Q&A: Noah Hall talks about doing battle with the city of Ann Arbor

The City Council responded to the public outcry in September by agreeing that council members no longer can e-mail each other during meetings. But in a lawsuit settlement reached last week, Hall is asking council members to go one step further and use their city government e-mail accounts from now on when discussing city business, even outside of meetings.

Council members don't have to comply with Hall's recommendation, but the terms of the settlement agreement mandate that they publicly consider it sometime in April.

Hall sat down with AnnArbor.com to talk about the settlement, what he's asking of the City Council, and his thoughts on the parking structure project.

Q: Do you think there has been an attempt on the part of council members to do business outside of the public eye? Or is this rule just a good idea?

A: We learned through the city's responses to our FOIA requests that some council members were regularly using commercial or personal e-mail accounts to communicate with other council members. There's nothing illegal or wrong about that. The concern, though, is that if council members are using their private or commercial e-mail accounts to communicate with each other, there's no way for the city's staff and the city attorney's office to manage all those records so that they can produce them in response to a FOIA request.

We saw going back to the deliberations over the parking structure that some council members were using private e-mails and we didn't think that much of it at the time. But around October of 2009, when the City Council was deliberating over what to do on Argo Dam, we got an e-mail that had about eight of the council members deliberating, all using their private, commercial, non-city e-mail accounts. I can't tell you with any certainty they were attempting to avoid public openness, but it sure looked like that. If council members are regularly communicating with each other with non-government e-mails, then there is no way to ensure that those e-mails would be produced for a FOIA request.

Q: Do you feel like this puts council members in a position where they either have to comply with your request or shame themselves publicly?

A: All we're asking the City Council to do in the settlement agreement is publicly consider the issue. And then if in a public open meeting they want to say, 'No, we think it's fine for us to keep e-mailing each other with our private or commercial e-mail accounts,' go for it. We basically just want them to publicly consider the issue and let the public know what they're doing.

Q: Does the settlement agreement resolve all of your concerns, including those calling for an environmental study?

A: The short answer is yes. Our major objective in this matter from the day we got involved was basically for the city to treat the parking structure as an environmental issue, and study it in a public and open process. Steve Bean, the chairman of the Environmental Commission,  asked the City Council to study this with more detail and look at the environmental aspects. They didn't do it then and this was in February 2009. Then the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center on behalf of the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council sent a letter in April or May. We sent the city a letter in May 2009, three months before the suit got filed — a short two-page letter with basically four or five points of what to do to resolve our concerns and it was to do a study. In a way that seems to be sort of typical with cities, they didn't say no, they didn't say yes. Just nothing happened. Really all we wanted was a study and now we got it.

Q: Do you think city officials didn't want to do the study because they were afraid it would hurt the chances of the parking structure happening?

A: The environmental study does not say not to do the project. That might have been their concern, but the environmental study does not at all say not to do the project. It's actually a misconception about environmental law. Environmental law doesn't tell you not to do something. It tells you if you do something, here's what the environmental impact would be. But you still might want to do it. I mean, we build highways and bridges and factories and we know that they have an environmental impact, but we say OK. The best explanation I come up with is that it's not that they didn't want to do it, it's just that they weren't going to get around to doing it until they had a reason.

Q: Does it make sense to do it now that the underground parking structure project is under way?

A: Ann Arbor is constantly struggling with issues like parking, transportation and transit and I think that this study will help inform future decisions. This project moved forward through the DDA and the city's environmental staff never had any formal engagement or input. A lot of what we wanted was just for the city as an entity to engage its own environmental staff in this decision and that's what the settlement agreement now requires, so I think it'll be useful. I think it will help the public understand the ramifications of the project, the environmental impact of the project.

And I think some of the aspects of the study — even putting aside the environmental stuff — are just good management things to know like how much parking you have, how much parking you're adding, what it's replacing. It was very frustrating all along on this case that we could never get from the city or the DDA real numbers. I think there's a lot of benefit to just doing that data collection.

Q: Do you think there's a need for the parking structure?

A: I've never really understood or seen a rational, compelling explanation for this project. I have seen, at various times, this project sold for several different and often contradictory purposes. They told the downtown merchants, 'This parking will be there for your customers and restaurant-goers and shoppers.' The downtown merchants said, 'Great, that's what we need.' At other times they said, 'Oh, no, this parking is just replacing other parking that we're going to close so that we can go from surface lots to underground parking.' OK, but that's a different story than the other one. Now it's becoming clear that this project may be needed to provide parking for whatever hotel concept they want to build on top. They also said this project was needed to help lure Google for expansion. Our problem, of course, is that you can't promise the same parking space to four different people, so I'm kind of as curious as anybody else in town as to who's actually going to be benefitting from the structure.

I think underground parking is a laudable new-urbanism goal but it is incredibly expensive — more expensive than above ground parking. These are literally the most expensive parking spaces anyone's ever going to come across. I know the DDA has tried to minimize the cost through various calculations, but the bottom line is it's $50 million and 600-some odd parking spaces, which is actually only a net increase at the site of about 400 or 500. So you're really spending almost $100,000 per parking space. That's a pretty expensive parking space.

Q: But won't it pay for itself with income from users?

A: That's another thing that's a little bit odd. I don't think that they've shown that this structure will pay for itself. But the parking system, as a system, they say will maintain a clean balance sheet. But there are some really big assumptions in there. One is that they're raising rates. I think there's a fair concern that if you raise rates you're going to suppress demand. That's what the downtown merchants are always concerned about, that if you raise rates people won't come to downtown. They'll go out to the mall instead. But the DDA's assumption for the payback of this is that they will raise rates and people will still come park there and it will pay for itself over time. I hope they're right because otherwise the city's on the hook for the bond.

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