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A weekly show from the folks at East Lansing Info breaking down all the news and happenings in East Lansing, Michigan.
WDBM East Lansing.
Announcer:This is East Lansing Insider, brought to you by ELi on Impact 89 FM. In this show, we break down all of the news and happenings in the East Lansing community. And now, today's East Lansing Insider.
Lucas Day:Hello, everyone, and welcome to East Lansing Insider, the radio show and podcast brought to you by East Lansing Info. For those of you unfamiliar with East Lansing Info, we're a nonprofit news outlet that reports on East Lansing City government, schools, businesses, and pretty much everything else that happens in the city. This show, which airs on Sundays at 9 A. M. on 88.9 FM Impact Radio and wherever you get your podcasts, will be an extension of our reporting. So you can get the news while you're driving your car or walking your dog. Some shows will have a reporting staff on to talk about important things happening in the city and others will do live interviews with important people in the community. Hi everyone. I'm East Lansing Info's managing editor, Luke Day. Today, we're gonna be talking about the upcoming election slate in East Lansing. We're about two months out. I'm joined by ELi's deputy editor, Anna Nichols.
Anna Nichols:Good morning. I'm glad to be here. We'll be talking about the election, as Lucas said. We've got two open seats, six candidates, each for a four year term, and we're gonna be talking about why this election is important and what's at stake.
Lucas Day:So a lot of people don't understand what exactly the city council votes on. And locally it can be anything from developments that come into town. The one that we've seen a lot about this week is that there's a sheets that's proposed for East Lansing and a lot of the reporting on it's been like it's coming to town and that's not necessarily true because it's going to the planning commission in early October for public hearing, a special use permit. After that goes through the Planning Commission, it has to be voted on by members of city council and they'll decide whether or not Sheetz gets that special use permit which it probably needs to come to East Lansing and actually open up a shop. We've seen gas stations locally approved and rejected that were controversial.
Lucas Day:The Graduate Hotel right now in downtown East Lansing, the city's deciding whether or not to let it expand its rooftop bar and patio. City Council also interacts with things like some of the ordinances that our police then enforce. There's a controversial ordinance regarding pretextual stops that some people thinks lets drivers have loud mufflers. It's a little bit more complicated with that because it interacts with state law but it's been something that people have talked about a lot lately. So these guys make a lot of decisions that matter and we see pretty low turnout generally for city council elections.
Lucas Day:So I think it's good that we know about who the candidates are and what they're going to do well before election day.
Anna Nichols:So there's two open seats in the East Lansing City Council this November, as mayor George Brookover and councilwoman Dana Watson are not seeking reelection. We're not seeing any incumbent people seeking reelection. We're seeing several candidates that have ran in the past or have other involvement in the city.
Lucas Day:Yeah. And I think that's kind of important to mention because the next council's gonna decide on a lot of things that are kind of developing right now. I think the most important two are the financial health review team which the city is currently trying to form. That committee is going to do like a three sixty review of city finances. The city's not in a great financial spot right now and this committee is going to look at everything from spending to ways the city makes money and the benefit structures that different employees have to decide what we can do to fix our finances.
Lucas Day:It's really important to note that there is a similar committee the city formed about ten years ago. I think 2016 they wrapped up their work. And the city council at the time, didn't implement all of their recommendations, which some people take issue with. Outgoing mayor George Brookover was against forming this current committee because he thinks we should go back and just look at what the last one did. So a lot of these candidates have talked about how they want to kind of lean on this financial health review team, which also has had some trouble recruiting members, but they want to lean on this team to implement changes to the city finances.
Lucas Day:There could be a significant amount of recommendations that comes out of this committee. I think the last one made about 40. The other major thing that's going on right now is the city's charter review committee, another temporary review committee that was put together last year by the city, wrapped up its work. I think the city voted to give those recommendations to its attorney to see if they're all legal about a couple weeks ago at the September. This current city council is not going to vote on those recommendations.
Lucas Day:There's 28 different resolutions they passed. It's everything from adding a preamble to the city charter, there's a new section on transparency that really focuses on FOIA. Sometimes we get kind of inconsistent results when we submit FOIAs to the city, so that's something I've got my eye on. There's another resolution in there that the city manager must live within 25 miles of the city of East Lansing within a year of starting the job. I it's kind of a shot at the current city manager Robert Bellman who last I knew lived in Saginaw.
