The Skinny

Miller vs. Huck, Round 347

County administrator says elected supervisor is full of, um, “false statements”

It appears that Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry is entirely out of fucks to give about Supervisor Ally Miller.

Huckelberry’s latest memos don’t quite call Miller a big, fat liar. But they come close. In one memo, Huckelberry says that Miller is “disseminating these false statements via social media and radio.” In a letter to Oro Valley officials, he says he is “at a loss as to why Supervisor Miller would disseminate such false and misleading information to the residents of Oro Valley.”

Unlike Huckelberry, The Skinny has no qualms about calling Miller a big, fat liar, though we reckon there are instances when it’s more akin to bullshit, in that she doesn’t really care whether something she says is true or a lie, as long as it somehow makes her political enemies look bad.

Miller didn’t return a phone call asking to discuss Huckelberry’s latest batch of memos, but that’s hardly surprising. She has had an antagonistic relationship with the Weekly ever since she first tried to peddle some bullshit, and we called her on it.

Anyhow, here’s the latest bunch of BS that Miller is spreading. About two weeks ago, Miller’s fellow Republican, Steve Christy, called for a new countywide half-cent sales tax that would be dedicated to road repair.

But Christy is running into a buzzsaw of opposition from Miller, even though he has backed nearly all of her Looney Toons agenda since he took office. Miller has declared that the county already has the money to fix the roads, but they keep wasting it on other stuff. She’s hauling out her greatest hits over the next 30 days on her website.

Some of Miller’s suggestions are simple disagreements over the values of the rest of the board. For example, she thinks the county is wasting $25 million by rehabbing the historic Old Pima County Courthouse so it can be future office space for the Visitors and Convention Bureau and other tenants, as well as an anchor for the Jan. 8 memorial. Evidently, Miller would prefer to see the charming courthouse, tile dome and all, be neglected until it falls into complete ruin. Miller tries to justify her position by saying that voters rejected spending money on the courthouse, as it was one of about 1,000 different projects in the 2015 bond package that voters rejected. If that’s your argument, Ally, you should just stop complaining about roads, because there was a big ol’ road package in there that didn’t pass, either.

Some of Miller’s other assertions are flat-out wrong, and Huckeberry decided to conduct a fact-check via a memo released last week. For example, she said the county got a special payout of $3,185,200 from the state for transportation needs, but Huckelberry explained that Miller’s figure was the amount for the entire state, and Pima County’s share is just $183,768, which the county already plans to spend on fixing streets. You wouldn’t think that Miller, who crows about her work in budget and finance in the private sector, would screw something like that up, would you?

Huckelberry is also taking offense at Ally-gations that Miller leveled regarding the county’s bond program in an effort to stop voters from supporting a $17 million bond to improve Naranja Park. Miller wrote a letter to the Let Oro Valley Excel blog—she can’t get a toehold in the real media in this town because everyone is on to her lying ways now, so she has to use outlets like the LOVE Blog to spread her BS—saying that Huckelberry regularly pulls stunts like promising to give every park a million dollars with a bond election but then spending it all on one park. She said Oro Valley officials might do the same thing.

Huckelberry responded with a letter to Oro Valley Town Manager Mary Jacobs, directing her to the county’s website for bond programs, which he said contained a wealth of data “that proves Supervisor Miller’s assertions are blatantly false.”

Huckelberry anticipates he’ll be writing more memos to fact-check Miller’s bullshit in the future. In his message to the other supervisors about Miller’s bogus list of transportation funding options, he predicts: “This list will apparently continue to grow and therefore you can expect to receive additional memorandums on this subject.”

Miller Under AG Investigation?

That probe into Miller’s use of private email for public business remains alive

Speaking of Her Looniness: Pima County Supervisor Ally Miller evidently remains under investigation by the Attorney General’s Office over those secret emails she used to instruct her staff to do the public’s business.

Without going into all the background—and it is a lot of background!—we’ll just cut to the chase: Following a bizarre 2016 episode involving a communication staffer who masqueraded as a reporter, we learned that Miller instructed her staff to “be more secretive” and avoid using county email because she was worried that Huckelberry and his minions were reading their every message, and Team Miller was in danger of losing the element of surprise when they sprang their traps on the other supervisors.

That led to the media requesting Miller’s emails from Miller’s private account that were related to the public’s business. Miller’s insisted that no such emails existed, even though some of her previous staffers turned over emails from Miller’s private account that clearly did involve the public’s business. (See what we mean about her being a big, fat liar?)

The Pima County Attorney’s Office, citing a potential conflict of interest, turned the case over the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, which has been slow-walking the investigation ever since. After all, given the mountains of evidence that Miller was lying about using a private email, it didn’t exactly require the sleuthing skills of Sherlock Holmes to get to the bottom of this.

While it is progressing slowly, a recent email exchange between Andy Flagg, the head of the Pima County Attorney’s Office civil division, and Kimberly Ortiz with the AG’s criminal division, revealed the investigation is ongoing.

“We are still reviewing the matter,” Ortiz told Flagg on Wednesday, Sept. 20.

Kim, what’s the rush?

This article appears in Oct 26 – Nov 1, 2017.