Josh Brodesky is clearly a sharp guy and a solid writer, but there are occasions when it’s difficult to understand what we’re exactly supposed to be so upset about. Some of his columns are clearly softballs, like Sunday’s exegesis of a poll posted on pseudo-news outlet the Huffington Post, not worth giving too much thought, and I get those…I post pictures of monkeys on a semi-regular basis. However, today’s attack on the Regional Transportation Authority and former Oro Valley mayor Paul Loomis starts off really intense and sticks to that bubbling rage, even when it’s not clear what exactly is the moral crime being perpetrated here.
Paul Loomis, you just got Brodeskyed!
I can’t pretend to understand the deep history of the RTA or Loomis’ time on the board, but for me, it doesn’t seem that strange that someone with experience in regional transit might be qualified to continue doing regional transit work even if he lost an election. But, hey, what would the Executive Director of the RTA and their lawyer know? Josh Brodesky’s on the case, and he’s going to get his little remarks in, even if that means bumping detail or clarity.
“So we have a six-figure RTA consultant who can’t actually speak to the RTA board for a year. This is so Tucson.”
ZING!
“Maybe Paul Loomis is worth every penny, but Hayes never showed the public that. Instead it’s just another reminder that in this town it’s really not what you know, but who you know that makes a difference.”
BOOM GOES THE REPORTING DYNAMITE!
I’m going to throw this out there…Brodesky didn’t prove what Loomis does or doesn’t know, so maybe there’s a space for someone being qualified because of who they know and what they know.
It’s not like the contract was given to Gary Hayes’ daughter’s out-of-work fiancee with no experience in government at all (note: I don’t actually know if Hayes has a daughter, much less if she has an unemployed love interest). Loomis spent quite a bit of time on the board. Hayes seems to think he has something to contribute that’s worth paying for and in general, RTA has actually worked, maybe Hayes is making a good decision. I haven’t really been convinced otherwise by today’s paper, at very least.
Now, if there’s really a larger issue with Hayes giving out small no-bid contracts as kickbacks and patronage (as Brodesky seems to imply), then investigate that. Figure out where the (by my quick math) less than one percent of the budget that’s doled out without bids is going. Is the firm headed by Hayes’ “daughter-in-law’s brother” qualified to receive $89,000 in contracts? I don’t know, and it doesn’t seem Brodesky does either, but it’s far easier to cast a line of suspicion than to really delve into the details. Between Brodesky and Rob O’Dell, the Star has seemingly taken a position that the RTA is a wildly corrupt organization, throwing money around like the Pima County version of Tammany Hall. Maybe that’s so, but I’d rather see proof of it than an occasional blast of seemingly manufactured snide outrage. For a guy who bashed blogs for not trying to see both sides, the inductive reasoning that goes into giving someone the Brodesky treatment doesn’t feel that much like journalism either.
This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2011.
It’s hard to imagine circumstances under which it would ever be appropriate to surreptitiously give a no-bid contract, without board approval, to someone who was himself sitting on said board just weeks before. Is it really so difficult to see the problem in a public authority being allowed to do this with public funds?
What I find especially frustrating about this story—and all local reporting on RTA—is that it’s symptomatic of serious, fundamental RTA problems that are never reported, and from which the voting public would benefit greatly if they understood. Most troubling is the RTA’s unfair governance structure, which is designed to marginalize the City of Tucson by disproportionately distributing the RTA’s board representation across the county population. Tucson, Marana, Oro Valley, Sahuarita and South Tucson are treated—absurdly—as equals on the RTA board, with each getting one seat and vote. But Tucson, whose population is ninety-three times the size of South Tucson’s, pays more into the RTA than the other four combined.
In short, the RTA’s board is designed so that the interests of the region’s dominant jurisdiction will never prevail. That’s completely unfair, and might even be illegal. The RTA’s 2004 enabling legislation says the PAG board must govern the RTA. But the RTA is a municipal corporation and political subdivision of the State, which means it can levy taxes and sell bonds. PAG, on the other hand, isn’t a government at all; it’s a 501(c)3 of voluntarily participating jurisdictions, and could—theoretically anyway—vote to remove ones it doesn’t like, or admit some non-municipal entity, or whatever.
Bottom line: the RTA has bad design flaws. These reward bad executive behavior, so long as said behavior is directed at the big jurisdiction while the little ones laugh and cheer. And Brodesky and O’Dell can feast on the anecdotes. Bad bureaucrats make for good stories, especially bad bureaucrats that are, like Hayes, practically invincible. But the problem will be an almost impossible one to fix. For $2.1B we got a rotten deal, and we’re going to be stuck with it for years to come.
Not entirely fair Luke. We got widened intersections (mid town to east side), bus pullouts and buses (all over town, roads widened (for the east siders mainly) and new bridges (for the far east and west siders) and a the streetcar (downtown/midtown) which is why I say to all the anti streetcar folks, in or out of the city, you got yours this is ours so I don’t want to hear it. We are getting enough that we all need to work together on making the RTA a success (its not a completely rotten deal we are stuck with). However I do agree with you about the power structure that is completely bogus and its why the city didn’t hand over sun tran.
Luke,
You are falling into the very trap Dan describes in his post. You are believing that the innuendo O’Dell and Brodesky are peddling has merit. I think the larger crime here is the selective reporting and obvious bias of these reporters hoping to create another Rio Nuevo where one doesn’t exist. When you read O’Dell’s columns, they are chock full of words like “might” rather than facts. Brodesky’s failures are apparent in how he characterized Paul Loomis’ experience with the toss away sentence detail is Bachelor’s degree while willfully ignoring his next 30 (?) years of experience. And in that “smoking gun” piece O’Dell wrote about some distant non-blood relative of Hayes’ being a member of a company that got a contract, did anyone notice that the fact that the process saved us $40 million? Seems like the media has no interest in the good things that are happening.
It appears to me that the RTA has been very successful. If anything they are too successful since I can’t downtown without hitting construction.
As far as the structure of the RTA board – if you look at the history of how the RTA came together, there was no way to get buy in from the smaller jurisdictions if it was perceived as a city controlled entity. And it looks to me like the bulk of the dollars are going in the city. Luke- can you site an example of how the city has been screwed by this arrangement?
So – bottom line: There is no place in media for examples of good government. We must constantly be beaten over the head with government bad. This is a slap in the face of the thousands of hard working and dedicated civil servants trying to serve our region.
Its bullshit that shortly after the leaving the board, a political wank is now a consultant. How is a ocean engineer qualified to be a rail consultant? I am sure there are better qualified engineer could not have been found that actually had work experience with trolley/railways. Loomis should return all the cash he received, as this is a clear violation of state law to not do any business w/ the governing body they were on for a year. All the board should be resign or be removed for using no-bid contracting. This is the same kinda of bad business practice that Amphi was doing back in the 90’s before the shake up and recall. The press needs to keep digging on this.