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This is East Lansing Insider brought to you by ELI on Impact eighty nine 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.

Hi, everyone. I'm Elias, deputy editor, Annalise Nichols. And today, we're going to be talking about the upcoming election we have on Tuesday. We have a panel of six candidates for two slots on the city city council. Mayor George Brookover and councilwoman Dana Watson are exiting their positions.

Joining me today is managing editor Lucas Day. Thanks for joining me, Lucas.

Hey, Anna. There's a lot to unpack today.

Okay. Let's get into the candidates. We have a diverse field of candidates. We have former ELPD officer. We have a recent MSU grad.

So, yeah, we got six candidates. They've been through two different election forums so far. We've done profiles on them all. You can find it on our website. We've got an election guide right in the middle of our website.

So if you need to find out more before election day, all of this is kind of linked within that story. It's pretty much just an organization by election reporting up until this point. But at the two candidate forums, we've learned where they stand on East Lansing Sanctuary City status. We've learned where they stand on the Parks And Recreation Millage. They're all against it.

Well, Steve didn't technically give a stance. Said he didn't want to tell people how to vote, but he did criticize it. At the most recent election forum, this one was hosted by ASMSU. They did a lot about housing and about the university's relationship with the students or the university's relationship with the city. So there's kind of interesting stuff in there.

And then following that that forum, which was held last Wednesday, it was kind of in the midst of the controversy around the police chief. A couple of the city commissions have requested that chief Jen Brown either resign or be removed. That's the police oversight commission, the city's human rights commission. The candidates were not asked about that at the ASMSU forum, and that debate really picked up after we hosted our forum last month. So our reporter Dustin DeForte Petty followed up with all six candidates afterwards, asked them where they stood on the police chief, if they'd kind of pushed the city manager to remove her.

We got pretty straightforward answers from three of the candidates. Adam Delay and Cath Edsel both said they would they would encourage that. Steve Whelan, the the former ELPD officer, said no. He thinks that she should be allowed to stay on and learn. Three of the candidates said that they'd wait for the results of an investigation, which city council said that they were ordering an an independent review a couple weeks ago at their meeting.

So the the Chuck Grigsby, Liam Rekicke, and Josh Ramirez Roberts also said that they'd wanna see what that review says before taking a stance on this.

I noticed Dustin noted that there was only moderate attendance at the the forum. We've talked on a previous podcast and also in in in discussing how we think this is all gonna shake out. This draws questions to me if we're gonna see MSU student voter turnout, which could make a big impact in this election. But maybe it's simply it was on a Wednesday, and we're leading into Halloween. And so maybe students actually, that was during rivalry week, wasn't it?

Yeah. It was.

Yeah. So maybe MSU students' minds were elsewhere.

They were busy. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the student vote is it's it's always important to mention when we, you know, live in East Lansing. It's a college town, but college students haven't impacted city elections in several, several, cycles.

It's really been decades since they've made a significant dent in the voter block in local local elections. In 2021 and 2023, we got, like, a few dozen votes off campus, and that's compared to thousands and thousands that we see during major election cycles. Liam Rekicke, who was the president of the MSU Democrats last year, now graduated and works in, state senator's office, I think. State senator, state representative, Jason Morgan?

Yeah. That's state representative for the Ann Arbor area.

Yeah. So Jason Morgan's office, he's I talked to him pretty early on in the cycle, and he had pretty lofty goals to draw out the student vote, which, I mean, I I think that it's gettable in some ways. In past decades, students controlled East Lansing Elections right after, the voting age was lowered, following the Vietnam War. Students totally flipped that election. Some of the newspapers from the time showed that, the candidates that got the most votes off campus weren't even elected, and I think there were three people put on council that year.

So there's there's votes on campus. The question is, will they turn out? And I was looking at the campaign finance reports that were filed late last week, and Liam's got a lot of money on hand. I still have to call him. This reporting should be out by the time that this podcast is out.

