Ann Arbor City Budget Favors Art Over Fire Fighting

The debate in Ann Arbor, where firefighters are being laid off due to a multimillion dollar budget deficit, is over an $850,000 piece of art.

That's how much the city has agreed to pay German artist Herbert Dreiseitl for a three-piece water sculpture that would go in front of the new police and courts building right by the City Hall.

The city has the money to do it because in 2007, it agreed to set aside for public art 1 percent of money that went into capital improvement projects that were $100,000 or larger. Most capital projects involve streets, sewers and water.

Ann Arbor City Council member Stephen Kunselman, a Democrat, opposed the art deal.

"I think it is incredibly insensitive," Kunselman said. "It is insensitive to the staff and their morale. It is insensitive to the community. There are people out there struggling financially, and here we are spending a large amount of money on a piece of art."

Kunselman said the city is also eliminating the solid waste coordinator from the budget, which oversees trash pickup, and hiring an art coordinator."

Ann Arbor is a University town. That in and of itself should tell you all you need to know.  Ann Arbor has been severely leftwing since the early 60's...when the definition of liberal began to change from patriots who perhaps favored a more compassionate rendering of the Constitution...to outright lunatics who definitely favor sending armed men to shoot you if you do not believe that ALL government has, in essence, the dictatorial powers of a monarchy.

So of course Ann Arbor thinks that artwork should be funded over firemen. Here in Gainesville, also a University town, one cannot walk, crawl, drive or even fly 50 feet without encountering a "bike-lane", and bike-lanes are fine but costly to create and maintain and ultimately take more room from the shoulder of the road, and, you guessed it, vehicular/pedestrian accidents increased exponentially when the town was at long last free of all that driving space. And I really don't want to even think of getting into formerly wooded-pedestrian paths carved out of what once was arboreal but now asphaltic.

University towns do things like layoff firemen and policemen and replace them with statues of one commie or another. Or twisted steel beams that remind them of one commie or another so's they can hide their predilection towards all things socialistic.And FOUNTAINS! OMG, lotsa fountains.