AADL Talks To: Janis Bobrin

Sat, 03/02/2024 - 3:14pm

When: August 10, 2023

Janis Bobrin came to the University of Michigan in 1969 to study urban planning and quickly became politically active in environmental issues with a particular interest in water resource management. She eventually served six terms as Washtenaw County Drain Commissioner. Since retiring as Drain Commissioner in 2012, Janis has served on numerous regional boards including the Huron River Watershed Council, the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, and Dawn Farm. Janis talks with us about some of the projects she undertook as Drain Commissioner and the many challenges she and her staff faced over the years. She also talks with us about Ann Arbor's ongoing efforts to address the Pall-Gelman dioxane spill and issues surrounding urban planning and density.

Read more about Janis Bobrin in historical articles from the Ann Arbor News and Ann Arbor Observer.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] EMILY MURPHY: [MUSIC] Hi, this is Emily.
• [00:00:10] AMY CANTU: This is Amy. In this episode, AADL talks to Janis Bobrin. Janis is the former Washtenaw County Water Resources Commissioner, formerly titled the County Drain Commissioner. She was elected for six terms, from 1989-2012. She's also a member of the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, the Huron River Watershed Council, Dawn Farm, and the former Manager of Water Quality Programs for the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments. [MUSIC] Welcome Janis. Thank you so much for coming.
• [00:00:45] JANIS BOBRIN: Oh, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
• [00:00:49] AMY CANTU: First, we would like to chat with you a little bit about what brought you to Ann Arbor. Did you grow up in Ann Arbor? Did you come to Ann Arbor and why?
• [00:00:56] JANIS BOBRIN: Well, I came to Ann Arbor in 1969 for college. I stayed here for undergrad, grad school. Moved back to the Detroit area, which is where I'm from briefly, and miss Ann Arbor too much. I've lived here full-time since 1979.
• [00:01:20] EMILY MURPHY: What did you study when you were here?
• [00:01:22] JANIS BOBRIN: History, undergrad and in the course of that work, I began to study history of the American city and was fascinated. My graduate degree was in urban planning here at UM.
• [00:01:36] AMY CANTU: Were you interested in working on Ann Arbor issues, at that point as a student, or did that come later?
• [00:01:45] JANIS BOBRIN: I worked, didn't really do that much. Took some literature door to door for Bob Harris, who was the mayor a long time ago. That was my first putting my toes in the water of politics. In the course of my studies, I did get involved with the city. I was taking a class called Economic Problems of the Inner City. We did smaller group projects, and mine was really focused on comprehensive code enforcement, bringing buildings up to code. There was a federal program that was providing funding for that, and it was used pretty heavily in Burns Park, the Old West side, and then landlords took advantage of that money to bring student housing up to code. That would probably be when I really began to look a little bit at the workings and the politics and the residential areas of the city.
• [00:02:47] EMILY MURPHY: How did you go from that to then? What was your next step? What was the first involvement outside of school that brought you to local politics?
• [00:02:56] JANIS BOBRIN: Well, when I finished graduate school, and this would have been in the mid '70s, I had this vision of working on social change and economic issues and power to the people kinds of stuff. After all, I was at U of M in the late '60s and early '70s, and there were a bunch of great society programs including Model Cities, and that's where I had envisioned myself going. Unfortunately, when I got out of graduate school, all of those programs were disbanded. At the same time, there was a huge amount of money released under the Clean Water Act to undertake regional water quality management plans. I had interned at SEMCOG, the Regional Planning Agency. They wanted me to come back when I graduated. Sometimes, it's the money that determines your career path. I was hired in the environmental department and we began to work on plans for the seven county areas, the different watersheds, the Rouge, the Clinton, and the Huron. That's really the direction my career took, water quality planning, and I've been in that area ever since.
• [00:04:20] AMY CANTU: That's fascinating. You answered a question that I've always had. Because when we look at our local history books, especially in the reference collection, the whole Model Cities Program, all of that money, all those issues they did suddenly dry up. I was curious about when, why, and how? I know a little bit about the history. That makes sense.
