How Cities Set Priorities: A Mayor's View | Podcast

What does it actually take to run a city? Not in theory, but in practice, with real budget constraints, competing interests, a major university that doesn't have to follow your zoning laws, and a state government that sometimes delivers less revenue than promised?

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On Episode 1 of In Pursuit, host Mike Bitchick sits down with Christopher Taylor, Mayor of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Taylor came to politics through an unlikely path: vocal performance, English literature, a PhD program in American history, and finally law school, all at the University of Michigan. He first ran for city council in 2008 with about a month to prepare, won, served six years, and has been mayor since 2014.

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What he shares in this conversation is one of the most honest and accessible explanations of how local government actually works that you'll find anywhere. Watch the full episode here.
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Ann Arbor Is a Council-Manager City. Here's What That Means.

Ann Arbor operates under a council-manager form of government, which Taylor describes as a "weak mayor" setup, though he prefers not to use those words. The mayor chairs the city council, which functions like a board of directors. Together, the mayor and council hire the city administrator, who serves as the chief executive and manages all city departments, staff, and day-to-day operations.

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The mayor's role is less about operational control and more about policy direction, coalition building, and interpreting what council wants so the administrator can act on it between meetings.

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"The administrator will say, 'What's council looking for here? We're thinking of implementing this solution, does this vibe with what council wanted three meetings ago?' And I'll say yay or nay."

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This structure exists for a reason. In a city of Ann Arbor's size, Taylor argues, you need a professional CEO who really knows what they're doing. Elected officials may not have operational expertise in HR, fire services, or police, and a council-manager setup insulates day-to-day operations from that risk.

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How City Priorities Actually Get Set

This is one of the most interesting parts of the conversation, because the answer is less structured than most people assume.

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There is no annual planning retreat where the mayor and council sit down and agree on the top five priorities for the year. Instead, priorities emerge organically. Council members run on specific issues, get elected, and seek appointments to commissions that align with their focus areas. Those commissions, working with professional staff, generate policy recommendations that eventually come back to council.

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"Some focus on transportation, some focus on policing, some focus on housing, climate, and so forth. The ability of those council members to work within the organization, work with their colleagues, work with the commissions to which they are appointed — those will sort of set the top-of-mind priorities."

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Layered on top of that are external forces: federal and state mandates, budget realities, and whatever is happening on the ground in the city at any given moment. Priorities in local government are less a plan and more a constantly shifting negotiation between what elected officials want, what residents need, and what the budget can actually support.

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The Budget Reality: Revenue Doesn't Keep Up With Costs

Ann Arbor's total budget is roughly $650 million, with a general fund of around $150 million. The primary revenue sources are property taxes, state revenue sharing, and utility rates from water, sewer, and stormwater.

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But there's a structural problem. Michigan's state constitution limits how much property taxes can increase for existing properties to the rate of inflation. Municipal costs, on the other hand, grow faster than general inflation because cities buy things like cement, healthcare, wages, and infrastructure repair rather than consumer goods.

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"We have revenue challenges in this regard. If we did not permit development, we would be having extreme budget challenges. Our finances would be far worse than they are. We would be in a service-cutting environment."

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This is the real reason Ann Arbor has leaned into development and density. It's not just about housing supply, though that matters enormously. It's also about growing the tax base in a way that keeps the city financially healthy. More residents in a denser footprint means more tax revenue without a proportional increase in infrastructure costs.

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Taylor is direct about the math: a thousand residents in a single building costs far less to service than a thousand residents spread across a single-family neighborhood. Same people, dramatically different infrastructure burden.

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Housing: How Facts Changed a Mayor's Mind

Taylor ran for city council in 2008 on a platform that included relatively strict height limits. He no longer holds that position.

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What changed his mind was data. Housing prices in Ann Arbor have increased four times the rate of inflation since the Great Recession. Rents have risen two and a half times the rate of inflation. The University of Michigan has added roughly 10,000 students over the past decade. About 80,000 people commute into Ann Arbor every day because there isn't enough housing for them to live there.

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"Supply and demand is real. There is increasing demand for housing. This has real and tangible challenges and creates real problems. Economic segregation, because of America, economic segregation leads to racial segregation. And that's not the direction we want our city to take."

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Taylor is now firmly pro-development, particularly in the downtown core. His view is that denser downtown housing reduces commuter congestion, improves the vibrancy of the city for everyone, and helps working people actually afford to live where they work. The city is currently developing a comprehensive land use plan that envisions meaningful housing growth while protecting established neighborhoods.