So again, go to our website eastlancinginfo.news and see if you can read about the campaign finances. But when I was digging through the numbers, Liam raised a lot of money, more than $20,000. Him and Steve Whalen kind of doubled up the field. Nobody else had more than 10,000, I don't think. But Liam had a lot of money on hand still, when that report was was filed, which again was just, October.

So pretty recently, and I'm you know, I've I've had to talk to him, but I I'm wondering if there's plans to use that on a get out the vote type of thing on election day because those votes are there. You just obviously, nobody's been able to convince students to vote for a long time, but they're votes that can be gotten.

A couple of things here. We did some reporting earlier in the election when it was around the time that absentee ballots were gonna come out. And every candidate we talked to, which was, you know, every candidate, said that they were making a particular effort right when absentee ballots were being mailed out to voters to really push for to get their name out at that time. Because as we know in the state of Michigan, the bulk of voters now that we have no reason absentee voting, vote absentee. And so, yeah, it'll be interesting what we're only a few election cycles, statewide into that of the no reason absentee voting.

Voters approved that, via the midterm election back in 2018. I think why we've talked so much about the student vote is when the margins in local elections like in East Lansing are so small, really anything could could put a candidate forward. So it'll be interesting observing this after maybe even day of election, seeing where the bulk of voters are are coming from, you know, what candidates did to to put their name further than their peers.

Yeah. I mean, and I expect the bulk of the votes as they always do will come from the neighborhoods, but even turnout in neighborhoods isn't great. I we're at, like, 30 something. I I think low 30% turnouts in these elections, and that's with almost no turnout from campus, like, percent from the campus precincts. But even the ones off campus, a lot of those precincts are under 50%, under 40%.

So if you can do something creative to draw draw turnout, like again, it just goes back to that there's votes to be gotten in past decades. Yeah. Everything feels really political now, but people who I've been who I've talked to that were alive in the seventies when voter turnout, especially in local elections, was a lot higher. They've told me things were a lot more political back then. I wonder if it's kind of a insight that we get from social media or just media in general being hyper political or maybe things feel feel more political.

But in in these local races, especially, we don't see anything close to the turnout that we did, you know, forty, fifty years ago.

Yeah. If you had asked me even two weeks ago or so if I thought student turnout would would see a spike, I would have said yes. Considering MSU students have been coming to city council meetings, to LEPOC meetings, to kind of protest and make their voice heard on some of the discussion on police brutality that the whole city's been having. We talked a little bit about Jen Brown. She, about a month ago, made some comments to a TV station that sparked a large discussion about racism within the department.

And we've we did a whole episode on on one incident that sparked a lot of controversy, during MSU's welcome week, where MSU police responded to a incident. And there's been questions raised on if that response, which involved pepper spray, the arrest of two individuals that later the city dropped the charges against, questions if police are responding in an appropriate manner, especially for, you know, residents and visitors of color. You know, Lucas, with older residents, I was wondering, you've covered East Lansing longer than I have, even though I've been a long time, resident or local. What do you think will drive maybe older residents or non the nonstudent population to the polls?

Yeah. And that that's a voter block that is pretty consistent. You know, I think that those are the votes that people usually try to get because they, you know, they know that they're gonna turn out. I've heard a lot about people caring about ordinances that impact the neighborhoods. We published a candidate series.

We asked them three different questions. The one that asked specifically about policies and developments impacting neighborhoods, that one was the most read by quite a bit, which I think indicates that people are interested in that. The overlay districts after a ballot or after a, charter amendment, excuse me, was passed last year that, there's some concern that it would impact overlay districts. They've gotten a lot of attention. People are worried that, you know, student rentals might move into their neighborhoods.

Might I I don't know how I I don't know how much influence the next city council will have on that, but just neighborhoods in general. I think people are wondering about that. Some of the neighborhoods specifically that could have been impacted by the MSU Gateway project, which I understand is substantially changing now. I've got to reach back out to them to see, what they think of these changes. I I know that some of the precincts that were close to MSU, like the Red Cedar neighborhood and the Flowerpot neighborhood, were pretty, concerned about traffic impacts and some other things from that development, which I I again, there's reporting out this week from LSJ and some other outlets that the new proposal is, substantially different, substantially smaller than the past proposal.

