Tucson Weekly: The Skinny (February 11

Skinny CUTTING THE FAT: The non-profit Mafia that has soaked Pima County taxpayers for decades is about to be squeezed. County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry, in a long-overdue move, is demanding the biggest hitters--those that rake in at least $100,000 a year from the county--lift off the covers to their budgets. This comes as Huckelberry and county officials, elected and appointed, are groping for ways to cut spending to erase a $6 million deficit this year.
The non-profits, ranging from the "living-large" Metropolitan Tucson Convention & Visitors Bureau to the Pima Council on Aging, will now have to show the details of their budgets, including salaries, travel, entertainment and the like. They'll also have to produce their boards of directors. It'll be fun watching them moan and squirm.
Huckelberry's probe will incite a nastier fight than would have ensued on the Board of Supervisors had budget discussions been confined to county departments. Republican Supervisor Mikey Boyd will howl in defense of the convention bureau and Democrat Raul Grijalva will whine when he sees his pets on the Pima County Interfaith Council put under the microscope.
THE PERSECUTION RESTS: Tucson High School Principal Cecilia Mendoza won't be prosecuted for the high crime of allowing a Tucson High parents' group to use $879 from a school account (including such things as soda machine revenue) to pay to mail a notice to parents. County Attorney Barbara LaWall, a Democrat, had the sense to tell Tucson Unified School District to buzz off.
LaWall's action was a clear rebuke to Superintendent George F. Garcia and the TUSD Board members Joel Tracy Ireland, Mary Belle McCorkle, James Noel Christ and former members Gloria Copeland and Brenda Even.
TUSD went into super-spin cycle upon hearing the news from LaWall. Garcia sent a memo to LaWall asking that his January 13 request for prosecution, sent through TUSD's legal beagle Jane Butler, be withdrawn. Then he quickly wrote a one-paragraph note to his Board saying that he sought the withdrawal. Finally, Garcia's PR office, which typically moves at glacial speed, cranked up the spin cycle, quoting Garcia: "To pursue this matter further will benefit neither the students, the school nor the district. Principal Garcia has been doing an outstanding job at the school and we want to continue to support her and assure her that she is a valuable asset to Tucson High and the community."
Hey George, that's what you should have said when Ireland, Christ, McCorkle and Even allowed Copeland last year to continue a petty, vindictive crusade against Mendoza.
TUSD's retreat was not due to any forward thinking on Garcia's part. Board Member Rosalie Lopez, elected last fall along with Carolyn Kemmeries, called for TUSD to stop harassing Mendoza. Lopez went on record, early and often, telling colleagues and Garcia that the criminal referral was way out of line, particularly when the new Board was not briefed about it, let alone asked to vote on such a dire move. That's in stark contrast to McCorkle, who fretted that doing the right thing would be "micro-managing." And Mendoza's lawyer, Anthony Ching, a former assistant Arizona attorney general, put TUSD and the County Attorney's Office on clear notice that: 1) Mendoza violated no laws and 2) TUSD and Assistant Superintendent Larry Williams broke the law by accusing Mendoza of committing an illegality when she didn't and then threatening prosecution.
MANUFACTURED JOURNALISM: Usually we'd cheer when we finally see the establishment media get off its ass and do an exposé on an industry that screws consumers, but reporter Laura Brooks' recent hits on manufactured housing in The Arizona Daily Star leave a lot to be desired.
First, it's a little hard to take seriously a front-page story headlined "Home, unsweet home--manufactured housing too often found a pain," when it's partially obscured by that annoying half-page flapper thingy pushing the usual ads for stick-built tract homes.
Brooks spent time with those who had what appeared to be legitimate complaints against the mobile home industry. She published statistics concerning the number of complaints by dealer and manufacturer. While she illustrated some of the problems involving manufactured housing, she neglected one important aspect of any genuine exposé, namely how do these products stack up against their competition, in this case, stick-built homes.
And later, the Star's crack editorial writers didn't bother making such comparisons, either, when they attacked the manufactured housing folks. They blithely discussed at length "the high percentage of problems" without telling us how that percentage compares to the problems generated by the conventional housing industry.
And now that we think of it, when it comes to other businesses that make major contributions to the Star's advertising revenues, we've never seen an exposé in their pages. How about the new and used car dealers. Surely there are some complaints about those folks the big, brave Star could discuss on Page One in some otherwise tepid Sunday issue?
The Star went on to lament insufficient numbers of inspectors, who are poorly trained, working for the state Office of Manufactured Housing, and it bitched that Brooks had to drive to Phoenix to compile the "non-computerized" records.
Apparently the Star is so unfamiliar with state records, and it's been so long since its reporters tried to expose anything, that they haven't noticed that virtually nothing useful at the state level is computerized and easy to find--from campaign contributions in the Secretary of State's Office to the records of the Corporation Commission, to how many cars have been repossessed by which dealers. If the Star's reporters plan on any more big exposés, they'll notice the problem is not unique.
And while the office that checks into complaints on manufactured housing could probably use some beefing up, we'd like to point out that at least there is a centralized place for consumers to bring their bitches. No such entity exists for new or used cars, or for conventional housing. Complaints on the latter would be filed with the state Registrar of Contractors, who handles a number of other items; while car-dealer complaints are shuffled among various offices and are clearly the most ineffectively handled of all.
But then, they make plenty of political contributions, and they sure as hell buy a lot of newspaper advertising.
AND SPEAKING OF MISSING THE ISSUE: Journalism 101 teaches students to get the who, what, when, where, why and how of things. It's mercilessly drilled into every wannabe reporter.
So it's rather surprising, really, how often the local electronic airheads miss these all-important basics.
Case in point: The recent massive flooding that wasted eight homes and a bunch of acres on the westside. Two small details were missing from almost every first-day electronic story, and were only touched upon by the Tucson Citizen--WHY and HOW.
An eight-foot water pipe busts and floods a neighborhood, and the Tucson Water clowns say, "Duh, we don't have a clue what happened--we'll get back to you later." And the media, almost to an airhead, say, "Sure, call us when you've finished cooking up your cover story." Most--again, the Citizen excepted--don't even bother to list possible causes, content to await the government handout.
The possibilities are narrow. Either Tucson Water screwed up when it built the waterline, or it somehow got screwed by the contractor. Or perhaps there was something the city or somebody else did, which would have to be pretty damn big and not particularly subtle, like an explosion, that took out that massive water line.
Either way, would you trust the Tucson Water clowns to lay pipes in your neighborhood?

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