Current Saline City Council members David Rhoads and Brian Marl are vying with two challengers to keep their seats in the Nov. 2 election. Dean Girbach is a former council member and mayor pro tem who would like another term on the council, and Jim Roth is aiming for his first council seat.

The four candidates for the three open seats have different concerns about the issues facing the city.

Roth, 66, a retired teacher who taught in Saline schools for 30 years, and Girbach, 47, a financial manger at the University of Michigan, said financial concerns are their top priority as they campaign to be on the council.

“The tax dollars for a lot of additional projects are not going to be coming from the feds or from the state,” Girbach said. He would like to see the council try to find other ways to fund the city’s needs, instead of raising the tax rate. He suggests getting grant money or asking voters to approve funding for individual projects.

Both Roth and Girbach have concerns about layoffs and job consolidations in the Saline city government. Last year, the council combined the ordinance officer and building inspector positions into one. The council also eliminated four full-time positions.

Rhoads, 69, a remodeling contractor, and Marl, 26, a legislative aide, said the city is in good financial shape, and the layoffs and consolidations were necessary to keep the city in that position.

“In this economic market, there isn’t a lot of development and building,” Marl said, “so the responsibilities of the building inspector probably over the last five or six years have lessened significantly. We felt there was an adequate amount of time for (one person) to do both the building inspecting and code enforcement.”

“I’m not naïve enough to suggest we’re doing as much code enforcement as we did two years ago,” Marl said. “But we are doing a sufficient amount of code enforcement to maintain a high quality of life that our citizens have come to expect.”

Rhoads said the council will need to continue to be careful about how it spends money because tax revenues have decreased over the past few years, and no one knows when they will increase. As of June 30, the city had a cash balance of nearly $2.9 million. The City Council will view an audited report on Monday night.

“The city is in pretty good shape financially…But we also understand that our revenue, which is mostly property tax, is going to continue to decline in the next however many years… so we’re being careful with how we spend our funds,” Rhoads said. “It’s also quite likely that we will request that city staff not get an increase next year.” He said city employees got a 3 percent raise last year.

Rhoads is particularly concerned about the rising costs of health benefits for employees, which he says have risen rapidly in the last year.

“I keep questioning … that the city’s well prepared,” Girbach said. “I don’t think we’re realizing how much problems could be coming down the road.”

Girbach is also not sure the council made the right decision in voting in June to ban medical marijuana dispensaries in the city. Residents of Michigan voted to approve medical marijuana in 2008, but marijuana is still illegal under federal law.

Girbach said if the issue comes up again, he would vote to approve dispensaries in Saline as long as they could be regulated properly. “The concern is how do we keep [medical marijuana usage] within the current laws and within the needs of the state because we voted for it,” Girbach said.

Roth said he agreed with the council’s decision.

Marl and Rhoads said the council voted to ban dispensaries because the state does not provide specific guidelines for medical marijuana dispensaries.

“We think that the vagueness of the current statute would only encourage mischief and irresponsibility, and would perhaps lead to marijuana distributed and sold to people who wouldn’t qualify for medical marijuana,” Marl said.

Tara Cavanaugh is a freelance reporter for AnnArbor.com. For more on this race, see our Voters' Guide. For more Saline stories, see our Saline page.