RESOURCES:
Amber Fellows for the People of Ypsilanti
Washtenaw County August Primary List of Candidates
TRANSCRIPTION:
Caroline MacGregor: You're listening to 89.1 WEMU. I'm Caroline MacGregor. And with me today is Amber Fellows. She's the current representative for Ward 3 of Ypsilanti. She's a first-generation Japanese American, and she is running against incumbent Ypsilanti Mayor Nicole Brown. Welcome, Amber!
Amber Fellows: Thank you! Thank you for having me, Caroline!
Caroline MacGregor: So, Amber, you're actually an Eastern Michigan University alum.
Amber Fellows: That is correct. I graduated in 2013.
Caroline MacGregor: And you've been in the area for 25 years.
Amber Fellows: Yeah, just about. I moved here in 2003 early, so it's been nearly a quarter-century.
Caroline MacGregor: Okay. You're running on an agenda that includes advocating for housing justice, racial equality, reparations, LGBTQ rights and government transparency. Let's delve into some of the issues. What do you feel is most pressing in Ypsilanti today?
Amber Fellows: Some of the most pressing issues in Ypsilanti is our housing crisis. So, Ypsilanti residents have been experiencing the pressures of a very dominant housing market, and landlords have become increasingly more aggressive and non-cooperative with renters. And we started noticing this a lot more in 2015 and started making demands on local government to do something about it. And so, that is a big motivating factor for why I ran for City Council and why I'm doing this run today. Another issue that's really important is the public safety. So, Ypsilanti, among being the highest percentage of renters in the state at 70%, we also are a working class city. And so, we have working class issues like mental health crises and substance use issues. And the way that the status quo has gotten about it is just to increase our police budget year over year and have a lot of mutual aid contracts with several other outside jurisdictions. And so, we are a very overpoliced community as well. And so, that is another issue that I care about that we need to create safety programs that actually attend to the issues that our residents need. And so, I have put $1 million aside for a unarmed community responder program, so that's unarmed crisis response. And I'm running for Mayor to implement that program with the help of the community to make sure that it attends to our specific needs here in Ypsilanti.
Caroline MacGregor: Now, obviously, we had a situation where there was a mental health episode taking place in Ypsilanti, and the home of Reuben Peeler was surrounded by police. It was a multi-agency response, and there was enormous feedback from the community about overkill, overreach, the home was virtually destroyed. And you've talked about mental health. How do you feel the Ypsilanti Police Department is handling this since that episode?
Amber Fellows: We're still waiting on a report back from the local police, Ypsilanti Police Department, about what their role was in the 30-hour police siege on Ruben Peeler's home, the destruction of the home and coordinating with SWATs and the Sheriff, and we still have not received that report yet, which is disappointing. I believe that the Ypsilanti Police Department does try to attend to issues that are not necessarily appropriate for them. So, it's not actually fair to them to handle mental health calls. We need mental health professionals to handle those calls. And so, part of doing a new program, a new city service, is to take that kind of responsibility and weight off of the small police department anyway. So, they can prioritize their efforts to things that are appropriate for law enforcement. So, while I am kind of pushing for YPD to be more transparent and to share what went wrong with the police siege on Cross Street, I also want to support them in the way that we're going to be bringing in a new service that will offset them responding to those types of calls.
Caroline MacGregor: And I do know that Washtenaw County is working with Community Mental Health, and Community Mental Health has really tried to point out a lot of information to help educate the public about their crisis response line onto housings. You have talked about landlords taking advantage of renters or the huge amount of money that people have to pay to either rent or own their own home. Given that Ypsilanti has been reported to be above the national rate for expensive living, what would you like to do in this area?
Amber Fellows: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first thing I want to say is that the housing crisis isn't just hitting renters. It's for people buying homes in Ypsilanti as well are having a hard time. The reason why I focus on renters is because we are 70% renter households in Ypsilanti. It is the highest in the entire state. And so, places like Ypsilanti that have a high amount of renter households need to orient our resources, policies, goals around supporting our populace, which are largely renters. And so, we need a renter's bill of rights. We need to do bold things like challenge the state preemption that bans rent control. We need to create recourses for when landlords are creating unsafe conditions in homes so that tenants don't just have to deal with that themselves. In this past year, I've created a tenants' rights committee. And so, we just started meeting with that committee, and that committee is going to be meeting with both the public and area tenant unions and other stakeholders to decide what we want to do, as far as policy approaches to the issues. I think one of the first things that we're going to do is the outreach campaign to just let tenants know what protections we do have on the books already. Because we're supposed to be a home-rule state. We're supposed to able to self-determine, and all political authority is supposed to flow from the people. But in Ypsilanti, what we have is a de facto rent control by the big landlords here. They meet, they decide what the rents are, and they determine the prices.
