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How Nice

An opinion piece in the Berkeley Daily Planet laments that the University of California doesn’t contribute to its host city like a certain public university in Ann Arbor does. “[T]he authors detail how much U-M has paid Ann Arbor and other public entities for things like property rental, water and sewer services, supplemental police service and capital improvements,” Talk About Town reports. You’d think that it would be difficult to refute an impressive array of statistics like this, but Talk About Town provides a devastating rejoinder: “From afar, it must look like Ann Arbor and U-M exist in utter utopian harmony. How nice.”

7 Responses to “How Nice”


  1. Stupid hippies. The grass must be both greener and stronger on the West Coast.

    posted by Mandrake on March 9th, 2005 at 2:13 pm

  2. Well, it used to be!

    posted by Anonymous on March 9th, 2005 at 6:06 pm

  3. Maybe the farther you get from Ann Arbor, the better it [well, the grass and AA’s reputation] gets…

    posted by meg on March 10th, 2005 at 12:32 am

  4. I actually think that Ann Arbor folks generally don’t really appreciate how good the UM is as a neighbor when you compare it with lots of other schools (and Larry has pointed out that it may also be vice-versa).

    posted by Anna on March 10th, 2005 at 9:24 am

  5. UM a good neighbor? When A2 officials suggested UM might up the ante a bit and contribute a bit more toward city services, UM responded with a the academic equivalent of “Fuck You.” Officials produced a glossy, 4-color brochure which outlined the institution’s “contributions.”

    Meanwhile, in Boston, Harvard came up with $30 million payable over 10 years for the city in which the institution does business.

    UM is a multi-billion dollar conglomerate that is exempt from property taxes, while sitting pretty as one of the largest property owners in the city. They are exempted from employment taxes for GSTAs, while raking in hundreds of millions in tution revenue each year generated by those same GSTA. They are exempted from sales taxes, to boot.

    My property taxes continue to rise, and services continue to be cut by cash-strapped Ann Arbor. It’s time elect a major and council who have the balls to stop playing nicely with our neighbor UM.

    Lifer

    posted by Lifer on March 10th, 2005 at 4:25 pm

  6. Check your facts, again. UM withholds payroll tax from GSRAs and GSIs. UM makes payments to the city and that is more than it is legally obligated to make, period. You benefit from the taxes of taxpayers all over the state by virtue of the fact that the UM is in Ann Arbor, perserving your beloved green space in the form of the diag and the arb. Furthermore, lifer, you benefit in terms of jobs and the jobs those jobs generate by increased demand for things like overpriced Zingerman’s sandwiches, not to mention the landlords who get rich by charging insane rents for their disgusting pits of apartments. AND students pay property taxes indirectly by paying rent rather than living in dorms.

    And if you think that comparing Harvard, with its 18 billion dollar endowment to the UM, whose money comes partly from the other folks in your state (and other US taxpayers in the form of grants), is fair, then what I think isn’t fair at all is the fact that you won’t share your crack with the rest of us.

    posted by Anna on March 10th, 2005 at 6:30 pm

  7. Anna,

    Share my crack? Not a chance.

    UM generates jobs, yes, but most of those jobs pay under $40,000 per year. Buy a house in A2 on that gross pay–not today, not tomorrow. Pay rent? Good for the landlords, naturally, but like watching good money burn for the rest of us. UM student needs (thanks to a lack of dormitory space) have driven up rents horrendously.

    As for Zingerman’s sandwiches, not on $40K a year, baby. At $40K, it’s a brown bag lunch.

    As for GSTAs and taxes: I stand corrected.

    Is UM legally obligated to pay anything? Nope. That’s a problem with the tax code in our country. Colleges are conglomerates which benefit from HUGE tax breaks from the cities, states and feds. Period. Tax breaks for big business mean others have to shoulder the tax burden.

    As an individual, I don’t benefit financially from UM’s residence in the city. All those millions from the state that go to UM are used for operational expenses by the U. As a homeowner, my property taxes are higher, because there is a percentage of the land in the city occupied by a tax exempt organization.

    Lifer

    posted by Lifer on March 29th, 2005 at 10:22 am