Tucson Weekly: The Skinny (April 1

Skinny HEARING THE CALL: After stalling for more than two years, wasting thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds and enduring regular beatings on the editorial page of every newspaper in town, the Amphi School Board finally voted Tuesday, March 23, to reinstate an open call-to-the-audience segment during regular meetings.
Congrats should be extended to Board member Nancy Young Wright, who fought for the return of call to the audience since her election in 1996, and Diana Boros, the Amphi mom who spearheaded the effort to restore the call. Although it was only a straw poll (the real vote will come at the next Board meeting, Tuesday, April 13), the Amphi Board unanimously agreed to establish an open call to the audience to allow students, parents, teachers, staff and taxpayers to address them on items that are not on the regular meeting agenda.
Amphi's plan will actually leapfrog it ahead of the Tucson Unified School District, which has a call to the audience, but with an iron fist--TUSD does not allow the public to speak on items that appear on its agenda for that particular evening. In the last couple of years, people who've wanted to speak on an issue that was the subject of a TUSD Board vote that night were put off one or two meetings down the schedule, when their testimony would no longer be relevant.
At first glance, the call to have a call seemed unnecessary. After all, Amphi, unlike TUSD's backward Board, actually allowed the public to speak on items the Amphi Board was discussing. But a closer look showed that because the Amphi agenda was so tightly controlled by the Board's former dictatorial President Mike Bernal, true debate on issues was all but forbidden. Voters wisely ousted Bernal, replacing him with Ken Smith last fall.
That didn't stop Amphi's Big Boss Man, Superintendent Robert "Bubba" Smith, or his remaining Board followers, President Richard Scott, Clerk Gary Woodard and longtime member Virginia Houston, from kicking, scratching and clawing to keep call to the audience out of the Amphi meetings. That braintrust pissed away more than $6,000 on a goofy legal opinion by lawyer Barry Corey that claimed call to the audience would violate the state Open Meeting Law.
Scott Alexander, a lobbyist and former state legislator who was a key author of the Arizona Open Meeting Law, tried to correct that for free. But it took a swat from Attorney General Janet Napolitano's office to get Amphi's intransigent majority to shape up. Following Napolitano's smack, the three were falling all over themselves and Bubba to "lead" the reform. Some of their phony showboating was dented by Young Wright, who smoked out Bubba when he tried to pass off comments in an analysis of the call to the audience as coming from the Attorney General. The comments, in fact, came from Tom Pickrell, the legal mind of the Arizona School Boards Association.
Amphi, this month, should set up a policy that will continue to allow the public to speak on agenda items while also giving them up to three minutes (30 minutes total) to address the Board about Amphi issues.
The most pleasant thing in all of this: the patience and graciousness displayed by Boros, a real champion whose grass-roots campaigning restored the voice of the people.
CANOA CANNING: Earlier this year the Pima County Board of Supes shot down Fairfield Homes' request to rezone, via "master plan," several thousand acres of the Canoa Ranch south of Tucson. We noted at the time that the effort was one of the most inept rezoning attempts in Pima County history, with the developer managing to piss off just about everybody who was anywhere near the Canoa Ranch, including even the Tohono tribe and the mines.
Fairfield has regrouped by dumping most of the geniuses who helped put them where they now are. They said bye-bye to consultant Pete Zimmerman, attorney Frank Cassidy (who had the brilliant idea of threatening to sue the Smithsonian Institution for having the audacity to complain about light pollution), and politically connected real estate player Joe Cesare. Cesare, who should've known better, pushed Sheriff Clarence Dupnik into endorsing the doomed plan for no real gain. Citizens actually booed the popular Sheriff at the public hearing.
The new consulting team has yet to be completed, but The Skinny is told it will be a lot longer on compromise and common sense. Its strategy may be to see just how much of Canoa can be sold to various preservation funds. One of its first jobs should be to make peace with those in the astronomical community who were badly dissed by the former Fairfield team leaders.
WHERE'S RICH? Debt-ridden Kino Community Hospital and its debt-ridden parent, Pima County Health System, can tap a new revenue source: a contest to name where the county's health czar, Dr. Deputy Richard Carmona, is at any given time. Carmona was AWOL, at least according to a few members of the county's Health Care Commission, from a few important meetings in March. Was he snowed in back East, or in the Midwest as one commissioner was told? Or was he stuck in SoCal (again), as another commissioner was told? For a buck, you can name the city, university, business or ballpark where Dr. Rich is when he should be minding the store here. No one was amused--particularly beer baroness Dorothy Finley--that Dr. Rich was not around to discuss remedies for Kino's chronic inability to collect millions in Medicare reimbursement. Shouldering the blame and following through on solutions have never been part of Dr. Rich's job.
