbyterian ministers.

She says religion has always fascinated her, so she majored in social work and religion at Alma College. While in college, Teall says, she was introduced to broader philosophies of religion and eventually, several years later, began attending a unitarian universalist church in Grosse Pointe.

"I don't know if I consider myself just strictly Christian," she says. "It really broadens your view of the world and the universe when you expand your own language about what that God could look like."

Teall is active with the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, where she served as assistant director of religious education. The church's religious roots are Judeo-Christian, but its teachings encompass a broad spectrum of spiritual beliefs from other faiths.

The Tealls, married for 25 years, met in Ann Arbor shortly after college, moved around and lived in Palo Alto, Calif., and Boston before eventually moving back to Michigan.

While living in Grosse Pointe from 1987 to 1995, Teall earned a bachelor's degree in photography at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. When her oldest daughter was about to start kindergarten in 1995, the family moved back to Ann Arbor, where Teall found work as a freelance photographer for the Observer and began working at the church she still attends.

In 2000, Teall says, she received a message from a friend who was interested in starting work on the Million Mom March, a national grassroots effort that aimed to stem the tide of gun violence. She became one of the organizers in Ann Arbor and helped fill two buses with moms and daughters and others who went to Washington, D.C., that spring.

"The Million Mom March is what got me politically active," Teall says. "It really kicked that off, and it kind of was an outgrowth of both my social work background and interest in human rights and community organizing."

Teall ran for City Council in 2002, a decision she says was motivated by her desire to help others.

"The nice thing about serving on City Council is that it really provides an avenue for you to do that very directly," she says. "If people have issues with their streets, their sidewalks, their government — whether it's city services or helping with a conflict with a neighbor — it's the most direct way to really influence somebody else's life on a very basic level."

Teall now draws her only income from her work on council, about $15,914 a year. During budget talks this year, she joined the mayor and other council members by pledging to donate 3 percent of her salary back to the city as a good-faith demonstration to the city's unions, who were being asked to make concessions.

Stances on a city income tax

Teall supports bringing a city income tax proposal to voters next year. Eaton is dead set against the idea.

A local income tax of 1 percent for city residents and half a percent for commuters has been kicked around by city officials as one way to infuse millions of dollars in new revenue into the city's struggling budget. For many property owners, a resulting 15 percent decrease in property taxes would offset the income tax, but renters and commuters would shoulder the burden.

"I think the city first has to learn to live within the means it has before we consider changing the structure of how we tax," Eaton says.

Teall believes it's worth taking to voters.

"There are a lot of voters who don't realize that the impact on them would essentially be neutral but would help the city a lot," she says. "So we would need to educate, but my opinion is that it should go to the voters."

The Stadium bridges

Teall lives in Lower Burns Park, a few blocks east of the Stadium bridges. The two spans are an issue Teall has worked on for several years, but Eaton takes issue with the fact that federal grant money hasn't come through yet and repairs are on hold until next spring.

"We're still waiting," Eaton says, visibly frustrated. He says he's typically against borrowing money, but it's time to float bonds to replace the bridges.

Teall says the criticism over the bridges isn't fair. She says the spans are in good enough condition to last until next spring, when they'll be replaced with or without federal grant money. The city is taking one last shot at applying for federal funds for the $23 million project before it turns to the last-resort measure of tapping the city's street millage money.

Single-stream recycling

Teall joined her peers on council last November to approve a $4.6 million initiative to switch to single-stream recycling, which now allows residents and businesses to put all recyclable materials into one cart.

City officials say it will make recycling easier and will expand the numbers and types of materials accepted. But it's a move Eaton opposes.

"The single-stream process won't allow you to put Styrofoam or motor oil out to curb," he says. "And we'll add the cost of having somebody else stand at a conveyor belt at the recycle center and sort our paper from our plastics and our glass, so it's going to be more expensive in the long run."

