Tucson Weekly: The Skinny (April 9

Skinny
TV IN THE SKY WITH DIMWITS: Show biz has taken a particularly nasty turn locally, now that the KOLD-TV, Channel 13, News hell-o-crapper has finally taken to the skies. These shallow KOLD wankers, with their perfect hair and expensive make-up, who--aside from veteran reporter Bud Foster--wouldn't know a real story if it bit them on the butt, are now noisily buzzing around overhead, looking for the latest car crash, or whatever. Last week, we're told, they were blitzing the Santa Catalina Mountains gathering video of the snow. Gee, that's a sure ratings-booster, and damned important journalism, too. God only knows how many bighorn sheep they terrified while on this fool's mission.
Is it any wonder that, increasingly, only stupid people watch this broadcast bilge?
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: After three years of planning, the Pima Association of Governments (PAG) has released its $5.6 billion transportation plan. That's a whole lot of concrete and land acquisition, folks.
Perhaps the phoniest part of the process is the so-called "public input" session, where they tell you about the plan, listen to the planted shills rave about it, hear a few bitches from the rest of us, and then move on to doing exactly what they wanted to do all along. One group pointed this out, and even got front-page metro coverage from the Citizen's Linda Witt.
Doug Furr, of Tucson Community Bike Ride, was critical of the plan and pointed out that "building more roads only leads to more traffic." Yeah, well after all is said and done, L.A. and Phoenix are still our role models here.
But a carpenter named Bill Moeller really put the hearings in perspective, according to the Citizen: "The whole public participation process has been a sham...it's nothing but loaded surveys and questionnaires designed to fulfill a federal mandate that a publicly approved funding source be in place for any transportation plan."
You're right, Bill. It's just like most other "public hearings," where the public's viewpoints are filtered through a bureaucratic sieve and nothing changes.
About $3.7 billion is supposed to come from federal funds, leaving us locals to pick up $2 billion more. The possible funding sources include raising the gas tax and a quarter-cent sales tax. The voters have twice defeated the sales tax idea, at least when it was pegged at slightly higher rates, but we guess the muckety-mucks will just keep having us vote until we get it right.
The plan also calls for six grade-separated intersections. Last time we looked, according the Tucson City Charter amendment passed in 1985, those intersections would require a vote of the people, too. This is one small fact all the local media ignored when they presented the PAG plan.
And apparently we'll find out just how reliable those public surveys PAG took really are when we get around to voting on the increased taxes and those grade-separated intersections.
JUDICIAL NOTICE: Not all of the judges in Superior Court are pleased with the leadership style of Presiding Judge Michael J. Brown, whose favoritism and meddling are wearing thin.
We hear a sort of courthouse coup is afoot to depose his highness, with Judge Bernardo Velasco's support gaining.
Brown's hiring of Susan Nagy to head computer operations added another nail to the coffin. Nagy will make $105,000 a year, a little more than $10,000 more than what she was paid at City Hall. But her imperiousness and abusive behavior triggered the move to kick her out of City Hall and into Brown's kingdom. Nagy had been at the city for about four years. She was lured by then City Hall Dictator Michael F. Brown (no relation to the judge) with extraordinary enticements for municipal government--including 40 vacation days, $19,000 for brokerage fees on her California home, and $3,000 in rental assistance.
THEY'RE PUTTIN' ON THEIR RAYBANS: Ray Carroll, the appointed county supervisor from District 4, is groping for support in his campaign to retain the eastside and Green Valley seat this fall. Although he's aligned himself with Democratic Supervisor Raul Grijalva on growth issues, the Republican Carroll is making stops at Grubb & Ellis, the commercial real estate firm where he worked before Grijalva sewed up the votes to have Carroll fill the seat vacated by the death of John Even last year. Carroll wants his former colleagues to write letters of support. Response has been tepid because he's antagonized the building and business communities.
Meanwhile, Even's widow, Brenda, who is also a candidate for that seat, has no such problems. Even's son, James, also once was a Grubb & Ellis guy.
Said one veteran Grubb & Ellis broker: "Ray has yet to prove himself. A lot of people, including his friends, may still be on the fence waiting to see how he'll vote on some issues.'' One will be the huge Canoa Ranch development, which will extend Green Valley south. Carroll spoke against it to secure support last year from Grijalva, who claims some ancestral right to Canoa.
Ken Marcus, an accounting type, is the third Republican candidate.
WITCH HITTING: While all the hype was going on over the new Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix and the glorious Arizona Diamondbacks, one group opposed to the taxpayer-funded stadium took direct action. The Arizona Libertarian Party, never happy about taxes paying for much of anything, hired a witch to put a hex on the Diamondbacks on opening day as part of a tax protest.
Unfortunately, the witch didn't show up, so the Libertarians hexed the Diamondbacks on their own. Apparently it worked pretty well--because the Diamondbacks dropped their first five games.
UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT: If you were tuned into the Diamondback's home opener on ESPN, you might have seen some of our pols enjoying Jerry Colangelo's food and drink at Bank One Ballpark last week. Democratic state Rep. Ramon Valadez got his beaming grill on the sports network. More obscured was Democratic Pima County Supervisor Sharon Bronson.