• [00:04:41] JANIS BOBRIN: It was under President Nixon that those programs were ended. Actually, the planning money under the Clean Water Act was impounded. The Clean Water Act passed in '72. The money wasn't released till about '75. Somebody who's listening to this is going to know precisely. [LAUGHTER] Well, around '75 as a result of a lawsuit, the planning money was released. It coincided with my graduating and the rest is history. When I got out of school, I worked in the regional planning, SEMCOG for 13 years. Then the current Drain Commissioner, his name was Jim Murray, decided he was offered a position at, Wayne County, to take over the Department of Environment under Ed McNamara. He called me up just a normal working day and said, Janis, I'm taking this new job. Would you run for Drain Commissioner? You'd be fabulous. You'll win. After 13 years of regional planning, which is really all education, and putting suggested policies out and hoping for the best, we had no statutory authority. I thought it would be terrific to be in a position where I could do something on the ground that would make a difference. I ran in '88 and won and stayed in that position until 2012 when I retired. Six times, I was elected six times. Yeah, 24 years. I didn't know that going in, but it was a great job and it was a different job every day just because of the whole variety of responsibilities. Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County are so supportive of environmental programs that I could do a lot of innovative stuff. My colleagues around the state used to ask me [LAUGHTER] , how did you do that water quality improvement for that stream or restoration or the things that they could never get funding and public support for. You live in the right place and that helps a lot.
• [00:07:07] EMILY MURPHY: Can you talk more about that? You said every day is different. Tell us about some of those things that the Drain Commissioner does.
• [00:07:15] JANIS BOBRIN: Now, as a result of legislative changes that we enact, well, we didn't enact it, we got them through the State Legislature, it's now Water Resource Commissioner in Washtenaw County.
• [00:07:27] AMY CANTU: I notice that. I was going to ask you about that. What's the difference there, isn't it? Is it just the name?
• [00:07:32] JANIS BOBRIN: Originally, this is going to be way more than you've ever wanted to know. Michigan was swamp land, it was mosquito-infested. It was passed over for development in the first wave of settlement moving West. In order for it to be viable for farming and for urban development, there really needed to be a network of drainage systems. That's what the job was all about once upon a time. It was digging ditches and putting in infrastructure to move water away and to create land that was suitable for development purposes or agricultural purposes.
• [00:08:19] JANIS BOBRIN: Over many years to today, we've drained something like two-thirds of Michigan's Wetlands we are not in the mode of draining lands, we're in the mode of managing water. In most parts of the state, the job has really become more about stormwater management and then with a lot of new federal mandates and also just public awareness, it's also become about water quality. Washington County has always been a leader in looking at this position as an environmental position. Actually, when I was elected and my three predecessors, we were the only Democrats among the five county-wide elected officials, Sheriff, prosecuting attorney, clerk, and treasurer and it was because, so looks at it as an environmental position and that Democrats they're the environmentalists. Right?
• [00:09:24] AMY CANTU: Right.
• [00:09:26] JANIS BOBRIN: Like I said, Washington County was in the forefront and it was I'd say, at least two drain commissioners before me who began to look at the quality of stormwater and how water was managed rather than just moving it away and flooding people downstream. Tom Blessing, who is Drain Commissioner '76-'80 was the one who put into place requirements for on-site management of stormwater and Briarwood is a great example of a really early project and there are those ponds all around Briarwood. Well, that's because they paved acres of land so all of that runs off, and those ponds help manage it so it doesn't just flow down in your Mallets Creek and rip out the creek and flood downstream properties. That was really, incredibly innovative stuff at the time to just think about managing the water. I came from a good line of folks who saw more did this job than drainage.
• [00:10:38] JANIS BOBRIN: Yeah. I'm curious. I want to keep going on this is this is really fascinating. Tell me what else you've done. What other projects?