City officials claim the switch to single-stream should result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual savings, covering any implementation costs being incurred now and eventually saving the city money in the long run.

"Single-stream recycling will benefit the city and increase our recycling rate immensely," Teall says. "It's good for the environment and good for the city budget."

Differing on Argo Dam

Eaton and Teall have somewhat differing views on the debate over Argo Dam. Eaton is adamantly in favor of keeping the dam in place, but Teall, a member of the city's Environmental Commission, sides with arguments by environmental groups like the Huron River Watershed Council who say the dam should be removed.

"I don't think dams are a healthy way to manage a river," Teall says, though she clarifies that she's not necessarily "dam out" at this point.

More so than any environmental issues, Teall says she's concerned that the dam is currently funded through the city's drinking water fund, and it provides no drinking water at all. She says that's not financially sustainable and it's something the City Council needs to address before any long-term decisions are made. Teall says she will not vote to remove Argo Dam until the city has a place for the rowers to move, and she believes there are several options for that. She also says it's premature to make any decision until the city conducts the proper studies and decides how to fund insurance, maintenance and repair costs.

Eaton agrees with Teall that removing dams from a river usually makes environmental sense, but he considers Argo Dam a unique situation.

"Just down river from Argo Dam is the big DTE pollution site that, if we unleash the river, we would have to do extraordinary things to keep the river flow out of that pollution," he says. "And the recreational uses that the Argo Pond are put to are important. We don't have easy replacement for those activities."

Eaton criticizes the city for failing to maintain the dam's toe drains, which he believes has been the problem all along.

"They weren't visible, and so the city decided to just wait until it became a crisis and then address it then," he says. "And so I'm really concerned about governing-by-crisis management."

Criticizing the police-courts building

Teall joined the majority of her peers on council in voting to approve the $47.4 million building addition to city hall, which will house the city's courts and police. Eaton has opposed the project, saying the city rushed ahead without a reliable financing plan.

"They were relying on the idea that they were going to get $3 million from the sale of a piece of property," he says, referring to land at First and Washington that is to be sold to developer Village Green. "That sale fell through and, even though we've incurred massive debt to finance the police-courts building, the budget is $3 million short because they rushed ahead before everything was in place."

Village Green officials said last month the sale has not fallen through, the financing partners are now lined up, and they expect to proceed with the purchase.

Eaton still thinks the city could have looked more closely at other alternatives, including leasing space in the City Center Building. Now, he says, the city is stuck with "that monstrosity that they built on the cheap."

Teall defends the project.

"The police deserve better quarters than a leaky basement and I was proud to be able to really push for that," she says. "At the same time, the courts needed the space. We examined so many different places and buildings that we thought we might be able to squeeze the courts into. I cannot stress enough that the buildings that we looked at could not have worked, and we needed to design something that was going to work."

Eaton says he's of the mind that the city shouldn't borrow money to finance new building projects during times of tight budgets. He says the city should be more concerned about tending to its basic infrastructure, like its crumbling roads.

"In order to build our economy, we're going to have to draw employers, or retain the employers we have," he says. "And I don't think going on a building spree accomplishes that in the same way as if we had a well-staffed police and fire department, well maintained roads, and bridges that weren't falling down."

Broader development issues

The two candidates also differ on broader development issues.

Eaton says he has opposed the Moravian and Heritage Row projects because he opposes "planning by exception," which is what he considers Planned Unit Developments. He considers the city's zoning code a social compact with residents.

"Development should fit the zoning in the area that it's being proposed for or it should have a really compelling reason for the exclusion from the zoning," Eaton says. "And neither one of those have any compelling reason."

Teall says her philosophy on development is that it should center in the core downtown, which she claims she has encouraged and worked for. She says the Moravian, in particular, was a good exception.

"I supported the Moravian because I think it made sense in that location," she says. "It offered community benefits that I think we as a community desire. And this is a location that is partly zoned industrial, it's right across from Fingerle Lumber, it's not taking out the heart of a neighborhood. It's developing sensible and convenient, energy efficient housing next to what is rental housing currently."

