Some of Our Restaurant Owners Really Don’t Seem to Like Us Very Much (And Why I’m Voting for Eric Haven This Year for Mayor 😱)

I’ve been behind at Clarkston Sunshine (significant computer problems), so I just had a chance to finish the informal transcription of the October 10^th meeting, and hoo boy, there was a whole lot of 💩 spewed by people associated with the restaurants who insist that homeowners should be responsible for the cost of their own bad decisions (while they reap the profits for themselves, of course). And, for reasons that I’ll explain, I want to thank Mayor Eric Haven for firmly standing up to these greedy restaurant owners and moving forward with something that puts the needs of the residents over these businesses – at least for once. (You can find my informal transcription here, and there’s a link to the video recording at the bottom.)

There were two discussions that brought some really selfish restaurant owners (and their associates) out in the open on the 10^th. The first concerned Robert Esshaki’s proposal for yet another effing restaurant in our half-square mile city. (Isn’t that exciting. 🙄) The second involved converting the city-owned Depot Road lot into a paid parking lot. The taxpayers pay all the expenses to maintain this parking lot, and the proceeds from the city-owned parking lot at Washington and Main have funded most of our road and sidewalk repair these last few years (as opposed to increasing your taxes to do it). However, some of our restaurant owners hoggishly think we’re not entitled to charge people $1.00/hour to park on our own property, or if we’re going to do that, they should be the beneficiaries, not us. No, I’m not kidding.

The Esshaki Restaurant Proposal

Esshaki’s restaurant proposal was approved by the planning commission with zero (yes, ZERO) consideration for where all those additional future restaurant patrons are going to park. Esshaki is the owner of Rudy’s Market and the old Clarkston News building next door, and these two buildings are where this new restaurant will be located.

Our zoning ordinance – that the planning commission ignored, even though it’s still our city law – has a lot of requirements relating to this issue:

• • Whenever there is a change in the “intensity of use of any building [or] increase in seating capacity,” additional off-street parking must be provided “on the same lot or parcel as the building or use being served or within three hundred (300) feet of the building it is intended to serve [and] may only be located in a rear yard or non-required front or side yard . . . ” Section 20.01(B)(1), (2); Section 20.02(A)(1), (2).
  • If a commercial property owner thinks that the planning commission’s parking requirements are excessive, Section 20.02(M) allows exceptions if a procedure is followed (that includes a written legal agreement approved by the city attorney).
  • Section 20.03 describes how the number of required parking spaces is calculated and includes a consideration for employee parking.
  • Section 20.04 provides a table for parking requirements. Sit-down restaurants with a liquor license – which would include The Fed, Honcho, Clarkston Union, and Woodshop – must provide 20 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of gross leasable floor area or .6 spaces per seat, whichever is greater. The Old Village Café (recently renamed “2 South”), which doesn’t have a liquor license, must provide 14 spaces per 1,000 square feet gross leasable floor area or .5 spaces per seat, whichever is greater, plus any spaces required for any banquet or meeting rooms. (It’s not clear which of these will apply to Esshaki’s restaurant because I don’t know if he will have a liquor license, but he doesn’t have enough required parking for either option.)
  • If a business owner can’t provide sufficient parking, Section 20.02(V) of the ordinance allows the owner to pay the city “a sum equivalent to the estimated cost of planning, acquiring, and construction of parking spaces within the Village Commercial limits [and] the estimated amount [is] to be determined at the sole discretion of the City Council . . . after review by the City Engineer and Planning Consultants.”

This last bullet above describes what everyone refers to as the “parking deferment.” (You can find a copy of Clarkston’s zoning ordinance by going here.)

Oddly, no one seems to know if the parking deferment required by the zoning ordinance has ever been enforced. Unfortunately, the city’s failure to insist that all local businesses take responsibility for the serious parking deficiency problems they have collectively and deliberately caused has had disastrous consequences for local residents. These problems increased exponentially at the end of 2016 with the opening of the Honcho restaurant at the corner of Main and East Church and continue unabated to the present day.