Public safety. Public safety is a huge concern right now. People are people are concerned about you know, you've heard council members say at meetings that they're going out there late that they're going downtown late at night, and they're seeing fights. I don't know if that's unusual. I feel like when I was a student and, you know, right before COVID, I I'd see fights downtown too.

There's a lot of, you know, drunk kids in the in the in the area. We've heard some business owners say that it seems worse. I I I've got no reason not to believe them, but people are worried about public safety. We've heard that at a lot of meetings. We've had a couple of scary incidents.

The one that seven Eleven comes to mind where an employee was pepper sprayed by by a man that was kind of in a group that looked like a very scary situation. So I I public safety is gonna be a factor in the election cycle. There's there's, you know, there's always going to be a group of people who that's their top concern. You see that locally. You see that nationally.

So that that'll be a driver too. I think that the opinions on public safety might be a little bit broader among this field. Steve Whelan, he's the former LPD officer. He's come out, and he said that he doesn't wanna do anything to impact and do any cuts to to public safety. We've heard police chief Jen Brown say at a previous meeting, she's gonna ask for more officers next year.

When the budget season comes around, ELPD does carry, you know, a pretty significant number of fewer officers than they did twenty years ago, which really is born out of, financial constraints. We just couldn't afford or the city just couldn't afford to carry the capacity that they were at before. But, we've also heard some candidates like Cath Edsallet said that we need to look at, the benefit structure that's given to public safety because it is the most expensive. The city manager, when I talked to him about this a while ago, he said he doesn't think that we can afford not to offer this benefit package. There's been a lot of turnover within ELPD, and he thinks that this is something that helps retain them.

But, yeah, I mean, they're going to have to make hard decisions on the budget, and public safety makes up more than 60% of our general fund. So when you're looking at how to balance that budget, we've heard the argument that you have to take from the biggest part of the budget because public safety is is funded almost entirely through the general fund where other slices of the general fund are going to various different things to supplement their budgets. And so that's that's that's an important decision that the next council's gonna make, especially if this parks and recreation village doesn't pass.

So there might be several factors that drive people to the polls. But I'm wondering, you know, from your expertise, Lucas, what gets someone to want this job on on city council and potentially our future mayor?

I don't know. Like, so when people ask me, because I kind of try to describe qualities because people you know, these are people in your community. If you're voting, there's a good chance you know some of these candidates. And so they're not paid very much. They just decline the pay increase.

I think that a council member makes 9,000 ish and the mayor makes 11,000 or $13,000.

Annually?

Annually. And so they tried to bump it up, I think, to 13,015 thousand dollars They just declined that. The city council did it a couple meetings ago. But I I think it leads into these people, it's this is a lot of work. Like, it's not just showing up at meetings.

A lot of these agenda packets have hundreds and hundreds of pages each week, and you can you can tell when they come in here or when they go into their meetings who spent a lot of time with those agenda packets because they've got questions that maybe are buried deep in the agenda packet. Know, they have to read through these things to know what they're voting on. A lot of times they'll have questions for city staff at the meetings. And then that's the city council meetings themselves, you know, that's not including the amount of time that they're supposed to spend at their commission meetings, which are volunteer commissions. They're supposed to be council liaisons to all these commissions.

They don't all go to all their commission meetings because there's a bunch of them. And like I said, they're not making much money. They've all got full time jobs, essentially. Some of them are retired. So outside of candidates who share your values, because you want to vote for people who share your values, obviously.

It doesn't matter how much time that they spend on this. If they have different values, then you're probably not going do what you want them to do. But, you know, trust, I think, is a big thing for a lot of voters, just trusting that they're voting for someone who's going to read through the agenda packets, who's going to have questions for staff. You know, go to the commission meetings if they're needed there, interact with the community. Because that's really work and effort is just such a big part of the job on city council.

Like, you can't you can't just be the smartest guy in the room and know how to vote if you're not reading through your agenda packets, which, again, some some sometimes they're more than a thousand pages long, and these guys are going to, you know, two, three, four meetings a week. It's a lot of work. So I think that just trusting candidates who are going to put in that effort and make important decisions is big for a lot of people.