Teall says adding more residential density in and around downtown is essential for making Ann Arbor active and vibrant, while also generating new tax revenue.

"We all love the character of Ann Arbor, but that character is going to change drastically if there aren't people to go to those locally owned stores," she says.

Eaton says the city can do better to respect the fragile balance between Midwestern values and big city culture, and it needs to keep what's special about the city intact.

"We have a really special town and our town wins awards of a variety of sorts, and on a pretty consistent basis," he says. "And we don't seem to lose any points for a lack of high-rise buildings or failure to build massive developments in near-downtown neighborhoods."

Teall says her long-term vision for Ann Arbor is a city that has maintained a lot of its historic character, but with a tolerance for new developments that reflect more modern thinking, energy efficient design, and more vertical use of space.

"I lived in Boston and you've got the Hancock Tower there right next to the church at Copley Plaza, and an acceptance and a tolerance that different styles of architecture can cohabit the same block while bringing in a lot of vitality," she says. "I see Ann Arbor as increasingly pedestrian and a lot more bikes downtown in 10 or 20 years, a lot more mass transit, and hopefully, ideally, fewer cars and a lot fewer surface parking lots."

Fiscal leadership in tough times

Eaton bills himself as someone willing to make the tough choices that will be necessary in the coming years as the city struggles with more budget problems.

"We're going to see reductions in property tax revenues and state revenue sharing, and we're going to have tough choices to make," he says. "During these next few years, I believe we have to focus on our core public services: public safety, roads, bridges and infrastructure, and maintaining our parks and recreation programs."

If the city takes care of the core services, Eaton says he's convinced its highly educated population will draw new employers, the economy will stabilize, property taxes will be restored, and then Ann Arbor can move on with a different vision.

"But in the short term, we have to focus on those things that are utterly necessary and put aside those other things that are merely desirable," he says.

Teall argues she has been working with other city officials since she arrived on council to make structural budget changes with a focus on core services. Within the past decade, the number of full-time employees has dropped nearly 27 percent, from 1,005 to 736.

Teall points out the city hasn't raised taxes in her eight years in office, and its fund balance remains healthy. She concludes Ann Arbor is weathering the current financial storm as well or better than any other city in the state of Michigan.

"This outcome has not happened by accident. It has happened through very careful planning and difficult decision making," she says.

Eaton says the current council majority is undermining the brand name of progressive Democrats by charging high taxes and not delivering services residents need.

"With the kind of taxes we pay in this town, we deserve decent services. We deserve good roads, certainly not the third worst in the state," he says. "We really need to look at the areas of our budget that have grown disproportionately at the same time that we're cutting back on police and firefighters. For instance, we've seen the IT department in city hall — their budget has ballooned over the last five years. And yet when we get to the point where we have to cut something in the budget, nobody's talking about the IT department."

Eaton has the endorsement of the city's firefighters union heading into the Aug. 3 primary. He says he's found the unions are willing to work with the city to save money, but just don't trust current city leadership enough to bargain now.

Teall argues it's not a council member's place to bargain with the unions, and she has faith city administrators are doing their best to convince employees to take on more responsibility for the cost of their health care and other benefits.

Eaton balked at the city administrator's suggestion earlier this year that the city should consider selling parks to help balance the budget.

"When you go to one of the council budget workshops, the city administrator and staff present phony choices like 'let's not pick up Christmas trees anymore' or 'let's reduce leaf pickup,' 'let's sell parks,'" Eaton says. "They're not looking at where the big dollars are. What we're doing is we're trying to scare residents into supporting an income tax. Real choices aren't being discussed and I think that's intolerable."

Ryan J. Stanton covers government and politics for AnnArbor.com. Reach him at ryanstanton@annarbor.com or 734-623-2529.