Carlisle/Wortman (the city’s planners) prepared a parking study on October 24, 2018. This very detailed study was created at the city’s request (and at taxpayer expense) but has been largely ignored even though it’s interesting reading and makes constructive suggestions. In that report, Carlisle/Wortman estimated that the cost of a obtaining a new parking space is $9,000 each. This does not include the cost to acquire the land where the space would be located, nor does it include all the other normal costs, such as maintenance, security, enforcement, etc. The parking study can be found here (and I took that information from page 33).

At some point in the past, the city council apparently adopted a $10,000 parking deferment charge for each parking space not provided by a business owner. I don’t know where that number came from, but it was referenced at the October 10^th meeting and has been mentioned on other occasions as well, so I assume that there is a city council resolution somewhere establishing this amount. Since the city doesn’t publish its resolutions online, it will be hard to find without a FOIA request. However, I think that $10,000 is probably a reasonable number, given the relatively recent Carlisle/Wortman parking study and considering the additional costs involved.

You can’t blame Esshaki entirely for the current cluster you-know-what that is Clarkton parking. No, as I said earlier, you would have to go back to 2016 when Honcho opened. Who owns Honcho? Union Joints, which is Curt Catallo’s and Erich Lines’ company. Union Joints is represented by local attorney Neil Wallace. Union Joints also owns the Clarkston Union and Woodshop. For all of the newer residents who aren’t privy to small town politics, Curt Catallo and his family are perceived by many of the locals to have an entitlement mindset, that everyone should be grateful that they deign to do business here. (It’s honestly so bad that I’ve heard the City of the Village of Clarkston referred to as “Catalloville.”) The family also has regular defenders, and you can often see snark fights on local social media pages about whether or not they have a favored status.

It’s not just local residents who allege that Catallo receives preferential treatment from the city. A lawsuit filed against  Clarkston several years ago concerning a rezoning denial specifically raised the Catallo favoritism issue. An October 30, 2015, article in the Oakland Press titled “Clarkston Sued, Accused of Favoritism after rejecting Re-Zoning Request for Proposed New Restaurant,” (linked here), and a November 5th article in the Clarkston News titled “Lawsuit charges City with Catallo Favoritism,” (linked here), discuss the lawsuit. Both articles include references to Catallo’s mother Sharron Catallo and his sister Cara Catallo.

I have no idea why Curt Catallo’s businesses appear to be favored over others.  I do know that when his mother served on the city council, many people (including me) objected to her refusal to recuse herself from votes concerning parking – even though some of those votes occurred while she was serving as a corporate officer for two of her son’s companies, and even though her son regularly appeared before council to whine and complain about parking shortages and paid parking. (I wrote about that here and here.) In the re-zoning lawsuit I mentioned above, the circuit court judge decided against the business owners for other reasons yet still took the time to include a footnote in his order, stating: “It is worth noting that the parties dispute whether Ms. Catallo ‘improperly influenced the Planning Commission and City Council to deny Plaintiff’s requested re-zoning.’” (I’ve linked that order here, and the footnote can be found at the bottom of page 2.)

There are other examples of the city favoring Catallo’s businesses. We have a “social district” that allows people to walk around town with alcoholic beverages. Why? Probably because Curt Catallo really wanted one and pushed for it. During the pandemic, the city allowed Catallo’s Honcho restaurant to exclusively occupy the end of Church Street and to put up a giant, ugly tent – something that amounted to a no-charge lease for almost a year – yet no other business received such a lucrative benefit from the city. According to Mayor Haven, the commercial district, including the restaurants, represents only 2-3% of the property use in the city, yet they are all given far more deference than that use percentage should entitle them.

