County Board Votes 8-1 To Put Police And Mental Health Services Millage On The Ballot In November
Also, Ann Arbor administrators move to reallocate ARPA dollars once earmarked for unarmed an crisis response program
Before I get into the essay for today, you’ll notice that I’ve switched platforms from Substack >>> Ghost. The reason for this is the fact that Substack platforms nazis and I simply cannot abide that. So here we are on Ghost, same content, same archive. The Substack site will continue to exist for the time being and I will delete it once the transition to Ghost has been in place for a fair amount of time.
If you’ve been following along here over the last few months, you know that I’ve written about the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners [BOC] moving to put an early renewal of the 8-year police and mental health services millage on the ballot in November 2024. However, if you are catching up let me summarize:
—The BOC moved earlier this year to put the measure on the ballot in spite of the fact it does not expire until the end of 2025, funded through the end of 2026.
—This move was being taken with no regard for the changing public health landscape and the fact that residents would prefer having agencies other than police administer housing, mental health and re-entry services.
—The BOC is/ was moving on this without complete sheriff [WCSO] budget information access by the public nor the commissioners.
I submitted a FOIA request for the entirety of the WCSO budget and will soon be submitting another request for the entirety of the Washtenaw County Community Mental Health [CMH] budget, a large majority of which is provided via Medicaid dollars.
At first, we were being charged $938 to obtain the WCSO budget MOUs and contracts, as well as the line item budget. In response to the FOIA request and yours truly drawing attention to the fact the public is being charged about $1K to obtain this information, the BOC placed the line item budget on the open book portion of the county website and refunded the $938. This was after commissioners Rabhi and Scott [Districts 8 and 9 respectively — Ann Arbor] amplified the fact that this info should be available to the public without charging the public for access to the documents.
I had raised $1055 in 1.5 days on a gofundme fundraiser page. I have since donated the $1055 to Care-Based Safety [CBS], a local nonprofit agency focused on building unarmed crisis response and crisis prevention programs in Washtenaw County. CBS has recently been attempting to get unarmed crisis response programs up-and-running in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. You can donate to them by clicking >>>> here.
As of the last BOC meeting, commissioners voted 8-1 to put a rubber stamp renewal of the millage as it is currently written, with commissioner Rabhi [District 8 Ann Arbor] casting the lone vote in opposition to this move. This is in spite of several residents calling for separate millages, a mental health millage that is not combined with a police millage.
That said, there was some movement on reallocating some portion of the WCSO dollars for housing, violence intervention and other mental health services. This reallocation is being accomplished through a millage ordinance guiding the usage of millage dollars. In addition to the extant CMH millage advisory committee, an additional advisory committee is being created for the WCSO portion of the millage. The ordinance updates were spearheaded by commissioners Somerville [District 6 — Ypsilanti] and LaBarre [District 7 — East Ann Arbor].
The final provisions of the ordinance passed at the same meeting commissioners voted to put the millage on the November 2024 ballot include:
1) A 10% floor was added to each of the three areas designated to receive the 50% of the Sheriff's millage funds. Meaning each of the areas, mental health, supportive housing and violence intervention have to get at least 10% of the funds.
2) Both the WCSO and CMH are now required to submit line item budgets for the millage money expenditures annually along with plans on how they will spend the money which requires input from each of their millage advisory boards
3) None of the WCSO millage money can be spent on guns or other weapons
4) The Sheriff will be ex-officio on the WCSO millage advisory committee--no voting privilege.
You can read the entire ordinance language >>>>> here
As far as the FOIA request for the entirety of the WCSO budget, I finally received the MOUs and contract documents this past Tuesday June 11 and have just started to go through the 330 documents ranging from 1-250 pages per document. I will soon post these documents to the https://a2docs.org/ site. One interesting nugget found thus far are two copies of a contractor info document, one of which is nearly completely redacted with the other completely un-redacted.
I’ll be following up with more on this as we make it through the documents and will also keep you updated re: the soon-to-be-submitted FOIA request for the entirety of the CMH budget. A brief preview… I’ll be shifting to the coming General Fund Budget where nearly 50% of those dollars are currently going to the WCSO.
To finish up today’s newsletter, I want to briefly draw your attention to the ongoing saga of the Ann Arbor unarmed crisis response pilot program. Back in late 2023/ early 2024 it was announced that the first RFP had no agencies with an approved application for the $3.5M pilot program funded by one-time ARPA dollars. This is in spite of CBS having submitted a proposal that met all the terms of the RFP.
Now, the second RFP closed with no one applying for the pilot program dollars.
In the wake of this administrative failure, city staff put a proposal to re-allocate the $3.5M to infrastructure and other related types of projects. City staff also put a proposal for a $483K grant from the state police to fund unarmed crisis response. For clarity, the $483K would not be funding a program implemented by state police, but the terms will be state police requirements for whichever program the dollars fund. Staff have since removed these proposals from the agenda for the June 18, 2024 Ann Arbor City Council meeting.
I’ll be following developments of both the county police and mental health millage/ funding for mental health services as well as where the ARPA funding, once allocated for unarmed crisis response, will be going.
Thanks for reading. We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been there.