• [00:10:50] JANIS BOBRIN: When I said every day is different, we do everything from big construction projects, so that means hiring engineers and construction contractors. It also means financing those projects. Selling bonds or notes, so we become involved in the financial arena and then there's the piece about telling either local governments or property owners that we're going to do a project and you're going to pay for it.
• [00:11:23] AMY CANTU: Yeah. That's fun? [LAUGHTER]
• [00:11:25] JANIS BOBRIN: Yeah. There's a lot of meeting with the public and with local governmental boards and commissions to explain what we're going to do, what the benefits are going to be, and what your share is going to be. The job is, our authorities as drain or water resource commissioners are limited. Our projects have to be petitioned for by property owners or by local governments. We can't just conceive of these wonderful pie-in-the-sky projects and then tell you how much it's going to cost. We have to be petitioned, but then from there, shaping the extent of a project and the design, that's where we have to become involved with property owners and with local governments. That's the construction side, because water quality is now a federal mandate, stormwater quality, we also undertook a lot of planning for the different creek sheds around Ann Arbor, identifying projects that were necessary to improve water quality, habitat and flood control, and then working with local governments on implementing them, we had a mandate for public education so we became a little environmental consulting business and partnered with the Watershed Council with City of Ann Arbor, and with other local governments on undertaking a lot of these programs that are targeted at homeowners, businesses, institutional landowners. What can you be doing that's going to improve the quality of what runs off your land in a rainstorm, and it's going to protect local creeks. I'm only touching on a small segment. There's also the downside of people getting flooded and we were on call 24 hours to get out there, find out what was going on, what we could do to alleviate problems, and with climate change and it is actually remarkable. I was there for about a quarter of a century and the difference in rainfall pattern that I saw from more continuous, even if there was a lot of water, it fell over a longer period of time and today we see these storms where you can get inches in hours, and none of our systems are designed to handle that. My successor in office, Evan Pratt, faces a whole range of problems that were not problems 30 years ago. There's that evolution of the job too. You look like you have a question.
• [00:14:36] AMY CANTU: My gosh. I have so many. I'm interested in a few specific projects, but just to follow up on what you just said. What are your thoughts about what Ann Arbor can do? What should you not the drain commissioner, but now the resources. [OVERLAPPING] research commissioner should be doing, what can we do?
• [00:14:59] JANIS BOBRIN: Well, Ann Arbor is really a proactive community, and there are projects going on right now. I'm not in charge of them anymore, but putting more storage in Mallets Creek, looking for areas where water can be held and managed. There's no way to upsize pipes to deal with this kind of stormwater. If you look at a watershed like Allen Creek, the Old West side.
• [00:15:26] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
• [00:15:27] JANIS BOBRIN: We're not going to dig up all the streets and put in something new and it's not practical and frankly, you could not achieve the capacity you'd need. What we do need to do is look at better ways to make sure more of the water gets into the ground and better ways to make sure that properties are not in that floodplain and floodway. Someplace like Allen is a tough one because it's all developed and we're not going to tear down houses. But you'll notice some of the newest developments, I'd say first,
• [00:16:05] JANIS BOBRIN: I'm blanking on streets here, I take them. But some of the newer development in low-lying areas, it's on stilts and there's [OVERLAPPING] pocking underneath.
• [00:16:14] AMY CANTU: Yeah. Actually or first down there.
• [00:16:16] JANIS BOBRIN: That's exactly what I'm talking about. That's because we know it's going to flood and let's design it so that the water can flow through underneath the buildings and not cause damage to property and not get impeded so it's going to back up and cause flooding upstream.
• [00:16:36] EMILY MURPHY: Are there things that property owners and Ann Arbor citizens can do to help this work?
