RESOURCES:
Washtenaw County Official List of Candidates: November 4 2025 General Election
TRANSCRIPTION:
Caroline MacGregor: This is your community NPR station, 89.1 WEMU. I'm Caroline MacGregor. My guest today is one of two candidates for Mayor of Chelsea, Julianne Chard. And voters will decide this issue on November 4th. Welcome! Thank you for joining us today, Julianne!
Julianne Chard: Good morning, Miss MacGregor! It's nice to be here. And I am looking forward to discussing the reason I decided to jump into the campaign for Mayor of Chelsea.
Caroline MacGregor: All right. Tell me about yourself, your background, and where you grew up, if you would.
Julianne Chard: Well, I grew up in South Lyon, which is north of Ann Arbor. I went to high school there. Then, at that point, I moved into Ann Arbor. So, I've spent almost 50 years in Ann Arbor. And during those years, I was married and I had a son. He lives in the area. I went to Lawrence Tech for my bachelor's in architectures. And then, I did my masters' of architecture at the University of Michigan. I had a number of actually challenging and prestigious jobs. I worked at General Motors Real Estate in working with the New Center Development Partnership, which was a local nonprofit housing partnership in the Detroit New Center area. Another project that I worked on as my son grew up and I had to anchor myself in Ann Arbor was I worked for the University of Michigan as a civil engineer, and that was predominantly the redevelopment of the central campus. If you look at the Diag now with all the brick pavers, I was the field engineer for that and supervised that as my son looked on as he waited for daycare. And then, later in high school, he went to Community High, and I was also the bond director for the 2004 sinking fund to the Ann Arbor Public Schools Improvement Program, and that included Skyline High. And I advocated for the the geothermal system that they have there now, and it has a silver at the leadership of when I was there. So, I have experience working with teachers and administrators, city officials. I also worked in private practice with a private architecture firm. Some of those communities were Pontiac, Michigan, and I also had to interface with the City of Detroit. And as I was working with U of M, we interfaced with the City of Ann Arbor. So, I had to interface with city officials, even when I worked at U of M. So, I have an extensive background, 30-plus years in construction, design, administration, finances, really dealing with all the aspects of management. So, I felt that, at that point looking at where we are in the city, I had a number of people ask me to run. And finally, when we lost our last city manager, I felt it was time that we needed at least some strong leadership that had experience. And I looked at my credentials and I said, "With everything that's going on, we really need stability. We need to keep our costs down because we have gone through three city managers. We've gone through five interim city managers. We have our second police chief. We lost an assistant city manager. We've gone through two financial directors. We're on our second financial director. We've gone through two community development directors. And we currently have that opening vacant." So, we use a consultant, an excellent consultant, but still consultants are expensive, and we pay almost $1,200 an hour for that consultant. And we've lost police dispatchers. So, I really felt that it was time to get the politics out of government and go back to our city charter, which is a nonprofit.
Caroline MacGregor: Tell me why the turnover. What's been going on? You mentioned politics.
Julianne Chard: Yes. I was not a participant in the protests that took place before the current administration came in, but the current administration was part of those protests. And out of it, there was born a political agenda to make the police department "nicer," for lack of a better word. There was a Bobcat report solicited by the city council at that time. The Bobcat report made clear that there were certain deficiencies in the way that the police department was run. None of them were extremely devastating, but like any small town, we need to get up to the curve. But I was not aware of the SMART team that came in from Eastern Michigan University as a public safety strategic planning group. Their intentions were to revamp the police department in a way that is supposed to be, I guess, quote unquote, "nicer to the community." I have had a number of people who stated that they wanted to be part of those meetings, but they weren't selected. And so, there started to build up a resentment in people who were either for the progressive approach or the people who felt that the police department were not treated very fairly, in terms of the way that the protests were handled.
Caroline MacGregor: So, you've mentioned your background. You bring it to some very interesting experience. And as far as running for mayor, you're up against Kate Henson. What makes you think that you're the best person for the job?
Julianne Chard: Experience in asking the right questions. I've worked with consultants. I have the experience of how administrators work. I understand how the government works in terms of the carrot-and-stick concept of grants. I also believe that there's a certain level of expertise, in terms of the bureaucratic process that you have to go through dealing with the state and the federal government. But I also believe, because I have had interaction with a large group across the board of people from students to administrators, that I can listen. I can hear them. And I don't make up my mind based on my political agenda. And I feel that that is probably the most compelling difference between myself and Miss Henson is that I have no party affiliations at all. I take no money from Republicans, Democrats, whereas my opponent is right on the website. They've got the Democratic button for donations, in fact, yesterday were canvassing in my neighborhood, and they came to my door, and they didn't know I was running for mayor, and they wanted me to vote for Kate Henson for the Democratic Progressives. And again, I told them that our charter is nonpartisan, and that I felt that it was improper to be canvassing and stating that they had a political agenda of the Democratic Progressives. So, going back to our charter is really the heart of why myself, as well as my associate campaign with Bill O'Reilly, are in fact the reasons that we both decided to campaign and run for, myself, mayor and Bill O'Reilly as a city council member.
Caroline MacGregor: Just given the time we have, my last two questions. What are the top issues or changes you'd like to see in Chelsea? How do you plan to affect change? And then, after that, I'll ask you about the importance of community.
Julianne Chard: Well, the most important changes that we have right now are we're a community that is expanding, and we need to address the core issues. And one of those issues is traffic. We never had a traffic study done until Mr. Colburn, our last city manager, advocated with the Washtenaw Area Transportation Study, WATS, to hire a consultant to do a traffic study. Also, the fact that we have 5,400 people in our population, and of that 5,400 people, we have almost 40% of our population is 65 and over. 8% of that is poverty level or below. It's the highest in Washtenaw County. In my own experience, as I've campaigned around, I've walked door-to-door, and I've seen that we do have people that are aging in place, but aging in place doesn't mean that you have the ability to actually maintain your home in the best because of limited resources and, in fact, even maybe limited mobility. So, there's a population out there that we really need to look closer at because we have such a large population of seniors. Those two things are really important to me. The other thing that's really important to me is that when we start to work as us and them and forget that it is a "we" community, we divide ourselves by ideology. And I feel that that's not constructive to the greater community. And in fact, it does not reflect the true and genuine care that Chelsea residents really deliver. And politics has been corrosive. It really seems like a reflection of what's going on at a national level. And I want to get back to "all of us."
Caroline MacGregor: All right! Well, thank you so much, Julianne, for joining us to talk about your candidacy!
Julianne Chard: Thanks so much! Pleasure meeting you!
Caroline MacGregor: And to hear the conversation I had earlier this afternoon with the other candidate, visit WEMU.org. This is 89.1 WEMU-FM Ypsilanti.
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