Satan for Mayor?!

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Fueling the heated rhetoric are two wildly conflicting visions of Ann Arbor. Challenger Pat Lesko sees the city administration as incompetent, the council as dysfunctional, and the budget as opaque and bulging with hidden funds. Incumbent John Hieftje sees the administration as effective, council as working well together in hard times, and the budget as clean and lean. The election may hinge on whose version of reality voters believe.

Patricia Lesko was born in Dearborn in 1961 and moved to Ann Arbor at twenty. She got a bachelor's in psychology and an MFA from the U-M in the 1980s and now owns a book publishing company, the Part-Time Press, and an online magazine, Adjunct Nation. (She's also written occasional freelance articles for the Observer.) She lives on the city's northeast side with her partner, Marjorie Winkelman Lesko, and their two sons.

Lesko twice has managed council campaigns and last year led a petition drive that would have amended the city charter to require public votes on all bond issues. But this will be the first time her name appears on the ballot: her only previous run for office, in 2008, was as a write-in candidate in the First Ward Democratic primary.

Both of the council candidates she managed lost, the petitions for her proposed charter revision were never submitted, and Lesko ended up with 297 votes to Sandi Smith's 900 in the 2009 primary. In an interview on her deck in her leafy backyard, I ask why she thinks she can win now.