• [00:16:42] JANIS BOBRIN: Yeah. You've probably seen a lot of it. We started a program of working with property owners and rain gardens. We think of these are small-scale things, but you get enough of them in place and it really makes a difference. So getting that water managed on your property and back in the ground, is one of the most important things that homeowners can do, thinking about how much surface you really have to pave, do you need that double wide driveway and then that patio that's twice as big as you'll ever use. Just thinking about more sensitive ways to develop. Then from the quality standpoint, what chemicals do you put on your lawn? How do you manage snow in the winter? Do you pick up after your pet? There's a lot of really small-scale actions that can make a difference.
• [00:17:35] AMY CANTU: It's an all-over sustainability issue? I have a question about Allen Creek, and this also is about your partnering, for example, I live close to West Park and I was curious about, over the years, it's been what? Twenty years now that they had put in some plants, they had dug it up, they'd reorganized a couple of times, and I remember reading a bit about it then, would you have been involved with the city on that?
• [00:18:04] JANIS BOBRIN: Yes.
• [00:18:05] AMY CANTU: How did that come about and what happened there?
• [00:18:08] JANIS BOBRIN: We were able to get some low-interest loans and grants from the state through the Federal Clean Water Act. Again, Ann Arbor was such a terrific community to partner with because we thought, well, we've got a vision here, we have open space in West Park, why don't we look at ways to slow the flow, manage and divert some of the water? It's wet anyhow, so let's make it intentionally wet, and create some wetlands, and undertake this redesign. Both the park staff and the engineering staff were folks who just looked at their jobs as way beyond what you might think of ball fields and bike paths. Bike paths are great and engineering staff, it wasn't just about engineering, it was about what can we do for the environment too. The city petitioned for that improvement in West Park. We were able to finance it. We partnered with the city on design and I hope you like it.
• [00:19:30] AMY CANTU: I do. [LAUGHTER] No, it's just changed so much. I lived over there roughly 25, 30 years, so I've seen a lot of the changes. No, it looks like you've figured it out.
• [00:19:42] JANIS BOBRIN: Well, [LAUGHTER] I hope it helps them and before we undertook any of those projects, we prepared watershed management plans. We looked at Swift Run and at Mallets Creek, and at Allen Creek and at Trevor Creek and we had the Watershed Council as a partner. The Adopt a Stream Program, had been collecting data on water quality for years with citizen adopters and so we had that to feed into our planning and see where we were beginning to get some problems and where did we have opportunities. We had a master plan to guide the work as we identified key projects and tried to implement them. Now I'll talk about favorite projects. Mallets Creek was delivering more phosphorous, eroded soil and pollutants into the river than other creek sheds. Number 1, it's bigger, but Number 2, there were serious water quality issues and the creek was eroded and we could see a variety of problems. Just to talk about a couple things that we did, there was a storage pond near Packard and Platte, Mary Beth Doyle Park, if you know that one. The pond had been put in a long time ago. We were able to do some redesign to make it manage storm water better and hold back pollutants more. In the course of doing that, we enhanced the whole area, put in paths and natural landscapes. Mary Beth Doyle, was a fabulous woman who worked for the Watershed Council and died very young in an accident. John Heath Dew was mayor at the time. Mike Garfield from the Ecology Center suggested honoring Mary Beth. John and I thought that was wonderful and so we were able to christen this new natural area, stormwater parkland, in her memory. That's what I meant by great partnerships. Between the watershed Council, the Ecology Center, and the leadership that I saw in Ann Arbor, I could do just way cool stuff. When I say the job was fun and that's why I stayed in it, that's the thing I'm talking about, not the dealing with flooded property owners. [LAUGHTER] But the last big project that I did before I retired was also on Mallets Creek. This one was there was taking care of severe eroding, and again, delivering pollutants downstream into the river and we restored the creek that runs through County Farm Park and then into Mallets Creek down along, let's see, what street is that? Next to-
• [00:23:05] AMY CANTU: Huron.
• [00:23:06] JANIS BOBRIN: No, it would be a dirt road between Huron Parkway and Pesanos.
• [00:23:18] AMY CANTU: Yeah, I know the one you're talking about.
• [00:23:19] JANIS BOBRIN: Go it. I know it.
