City Council and Responsibility Part I

There is plenty of responsibility to go around for the continuing delays in getting an off-leash play area in Ann Arbor. Ultimately, however, the buck stops with the Mayor and City Council.

The normal procedure for anything park related to become policy in Ann Arbor is for the staff of Parks & Rec and the Parks Advisory Commission to come up with plans and recommendations and send them to City Council for final approval. Some Parks staff have worked very hard on this issue and certain PAC members have supported us every step of the way, but overall they have not exactly been aggressive in promoting off-leash play.

Council itself has not generally been obstructionist over the past couple of years and in fact passed the dog park ordinance change unanimously last month. But they are still ultimately to blame for the long delay. I say this because a lack of off-leash play areas has been identified as a sore need for years now. I've previously documented some of this history, beginning in 1997 with the creation of Ann Arbor's first dog park task force and continuing through the most recent PROS plan and Parks millage. And yet Council has not been pro-active in finding solutions to the needs of dog-owning taxpayers.

Part of this has to do with the peculiar nature of the dog park movement. In the case of other Parks programs, a particular neighborhood will identify a need - a new playset or disc golf course for example - and approach their Council members about meeting the need. Those Council members will then act on behalf of their constituents, actively bringing the issue to PAC and pursuing it until the neighborhood is satisfied with a solution. They do this both because it is what good elected representatives do and also because they know that ignoring constituents is a good way to lose their seat on the Council.

The dog park movement, however, is not a neighborhood issue - it is a city-wide issue. Voters from all around the city want this to happen and are not particularly concerned about what Ward is chosen as the host. Thus no single set of Council members sees this as their issue and so none of them takes an active role in seeing it through. Paradoxically this means that an issue with broad appeal across the city is more difficult to solve than a local neighborhood issue.

The Swift Run plan is a case in point. That plan began with County Parks & Rec who approached Ann Arbor and suggested it as a joint project. If the County had not approached the City, we may still be without any plan.

This is the first reason that Council bears the ultimate responsibility for our continuing frustrations - none of them has sought to actively represent our needs, rather they wait passively for solutions to come to them.

To be continued...