Lucas Day:He would not be subject to that that charter change because, he'd kind of be grandfathered in. But I do think it's kind of notable that change may go into our city charter and you know it relates directly to the current city manager. So way that charter changes work is the next city council will vote whether or not those are placed on the ballot and then voters will vote whether or not to approve them. So if you get some candidates or city council members that don't support these charter changes that were recommended by this committee, won't make their way to voters, essentially. The third thing is that at Tuesday's city council meeting, council member Mark Meadows mentioned that he'd had several developers come to him recently.
Lucas Day:He said that there's there's building has slowed in East Lansing. We saw Newman Lofts, we saw The Hub, we saw The Graduate and The Abbott all come up within a couple of years of each other and Mark said that that's really slowed because of COVID. That was his reasoning. I don't know if that's right or not, but he said that he's heard from a lot of developers that want to build in East Lansing. The big project that's been talked a lot about in city meetings is the Howard.
Lucas Day:It's being presented by the owners of the student bookstore at their current site. They want to build a, it's a very large housing project. They want to build where the student bookstore currently is. The next city council will likely decide on that project. It hasn't been officially proposed yet but developers put enough time that I think it's fair to say that there's a good chance that it is officially proposed.
Lucas Day:But also other large developments that council member Meadows said we should be expecting on the horizon.
Anna Nichols:Yeah. So there's a there's quite a few issues on the line here in an election that isn't expected to draw a whole ton of voters. Even in the November during a historically high voter turnout, in fact, the highest voter turnout Michigan ever saw statewide, East Lansing only had about just under 19,000 voters. It was really good. It was a 67%, nearly a 68% voter turnout as opposed to, the year prior in November 2023, a 24% voter turnout.
Anna Nichols:Isn't that crazy?
Lucas Day:Yeah. And that's largely because East Lansing does their local elections on the odd years. And during the even years, you've got those big top of the ticket presidential, you know, senate races that are drawing people in.
Anna Nichols:There's hope that voter turnout with the youth population, specifically students, as East Lansing is college town could improve, especially considering in these presidential elections and even midterm elections in Michigan, highly competitive. Youth voter turnout has been increasing over the last couple years, especially in 2024 where we saw historic near top of the nation results in turnout in the in the youth population with local elections coming down to either a handful of votes or only a 100 votes. Those votes matter.
Lucas Day:Yeah. I think that they could. They they used to matter a lot. I read old newspapers because I've got too much time on my hands. And in 1972, which was the first election after Vietnam lowered the voting age essentially down to 18, it was 21, Students were very involved.
Lucas Day:The town courier which was the East Lansing newspaper at the time credited the election to the students. The candidate who won in the neighborhood said the most vote in the neighborhoods, I can't remember these names off the top of my head, but he wasn't elected at all. There was actually a student, maybe not a student, he was a janitor at Michigan State for sure. Think he was also a student. But he ran a write in campaign that received so many votes that he would have been elected in 2023.
Lucas Day:So that's how much higher the turnout was, in earlier days, especially on campus. You used to see 60% turnout in East Lansing. You know, numbers very similar to those odd year general elections, but we just don't get that anymore. I guess we can jump right into the candidates because some of them are trying to drive that student turnout up.
Anna Nichols:Yeah. For there being two seats, we have six candidates with a range of backgrounds. We talked about local involvement, but we also have a recent grad who, has a lot of participation in in statewide elections. We have individuals that have worked in in state government, in East Lansing police, and the school board. So we really have a, a wealth of backgrounds on this.
Anna Nichols:First off, we have Adam Delay, who worked in, former US senator for Michigan Debbie Stabenow's office, as well as current governor Gretchen Whitmer's office and is now working for the state health department as the legislative analyst. And he currently serves on the Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission.
