Courtesy of Stanislav Voskov 

Purple coneflowers and black-eyed susan varietals are shown in this streetside planting in Pittsfield Township that was the subject of a civil suit in 14A-1 District Court in 2009.

Neighbors and friends in my part of Burns Park and near Allmendinger Park have gotten notices from the City of Ann Arbor for having day lilies on their lawn extension in 2008 and again in 2009. When I got a worried call from a neighbor earlier this week about a notice he had received for a rosebush planted on his lawn extension, I knew it was time to start writing the annual update.

I want to get the story right, especially since there is a history to it that needs to be told properly. There are safety issues, code enforcement issues and some details about how decisions are made. I want to get them all right. It's complicated.

According to the city's ordinance:

"3:15. Lawn extension and city street right-of-way. The owner of every parcel of land is responsible for grading, planting, mowing and raking the extension or city street right-of-way so that it is covered with turf grass with an average height not in excess of 12 inches or other ground cover vegetation with an average height not in excess of 36 inches above the adjacent road surface unless it presents a view hazard based on the criteria in the AASHTO (American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials) Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets, 5th Edition (2005), or as subsequently amended. The city shall not be liable for damage to any vegetation planted, or to any property or fixtures placed, in or upon the lawn extension or the city right-of-way that results from work performed by the city in the lawn extension or right-of-way. (Ord. No. 43-04, § 17, 1-3-05; Ord. No. 19-05, § 4, 5-16-05)."

The simpler part of the story, though, is the process of describing and deciding how Freedom of Information Act requests come into play in telling the story. As I've said before, FOIA is the world's worst possible search engine, and if you try to tell a story completely through FOIA requests you have to budget in the maximum possible time just to get the documents, which is 15 business days. By then, the story will have come and gone and the day lilies (which, after all, only last a day) will be gone.

The strategy that I'm working on is the right combination of formal, written requests, research through openly available archives and databases, conversations with people who are affected by this and official written documents. No comment is a comment.

I've talked to several people in the middle of this who clearly have not wanted to talk to me. They know something, but it's above their pay grade to make the particular politically-motivated decisions that decide how these particular ordinances are enforced. There's a chain of command - they are not at the top of it, they are not at the bottom of it and they'd rather talk to me after the decisions are made by someone else.

After a telephone conversation, my next question was sent through the communications office. The response was polite and civil and prompt, and again it was incomplete. The message was clear: while we could possibly answer the questions which you have in the detail that you want to have them answered, we can't do that in time for the deadline you have imposed. I was encouraged to send in a FOIA request to get the information that I wanted; I know that means anywhere from a five day to a 15 day wait to get a response.

By the time the FOIA request comes back, the decisions will have been made and any ambiguity will be resolved. One of the quirks of the FOIA is if you ask a tough question, the response time in the system has enough lag that administrative (and perhaps also political) decisions can be made to address the problem that prompted the request in the first place.

Figuring out how to ask for records

The hardest part of making a FOIA request is specifying the records that you want in such a way that fulfilling the request is a routine matter. Ideally there should be no ambiguity in the record specification, no question whether a particular record is of interest and a narrow enough scope to the search that you know it can be executed in finite time and within a finite (and small) budget.

To do this, however, you need to somehow understand enough of the structure of the system you are looking to query in order to formulate a query that makes sense. If you don't know how the records are organized internally, there may be no way to know how to make the question easy to answer.

I spoke with the FOIA coordinator for the city and also with someone in the Police Records department. Neither one knew off-hand how the data that I was looking to search, about issuance of tickets through Community Standards, was structured. Someone does know how these records are organized and where they are stored; I knew I'd save time by talking to them first before writing something down and submitting a written request.

Community standards vary and are open to interpretation

Note that this is not the first time city administration has gotten involved with the issuance of Community Standards tickets; 95 parking tickets were voided after the spring football game. "To the extent that we made a mistake in terms of our communication about that issue, we have corrected that," City Administrator Roger Fraser explained to the City Council in a report in April.

A previous case involving lawn maintenance in Pittsfield Township that went to the 14A-1 District Court for resolution was reported on in characteristic depth - 4,000 words, plus 2,000 more words of reader comments - by the Ann Arbor Chronicle. The 920 word Ann Arbor News story includes a photo. Judge Cedric Simpson ruled against Stanislav Voskov in favor of the township, ruling that the "plant and watch" approach to native plant gardening did not meet the township's standards for cultivation. The February 10, 2009 Ann Arbor News story noted that Washtenaw County Water Resources Commissioner Janis Bobrin observed that Voskov was growing flowers known to be effective at managing stormwater, such as purple coneflowers and black-eyed susan varietals.

Always figure out something that you don't know

The process of wandering around town, or around city hall, often unearths information that you would like to know but again don't want to have to file a FOIA form to find out.

I spoke with Kristen Larcom, senior assistant city attorney, and got some understanding how tickets like this would go through the system. If you decided to contest a day lily ticket, it would go to 15th District Court, where you could ask to have the magistrate review your ticket in an informal hearing. The docket for the 15th District Court is online if you want to see what cases go through that system.

I also talked with IT Director Dan Rainey about the City of Ann Arbor data catalog, which includes all kinds of interesting public records which you don't have to go through the FOIA process to see. I encouraged him to help the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority publish to the Internet the same records that they already provide to Google for their Google Transit service.

Just talk to people

Not surprisingly, few people who have gotten day lily tickets want to talk about it with their name attached. Some folks are worried about the repercussions of speaking out openly against municipal code enforcement; others simply think it's "ridiculous" to get this particular ticket when their neighbors who also have day lilies don't get tickets.

There are organized efforts to look at the problem of overgrown vegetation, from the perspective of safety issues and sight lines for traffic and for children. When, instead of day lilies or roses or other cultivated vegetation, the lawn extension is occupied by thistles, people react differently.

Edward Vielmetti went to high school with Bill Vajda, the new city manager of Marquette, Michigan. I wonder what he thinks about day lilies. Contact Ed at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.