JUST A COUPLA BIG BOYS TRYING TO RUB CRAP IN OUR FACES: Monday at the state Legislature a couple of heavy hitters from Tucson, Roy Drachman and Donald Pitt, were trying to pressure state Sen. George Cunningham into supporting a bill that would prevent the Tucson City Council from regulating the hideous billboard industry blighting our community.
The shameful bill is the mutant bastard child of Karl Eller, a longtime Phoenix jerk with way too much money who should've retired eons ago. He recently purchased prominent local visual polluter Whiteco Outdoor Advertising, Inc., a billboard company with a number of venues the City has declared illegal in the wake of a 1985 public vote to restrict billboards in our community.
So what does Eller do? Like most clever plutocrats lusting to make even more bucks, he runs to Arizona's corrupt, money-grubbing legislators, seeking relief. Under the guise of preventing an unconstitutional "taking" of private property by "evil" government, Eller enlists the likes of fellow rich guys Drachman and Pitt--both of whom have outlived their usefulness, as far as we're concerned.
We're told Cunningham didn't buy their bullshit--and he'd better not if he hopes to have a snowball's chance in hell of overthrowing Jim Kolbe in Congressional District 5 this time around.
Meanwhile, the anti-billboard forces currently think they have 14 votes to kill Eller's bill, and they say they need only one more. Frankly, if the Legislature does the right thing in this case, we'll be flabbergasted.
The billboard "industry," as it's called, developed in the early part of this century in the slums of large American cities as a means to reach the poorest consumers. It's a pathetic remnant of an unpleasant time, and the City Council should do its best to stomp it to death. If that means forking over millions to a greedhead like Eller, and buying out Whiteco for what Eller paid, so be it. But after the way he's behaved, he certainly doesn't deserve a penny more.
SAY, WHO IS BILL'S BAG MAN, ANYWAY? Sierra Vista GOP state Rep. Bill McGibbon, in his determined quest to keep the Village of Casas Adobes legally incorporated, has a new version of an incorporation bill to save the beleaguered town, which allows only towns with more than 15,000 residents to be retroactively valid. In the process McGibbon conveniently screws the Town of Tortolita, population 3,000.
McGibbon's bill passed the House Ways and Means Committee 6-3 and is back up for a full shot in the House. The bill is being pushed by high-end lobbyists Wes Gullett and Chuck Coughlin, who founded the Phoenix firm HighGround after that jury convicted their former mob leader, Gov. J. Fife Symington III. Casas Adobes can pay HighGround because they are able to issue warrants, unlike Tortolita, which is hamstrung by the opinion of Judge Michael Brown, who ruled that the tiny town couldn't run up debt.
Many are wondering what other compromising deals the folks running Casas Adobes have cut. Both Marana and Oro Valley have apparently backed off opposing Casas Adobe's incorporation, but both growth-happy communities are hot to dismember Tortolita and jam that 20 miles of low-density desert with as many fake tile roofs as they can.
So what principle does McGibbon support? All we can see is a slavish loyalty to the state Land Department, whose bureaucrats issue him grazing leases. Land Department officials want Tortolita out of the way because its citizens have the audacity to question some of their insane mega-growth decisions and multiple forms of corporate welfare.
DAY TRADING: Forget which side of the issue you're on. House Bill 2615 tightened the state pre-emption law on firearms legislation and would have kept cities and towns from passing restrictive gun laws, such as the City of Tucson's recent ordinance banning the carrying of a gun in a park. The bill passed the state House but went down 3 to 4 in the state Senate Judiciary Committee--with a couple of supposedly pro-pistol senators ducking.
One local supporter of the bill has a tape of his call to state Sen. Ann Day in which she committed to vote for the measure. She didn't--she voted no. Her excuse for breaking her word: It seems she didn't quite understand all the implications, says Day, who adds she's a strong supporter of "local control."
Well, that's a bit ironic, given that Day broke her word last session by claiming to support the "local control" that would've manifested itself in the incorporation of the towns of Casas Adobes and Tortolita while she was caught on several occasions telling other senators to vote against the bill that would've let them stay towns.
Day's duplicity became well known then and has been demonstrated again. If you didn't fully understand the bill, Senator, then you shouldn't have told people you'd vote for it. And after you commit to a course of action, try keeping your word. Lying is unbecoming.
But at least Day has helped establish one thing--gender equity. She's proved conclusively that female politicians can be just as sleazy, just as devious, just as morally bankrupt and just as self-serving as any of the guys.

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