Lucas Day:So Adam's pretty pro development. He thinks that, adding some of these large developments like the Howard which we talked about earlier, that's the student bookstore proposal, will help the city grow its tax base which, you know, he sees housing as needed as Michigan State adds more and more students. But also the additional tax revenue that brings in, he thinks can help the city fix its budget issues. Adam, he's been critical of some of the city council, decisions over the last year or so, last couple years. He's called out some of the smaller expenses at the candidate forum last night.
Lucas Day:He actually printed off agenda items and he'd actually read it some of the expenses, some of the smaller expenses, I think $50,000 a piece that the city spent money on without much discussion. And just point out, these things add up. He thinks that we really need to dig into what we're spending money on, what we're hiring consultants to, and decide whether or not those things are needed.
Anna Nichols:The next candidate we'll talk about is Liam Rikiki, a recent graduate of Michigan State University who has worked on campaigns since he was 15 years old. I actually met Liam on this, last presidential trail when, Kamala Harris is running me, Tim Walls, came to Michigan State University, and Rakicke was president of MSU Dems. Now he spends his time at the capital working in, Ann Arbor area state rep's office, Jason Morgan.
Lucas Day:Yeah. So and you'll you'll notice a theme with some of these candidates. Liam wants to promote development in the city. He's been pretty aggressive about talking about how he knows that there's a need for student housing because, he was recently a student and he knows a lot of students who had trouble finding housing. When I talked to him earlier this year, he talked about how it's kind of absurd that you're a student and you've got to find housing for the next year and if you want to stay at where you're living, you've got to resign that lease in October.
Lucas Day:So maybe you've only been there for a month, a few weeks, you don't know how your property manager is going to be and they're telling you you've got to resign or you've got to leave or you've got to lose your housing. That's an issue that matters a lot to Liam. He's also talked about building up the city university relationship and increasing traffic safety. He thinks his experience as a recent grad will give him a pretty unique perspective about some of the issues the city has. We've heard again from a lot of candidates that they want to improve the relationship between the MSU and the city.
Lucas Day:Liam thinks that he's already got a lot of those, relationships that can help do that.
Anna Nichols:Next on the list is Cath Edsel. She's a longtime participant in the East Lansing School Board, even serving as president of the board at one point of her more than a decade of experience on the board. Now she's the treasurer, and she currently serves as vice chair of the East Lansing Independent Police Oversight Commission.
Lucas Day:Kath's top priorities are balancing the city budget. That's gonna be a theme with all the candidates. Development and budget are the two things that most of them are pretty focused on. But Kath always also talked a lot about increasing equity in city policies, that's something that she focused on a lot in the school board. I think it's worth mentioning that Kath is the only candidate who's been elected to a citywide position on the school board which she's I think she's won three elections there and, the boundaries are a little bit different but it's basically a citywide election.
Lucas Day:Cath, both when she talked to our reporter Allison Treanor and at the candidate forum last night, her idea to address the budget was to drill into public safety, which makes up about 60% of the general fund. I think that it's kind of a it's a different approach than other candidates mentioned. I think that some of them may be a little bit concerned about talking about cuts to public safety as we're experiencing some concerning violence downtown, especially late at night and weekends. But she made the point that 60% of our general fund goes towards public safety. And so if you're looking at these other parts of the fund, you're kind of trying to make cuts in departments that already aren't receiving much.
Lucas Day:You need to look at where the bulk of the funding is going.
Anna Nichols:On a local level, public safety was a huge topic at the candidate forum, and I think will continue to be a conversation point throughout this election. In fact, our next candidate, Chuck Grigsby, has a background in being an investigator for the Iowa State Attorney General's Office. He's previously chaired East Lansing's Human Rights Commission and the study commission that created the city's police oversight commission.
Lucas Day:So when our reporter, Alison Treanor, talked to Chuck, he said he wants to make East Lansing more accessible to both small businesses and people looking to join the community. He's talked about affordability, how it's hard to get a foothold in East Lansing. The other thing that Chuck said is that he wants to rely on experts like the city commission members to help him make decisions when he's on city council. There's been some frustration with decisions that councils made in the past where the city commissions which are made up of volunteers, they're not elected officials but they're made up of volunteers who sometimes spend much more time on certain topics than city council will. These topics will go to the city commissions before they go to city council.
