ANN ARBOR, MI – The anger inside the Ann Arbor City Council chambers was palpable Monday night, July 15, as council members took turns dishing criticism.

Most of it was directed at Mayor Christopher Taylor and his allies for blocking a November ballot proposal, a move other council members called an assault on democracy.

“If I sound angry, it’s because I am, because you’re stiffing the people,” said Council Member Jeff Hayner, D-1st Ward, calling Taylor “the mayor of no.”

At the center of the debate was a proposal to switch to nonpartisan city elections and do away with party labels for mayor and council candidates — a proposal council recently voted 7-4 to place on the ballot. Taylor blocked it with a veto, and council failed to secure eight votes Monday night to override the mayor.

Taylor and his allies — Zachary Ackerman, Julie Grand and Chip Smith — were against putting the question to voters.

While arguing against party labels and saying not all Democrats are alike, Hayner brought up Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier accused of molesting underage girls.

“If you put a D in front of your name, you might end up voting for Jeffrey Epstein by mistake,” Hayner told his colleagues.

“This conversation got pretty ugly, pretty quickly,” Ackerman, D-3rd Ward, responded a short while later. “At certain points, I’m not sure if I was or we were compared to a pedophile.”

“Point of order. There was no comparison,” Hayner interjected, saying he didn’t want Ackerman putting words in his mouth.

Council Member Jane Lumm, a 2nd Ward independent who has been trying for years to get the question of nonpartisan elections on the ballot, had choice words for the mayor.

“It takes a supreme arrogance to conclude it’s not appropriate to at least conduct a voter referendum on the question, and to take a conscious, extraordinary action to prevent it,” Lumm said.

“It takes an extraordinary conviction that you know better than your colleagues, know better than the voters of Ann Arbor.”

Issuing a veto to block a voter referendum is dramatic and hasn’t been done in Ann Arbor in at least the last 43 years, if ever, Lumm said, noting staff researched back to 1976.

“It is truly an assault on the will of the people,” she said.

Taylor noted in his veto letter that Lumm and Jack Eaton, D-4th Ward, both voted in 2016 against putting an election reform proposal on the ballot, a proposal to do away with low-turnout, odd-year city elections and switch from two-year to four-year terms for mayor and council. Taylor and his allies prevailed in putting the question to voters, who approved the reforms.

Taylor said he doesn’t think Eaton and Lumm were being undemocratic or distrusting of voters in trying to keep the 2016 proposal off the ballot, as he’s now being accused. Rather, they viewed the proposal as unwise and voted accordingly, which is what he’s doing now on the nonpartisan elections proposal, he said.

Taylor argues party labels provide voters with important information about candidates’ values and doing away with them for city elections would cause real and substantial harm.

“That’s nonsense and so over-the-top, it’s laughable,” Lumm responded, noting most Michigan cities have nonpartisan elections.

Council Member Ali Ramlawi, D-5th Ward, suggested there will be political consequences for the mayor and his allies.

Smith and Ackerman are up for re-election in 2020, and Taylor and Grand in 2022.

Ramlawi called Taylor’s veto an abuse of power that stripped the votes of 70% of council. It will be a battle cry of the next election, he said.

“The mayor is supposed to be a consensus builder. I don’t see much consensus going on here,” Ramlawi said. “I see real bright lines being drawn."

If there was a compelling case for nonpartisan elections, there would be eight votes, said Grand, D-3rd Ward.

“I understand the frustrations," she said. "I’ve sat on the other side where I’ve been one of seven and we didn’t have eight, and I know what that feels like.”

Smith, D-5th Ward, suggested he’d be open to placing the question on the November 2020 presidential election ballot when voter turnout will be higher. He made that known previously, he said, but the other side didn’t make an effort to compromise.

“I look at this as nothing more than trying to sneak something through during an election year when nobody is paying attention,” Smith said, calling it “lazy” and “inept.”

“I think that this is just a giant piece of grandstanding,” Smith said, drawing objections from multiple council members.

Lumm said she didn’t reach out to Smith because she considered him a “lost cause,” since he voted against putting the question on the ballot multiple times in recent years.

“The last presidential ballot … you couldn’t find your way to support placing this question on the ballot for voters,” she reminded Smith. “So what are the odds that you would be OK allowing voters to weigh in on this? Slim, fat and none, at best, based on your voting record.”

Hayner called the mayor’s veto a heavy-handed attempt to support the status quo. He argued it’s time “to join the rest of the civilized world and have nonpartisan elections.”

He took issue with the mayor’s veto letter, which raised concerns about the prospect of Republicans getting elected to council through nonpartisan elections. Hayner said the “it’s us or them” tone, as he perceived it, was startling and divisive.

He considers nonpartisan elections an important step forward for more diversity of political thought in Ann Arbor.

Partisan elections disenfranchise a large segment of residents, including many University of Michigan students who don’t vote in August primaries, Hayner said.

“For that reason alone, we should have nonpartisan elections — to speak nothing of all the other disenfranchisement that happens,” he said, noting city residents who want to weigh in on a council race between two Democrats in an August primary can’t do so and also vote in another political party’s primary.

Council Member Elizabeth Nelson, D-4th Ward, noted one of the mayor’s allies whom she ousted from council last year, Graydon Krapohl, was able to retain his seat in 2016 after winning with 40% of the vote in a three-way Democratic primary.

“Do you really want to stand for disenfranchising voters in this way?” she asked, arguing people are becoming disillusioned with the two-party system.

If the city’s elections were nonpartisan, Nelson said, the two candidates with the most votes would advance to November and significantly more voters would then decide the outcome.

Ackerman, D-3rd Ward, said he talked to political science professors to form his opinion.

“There’s no one mind behind whether or not nonpartisan elections are the silver bullet to increasing democratic turnout, but there is a lot of research behind why they don’t work,” he said, arguing incumbents are more heavily favored in nonpartisan elections, because, without party labels, people lean more heavily on name recognition.

While it’s true that student turnout is low in August primaries, he said, the way the city’s ward boundaries are drawn to divide the student population inherently disenfranchises them. He said he supports taking a more holistic look at possible reforms.

The mayor and his allies are “going to have egg on their faces,” Lumm said, because the nonpartisan elections proposal could end up on the ballot next year.

She and other residents will be launching a citizen-initiated petition drive to collect roughly 5,100 signatures, she said.

“You can take that to the bank,” she said. “I personally will knock on every door in the city if that’s what it takes, but I know I won’t have to because lots of people have stepped up already.”

It’s unfortunate the mayor and his allies will make citizens jump through extra hoops just to allow democracy to happen, Lumm said, recalling similar circumstances surrounded the 2018 central park proposal.

Hayner suggested there could be another citizen-initiated ballot proposal in 2020 — one to change the city charter to remove the mayor’s veto power.