Thread by @fleshytimeclock

#A2Council
Here's a strange moment from last night's council meeting in which CM Hayner appears to call for elimination of the mayoral veto from the Ann Arbor city charter.

The reasons this is strange to me take some explaining, so please read on after watching the clip.

Here's a summary explanation of the two main kinds of city governance that exist in the U.S. taken from the National League of Cities website.

It's particularly notable here that Ann Arbor has a hybrid version of the strong and weak mayor systems described.

In Ann Arbor the mayor gets his veto power (and the power to make various appointments) by being directly elected by the citizens of Ann Arbor. He is the only one on council with that distinction, which he has to add a layer of "checks-and-balances" style representation for us.

So the big issue here is that CM Hayner appears to want the increased legislative & policy making power granted to CMs within the strong mayor form of gov't, but at the same time he seems to want the veto-less mayor seen in the weak mayor system.

This seems problematic at best.

My questions, then:
Does CM Hayner not value our hybrid form of gov't?
Does he think we don't value it, and that this creates an opening to attempt increasing the powers of CMs?
Why does he not want to work within the system we have, preferring to suggest systemic change?

That last question can be generalized to any/all CMs who seem to want to take their responsibility to *represent us* as elected *representatives* and shift it back onto voters in the form of various opinion surveys and ballot issues they have supported and continue to support.

Efforts at "direct democracy" may *sound* good, but it's worth considering whose voices are less likely to be heard in such systems. Part of the value of representative democracy comes precisely from electing *leaders* who aren't just stand-ins for certain (louder?) constituents.

Please also note that I just tried to compose 7 tweets in a row without any name-calling or invective. Probing political discourse really is possible without those things.

Fun is fun, but sometimes it's worth trying a little harder to buck the trend toward negative language.