Caroline MacGregor: With regards to the tax base, I know that both you and Nicole Brown were asked a couple of questions during a recent debate about increasing the tax space of the city. The subject was brought up of Eastern Michigan University, and apparently, there's some discussions ongoing with the President to utilize some buildings on the campus to help with the taxbase of the city. What are your thoughts about this?
Amber Fellows: Yeah. I mean, a lot of the problem is that we are four square miles, and a lot of our land is Eastern Michigan and other nonprofits and faith agencies. And so, a lot of our land has not been taxable. And so, we're putting the lion's share of the taxable responsibility on both tenants and homeowners. And so, we do need to demand more from our partners. I think, in most other places, they have at least some sort of payment in lieu of taxes program with their universities, so that there's contributions towards emergency services. We do have a small amount coming in from the state of Michigan for fire services from the City of Ypsilanti, but I believe that should be a bit more. As well, we should make a better partnership with EMU, so that we can do resource sharing. It doesn't have to all be payment, but it can be like opening up buildings to the community, opening up some of the housing to the communities. So, yes, we need to do better with both partnerships to share resources between both entities and integrate better, as well as coming up with strategies that help with increasing our revenue that's not just demanded upon our residents.
Caroline MacGregor: On the controversial subject of data centers, the University of Michigan has proposed a project at Bridge Road and Textile Road. Data centers seem to be springing up not only all over Michigan but around the country, and people are very, very upset about this because of the amount of land that's been taken up, the water and electricity usage. As far as data centers go, what are your thoughts as far as them bringing money into the economy--the positives of data centers?
Amber Fellows: At this point, I'm going to speak specifically to the Los Alamos/U of M Data Center, which does not bring any benefits to this community. First off, the State of Michigan created a $100 million of public funding towards this data center project. In addition to that, because the Los Alamos Data Center has attached itself to U of M as a nominal state agency, a state school, that means they do not pay any taxes. They do not pay any of the state use tax, which is what funds our public schools. And they do not follow any local regulations. And they utilize this to the fullest extent of their authority. So, they do want to do any collaboration with the local entities. I don't believe this is just the Ypsi Township issue. This is a regional issue. This is an Ypsilanti city issue, as well as all the other surrounding jurisdictions because this will affect all of us. So, I do think that the bipartisan resistance against data centers is because people understand that we're not being offered anything in reciprocity for what they're bringing to our communities. And what they are bringing to communities is still an unknown because many other places are having data centers, people are seeing environmental shocks and concerns, public health problems that weren't anticipated before they came. So, this is something that we put a year-long moratorium on, and I'm proud to say that I brought that resolution. It was the first year-long moratorium in the entire state, and that we're going to study what data centers of similar size and magnitude have had impact on other communities and come up with regulatory solutions in that year time. And we're going to be working with our partners in Ypsilanti Township as well.
Caroline MacGregor: You've talked about Ypsilanti being a very progressive town, but we continue to be somewhat conservative in leadership because of the primary partisan system. Tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on this and how you feel that could change.
Amber Fellows: So, the voting system in the City of Ypsilanti is the one of the last in the entire state. The only other city that have a similar partisan primary setup is the City of Ann Arbor. And that means that everything is decided in August, effectively. Both the City of Ann Arbor and City of Ypsilanti, we don't have anybody running in our Republican primary. That doesn't ever happen. And so, everybody runs on the Democratic line in August, and that is when we have the fewest amount of people that participate in the electorate. So, we have maybe like a 10% or less voter turnout for August primaries. You know, there's an education issue where people don't understand that's where our elections are decided. And so, I don't know if many people want to participate in the August 4th primary. They don't think it's important to the outcomes in their local politics. That's part of it. It's just like a lack of doing a voter drive for those elections. And I think it also makes it so that a small amount of people in like the greater Michigan Democratic Party can kind of like hand-select who they want to be in leadership in both Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. And so, this has presented a problem for people who are having increasing frustrations around issues that affect them, but their leadership are very invested in the status quo, which is mostly decided by a small group of people. And so, this is something I wanted to bring attention to. I think there are multiple ways to deal with it. We could just do more voter outreach and education to get more people to come out in August. That's one strategy. And another strategy is to go all along with what the rest of the state, cities have done in the state and just become non-partisan in our primaries.
Caroline MacGregor: With regards to ICE, do you think Ypsilanti has done enough to protect people or not cooperate with ICE or where do you think we could improve there?