• [00:23:20] AMY CANTU: To get there. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:23:21] JANIS BOBRIN: It'll come to me. Anyhow, the creek runs along there. It runs through Huron Chase Condominiums. We restored that entire creek. Put in a lot of native landscapes and stabilized the banks and took care of a lot of problems. One of the really fun things about those projects is initially property owners are really disturbed and a little bit in opposition, but as they come to learn what's going on, they become huge supporters.
• [00:23:59] AMY CANTU: Get involved, yeah.
• [00:24:00] JANIS BOBRIN: Yeah. It's tremendously rewarding to see the public education that goes on when people realize, hey, we're part of a big creek shed here. It's not just about the creek that goes by my house, it's about upstream and downstream too and then they begin to have their own ideas and they're great ideas and so we can really work together.
• [00:24:28] EMILY MURPHY: How did you go about communicating all that in that process with property owners? What did that look like?
• [00:24:34] JANIS BOBRIN: Well, we usually engage a team that has multiple areas of expertise. I had people with landscape expertise in fisheries, and of course, engineering. On that one, the easy way is to just say we knew there was going to be concern, we had a public meeting and we spent a lot of time explaining exactly why we were doing what we were going to do, what it was going to be like and what the outcomes were going to be. We use a lot of visuals. Ann Arbor is a pretty educated community, people get it. There's always going to be somebody who's just going to hate everything. [LAUGHTER] But I'm just thinking of the one pivotal meeting with the residents of here on Huron Chase Condominiums. They walked in very concerned because they have natural areas behind their homes, and what's going to happen? We're going to take down trees. Indeed we did have to do some of that. They came in very, very negative.
• [00:25:52] JANIS BOBRIN: They came out with a great understanding and a willingness to, I'm not going to say everybody thought this is great. Janis, you're wonderful [LAUGHTER] and I'm so excited. But a willingness to work on the process and cautious optimism, I would say. Because again, we had experts who could answer every question, and we used a lot of visuals. Public hearings do not always work that well [LAUGHTER] Let me say. But bringing people in and trying to accommodate their concerns and needs is the way we did this.
• [00:26:37] AMY CANTU: You can't really talk about Ann Arbor water without bringing up the dioxane spill. I'm curious how you work with that and what you've seen happen over the years and what your thoughts are about where we are and what we need to do going forward?
• [00:26:55] JANIS BOBRIN: Well, I'll preface it by saying I'm not the expert, and I am not as close to it as I was. It's been quite a few years now, 11 years since I was in office. But you can't live in Ann Arbor without knowing about Gelman. Back around 1990, I would say maybe 91, the contamination was identified by, I think it was a public health student, somebody going to the university did some sampling, found levels of 1,4 dioxane that were of concern. Though it was not below the radar, but people weren't really paying a whole lot of attention. By the early '90s, Chuck Gelman, they were pumping and they proposed discharging their contaminated groundwater. At this point, everybody knew it was contaminated groundwater into Allen Creek and down from there into the Huron River after some level of treatment. That's why I became directly involved. He was like, who are you? What do you think you're doing? He was not pleased to find out that he would need a permit to discharge into the creek. That was, I'd say, years of hue and cry and arm twisting and hand wringing. We did not allow that discharge to take place. He actually ran somebody for Drain Commissioner.
• [00:28:53] AMY CANTU: Against.
• [00:28:53] JANIS BOBRIN: Against me in '92. It was not the situation I had dealt with property owners who weren't thrilled about what I was doing, but I really didn't expect that level of public attack. I know maybe you talked to Liz about this.
• [00:29:15] AMY CANTU: A little maybe, but not much.