The only thing that I’m aware of that Catallo has ever done for the city is to provide “free” food to a handful of people who work during city elections (which often includes his sister, Cara Catallo, as well as his niece). Other than that, he’s been the catalyst for the worst of our current parking problems, beginning with the opening of Honcho. Our city council has mostly ignored the residents’ complaints about parking, probably because most of them (and five of the seven current council members) live far enough away from the restaurants that they can continue to quietly enjoy their homes without being disturbed by thousands of transient restaurant patrons.

Catallo’s company was not required to pay the parking deferment when it opened Honcho. To no one’s surprise, the narrow residential streets near the new restaurant were immediately flooded with hundreds of cars with people in search of expensive burritos. Buffalo, Washington, and Church Streets were hit the hardest. Before city council belatedly took some action to protect the homeowners, parked cars often filled both sides of the streets and there wasn’t room enough for a larger emergency vehicle to travel down the middle of the street to deliver assistance. The new normal on my street included rude, wandering jack wagons who loitered near my home late at night and left trash on my lawn. I recall hearing Curt Catallo telling the city council at one point that he knew the exact number of parking spaces he would need for Honcho customers; he knew he didn’t have enough spaces; and his business plan was to rely on street parking in front of our homes to meet his restaurants’ needs.

Despite avoiding any parking deferment payment – money that would have been specifically earmarked to create more parking spaces under the terms of the ordinance itself (which is something his attorney claims they want) – Catallo always expressed fierce opposition to paid parking in the city, showing up to complain at city council meetings whenever paid parking is on the agenda. The meeting when the city council voted to purchase one measly parking kiosk and to charge a small $1.00 an hour fee to park at the city-owned Washington and Main parking lot was no exception. (Clarkston News, August 31, 2017, “Parking Kiosk Coming to Downtown,” linked here.) You’ll note that the article reports that Catallo’s mother, a council member at the time, voted “no” on the paid parking resolution after unsuccessfully trying to delay the vote for “more research.” Her son threw a temper tantrum when he didn’t get his way, claiming that this “makes the city into a ‘money vampire,’ sticking a ‘blood funnel into anything smelling like money.’”

Yeah, right. The city is the blood-sucking money vampire. 🙄 One businessperson attending the October 10^th city council meeting estimated that if Catallo had been forced to pay the parking deferment, it would have amounted to $2-$3,000,000 in fees, fees that would have gone to developing more parking spaces as required by the zoning ordinance. (To put things in perspective, the city’s income for one year is less than $1,000,000.)

I think Catallo and Union Joints should accept the gift of the parking deferment waiver and shut up. Only people believing that they wield some serious privilege would whine and complain at every opportunity about the city’s decision to charge for parking on city-owned property. We’re not the only city residents who have been treated this way. If you doubt that, just ask Berkley residents how they feel about Catallo opening a restaurant in their town, knowing once again that there was insufficient available parking to support it. (Detroit Free Press, January 6, 2020, “Settlement Would Allow Vinsetta Garage to Raze Homes for Parking,” linked here.)

As I said earlier, the opening of the Honcho restaurant severely escalated the parking problem in our community. Shortly after Honcho opened, The Fed followed, increasing the problem. And the city council couldn’t/wouldn’t enforce the parking deferment for them either. So, it naturally follows that they can’t/won’t enforce the requirements against Esshaki, and the city council and planning commission decided they aren’t going to. This means that private homeowners will continue to pay the cost for the city’s decision to place the problem of insufficient available parking on the shoulders of the residents rather than the business owners. Homeowners are saddled with the ongoing expense to maintain all of the “free” parking outside the small paid lot at Washington and Main Street – to the tune of millions of dollars in lost compensation – and the restaurants as a group abuse the “free” parking in the city the most (with Catallo’s Union Joints being the biggest abuser since they own three large restaurants in town).

