City Council Retreat

I bunkered down in a small conference room with the Ann Arbor City Council for eight hours on Saturday and listened to City Administrator Roger Fraser offer a grim financial outlook for the city, which must trim its budget by 30 percent over three years – starting immediately – to confront falling property tax revenues and declines in state revenue sharing in Michigan. The words "reduced" and "impact" projected onto the city administrator's head in this first photo are indicative of what's ahead. The guys in the middle photo are firefighters who watched on as Fraser talked about the need to immediately lay off 14 firefighters. The last photo says it all.