Believe it or not, it’s time for the every-other-year City Council elections, with three seats theoretically up for grabs. Jim Nintzel looks at the two contested races in our cover story this week: Karin Uhlich’s rematch with Ben Buehler-Garcia in Ward Three and Richard Fimbres’ near-certain conquering of Mike Polak in Ward Five. The city is at somewhat of a turning point, so you’d hope that these races would be somewhat interesting, providing in-depth discussions of the issues facing our city. They still might, but with only one race that is competitive in any manner whatsoever (and it seems somewhat likely that the Ward Three race won’t be nearly as close as it was four years ago), we’ll still cover the process and the policies, but it would be nice if this city could help us out with more interesting races in the future, I’d personally and professionally appreciate it.
In the meantime, we’re not going to run candidate endorsements this cycle. It’s not that we don’t believe one candidate is better than the other in each race or that we won’t be issuing endorsements in the future (I’ve already started composing an epic poem designed to reign in Republican votes for Al Melvin in the gubernatorial primary next year). More that neither race seems worthy of an institutional proclamation. First, unless a mystery scandal is unearthed in the next month, Fimbres doesn’t need our help. Second, some of us here are sort of underwhelmed by either choice in Ward Three. Uhlich doesn’t help her re-election cause by saying things about hitting “her stride” near the end of her second term in our cover story and while Buehler-Garcia is a nice guy, he isn’t saying much to win us over either.
Maybe in 2015, the Wards 1, 2 and 4 races will be a little more thrilling, but this city might continue to have trouble drawing good candidates until we make the gig full-time. You get what you pay for and as long as it’s more lucrative to assist a city councilperson than to be one, we might have races like these for awhile.
This article appears in Oct 3-9, 2013.
Check it out: “reign” vs “rein”.
Aw, c’mon. Don’t “rain” on Dan’s charade.
You mean you are not going to endorse the Progressive Liberal Road to failure candidates this time?
Take a look at the City Manager’s budget presentation to the Mayor and Council from April of this year. Hint it’s a PowerPoint you can find on this web page: http://cms3.tucsonaz.gov/budget and click on the April 14th PowerPoint link, which is actually a pdf file. Then read it or just cut to the chase and look at slides 47 to 53. These slides show that the city had $2.3 million surplus in unallocated funds at that time. The slides also show options to use that money and the city’s bottom line. What the elected officials did as a) use the $2.3 million they had and about $9 million the city doesn’t have to give employees a raise, b) cut pension contributions from 14% to 6.5% and c) made the numbers on slide 53 that show a $250 million cumulative operating fund deficit over the next 5 fiscal years even worse. In short the Mayor and Council came up to Tucson’s Fiscal Cliff, looked over the edge and gleefully jumped. No wonder you can’t endorse this cycle. It would be a sin to endorse a Republican but the incumbents are too incompetent and irresponsible for words. And there you have it. Don’t believe this set of facts, check it out yourselves.