Robocall of Duty

Sometimes, politicians work their way up from volunteering on
campaigns to become the candidate themselves. Sometimes, they earn a
position as an upstanding member of the community and are recruited by
the Chamber of Commerce or the neighborhood associations.

And sometimes, they get a recorded phone call asking if they might
want to run for office.

The two GOP candidates running for Tucson City Council Ward 5 in the
Sept. 1 primary got into the race after the Pima County Republican
Party randomly dialed GOP households seeking candidates.

The lack of interest among Republicans in Ward 5, where incumbent
Democrat Steve Leal is stepping down after two decades on the City
Council, is easy to understand. The deck is already stacked against
Republicans in Tucson, given that for every seven Democrats, there are
roughly four voters who identify with the GOP. And Ward 5 isn’t home to
all that many Republicans to begin with; of the southside ward’s nearly
28,000 voters, only about 3,800 identify as Republicans.

Nonetheless, two Republicans answered the robocall of duty. Judith
Gomez and Shaun McClusky will face off next week for the right to face
Democrat Richard Fimbres in November.

Neither Republican has much experience in politics. They’ve each
made only three trips to the polls to vote over the last decade. Gomez
says she only recently developed her political convictions, while
McClusky says he wasn’t aware that he was eligible to vote in some
elections, and he wasn’t aware that others were going on.

Gomez has worked on and off in banking, started a photography
business out of her home and tried her hand at writing novels, but her
primary passion is raising her three boys with her husband, a sergeant
with the Pima County Corrections Bureau.

Gomez says she wants to be a “universal voice for the city of Tucson
and bring some accountability back to the decisions that are being made
and to make sure that every decision is being made for the greater
Tucson and not for small groups or select groups, but that everyone is
being universally represented.”

A Chicago native, McClusky worked in the hospitality industry before
moving to Tucson as an A-10 crew chief with the U.S. Air Force. After
some knee trouble, he left the service in 2003 and now is a co-owner of
Rincon Ventures, a property-management and real estate company.

“There’s an opportunity for a little bit of diversity on the City
Council at this time,” McClusky says. “The seat became available, and
it needs to get filled so we can have a little bit of a different look
going forward, so we can change the path the city has been traveling
on.”

When it comes to issues, it can be hard to discern many differences
between the two candidates. Both candidates blast the current council
for botching downtown redevelopment, allowing the streets to crumble
and doing nothing to stop crime.

Both support the Public Safety First initiative on the November
ballot, a proposition pushed by local real estate agents, homebuilders
and police and fire unions that would require the city to hire more
police and firefighters.

Neither candidate offers much in the way of specifics regarding how
they’d handle the costs of the additional officers, which have been
estimated by some city officials to be as much as $50 million annually
when the proposition would be fully implemented in five years.

Both say the city should cut fat—including support to arts
groups and other nonprofits—and trim red tape, which would result
in a booming small-business environment and new tax revenues.

Both oppose a tax on residential rent payments that was proposed
earlier this year by City Manager Mike Letcher, who projected the tax
could raise as much as $10 million a year.

On the campaign front, neither candidate has collected much in the
way of contributions. As of Aug. 12, McClusky had raised a total of
$6,692 and had $3,630 left on hand, according to campaign-finance
reports filed with the city last week. Gomez had raised a total of
$2,716 and had $555 left in the bank.

Then again, the candidates don’t need to reach that many voters: As
of Aug. 20, 1,105 Republicans had requested early ballots, and 459 of
them had been returned. That’s roughly the same rate of return of
Republican ballots in Ward 3 and Ward 6, even though the candidates in
those races face no opposition.

McClusky has won a few endorsements, including nods from the Tucson
Police Officers Association, the Tucson Association of Realtors and the
Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

Robert Medler, manager of government affairs for the Chamber, says
McClusky stood out because he was the only candidate the organization
interviewed. Gomez, Medler recalls, had a scheduling conflict.

Medler says that McClusky “had an upbeat personality. He seems like
a real go-getter.”

This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2009.