The Start Our State movement is underway:

Start Our State (SOS) has been formally established as a political committee registered in Pima County. SOS is dedicated to creating the 51st American state in Southern Arizona, separating us from the extremists in Phoenix. Our mission is to establish a new state in Southern Arizona free of the un-American, unconstitutional machinations of the Phoenix-controlled Arizona legislature and to restore our region’s credibility as a place welcoming to others, open to commerce, and friendly to its neighbors. Our first and immediate goal is to place a referendum before the voters of Pima County on the 2012 ballot on the question of statehood.

We welcome other Arizona counties that wish to join this effort. In the meantime, we shouldn’t forget that, with a population of 1,020,200 (2009), Pima County has more people than Montana, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming. With an area of 9,189 square miles, Pima County is bigger than Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island. There is legal precedent for the separation of a portion of an existing state from the original state in order to form a new one. In 1820, Maine split off from Massachusetts and was admitted to the Union as the 23rd state.

Find ’em on Facebook here.

This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2011.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

9 replies on “When in the Course of Human Events: Is Pima County Ready to Secede?”

  1. Can you fund yourself sans our tax dollars? Are you gonna put this on the ballot since everyone probably won’t agree with this? Are you really just working for Sheriff Dipstick and looking for more publicity?

  3. Of course we can fund ourselves as our tax dollars will no longer be wasted by maricopa county. No one is working for Dupnick, where did you even get that idea? Also nice name calling, very mature and helpful.

  4. Go for it! I’d like to think I was really being represented. Where can I make a donation?
    Pima Co. Refugee

  8. The recent effort to make Pima County a new 51st state of the US is riding on the coattails of my Tucson Weekly political platform from 2007/2008. I hope Tucson seizes this opportunity to continue its leadership in US political circles. As you may recall, I proposed that the USA should be subdivided to let Democrat and Republican economies coexist peacefully. http://skelley2008.wordpress.com/2007/12/

    summary of Pima County’s 23 major employers for 2007/2008

    13 Government employers
    6 Healthcare group employers
    1 Wal-Mart retailing employer
    1 Fry’s grocery store employer
    1 Asarco mining employer
    1 Citi banking employer
    reference: http://www.pima.gov/finance/PDFs/Budget/Ad…

    summary of revenues………… Pima…….. vs…….. Arizona
    wholesale trade revenues….. $2.8 billion……….. $61.0 billion ( 4.6% is in Pima)
    Federal spending…………….. $12.3 billion………. $54.3 billion (22.7% is in Pima)
    population ……………………….. 1.0 million ………….6.6 million ( 15% is in Pima)
    reference: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04…

    The above data shows that Pima County gets 4.4 times as much revenue from the Federal Government as it does from private wholesalers; whereas Arizona overall gets only 0.9 times as much revenue that way.

    Washington DC is similar to Pima County in its dependence on Federal spending, according to US census data. DC gets 15 times as much revenue from the Federal government as it does from private wholesalers; whereas the USA as a whole gets only 0.6 times as much revenue that way. reference: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/11…

    If Pima County data is deleted from the Arizona data — then the rest of Arizona receives 0.7 times as much revenue from the Federal Government as it does from private wholesalers.

    Consequently, the rest of Arizona (excluding Pima County) is nearly as industrious as the USA as a whole.
    But the economic basis of Pima County resembles Washington DC.

    As a matter of fact, none of the current 50 states are as economically dependent on Federal spending as Pima County.

    No current state of the US gets more than 2.7 times as much revenue from Federal spending as it does from wholesale trade revenues. reference: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.htm…

    Therefore Pima County will need to increase its private sector business activity by 75% to avoid being the state which is most dependent on Federal spending, based on this particular ratio. And if we can increase our private sector wholesale business production by 500%, then Pima County would become comparable to the overall US average for this ratio.

    TREO is the program which aims to stimulate this type of private sector business activity in Pima County.
    http://www.treoaz.org/ If we want TO BE A STATE, then Pima County should begin to act like a normal state of the USA. We need to be shipping products out of Pima County on a scale large enough to pay for what we consume.

  9. If I’m not mistaken, the name Baja Arizona has been around since David Yetman was a county supervisor. Yetman proposed that it include everything south of the Gila River, as opposed to just Pima County. However, it was never a serious proposal, just an interesting intellectual exercise. This time it has legs, albeit weak ones, in that a real committee has been organized to pursue it and get it on the ballot. But it’s still a doomed effort because while that vote could actually pass, the next step is to get the legislature to approve it, which is an impossibility with the neanderthals that run that circus, and then the governor (Ms. Neanderthal), Congress (more neanderthals) and the President all have to approve as well. So while the effort is welcome, in the end it’s just a re-hash of David Yetman’s fantasy.

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