Study: Ann Arbor council most divided in nation — and that’s a good thing

A data company analyzed meeting minutes of 142 municipalities over the past 17 years
It found that Ann Arbor City Council had the highest rate of dissent, about 18% of agenda items
The national rate among studied municipalities is less than 2%

Ann Arbor — known as A2 and the People’s Republic — has a new honorific: “The City that Won’t Agree.”

That’s according to an examination of 142 larger cities and counties nationwide by data company Hamlet, which analyzed meeting minutes from the past 17 years and found the Ann Arbor City Council has the highest dissent rate nationwide.

While most council meetings nationwide are pro forma affairs that end in unanimous approval of agenda items, Ann Arbor meetings can be knock-down affairs that stretch into the early morning,

Nationwide, according to an analysis of 8.1 million records, only 1.59% of city council or planning commission agenda items included a dissenting vote.

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In Ann Arbor, it was 18.19%. That rate is triple the No. 2, Pima County in Arizona, which includes Tucson.

“It was really shocking to see just how low (dissent) is in most places,” Sunil Rajaraman, founder of Hamlet, wrote in an email to Bridge.

“This indicates to me that most councils just agree on what they are going to vote and act as more of a rubber-stamp mechanism. The real discussions happen outside of council chambers”

Ann Arbor hasn’t elected a Republican to City Council since 2003, prompting progressives to form blocs on specific issues, according to the study that scrutinized 53,207 council votes in the city.

Rajaraman said disagreement makes for long meetings but good democracy.

Unlike other local governments where decisions are made before public meetings, Ann Arbor’s “council members actually read the 400-page budget packet, show up with amendments, vote no when they disagree and occasionally lose a 5-1 fight over leaf blowers at 11 p.m. on a Monday night,” the study read.

“If you believe meetings should be what they claim to be — open deliberation by elected representatives who disagree honestly and settle those disagreements where the public can watch them — then Ann Arbor starts to look less like an outlier and more like the only city in this dataset that is actually doing its job.”

It’s true that Ann Arbor spent months debating leaf blowers before banning gas-powered ones in December 2023, but the city has moved onto other issues.

The new hot topic: bike parking, with the council last week re-referring a regulation overhaul back to the planning commission.

The vote to do so, perhaps unsurprisingly, was split, 5-4.

Hamlet is a private civic technology company that uses artificial intelligence to monitor council and commission minutes in 40 Michigan cities. Ann Arbor was the only Michigan city included in the analysis of 142 municipalities, Rajaraman said.