Though Curt Catallo didn’t come to the October 10^th city council meeting, his interests were fully represented by his attorney (Neil Wallace), his business partner (Erich Lines), and his sister (Cara Catallo). At that meeting, before the council was ready to approve Esshaki’s site plan with no mention of parking, resident Chet Pardee reminded the city council about the parking deferment payments required of Esshaki under the zoning ordinance and the importance of following our own rules. The city attorney said that the city council and planning commission agreed that they weren’t going to enforce an ordinance that has not been enforced for many, many years, and he later stated that this is the third use on Main Street that’s been approved without the parking deferment in the last five-seven years (Honcho opened six years ago in October 2016). Pardee also managed to extract a confession from council member Wylie that the planning commission didn’t even bother to do the parking deferment calculations required by the zoning ordinance for Esshaki’s proposed restaurant. So, we’re apparently now at the point where city officials won’t even perform the minimum required due diligence in an obvious effort to paper over the breadth of the problem that the restaurants have caused the city. Using the information provided by Esshaki, the estimated parking deferment that he would have had to pay if our zoning ordinance were enforced is $1,400,000 if he has a liquor license and at least $950,000 if he doesn’t.

Wallace, Union Joints’ attorney, tried to trick Mayor Haven into making a public statement indicating that the parking deferment requirement would never be enforced. (I’m sure there was no client interest involved there, eh?) As an attorney myself, I think Wallace’s attempt to obtain such an admission was extremely inappropriate. Wallace should know that the mayor can’t bind the city (only the city council as a whole can do that), and I don’t know why the city attorney didn’t interject and make that point. But that’s exactly what Wallace was trying to do, since he said that he would look for a sound bite supposedly proving that our small charge for parking in a city lot acted as a tax that was only directed at certain businesses by “looking at the tape” of Mayor Haven’s comments from the city council meeting. Wallace also said that just because the city hasn’t enforced the law before doesn’t mean that the city can’t enforce it now. Though it’s likely that Wallace was just trying to make life difficult for Esshaki since he will be a direct competitor for Union Joints, Lines, and Catallo, I think his idea is sound. I would like the city council to enforce the ordinance and make every business pay for the parking headaches they’ve caused so the taxpayers can get some relief. I’d be happy to take some amount less than $10,000 per space, even though the Carlisle/Wortman study supports a $10,000 per space charge as fair compensation to the city.

The city council ultimately approved Esshaki’s plans for a large, new restaurant scheduled to open in approximately 18 months, with no care in the world for where the patrons are going to park other than an optimistic wish that it will all be worked out somehow, someday, in some way. Gary Casey, Bruce Fuller, Eric Haven, Sue Wylie, and Joe Luginski voted in favor of the proposal. (Laura Rogers and Al Avery were absent.)

Paid Parking in the Depot Road Lot

The next item of interest on the agenda was a resolution to convert the Depot Road parking lot to paid parking. The screeching that followed from some of the restaurant owners and their supporters was louder than a bunch of long-tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs. Though Curt Catallo didn’t come to the meeting, his interests were fully represented by his attorney, his business partner, and his sister.

Neil Wallace, Union Joints’ attorney, went to the podium and waxed eloquently about how wonderful his clients are. If you accept what he says as true, we should all celebrate Catallo’s Union Joints for taking a great business risk by opening the Clarkston Union in an abandoned church on Main Street in 1995. But there’s more to that story. I found a June 6, 1995, AP article titled “Plan to Turn Church into Bar Inspires Battle” that I’ve linked here. This wasn’t just any old, abandoned church building – it was owned by Catallo’s parents who bought it in 1991, four years before the restaurant opened. The decision to allow Catallo to open a tavern and microbrewery inside a place of worship reportedly generated an “unusual amount of controversy.” Even though the article states that Sharron Catallo, then the Clarkton mayor, abstained from voting on allowing the project to go forward, a lot of the controversy involved allegations of Catallo favoritism, which is extensively detailed in the article.