Amber Fellows: Yeah. This is the issue that's really weighs heavy on my heart. So, I have both felt like the City of Ypsilanti has been as responsive to the issue as many other municipalities have tried. Our tools are limited in government because the legal frameworks only work if other entities follow the laws, and the way that the federal agency that we know as ICE are operating do not operate on any law following and rule following at all. They're a totally rogue agency, so what a city government can do to create recourse, trip wires is only so much, especially if they're not going to follow it. But we have done some. We've made it so that our public areas in town are not areas for ICE to do staging. Public buildings are not places where ICE can enter without recourse. I wrote the resolution that has created a "Know Your Rights" campaign. It's going to launch a little bit later this summer, so every household has their basic knowledge of rights when it comes to interactions with ICE. We've also put pressure on local entities like Willow Run and Wayne County Airport to stop deportation flights coming out of Willow Run Airport. We've put together support for the release of a Ward 2 neighbor who was detained by ICE, and we have mobilized around this issue. So, this is more of like an outside of city council issue for me where I'm doing community organizing. A lot of people in the community are doing organizing around this, but this is something that the city can do better on as well. And I think we need to start using our city attorney, and maybe some outside council too to start pursuing a recourse when ICE breaks our local laws.
Caroline MacGregor: On the subject of reparations, you've stated that Black and Indigenous residents who have long-standing roots in Ypsilanti have faced systemic racism. What are some of the biggest areas that you see the systemic racism still continuing to this day, given that Ypsilianti is quite progressive, and it seems to be making big attempts to amend this?
Amber Fellows: Yeah. Addressing the issues of historic and racial harm is extremely important in places like Ypsilanti. We're one of the last cities in the entire state to have a significant historic, Black district neighborhood. Many around the state have been gentrified away. So, we are undergoing a similar process where, because of the lack of upward mobility, the economic pressures and housing pressures from Ann Arbor, we have been a community under gentrification pressure for quite a long time. And this isn't a new thing. This has been happening since the 60s and 70s, but even in the last 10 years, there's been over a 5% reduction in Black residents, especially in certain neighborhoods. And so, it is something that is going to continue to happen, unless we actually put our resources and put intention around investing in our communities to preserve the diversity in Ypsilanti. A lot of city governments, it's not just the city of Ypsilanti, have been very ignorant to the issue. Just pretend it's no there. They're very stagnant on the issue. But if we're going to actually address the historic and racial harms of the past, including with Black and legacy residents in Ypsilanti and Indigenous residents, then we actually have to put our money where our mouths are and attend to those issues.
Caroline MacGregor: An important part of the role of being a mayor is transparency with the public and the media. How do you foresee your potential performance in this area if you are the successful candidate for Mayor of Ypsilanti?
Amber Fellows: Yeah. Transparency and communication is the bedrock of a trusting relationship between residents and the city representatives and the city government, as well as with the media. And so, transparency is a focal point of everything that I am interested in and expanding democratic tools and accessibility, just like the flow of information. I'm proud that we have put efforts in the city towards better communication, as far as what the city is doing to residents. We could always get better at becoming transparent about our internal and external processes, as well as communication with the media. And so, I hope that we can just continue to strengthen our partnership and bring as much transparency as possible.
Caroline MacGregor: What do you think we are lacking right now in leadership in the role of Mayor of Ypsilanti?
Amber Fellows: I think that we need to look at what it means to be in leadership in a place like Ypsilanti that is diverse, that has all this lineage of being a multicultural sanctuary, a working-class sanctuary and what we can do to actually respect and care about the issues that people are so frustrated about in this community. People bring so many frustrations to us, and we need to do more than just kind of like nod our heads. We actually need to move resources, do reinvestments in community, and really take a look at like how are we going to come together in order to tackle the really intense problems, instead of kind of just deferring to staff or the higher authorities to take care of our problems for us, because it hasn't been working. And so, I'm trying to bring an approach where we're an active player and kind of shaping the destinies of our community, so we're not just sitting back and kind of taking it from higher authorities all the time. I think Ypsilanti is a very, very, very special place, and I hope to grow our legacy. And that's why I'm running for Mayor.
Caroline MacGregor: All right. Thank you. You've been listening to 89.1 WEMU. I'm Caroline MacGregor, and I've been speaking with Amber Fellows. She is challenging Incumbent Ypsilanti Mayor Nicole Brown. And thank you again, Amber, for joining us today!
Amber Fellows: Thank you so much for having me today! I really appreciate this time with you!
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