Lucas Day:The commissions will vote whether or not the city should pass it. They make a recommendation and sometimes because the commissions receive more direct feedback during their process than city council does, there's some frustration from community members about certain things that pass because, I think some of the commission feedback's overlooked or missed. And so that checks that it's gonna be a priority for them.
Anna Nichols:The next candidate, Steve Whelan, is a retired East Lansing Police Department officer after twenty five years of service. He used to be a school resource officer and has held other roles in the department, including detective.
Lucas Day:Yeah. So a lot of people know Steve from when he was in the schools. His top priorities are he wants to continue to invest in public safety. He described smart growth, so making sure that we're growing the city, letting developments in, but he wants to be maybe a little bit more selective than some of the previous candidates. And once again, balancing the budget.
Lucas Day:Steve thinks that the city could do more to work with the public schools than MSU. When Allison talked with him, he just gave some anecdotes from the time that he spent in the schools where he learned things that you wouldn't have known as an outsider otherwise. And obviously, MSU police work closely with the East Lansing Police. I'm guessing there's a lot of overlap Steve had when he was with ELPD. So he thinks the city can, you know, learn things from working with MSU as well.
Anna Nichols:And our last candidate, Joshua Ramirez Roberts. He's another one of our younger candidates at age 24. He served on multiple commissions and committees, including the University Student Commission, the Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission, the Folk Festival Study Committee, and the Comprehensive Plan Update Committee.
Lucas Day:Yeah. So Josh ran it in 2023. He was right out of MSU, he he did pretty well. I think he finished sixth, so he finished ahead of a couple of candidates. We see him a lot of city council meetings, different city commission meetings.
Lucas Day:His priorities are balancing the budget again. He thinks that we can improve development by fixing our zoning code. He thinks that it's a little bit congested. It could be simplified. He also wants to encourage more owner occupied housing.
Lucas Day:I've heard him talk about condos a lot. He thinks that as the city builds, it should be giving opportunities for its residents to build wealth. Josh has said both at the candidate forum last night and a couple times when I've talked to him in the past that he thinks that MSU should be doing more to help with some of the, issues with violence downtown. He thinks that MSU police should have more of a presence. Maybe, that's that's something he's he's said that he wants to look into is if we could tap more into MSU policing to address issues that are happening across Grand River in in the city.
Anna Nichols:And it was clear that that was an important issue for residents at the candidate forum. Public safety was asked about in several forms, including just the state of wellness and and public safety in downtown. The parks millage was brought up. Our status as a sanctuary city was brought up. And youth behavioral problems at the library, there's a high school right behind the East Lansing Public Library, was also a topic of conversation at the candidate forum.
Lucas Day:Yeah. And we got those topics by collecting questions from our readers. I think we got upwards of 50 different people who submitted questions and I'm guessing that there are around a 100, maybe more than a 100 questions that we got and we had to condense those down to about seven. The seven questions we asked made up the bulk of what we got. So it was it was an it was an interesting forum.
Anna Nichols:One conversation point that residents asked about that I thought was interesting was our status as a sanctuary city. Because it's not just about the local issue of being a sanctuary city, It has federal implications. This summer, East Lansing was put on a list, released by the US Department of Justice. It was a list of sanctuary cities, a list of states, cities, and counties. The Trump administration says have policies or regulations in place that go against the immigration policies of the administration.
Anna Nichols:East Lansing was the only Michigan mentioned on this list, which is a concern to residents as Trump has deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles and Washington DC over the last few months and has threatened to send troops to other Democrat leading areas like Chicago. Even this week, vice president J. D. Vance said to Michiganders on a visit to Howell that the administration would be happy to send the National Guard to Detroit to help lower the city's violent crime rates. But in reality, the city last year reported the lowest homicide rates it's seen since the nineteen sixties.
Lucas Day:Yeah. And just jumping back to the sanctuary cities conversation, you saw a lot of the same debate last night that you saw in 2023 when the city council voted to declare East Lansing a sanctuary city. So so for some context, since about February, again, council member Mark Meadows has been in city government since before I was born. He kind of gave us some history. He said that around 2001 after the nineeleven attacks, the federal government was pressuring localities essentially to racially profile people that appeared to be Muslims.