Wallace also claimed that Honcho was built where a gas station and storage building sat, unused. The facts simply don’t bear this out. Morgan’s auto repair was an active business at the “gas station” location. As Wallace is aware, Morgan’s moved and is now located at 148 North Main Street, property that Catallo also owns. Clarkston government actively used the “storage building” at 3 East Church Street (located next to Morgan’s) for its public works and police departments over the years. Later on, after the police department was disbanded, the city primarily used the building for record storage and to house the city’s computer server, paying $1,600/month to rent it. A review of the city manager’s reports for the 2014-2015 time period show that the city was advised in July 2014 that John Morgan (of Morgan’s) intended to sell 3 East Church Street (linked here). The April 11, 2015, city manager’s report references an email from Wallace confirming that the city had to vacate 3 East Church Street by the end of that year (linked here). Another email from Wallace was referenced in the August 24, 2015, city manager’s report suggesting that Wallace was under the impression the city wanted to negotiate an extension of time to vacate the premises (linked here). (Please note that you can find the city manager’s reports on the city’s website in the city council meeting packets for those dates, though she did not include the correspondence that she referenced in the online material.)

Throwing the city out of 3 East Church caused a lot of problems for the city and its employees, which was also described in the city manager’s reports during that time (linked here and here). Not only did city employees have to scramble to find an alternative space, but there was also a concern that city hall had become so full of things moved from 3 East Church that city council meetings might need to be temporarily moved elsewhere. This led to a cascade of unfavorable events for Clarkston taxpayers that culminated in a revamped City Hall/Department of Public Works expansion that cost taxpayers somewhere around $400,000 – and all of that started, in part, because city employees claimed that there was no convenient place to store city records. The facts simply don’t support Wallace’s claim that 3 East Church was “unused” before Catallo built Honcho. Since Wallace apparently emailed the city about clearing the building personally, it’s puzzling that he would suggest otherwise.

Wallace claimed, correctly, that there isn’t enough parking in town. (Well, duh. Maybe he might want to discuss that issue with his client?) Wallace suggested that the restaurants are the “goose that laid the golden egg.” He alleged that the restaurants have added “substantial value” to Clarkston. Wallace also suggested that asking people who use our taxpayer-owned property to pay $1.00 an hour to park is somehow a “tax” on the restaurants and this is supposedly putting these businesses at risk of failing. Um, hyperbole much? (I honestly believe that Wallace, Catallo, and Lines met at some point and decided to use the same catchphrases because I’m pretty sure Curt Catallo has used the golden goose analogy and both Lines and Catallo have also claimed that charging people to use city-owned property equates to some sort of a restaurant tax.) Without evidence, Wallace alleged (as Catallo has also done) that charging $1.00 an hour for paid parking dissuades people from driving all the way to Clarkston to eat at the restaurants (but Union Joints could offer parking vouchers to its patrons if the owners really believe that allegation is true). Wallace also suggested that using paid parking dollars for street and road improvements (rather than using that money to find more “free” parking spaces for his client) is an inappropriate “diversion” of those funds.

Taxpayers, pay attention to Wallace’s comments – what he is literally saying is that Union Joints doesn’t give a flying you-know-what if you are saddled with increased taxes to pay for parking lot, street, and road repair. He doesn’t think that our government should be charging people who don’t live here to use our property, but if they do charge, then our government isn’t entitled to use the proceeds to provide any relief to taxpayers to help compensate us for the cost to maintain the parking lots, streets, and sidewalks that restaurant patrons use. Wallace apparently believes restaurants that knowingly opened without adequate parking are entitled to the benefit of all the proceeds from paid parking in city lots, even though paid parking wasn’t initiated for almost two years after Honcho and The Fed opened. (Remember the old saying – when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. The restaurant owners holding these beliefs could not be clearer about who they are and what they think of you.)