You know, what is the city's financial situation, and why doesn't the current city council agree on what the city's financial situation is?

Yeah, so there's just a lot of moving parts with budgets. At the last meeting, this was a debate that was really carried on throughout the meeting. At the start of it during public comment, you heard Eric Altman say that he thinks the city's running at a $4,500,000 deficit, which is worse, like significantly worse than what we previously believed. And then Mark Meadows, I can't remember if he said he well, he definitely said at the meeting that he disagreed with him, but then I talked to him later on about this financial health review team that the city's setting up, and he doesn't think that things are quite that dire. He thinks that we've got some time to figure things out.

He thinks we've got some time for this financial health review team that's being assembled to do its work before we've got to make any big decisions. That's why he's been opposing this Parks Millage. He doesn't know if it's necessary right now. He also thinks it's dishonest because it's being called a Parks Millage, but it's replacing the general fund's contribution to the Parks Department. So it's really it's not increasing the amount of resources the Parks Department has substantially.

It's easing the budget restraints on the general fund. It's it's and we're also increasing the number of mills that can currently be levied on voters according to the city charter. This was something that was changed when the income tax was approved. We set a cap. Now we're raising that cap up again to, pass this to pass this, Parks Millage if it if it is approved.

So Meadows doesn't think we need this so much right now because he he said in the past, we've seen budgets that say that we're running at a deficit. Then we get to the end of the year, and that deficit isn't there. You know? I think last year was an example where we're supposed to run at a pretty significant budget. We got or we were supposed to run at a pretty significant budget deficit.

We got to the end of the year. We saw the final numbers. They weren't that bad. Now I've talked to the city manager. The city manager says a lot of that's because of staff turnovers.

We're saving a lot of money because people weren't in positions that were budgeted for. We also delayed some pretty big capital projects that are expensive. And so these are things that I think are going to end up costing the city money later on. There's also various lawsuits. Brookover mentioned this at the last meeting.

The 7 and a half million almost $8,000,000, BWL lawsuit was a was a good you know, that's a big hit for the city. But, I mean, between Meadows and Brookover and Altman, like, there's not agreement on what the city's budget situation is. Brookover said that whoever, wins wins or whoever's sitting on city council for the next council after this election is going to have the job from hell if this Parks millage doesn't pass. So he seems to see it as absolutely absolutely necessary. And, you know, Meadows thinks that we've got more time to figure things out.

So it'll be interesting to see. A lot of what I've heard from candidates so far, Cath Edsel, her proposal to look at benefit structures would be pretty substantial, I think. That's a lot of money. I also don't know if it's I I also don't know if anybody else would go along with that. Like I said, the city manager told me he sees it as necessary when I talked to him about this months and months ago.

But other than that, I've seen, you know, a lot of candidates saying that they'd look at the smaller smaller spending items that the city has made, and they think that those add up. I don't know how substantial that would be on the on the budget. A lot of them wanna lean on this financial health review team that the city's setting up.

Like you said, the BWL money is no small chunk of change. Earlier this month, the city had to settle for 7,800,000.0, after in 2017, East Lansing City Council leveraged a 5% franchise fee on BWL customers. Over the course of a fairly lengthy legal battle. I think it was about five years. The Michigan Supreme Court deemed that, tax an illegal tax, so they ended up having to settle on that final settlement again was earlier this month.

But you had mentioned the the Parks millage. I know that there's a little bit of confusion, at least, in that first, candidate forum. They said, you know, some voters might be confused what it does and doesn't do, and maybe even vote against what they what they would want because it's a little confusing. Could you elaborate on what the Parks Millage is and what it entails?

Yeah. And I think that there's a lot of confusion around the Parks Department in general, what exactly they do. They maintain a lot of our facilities. They put on a lot of activities for kids and things like that. So this millage itself is it's two mills.

What they're it's it's paired with a charter amendment. So right now, the city can collect up to, I think the number is 13 mills. That's down from 18. It was 18. Then they approved the voters approved the income tax in 2018.

