ASK ELi TO INVESTIGATE: Why Did People Vote No?

What were the 3,728 people who voted “no” thinking? That’s the question we’re tackling this week in “Ask ELi to Investigate”—why enough East Lansing voters said “no” (to authorizing City Council to sell three parking lots) to cause the measure to fail. We think gathering answers to this question could help citizens, City officials, and developers understand what happened as the City goes forward from here.

The ELi reader who inspired this week’s investigation actually asked about one much smaller group of voters: “I don't understand what groups like Neighborhoods 1st want. They are opposed to the current proposal, but I'm not sure why. I thought there was a great deal of public input into the current proposal [from DTN]. They say they want to see the developer’s money upfront. They want to see who is going to occupy the property. But I find all those requests to be putting the cart before the horse. Do they really just oppose development of this area? They don't seem to have an alternate proposal for development. What am I missing here?”

I agree that it is difficult to know exactly what Neighborhoods 1^st (the PAC that opposed the ballot measure for the authorization to sell three City parking lots) wants in the Park District. As I’ve reported at ELi, it’s been difficult to obtain clear answers from the PAC about lots of things, including the basis for its political positions, how those positions are decided, and by whom. But while I can’t say what Neighborhoods 1^st wants, I think the reader is getting at a bigger and important question here, the question of why so many people voted "no." So that’s the question I tackled this week.

An unscientific but thoughtful sample: I collected feedback from six citizens who voted “no.” My sample may not be representative of "no" voters, but I think their answers do help to capture the range of issues “no” voters had. We can break their answers down into these six categories:

1. This project wasn’t going to fix the blight that matters. This was a very common answer among those polled. The blight that matters to most citizens is at the corner of Abbot Road and Grand River—the big boarded-up, vacant, commercial properties. The DTN project wasn’t going to fix that at all. It was going to knock down and replace smaller buildings along Evergreen Avenue that are all currently in use. (To understand the difference between these projects, see last week’s Ask ELi.) Related to this concern was a concern about what would replace the in-use buildings:

2. What DTN was proposing was dramatically out of scale. The Developer DTN was proposing, among other buildings, a 10-story apartment building wrapped around a 7-story parking ramp bordering the east side of Valley Court Park. About half those responding said that if the in-use smaller buildings along Evergreen are going to be replaced, they wish they were replaced with something reasonable in scale (3-4 stories), because the new buildings would be surrounding the park and bordering an older, residential, low-rise neighborhood.

As one respondent put it, “the land sale was bundled up in a project plan developed with the notion that bigger is better, when in fact it may be better for residents to see several smaller developments in the [project] area.” Another called the proposal “too massive with way too many rental units.” A third said, “This push for [big] development is destroying the college-town charm that has always made East Lansing special.” Said a fourth, “We’re never going to be Chicago, and we shouldn’t want to be Chicago. We need to create a livable modern small city, one that is sustainable.” Tied up with this concern was a concern about the funding structure:

3. Taxpayers shouldn’t pay to subsidize developers’ profits, especially when they’re just building more off-campus dorms for MSU students. If DTN had planned to assume all the financial risks and costs of their proposal, fewer people might have voted “no.” But as ELi has reported, the plan was likely to be heavily subsidized by all of us East Lansing taxpayers through tax schemes that would ultimately put a financial burden on East Lansing citizens for as many as three decades.

Said one respondent, “the proposed land sale was supportive of development schemes that would enrich developers at the expense of East Lansing residents and taxpayers (too much public funding to be committed to the new projects in form of TIF, infrastructure costs, and parking garage).”

Said another, “The five buildings in total would have added between 600 and 700 new beds of rental housing to a concentrated area all at once. Was that going to turn into a dorm (financed by taxpayers)? Or was that going to turn into a diverse community that would help diversify the business mix downtown?” While it is the case that the project would probably lead to some economic boost for downtown businesses, many respondents feared that the only businesses that would benefit are bars and tanning salons, not the new businesses they want, including a grocery store and other amenities for year-round post-college residents.