Catallo’s business partner, Erich Lines, also claimed that paid parking is a “tax” on restaurants at the October 10^th meeting. He oddly seemed to conflate his difficulties in hiring restaurant waitstaff with the paid parking issue – because apparently when visitors to the city pay $1.00/hour to use a taxpayer-owned lot, this somehow negatively affects Lines’ ability to find people who want to work in in his restaurants (even though most businesses currently have staffing problems, whether there is paid parking in the area or not). I’m pretty sure if he talked long enough, Lines (and Wallace) would find a way to blame all of the costs of doing business in Clarkston on our $1.00/hour paid parking. (Quick! Call the whambulance!)

Wallace noted (as has Catallo) that Clarkston has not given them financial subsidies to do business here. I’m not sure why we would do that, and if they don’t like it, they’re free to go somewhere else rather than opening restaurants here. But since Wallace brought this issue up again, I did a bit of research and learned that Union Joints has already been significantly subsidized courtesy of our federal tax dollars. The COVID-era federal Paycheck Protection Program authorized “forgivable loans” to businesses and is described here. Union Joints received $3.3 million in these “forgivable loans.” (Link here.) Union AdWorks, another Catallo-related company that was mentioned in Wallace’s podium speech at the October 10^th city council meeting (that Wallace referred to as an “advertising agency” without specifically naming it), received $2.4 million in “forgivable loans.” (Link here.) The linked website data does not indicate whether Union Joints and/or Union Adworks met the criteria for loan forgiveness, so you would have to ask them directly if these companies paid back any of those millions and millions of federal taxpayer dollars.

And, frankly, claiming that restaurants (or any other business in town) are golden geese of some kind is a crock of you-know-what. Businesses pay property taxes to the city, the same as we all do. As the city manager explained in his May 23, 2022, budget presentation, the city keeps less than half of those property taxes (46%). The remaining 54% goes to support schools, the community college, county operations, the Metroparks, the Zoo, and Detroit Institute of Arts, among other things. (I’ve linked to a copy of the city manager’s pie chart here.)

I think some people believe that the sales tax the restaurants and businesses collect gets sent directly to city hall, but nothing could be further from the truth. The sales taxes restaurant patrons pay are sent to the State of Michigan, and the state sends back a small portion of that money to local municipalities throughout the state in the form of revenue sharing as required by a state statute. (The city also gets money from the state based on our population, and this payment is required by the Michigan Constitution.) If I get a chance in the future, I’ll try to provide you with the amount of tax the restaurants are paying, as well as how the revenue sharing that we receive under the state statute has changed in the years since Honcho and The Fed have opened. Whatever increase there has been in revenue sharing, consider how much wear and tear the influx of business patrons have inflicted on our parking lots, streets, and sidewalks. We simply don’t have enough money to fix these things without raising taxes or getting revenue some other way. The city has chosen to offset some of the cost by using paid parking proceeds, as it is entitled to do.

Cara Catallo spoke as well. She urged a delay because she wanted the city to adopt a “legitimate” strategy for paid parking. Apparently, our elected officials can’t make “legitimate” decisions and should defer to the Main Street Oakland County organization for their marching orders.

Cara Catallo also said that she thought it was “a little bit unseemly to do this right before an election” and that it “feels a little bit campaign-y.” That’s an odd comment, but I think I might know why she said that. Scott Meyland is running against Eric Haven for the mayor’s seat. The first three signatures on Meyland’s nominating petitions (linked here) were from Cara Catallo (Curt’s sister), Cara’s daughter (Curt’s niece), and Sharron Catallo (Curt’s mother). Erich Lines (Curt’s business partner) was the last to sign the petition. Derek Werner, Cara Catallo’s former partner and chair of the planning commission, also signed. Do you think maybe their support of Meyland has something to do with paid parking? I don’t know, but I find it odd that Cara Catallo seemed to think that the paid parking decision should be delayed until after the election. I’m not aware that Meyland has said anything publicly about paid parking, but I’d be interested in hearing his position on that and why these people might want to support him, wouldn’t you?