• [00:29:20] JANIS BOBRIN: Chuck Gelman was an unusual man, and he was very personal, and it was interesting that he seemed to single out women. Lana Pollock, myself, Liz Brater, Tracey Easthope at the Ecology Center. I won't speculate about anything further, but it was very personal and very nasty. But meanwhile, back to the contamination because Gelman chose to go the court route and to fight, I would say that at one point when it was more confined to the area immediately around his facility, there was a chance that it could have been cleaned up. But with the delay and, again, the arguing and the going to court and refusing to accept state environmental agencies direction, it's now to a point where I don't think that it'll be cleaned up in our lifetimes. I'm hoping that it can be contained effectively and that it doesn't affect drinking water supplies. But it's just such an object lesson in an opportunity lost and why the public just doesn't have faith in business. We're working on some polluter accountability legislation right now. We being, I'm more from an advocacy standpoint, but Jeff Erwin and Jason Morgan are spearheading work on putting some more legislation in place that would hold polluters accountable. There's a lot of good businesses that try to do the right thing, but unfortunately, it's the cases like Gelman that you have to have laws in place to deal with the lowest common denominator. Good businesses don't need it and don't like to see it happen.
• [00:31:49] AMY CANTU: That wasn't a particularly fun recurring topic [LAUGHTER]
• [00:31:53] JANIS BOBRIN: No, it wasn't fun, and now it's just heart-rending to see that we're going to have to live with this. The injustice of people losing the use of their drinking wells and having to hook up to city water at great expense for something that they never did and had no role in.
• [00:32:26] EMILY MURPHY: You mentioned that you're still involved, tell us about this last 11 years since you officially retired, but it sounds like you're still involved with things.
• [00:32:37] JANIS BOBRIN: When I retired, I had a very good relationship with our Board of Commissioners. They were a part of a team that wanted to see good environmental stuff happen in the county. Anyhow, I said there's one thing I'll ask for in that is could I be a citizen member on County Parks Commission? I have been a citizen member on County Parks Commission that we are doing things like the border to border trails.
• [00:33:09] AMY CANTU: It's a beautiful project.
• [00:33:11] JANIS BOBRIN: Isn't that great?
• [00:33:12] AMY CANTU: It really is.
• [00:33:14] JANIS BOBRIN: We're in the process of just beginning an Eastern Rec Center, is right between Superior and Ypsilanti townships, to really provide the same services for the population on the extreme East part of the county. What we do really makes a difference in people's lives, and it's a lot of fun. I've also stayed on the Huron River Watershed Council board and Executive Committee. Again, I can't think of an organization that I love more than the Watershed Council. I'm on the board of the Michigan League of Conservation Voters. What we do there is really try and make sure that the right people get elected to office, people who are conservation champions, and then educate them on the issues and hold them accountable once they're elected. Because we all know, it's easy to say I care about clean water and I care about energy efficiency. When you get in there, what are you really doing, vote-wise. Then we let their constituents know what's going on, and we do a lot of public education. So it's just a wonderful organization.
• [00:34:41] JANIS BOBRIN: Now, separate from environment, I've been on the board of another organization I love, and that's Dawnfarm. Dawnfarm provides drug and alcohol addiction treatment, everything from outpatient to long-term residential care. Then beyond that, to transitional housing, so that people become part of a recovering community and have a much better chance of staying sober. I'm passionate about this is our 50th anniversary at Dawn Farm.
• [00:35:22] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
• [00:35:22] JANIS BOBRIN: We've got a project underway to try and purchase some transitional housing, a small apartment complex, 12 units in Ypsilanti county. So that we know we will have that resource for the community that really needs more resources. Then I'm involved with an informal, I don't know what to call them, organization called Wolf Pack. This is just a coalition of regular folks who care a lot about environmental issues and want to get involved and make a difference. One of the key projects that Wolf Pack is working on now is Line 5 up in the Straits of Macinaw, trying to get that operation out of our Great Lakes. The organization also brought together all of the different entities in the area who are working on climate change projects so that would include the county, the city, UNM, EMU, the community college. I'm only naming a fraction of them. Well, they're all doing great work on developing plans, hopefully, to reduce our carbon footprint and to deal with climate change. The Wolf Pack committee that's dealing with climate change, brought all those folks together to see where there are some economies of scale and where information can be transferred. We don't know what the future that's going to be, but I don't think it would have happened if we didn't decide to try and bring those folks together. One of the priorities, when you mentioned that, I talked about polluter accountability. One of the priorities of the clean water team is getting that legislation back in place. Actually, I've got a meeting at two o'clock today and we'll be talking about creating some citizen advocacy to help get legislation through. So that's what I'm doing.