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The University of Michigan: A Unique Relationship

Ann Arbor's relationship with the University of Michigan is unlike almost any other city-university dynamic in the country, and Taylor explains why with unusual candor.

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The University of Michigan was created by the state constitution, not by the state legislature. That puts it on par with the legislature itself, which means there is a legitimate legal argument that the university doesn't have to follow state law. What is certain is that it does not have to follow any local law: no zoning code, no sign ordinance, nothing.

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The university also holds the right of eminent domain over private property. It pays no property taxes. It does not pay a payment in lieu of taxes to the city.

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"You couldn't ask for a better behemoth amongst you than the University of Michigan. They understand that it is in their existential interest to have an amazing city. If they do what they do in a way that messes up Ann Arbor, that is going to be extremely bad for their long-term success."

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The relationship works, Taylor says, because the university understands its own self-interest. A diminished Ann Arbor would hurt the university's ability to attract faculty, students, and research partners. That alignment of interests has produced a mostly cooperative relationship, even without formal obligations.

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State Funding: The Downstream Problem

Cities don't operate in isolation. They depend on state revenue sharing, and that sharing is subject to political winds.

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Taylor explains that revenue sharing comes in two forms. Constitutional revenue sharing is protected by the state constitution and relatively stable. Statutory revenue sharing is subject to the annual state budget process and can be cut when the state faces its own pressures.
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"We don't always get what we were promised when it comes to statutory revenue sharing. When the state gets money, they're like, 'We have needs.' And so we're going to squeeze the people downstream. We're the people downstream."

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With federal funding also under pressure, cities like Ann Arbor are watching housing vouchers and grants shrink. Taylor is direct about what that means: fewer people get the help they need, and some of them become unhoused. The effects are concrete and immediate, even when the policy decisions that cause them are made hundreds of miles away.

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The Incentive Problem in City Planning

One of the most insightful moments in the conversation comes when Mike asks Taylor about unintended consequences in government policy. Taylor uses Ann Arbor's own planning department as the example.

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For years, the city's development review process required every stage to be fully completed before the next one could begin. No parallel work, no provisional approvals, sequential gates all the way through. This added time and cost to every development project.

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Taylor is honest about why that system existed. It wasn't malicious. It was defensive.

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"We are trying to demonstrate that we are not improperly trusting the petitioner. So that we are not relying upon their say-so."

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The incentive was to protect staff and council from accusations of favoring developers over residents. The result was a slower, more expensive process that ultimately raised the cost of housing for everyone. Taylor acknowledges that cost doesn't disappear: it gets passed on to the people who eventually live in those buildings.

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Understanding that incentive, rather than simply criticizing the outcome, is the kind of clear-eyed thinking that makes this conversation worth listening to.

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What Taylor Believes Now That He Didn't in 2008

Taylor has been in Ann Arbor politics for nearly two decades. When Mike asks what he believes now that he didn't back then, his answer is characteristically honest.

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He's more pro-development than he was. He's less nostalgic about preserving the city as it was when he arrived in 1985. And he's been genuinely surprised by the resilience and generosity of Ann Arbor's residents: the city passed an affordable housing millage 70-30, and a climate action millage by a similar margin.

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"The community that we have here is more resilient than I had feared back in 2008. We are able to experience inputs and take them in and create change and have that change be okay."

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If he could give himself one mulligan, it would be his early position on height limits downtown. The evidence changed, and his position changed with it. That kind of intellectual honesty is rarer in politics than it should be.

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What Ann Arbor's Next Chapter Looks Like

Taylor's hopes for Ann Arbor in 2035 are specific and grounded. Fewer commuters, not because jobs left, but because more people who work in Ann Arbor can afford to live there. Meaningful progress on the city's A2Zero plan to reach community-wide carbon neutrality by 2030. A comprehensive land use plan that enables housing growth while preserving what makes the city worth living in.

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The city's purpose, as Taylor frames it, is straightforward even if the execution never is: improving basic services and enhancing quality of life. Everything else is judgment calls, tradeoffs, and the messy work of democracy.

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This post is based on Episode 1 of In Pursuit, featuring Christopher Taylor, Mayor of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Watch the full episode for more on city finances, the University of Michigan's unique constitutional status, and what it really takes to govern a mid-sized American city.

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