Hundreds of people have turned out for today’s Tucson City Council meeting. Most appear upset at the idea of cuts to police and fire services.
City Manager Mike Letcher is floating the idea of a rental tax, now renamed the “landlord tax.”
More to come.
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2009.
Perhaps on edit
City Manager Mike Letcher is floating the idea of a rental tax, now renamed the “landlord tax.”
Will change to:
City Manager Mike Letcher is *again* floating the idea of a rental tax, now renamed the “landlord tax.”
Along with analysis of why county property tax revenue isn’t getting passed back to Tucson to Letcher’s satisfaction…
…seems to be the usual problem with the city-county model…
It seems the right-wing backers of Proposition 200 really knew, despite their spectacular electoral failure, which can the worms were in. “Public safety” is presently Tucson’s most powerful political code word; it is the metaphorical border fence separating an over-tolerant, graffiti-splattered Bohemia from the tenuous serenity of one’s KB home. Prop. 200 may have been a loser, but cultivating a collective preoccupation with “public safety” is a long-term, right-wing political strategy the best days of which may be ahead.
It was a shame to see all those police and fire personnel in the room today, some genuinely under the impression their jobs were threatened by a City Council that could care less about their role in the community or its benefit to the public. That’s not the case, nor has it ever been. But the flow of information, what with Lee Enterprises (Rob O’Dell) and the Journal Broadcast Group (Jon Justice) and their dwindling supply of well-heeled advertisers (Jim Click) is, like everything else a community needs to survive, threatened by the present scarcity of dollars, and the kind of politics that got us there.
Red Star, I’d accept your edits. Amazing technology fun fact: I delivered that report via thumb typing on my iPhone, which doesn’t lend itself to much polishing while you’re also taking notes.