Lucas Day:And the city adopted a policy then that was pretty close to being a sanctuary city. And then in 2017, they made it more formal and they put in a safe haven resolution. Again, is early in the first Trump administration. The safe haven resolution operates functionally pretty similarly to how sanctuary cities operate. The discussion in 2023 when we adopted that sanctuary city resolution wasn't that we were going to start doing things drastically different.
Lucas Day:Mayor George Brookover or at the time council member George Brookover said, I don't think we've been doing these things in a long time and I'm afraid it's gonna put a target on our back. And now there's concern that it has. But the Sanctuary City and Safe Haven Resolution was present again last night at the candidate forum cause there were a couple of candidates that either explicitly said, that we should switch back to that Safe Haven designation or kicked around the idea at least. I know Steve Whelan said that from when he was working on ELPD, he thought the Safe Haven designation was appropriate.
Anna Nichols:And he said with the Safe Haven distinction, it was effectively a promise we could keep. Ramirez even said that he himself was a descendant of undocumented immigrants and questioned, you know, the value of the sanctuary city status, if it is in fact helping residents or if it puts a target on residents' backs. Which residents is it better for? Or is it he used the word performative. Does it just make people feel better because they live in a sanctuary city, or does that distinction put a target on people's backs?
Lucas Day:A lot of what they talked about was, just communication that they think that people know the designation of sanctuary city, but not necessarily safe haven. And so some of the patterns you see is that undocumented people may be less likely to call the police if they're in need because they're afraid they're gonna get arrested. And they think that, having this designation helps get that message across more than maybe the safe haven Resolution did. That's really the discussion that was going on in 2023 and apparently still going on today. So the other big thing that kind of stood out to me from this forum was we asked them point blank if they supported the Parks and Recreation Millage and if these candidates responses are any indication, the city's gonna have a lot of trouble getting this thing to pass.
Lucas Day:So basically the background on this Parks Millage is that in 2018, the city passed an income tax. Voters approved it. It had been rejected once in the past, but voters approved it. One of the reasons that it was approved is that the city added a clause in the resolution that said we'll lower our property tax cap by five mills. And now as the city's facing some financial challenges, it's running out of deficit or it's budgeted to run at a deficit this year.
Lucas Day:The city's asking for two of those mills back and they're calling out a Parks and Recreation millage. It's gonna insulate the Parks and Recreation Department from cuts in the future, but it doesn't necessarily mean that if this doesn't pass that the Parks and Recreation General Fund contribution, is about 40% of its total budget, is going to be cut entirely. I talked with the interim director of the department and he said that without firing employees, which the city manager said something he does not want to do, there's not a ton of areas that you can make cuts in the parks department. Because things like the aquatic center, they essentially pay for themselves. So candidates felt that the way that this Parks and Recreation Millage was presented was a little bit dishonest.
Lucas Day:They were calling it increase in general taxes.
Anna Nichols:And there were a few weeks out before the election. Conversations surrounding the future of the city are very pertinent right now. As in a few days, voters are going to be getting their absentee ballots forty days ahead of the election, and the bulk of voters in East Lansing vote absentee. They might turn in their ballot a few days before the election or the day they get the ballot, but that's gonna be a venue that we really focus on this election. In recent days, I've been talking to each candidate about how the campaign is going, how Michigan's no reason absentee ballot system is impacting the timeline for elections.
Anna Nichols:A lot of them are in effectively the final stretch for campaigning, trying to secure support, put a face to their campaign just a few days before people receive these absentee ballots. I actually talked to Chuck Grisby while he was knocking on doors, over the phone. I checked the temperature of that day, and it was 85 degrees. So him and the candidates are working pretty hard as most of them implored that they themselves were knocking on the doors, in addition to the teams they have in their respective campaigns. For example, Chuck Grisby himself, he said he's personally knocked on at least 1,000 doors.
Anna Nichols:And in talking to Liam Murkiki, he's really dialing in on the student vote. He's got signs all over East Lansing. There's even been an Instagram post that I've seen circulated quite a bit where his sign as well as another candidate sign, is in the window of a bar. So he in our conversation, he really talked about the concept of dorm storming, which was a method candidates used in the presidential election and the and the highly competitive senate election Michigan saw in 2024, where when margins are so small, the student vote, which is not predominantly, not historically the demographic that turns out in elections matters. Because sometimes elections, especially local elections, come down to two vote as has been the reality in East Lansing.