That income tax was paired with a decrease in the cap that the city can have for the amount of mills that can be put on its residents. So they're asking for two of those mills back now because they're struggling financially. Some people think it's dishonest. Some people have said that it's a raise in general taxes disguised as a parks millage because, I think I mentioned this earlier, this doesn't come with a substantial increase in, resources for the parks department. It's replacing the city's general fund contributions to the parks parks department.

And I I talked with the interim parks director about this previously, what he said is that short of cutting employees, he's not sure where they can make major cuts if this does not pass. So we're not cutting the general fund's entire contribution to the parks fund if this doesn't pass. That's about 40% of the department's budget. That would that would be a major decision. I guess I shouldn't say that we're not.

I I'd be extremely surprised if that's what they decide to do. I don't expect that to happen at all. What it would mean is that the parks department is now subject to the same cuts that may happen, you know, across the city's general fund. Because that BWL ruling, it's not just a, you know, $7,800,000 one time payment. The city's also losing 1,000,000 point dollars from its general fund every year in revenue that's no longer collecting through that franchise fee.

So that's an ongoing cost that the city has had since 2018, I think, 2017 when that was first put in place. And a million and a half dollars is a pretty substantial amount of money to a city like East Lansing. So, again, this this parks millage, it would replace the general fund's contribution of the parks department. If it doesn't pass, it's unclear what cuts would actually happen to the parks department, but it would make a major difference for the general fund. We've heard council members say that if this doesn't pass, there's gonna be changes.

They don't know what those changes are gonna be, but you you'll probably notice some. It seems like city council thinks that this is a lean is a lean organization. They're they're not sure where these cuts are gonna come from, but they're they're I mean, you've gotta they've gotta come from somewhere. The city has a pretty healthy, or at least at the end of the last fiscal year had a pretty healthy fund balance. But if you're running at a deficit, that that can go quick.

And it's not like you can run your fund balance down to zero. Once you cross a threshold that if they run at the deficit that they were projected to, it's only a few years away, all of a sudden you're impacting your credit. And so long term projects get more expensive. So really it's that line where you don't want to start impacting your credit. So the city some members of city council think that they don't have a ton of time to figure out the budget stuff.

And this Parks Millage, they think, a fix for that. Having said all of that, and I kind of just rambled a lot, millage is usually a pass in East Lansing. I don't know if this one will. We've heard from a lot of people who think it's dishonest. If those city council candidates are are are a reflection of what they're hearing at the door, it certainly will not pass.

You know, five out of the six outwardly said that they won't support it. The sixth said that he doesn't want to tell people how to vote, but then he criticized it. More than any other millage that I've seen in East Lansing, I've been here for a few years, there's a lot of pushback to this one. Some people think it's dishonest. A lot of people think their property taxes are too high already.

What this what this would do, just for reference, is if you got a 100,000 house, this increases your property taxes by $200 every year. So you can do the math for whatever your home's worth right now, but that's that's what the property tax increase is.

So like we said, only a few thousand vote in these elections. I think that's in large part why I'm so interested in the student population is, you know, a couple 100 from from MSU. A couple 100 votes would go a long way considering in twenty in twenty nineteen, Altman lost his bid for city council by two votes in an election where nearly 12,000 votes were cast. That that two votes represented a two hundredths of a percent margin.

Yeah. I was I was covering that election as a student. I can remember they had a joint watch party that I was at, and we've been getting I can't I can't remember who was getting votes, but we were getting votes from precincts that were coming in, like individual precincts. I think someone was going to the chairs and you can ask for the votes. And Altman was running a little bit ahead of Meadows all night, and I was there and I had a joint watch party for the election, Meadows and Altman.

And I interviewed I interviewed Meadows when it looked like he was gonna lose, and he basically gave me a concession speech. Is you know, he's been a politician for a long time. He's been in East Lansing for thirty something years, but he was also in the state house. He's he's a you know, he he gives a good speech. And he he gave me this great speech that was basically a concession speech, and I was walking out the door and someone grabbed me.