Another said that “we don’t need to stick our children with the debt to build MSU’s off-campus luxury dorm.” This person said that all that would achieve is making sure our children leave East Lansing to get away from the big local debt we are causing through “governmental giveaways.” (To read about why East Lansing has $186,000,000 in debt, click here.) This person, like others, was especially troubled with the idea of going into ever more debt to pay for parking. “Parking is not a public utility,” said this person (and added the joke, “If it is, it should be turned over to BWL”).

So this concern was tied up with a general concern about this Council’s management history:

4. The wording of the ballot measure left too much wiggle room for political mischief. Some people who voted “no” probably might have voted “yes” if the ballot question had specified DTN as the buyer and had specified good prices. Instead, the ballot question asked the voters to trust Council to be “authorized, but not mandated, to sell for fair market value all or portions” of the lots to whomever, leaving a lot of leeway for how the sale would actually take place. Some people even read the line “but not mandated” to mean Council didn’t even have to sell the lots for fair market value, but could sell the lots for a dollar if they so decided. This leads us to:

5. This particular City Council can’t be trusted with this kind of blanket authorization. They’re too chummy with DTN and other developers. Because (a) the majority of this City Council has been very generous to developers with tax revenue give-back deals, (b) at least one Councilmember has accepted substantial contributions from developers with business before Council, (c) four Council members collaborated with DTN on an expensive political mailer that did not disclose DTN had paid for it, and (d) DTN and Mayor Nathan Triplett were seen by those I polled as misleading voters about which “blight” DTN’s project would fix, trusting this Council became an issue for the voters I polled. As one put it, “we did not trust the pro-development staff and current City Council to take care of this sale in the neighborhoods’ and residents’ best interest.”

Another said something similar: “City Council members need to maintain an arms’ length relationship with developers, not walk hand-in-hand with them down the campaign trail. City Council was going to have to hold DTN to its promises to get a project that was good for taxpayers. But they'd already let important things [drop out of the proposal], like a grocery store, and after the ballot initiative campaign four Councilmembers and the developer were comrades in arms. I don't know how those four were going to drive a hard bargain [for citizens].”

The way DTN ran the “yes” campaign, without adequate disclosure on their printed political ads, seems to have eroded some trust in the company, but a bigger issue for almost all was this:

6. Too many unanswered questions remain. Voting “yes” meant, to these respondents, saying “yes” to too many unknowns. Who is going to occupy the planned 68,000 square feet of office space? Will seniors really want to live right next to hundreds of students, and is there a better offer possible for downtown senior housing? How was the area going to manage all the cars, bicycles, and walkers these large buildings would bring to this area? How much was all this going to cost the average City homeowner in subsidies and debt? (Sample answer: “uncertainty over ultimate cost to the taxpayer to provide adequate parking to the project.”) If the project is economically sustainable, why would it require so much public financial assistance? Is the reality that the student housing market is saturated? (Said one, “We already have many student apartment developments nearby, a huge one behind the MAC off Hagadorn, the complexes on Chandler and one going up on Trowbridge to name a few.”)

For many of my respondents, the project was too much about pretty pictures and not enough about realistic economic and infrastructural details that could show how this was really going to work.

It is true that, as the reader who inspired this investigation pointed out, “a great deal of public input [went] into the current proposal” from DTN. City Manager George Lahanas suggested at City Council this week that DTN’s outreach to the public in proposal development was exemplary. But that public input in the end didn’t lead to a clear plan that would satisfy enough people to pass a ballot measure that would give this City Council the ability to make a decision for the citizens on the sale of the parking lots.

Next week, ELi will look at why 4,858 East Lansing citizens voted yes on the ballot measure. Want to tell us why you voted "yes," or have a question you want ELi to investigate? Contact us!

UPDATE, NOV. 14: You can now read the follow-up about why people voted "yes": click here.

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