Lucas Day:Yeah. So in 2019, council member Mark Mark Meadows retained a seat by just two votes ahead of another incumbent council member, Eric Altman. They're both on the city council now because they were reelected again in 2023. But I think that Liam's strategy is kind of interesting because when we talk about student votes, at least the votes coming from campus, where we can measure directly, how many students are participating, you're talking about a few dozen votes in these local elections. In 2023, it was 40 some students turned out, and in '20, '21, it was even less.
Lucas Day:I think it was 30. Decades ago, as I mentioned, you know, after Vietnam, students drove local politics in East Lansing, and that just doesn't happen anymore. I think that part of the reason is you don't have that engagement between candidates and students that you used to. It's harder to get into dorms. Mark Meadows talked to me about how MSU changed their policy early on in his career.
Lucas Day:He'd something called a poll campaign where he'd go on campus and they'd go to the dorm, they'd try to find students that weren't going to vote but were maybe registered to vote and they try to convince them right there to go down and vote for them. Now what you have to do is you have to have a student that lives in the dorm escort you essentially. So if you're a candidate, you can't go in there right yourself. But Liam knows students, and so he can especially with his ties to MSU Democratic Club, he has access to these dorms that maybe other candidates don't, and he's also got more than a dozen volunteers. He told me earlier this year that we're going to be campaigning for him on campus.
Lucas Day:So if Liam can convince, you know, a few 100 students to turn out, which again, it's not a significant number. You see thousands of votes coming from campus in these major election cycles 2022, 2024. If that if that number is hundreds or thousands and maybe even he convinces them just to vote for him and not write in a second candidate, he's also campaigning in the neighborhood. So that could absolutely flip election, especially when the margins are so close. As Anna mentioned, it was just two votes in 2019 that separated someone who made it on council and someone who didn't.
Lucas Day:In 2021, that number was about 280 votes. And in 2023, it was just 43 votes. So these elections, they're they're very close.
Anna Nichols:And in context for those nearly 300 votes that determine the election, less than 9,000 votes were cast. Like, these are very tight margins even when it gets up into the hundreds, the low hundreds, mind you, which is not only a classic local election story, but also a Michigan story. One example being on the national scale where the candidate for Democrats in the US senate election, then US rep for Michigan, Alyssa Slotkin, beat out the Republican candidate, former US rep for Michigan, Mike Rogers. Slotkin won by a third of a percent of voters, less than 20,000 votes, which sounds like a lot of votes, but about 5,700,000 Michiganders voted in that election, the most in state history. And so I think even on a a micro level, a a local election, I'm personally curious to see if voter turnout it definitely won't be to, you know, presidential year standards, but I'm curious to see if we see more voter turnout this time around just because new voters were engaged in the previous elections.
Anna Nichols:Students were engaged in a way that I don't know if they've ever been engaged with by these big candidates before. And so I don't know. Maybe we'll see high voter turnout. Certainly, clerk, when I asked about, you know, what's expectations for this time around, though she acknowledged that typically in off year elections, there's not a lot of turnout, she's prepared for high turnout.
Lucas Day:Sure. So thanks for joining us for this election recap. Up until the November 4 election day, we're gonna continue to cover the candidates and what's happening in the city. If you wanna learn more, go to eastlancinginfo.news. Up there, we've got candidate profiles that gives you a more in-depth look at each of the six candidates that are running along with the analysis of that parks and recreation millage, you know, what happens if it doesn't doesn't pass.
Lucas Day:As we get close to the election, you can look forward to learning more about things like candidates' finances and, some of the different patterns that they're seeing with voting. For East Lansing Insider, I'm East Lansing Info managing editor, Luke Day.
Anna Nichols:And I'm deputy editor, Anna Liz Nichols.
Announcer:East Lansing Insider is brought to you by ELi on Impact 89 FM. We are on the web at eastlansinginfo.news and impact89fm.org. Thanks for listening.