• [00:37:44] AMY CANTU: That's a lot and it's great and it's fantastic.
• [00:37:47] AMY CANTU: It's all interconnected. It's all where your passion is, that's really something. I just want to ask one more question about You said you studied urban planning and what do you feel that Ann Arbor is doing right, in terms of, we were talking earlier about the streets and the bike lanes and the building and all of us going out. Some of it's right. A lot of people complain. What are your thoughts about where we're going and what we should do to consider a lot of these issues that are so near to your heart?
• [00:38:23] JANIS BOBRIN: Again Ann Arbor has really taken a lead in thinking about water when they make development decisions. In 1989, my first year in office stormwater was there were some engineering standards, but it was not a big issue. This is true for the townships around Ann Arbor and the other cities in the county. Water was a secondary consideration. Today, we know where the flood prone areas are, we know where creeks are being impacted. I think the city puts that up front and center in development decisions. But the larger question of what do I think is going on, that's right. Everything's controversial, isn't it? I'm a big fan of urban density and I went to school here and I was here in the '60s and I loved the way it used to be and all the little shops that are no more, and I always mentioned drakes, the old coffee and tea locale. These were all fond memories, but change happens and cities either grow and change or they die. This is a hugely popular place to be. Downtown looks very different than it used to. When I was going to school University Towers at the corner of South U. and Forest. Is that it?
• [00:40:05] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
• [00:40:06] JANIS BOBRIN: That was built, it was like we're not doing any more of that, we're not creating any more of those high rises. That was the position for a long, long, long time. But we have no more place to go out downtown, and people want to be downtown. So yeah, it's going to change the character of the area. I don't like everything, but I'm a real fan of trying to put development here. One of the reasons that we worked in this is a coalition of groups on the Ann Arbor Greenbelt and the county's natural areas program was because we recognized that if we didn't do something, not that there's anything wrong with Wayne in Oakland County but that's what we were going to be. If we didn't find a way to actively work to preserve open space and farmland and we did that. At that point, you got to recognize that if there's that much demand to live here, it's going to mean higher density. I think the city is looking at opportunities to develop within some of the areas where we have huge expanses of parking lots. Could we be doing something else with that parking lot and create more density without sacrificing green fields? The one piece that city council, I'm glad I'm not on city council, the one piece it's very hard to deal with is affordability. When you're in an area where people want to live here, and developers need to make a profit on what they do, it's pretty hard to satisfy that concern. I think we're all troubled by that. Because again, one of the things that's really cool about Ann Arbor is the diversity of the population and that diversity really should include economic diversity, too so great that we have people from all over the world, but if they're all educated and successful, we really aren't achieving much in the way of diversity.
• [00:42:35] AMY CANTU: You have a lot to be proud of. Thank you. Thank you so much for your service. Is there one thing that stands out for you? If you were asked what are you most proud of?
• [00:42:47] JANIS BOBRIN: Well, without going to a specific project, I guess I'm most proud of the fact that in the period that I was in office, people who, like I was saying before, never really thought much about water quality. If I do development here, it's going to affect a stream all the way over there. That today the thinking has changed so much that, putting in native plantings, people don't say how come there are weeds on your lawn. They understand what's there and why it's there. I'm just that whole change in public perception and in public values, I think I contributed something to that. I'm really, really proud of that. The most fun project though, is the Ballots Creek restoration work we did. Because I'm in County Farm Park all the time, just seeing the results of our work and knowing that people are enjoying it.
• [00:43:49] AMY CANTU: AADL talks to is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.