They said, you want you're gonna wanna come back in. And and the final number had just come out, and he passed Altman by two votes. And Altman did not do an interview with me. He was he he left right away, which I get. I mean, these campaigns are brutal.

Like, you you're convincing people to donate. You're spending a ton of time going door to door. Like,

They're, campaigns like, with their own two feet going door to door.

It is a Yeah. I've always kind of regret I asked my videographer when when we were done if she had that, and she had not hit record during the Meadows interview, which I I've always been of bummed about because it was it was a good speech. It was a good speech, in that moment, I thought.

No. So this election, you know, this might sound a little cheesy, but it's it's super personal in the sense of these candidates. These candidates like, they have to put their literal face out there. Like, in statewide elections, in national elections, you can use surrogates for your presence. You can, you know, get x y z politician or community member to to campaign on your behalf.

But I think in local elections, that in person connection is really important. And so I you we're not you and I are not privy to all these individual conversations every candidate's had. We don't know, you know, what's really going, for all certainty, spur people to the polls or or spur people to a particular campaign. But what we do know is, you know, two people can make a difference, which, you know, if two people can make a difference, one person can make a difference.

Yeah. I I tie in just getting your face out there. I talked with Shanna Drehyme who was elected. Think she would have been elected in 2015. I asked her about running a campaign, one of the questions I asked her was, So do you guys have volunteers that go to door door?

She said, Yes, some people do, but the people who vote in East Lansing are usually pretty invested in this. They know the candidates, and they wanna speak to the candidates. So she told me that people who campaign, and they've got people going around talking for them, a lot of the residents will say, get the candidate over here. I got some questions for them. They they they don't wanna talk to their they don't wanna talk to their volunteers.

So I think that's kinda funny.

I don't know. That level of voter engagement is kind of beautiful to me.

So it's an people have got a lot of question. I mean, we get a lot of questions just in our email, in our contact box from people. We we held that candidate forum. We had over a 100 people submit questions in Twitter, over a 100 questions submitted. I I don't know about a 100 individuals, more than a 100 questions submitted.

And then throughout the cycle, I've gotten more questions to me asking me to ask candidates things. It's an important election. Like, the things that the city is going to have to do with their budget are going to be major decisions. I think regardless of what you feel like the level of panic within city government should be for the budget, like, think it's clear that there's going to need to be important budget decisions made that people are gonna notice, especially if this parks militia doesn't pass. We're hearing a lot about different developments, you know, with the hub, the Abbott, the landmark when those went in, five, six years ago now.

That was, like, the big controversy and really the defining moment of that city council. Some people think that those were absolutely needed. You know, there's a lot of people that live in those. Housing is a huge discussion right now everywhere. It's drying out votes.

We've heard from Meadows. We've heard from some other members of city council that say that development's coming. We've seen some developments, turned down by council over the last few years, some housing developments turned down by council. So I I think that the next council is gonna vote on some some major projects in East Lansing. Everything that I've heard has been that we can expect some major projects to be, in the works in East Lansing in front of council.

There's only five people on the city council, so two of them is 40%. That's a big deal. We've heard from the student bookstore owner already who's trying to build, I think it's a 14 story apartment building with a retail space right where the student bookstore is right now. That's a major project. There's there's a lot there's strong feelings on both sides of that.

So, yeah, it's it's an it's an important election. They're gonna make important decisions.

When this podcast comes out, we'll be two days away from election day. And so just as throughout the the campaign season, East Lansing Info provided, you know, up to date and comprehensive information on, you know, candidate stances and their plans for the city. We're gonna remain on on the story of, you know, how how the future of the city is going to unfold. You know, who's going to be at the helm of some of these important decisions you talked about, and who's going to be making decisions about the things that impact residents. This has been East Lansing Insider.

I have been deputy editor, Annalys Nichols.

I'm managing editor, Luke Day.

See you guys next week.

Lansing Insider is brought to you by ELI on Impact eighty nine FM. We are on the web at eastlancinginfo.news and impact89fm.org. Thanks for listening.