Cara Catallo spoke twice at the October 10^th meeting. In her closing comment, she suggested that we should charge our city employees for parking on city property. And we should also consider charging moms who bring their toddlers to Depot Park to park during the day. Because those things are also revenue generating and are apparently totes equivalent to charging her brother’s restaurant patrons $1.00 an hour to park on city property. (Isn’t she a peach?)

People related to the Catallo businesses weren’t the only ones making outrageous comments on October 10^th. Robert Esshaki’s comments were priceless. (You’ll recall that Esshaki is the owner of the future restaurant that we don’t have parking for.) He claimed to support paid parking and doesn’t think he should have to pay the city for each of the parking spots that he can’t provide as required by the zoning ordinance because others haven’t paid it either. He also thinks that the residents on Buffalo and Church Street should be inundated with transient restaurant visitors again so that he can shoehorn another restaurant into the city because there should be some “shared pain with everybody” and “if everybody’s a little bit unhappy, we’ve probably done a good job.”

Oh really? “Shared pain” sounds so corporate-y. Tell us, Mr. Esshaki, if the residents are supposed to “share the pain,” will you be sharing the profits with us? I’m guessing the answer is “no”? So, in that case, you know where you can stuff your “shared pain” discussion. It’s only fair that the people who are literally causing the problem figure it out for themselves. And if they can’t, perhaps that will lead to a recognition of the obvious – we can’t support parking for the restaurants we have and don’t need another one.

Councilmember Wylie was a major disappointment in the discussion on October 10^th. She apparently thinks that it’s the city’s obligation to find parking for employees who work for private businesses. Does Wylie’s belief match your real-world work experience? None of the cities I’ve worked in have cared a whit about where I parked or how much it cost me – and I worked directly for a large city at one point. Wylie also tried to delay the vote on paid parking supposedly so the two missing council members and the city manager could participate in the discussion, even though, as Haven pointed out, this discussion has been going on for years, there is no guarantee that all council members will be present at any meeting, and the city manager drafted the resolution. Wylie’s effort to delay failed because, thankfully, none of the other four council members present supported her. In the end, all five council members present voted for paid parking in the Depot Road lot, including Wylie, so waiting wouldn’t have made a difference in the passage of this proposal. Wylie’s attempt at delay was nothing more than a transparent attempt to kowtow to the whiny restaurant owners present at the meeting.

Why I’m Voting for Eric Haven

I think that Mayor Haven displayed a lot of courage and fortitude in standing up to all the 💩 flung against the wall by Neil Wallace, Erich Lines, Cara Catallo, and Robert Esshaki. Rather than raising taxes (which are permanent) or issuing bonds (which are taxes that last for years and years), Haven supports increasing paid parking opportunities because it will create an additional revenue stream for the city without burdening the taxpayers. Imagine that. Someone who cares for us more than the businesses (at least on this issue).

As you know, I’ve made no secret that I don’t like Eric Haven. And he doesn’t like me. Our opinions about each other were formed during the open meetings act and freedom of information act lawsuits that my husband and I filed against the city. My husband’s case settled with the city’s admission that it had indeed violated the open meetings act, and the city lost my freedom of information act case after fighting it for five years, all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court. The city’s litigation tactics went beyond the legal issues in the cases to the personal, seeking to damage my husband’s ability to practice law and to destroy me financially. Haven has never apologized for his role in supporting that litigation. I dislike Eric Haven so much that I’ve always enthusiastically promised my support to anyone who runs against him.

Or at least that was the case before I saw who signed Scott Meyland’s nominating petitions. I know who is supporting Meyland and now, so do you. And if you want to get a flavor for who some of the entitled people are that support Meyland and how little they value your interests as a taxpayer and a resident, you really should listen to the October 10^th city council meeting recording.

And I would ask that you consider voting for Eric Haven for mayor. It really did take a lot of courage to stand up to the Catallo machine. And that’s why he’s earned my vote this time.