Apparently the baseball bash, which included appearances by Billy Crystal and Robin Williams in the politicians' suite, was not enough to sustain Bronson's spirits. By the end of the week she was back to the Sharon that many county employees have come to cringe about. She chewed out an innocent county receptionist for doing the unspeakable--talking to the county administrator's secretary. Shortly thereafter, Bronson was in the garage screaming at a member of a county commission. Bronson now thinks that parking control is part of her job. Witnesses say Bronson was so loud that the tirade about parking privileges--her own space was not in question--could be heard throughout the garage and even in the elevators.
And then, on Friday, Bronson ran out of gas in her county car, evidently near the supervisors' downtown offices. She charged upstairs, threw the keys at the receptionist, and barked, "I ran out of gas. Gas it up."
Like it's really that poor woman's job to keep Bronson tanked.
NEWS YOU CAN LOSE: Former Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson is a little young to be reminiscing about the old days, but he did make a telling point during a recent visit to Tucson. He recalls a few years back, when he was at Phoenix City Hall, the various Phoenix media had assigned a total of nine reporters to cover civic events. On a recent trip back to his old stomping grounds, however, he discovered the total number of reporters had shrunk to one part-timer.
In Tucson, the Star and Citizen still assign reporters to governmental beats; although, for all practical purposes, they seem to have terminated political coverage as part of an insidious trend toward accepting the official government version of events.
It's almost as if the corporate beancounters and consultants who now advise the nation's newsrooms have told our timid editors that politics and government coverage upsets people, so cut it out. Certainly the pols who don't like unflattering stories often whine to powerful newspaper advertisers. Could the new policy in modern American corporate journalism involve simply dropping hardball coverage of the unpleasant in government and politics altogether?
Increasingly, it seems the new mission of today's mainstream journalism is not to bring us the truth or to tell us when we're getting screwed, but to make us feel better about the wonderful society in which we live.
PUTTING HER MONEY WHERE HER MOUTH IS: Although she has entered the race for the Tucson Unified School District Board, Rosalie Lopez delivered on her pledge to support Jesus Zapata. On Friday, Lopez delivered Zapata a $300 check, the maximum contribution allowed for the November election for two school board seats. Lopez also comes through at her alma mater, Pueblo High School. She provides three, $1,000 scholarships there each year.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST-FREE? Amphi School District real estate "consultant" Bill Arnold is claiming "vindication" now that Superior Court Judge John Quigley has thrown out that portion of former Supervisor David Yetman's lawsuit that alleged Arnold had a conflict of interest when he recommended purchase of the controversial site for a new high school. Arnold was paid a commission by the seller based on the total price of the sale.
Quigley basically ruled that no conflict existed because Arnold was not a "public official" within the meaning of state law, and therefore could not have a conflict of interest. So Arizona law, according to Quigley, must work like this:
If you're the purchasing director of a city or other jurisdiction, like a school district, and you decide to buy your widgets without a bid from a company owned by your brother, and in which you own stock, that would be a conflict of interest. But if you were hired by that jurisdiction as a consultant to make a recommendation, and you advised them to buy their widgets without a bid from a company owned by your brother, in which you owned stock, that isn't a conflict of interest.
Quigley may be correct. One of the legacies of the late Burton Barr, when he ran the Arizona Legislature, was to repeal every conflict-of-interest statute he could, an effort in which he secured the full cooperation of then-Gov. Bruce Babbitt. Yetman may appeal that decision, but in the meantime, there's still a court fight ahead regarding the process by which Arnold got his "exclusive retainer agreement" in the first place.
POOR LITTLE RICH BOY: Our deposed governor, J. Felonious Whiteguy III, has now been the subject of two profiles in our local dailies.
That skunky deadbeat is now re-inventing himself as a victim of political persecution. (Never mind that he surrounded himself with political goons who liked to promise "a day of reckoning" for anyone who opposed their agenda.) He's just an honest guy punished by overzealous prosecutors. (Never mind that Fife himself was the tough-on-crime governor who rarely missed an opportunity to scapegoat criminals to advance his own political track.)
In the wake of a court decision allowing him to remain free while his case is under appeal, Fife--on the advice of his shrink--has begun reading up on mythology in search of similar titans who triumphed in the face of adversity. (Come to think of it, Fife's infamous international-affairs advisor Annette Alvarez does bear a passing resemblance to Xena, Warrior Princess. Can't you just see her clad in skintight black leather?)
We got the biggest laugh hearing about how terrible it was for Fife to get lost the first day he had to drive himself around. It must have been just horrible to no longer have an armed chauffeur courtesy of Arizona taxpayers. Oh, the trials of a prince become pauper!
Fife's current pose is just as phony as his claims to be a "successful businessman" back when he was running for office. Remember: This is the man who has been convicted of committing fraud in a desperate attempt to keep his financial empire alive. When that sleight-of-hand failed, he declared bankruptcy so he could welsh on $24 million in debt just weeks after returning from a European vacation--a bankruptcy timed so he could avoid losing any of the fortune he was due to inherit from his then-sickly (and since deceased) mother. And since his conviction, he's continued to live well, jet-setting around the globe until the court took his passport away.
He belongs behind bars.

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