age Twelve'
THE M1Ch(7AN DAiLy
Wednesday, April 18, 1973
~'d~& Twelve THE MICHIGAN DAILY Wednesday, April 18, 1973
LOOKS TO FUTURE:
-: x'!
Harris
(Continued from Page 1)
him so well in hammering to-
gether council majorities event-
ually led him on a collision
course with the increasingly
militant no-growth sentiment
which was gaining strength in
his party. in 1971 and '72..
On two major issues - the
Briarwood Shopping Center and
the Packard-Beakes By-Pass --
Harris found himself all alone in
taking what he still defends as a
"pragmatic" rather than a "ro-
mantic" approach.
In the spring of 1971 the Taub--
man Co. came to City Hall re-
questing permission to build a
massive regional shopping com-
plex at the corner of State Road
and I-94 on the city's south side.
Environmentalists and the no-
growth, liberals were outraged.
Such a massive complex,
they argued, was merely another
extention of urban sprawl into
the city. The center and the
crush of traffic it would gener-
ate, they asserted, would have a
disasterous effect on the area's
ecological balance and would
further cutback the already
shrinking "green space" be-
tween Detroit and Ann Arbor.
While most of his party ac-
cepted this view, Harris did not.
The "realities" of the situa-
tion, as he saw them, were that
the center, if it were not built
in Ann Arbor, would surely be
grabbed up by some develop-
ment - hungry Pittsfield Town-
ship across the road. The issue,
as Harris framed it, was not
whether there should be a re-
gional shopping center but whe-
ther it should be on the north
or south side of the highway.
Reasoning that building the
center in Ann Arbor would allow
the city to'tax it and regulate its
construction, Harris bucked his
party and most city liberals and
supported the center. It was ap-
proved by council and is current-
ly under construction.
The issues in the Packard-
Beakes flap were essentially the
same.
For years, city businessmen
had wanted to improve the con-
nection between Packard St. on
the South side and Beakes on
the north side via Ashley and
First Streets. The route, if
completed, would afford motor-
ists, from the rapidly growing
subdivisions north of town an
easy route to the south side, by-
passing the business district.
The city's blacks on the other
hand had vehemently opposed
the plans for years. They feared
that Beakes, which runs through
the center of the city's heavily
black north side,- would become
a busy highway, splitting their
community in two.
ponders
The Democratic contingent on
council, led by black First Ward
Councilman Norris Thomas, was
united in opposing the project.
Harris supported it.
Regardless of whether the con-
nection between B e a k e s and
Packard was approved, Harris
argued, Beakes will soon be in-
nundated by some 40,000 cars a
day.
As he saw it, it was just an-
other case of taking the prag-
matic a p p r o a c h. The traffic
would be there anyway so the
city may as well provide for it.
With his support, the measure
passed City Council. The project
died, however, when .the city's
voters failed to approve a bond
issue to fund it.
Harris sees these clashes with
his party not as ideological rifts
but as simple matters of prac-
ticality versus romanticism.
"I really think if they (his
party) had known more of the
facts it would have come out dif-
ferently. But there was a great
romantic desire to be against
'the beast' without asking 'who
is the beast? or 'If we kill the
beast, then what?' ".
As rits were beginning to show
within his own party, a new
threat emerged on the horizon:.
the radical Human Rights Party.
The party's small-scale write-in
campaign in 1971 had been all
but ignored in the wake, of the
Harris-Garris race. The entire
election was bathed in the glare
of the ultimate clash between
liberalism and -reactionary con-
servatism, and the issue of a
third party seemed almost irrele-
vent.
But h lot of things changed
over the following summer.
The 26th amendment to the
Constitution gave 18-year-olds the
vote. And in Michigan the state
Supreme Court ruled that city
clerks in college towns had to
allow students to register and
vote.
Through frenetic registration
efforts, HRP managed to expand
the - electorate by some 7,000
new student votes in time for
the April election.
As' a result, the Democrats
were completely shut out.
They lost the student-heavy
Second ward to Nancy Weschler.
Even more-shocking was the loss
of their traditional stronghold,
the First Ward.
The winner in Ward One, iron-
ically enough, was HRP's Jerry
De Grieck who had worked as
an area co-ordinator in Harris'
original 1969 electoral victory.
"It was a combination of two
things," Harris says of the Dem-
ocrats' defeat, "lousy campaign-
ing and probably not the right
C
city cha
candidates given the newly ex-
panded electorate."
The teacher also gives some of
the credit to his victorious pupils.
"It was just superb work by
HRP."
He also conceeds, somewhat
surprisingly, that De Grieck and
Weschler played a vital role in
their first year on council.
"They (HRP) have shown an
energy at a time when it was
lacking in the Democratic party.
"For instance, on unit pricing,
they had to push it or it never
would have surfaced because
our party wasn't generating it.
"On rent control, I think we
hhd assumed from an earlier
legal opinion that you couldn't do
it under state law. Now, maybe
you can, maybe 'you can't. But
it is certainlybquestionable, and
if they hadn't surfaced it, you
wouldn't have a rent control com-
mittee now."
Despite his acknowledgement
of HRP's role as a catalyst for
change, Harris does not feel a
Democratic-HRP coalition is a
viable vehicle for running the
city.
"The trouble with coalition
rule," he says, "is that you can't
do anything bold. An HRP-Dem-
ocratic coalition is far too fragile
to undertake a prolonged fight.
If you're in your right mind you
don't start that way . . . because
you're spending more energy try-
ing to steal constituents from one
another than you are trying to
win the fight.
"With a coalition, I think you'll
always have weak government-
it may be a liberal government
but it will be a weak liberal gov-
ernment. We've had this in the
last year and we haven't gotten
a whale of a lot done."
Now, as he departs from City
Hall, Harris leaves Ann Arbor
pretty much as he entered it in
1969-dominated by the Republi-
cans. His vision of the future,
however, is not as gloomy as one
might suspect.
"I'm not starting out convinced
that Jim (Stephenson) will re-
peal everything he voted against'
when he was a City Council mem-
ber," Harris says.
"My hope is that he won't act
as conservatively as his ideology
would lead him to lbecause of
two things: (1) fear that ,Repub-
licans will lose future elections,
and (2) when he sits in the may-
or's office he may feel some ob-
ligation to people who didn't vote
for him but are still Ann Arbor-
ites and are entitled to their own
way of life."
Further, Harris. sees a GOP
majority as merely a passing
lnges
phase and looks ahead to a time
when he hopes the Democrats
will return to power.
"The Democrats," he says,
"could hold the mayor's post and
a majority of council for at least
half -a decade . . they could
put it together in a way that I
never could.
"I never had the money and
the personnel and the majority
at the same time-certainly I
never had it long enough to put
many programs through.
"I don't think any city's ever
put it all together. You can get
it in a city that's predominately
black, but they're so broke the
problems overwhelm them.
"But in Ann .Arbor there's
enough wealth and the problems
aren't that bad. You could put
it together for the first time in
American history.
"It's a r a t Ii e r tantilizing
thought."
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