As members of the Pima County Board of Supervisors seek re-election, a shadowy nonprofit organization is making a demonstrably false claim about missing money in the county’s transportation budget.
And at least one Republican candidate who is seeking to win a seat on the Board of Supervisors has been using the bogus allegation as a reason to vote for her in the Aug. 28 primary.
Ally Miller, a Tea Party organizer who is among four candidates vying to replace the retiring Supervisor Ann Day, said she believes the claim of Arizonans for a Brighter Future, a business group created by anonymous political operatives who have issued a “Fact Sheet” alleging that the county has failed to keep track of $345 million in the transportation budget over the last 10 years.
“I’ve been doing some research, and there was a group that did a lot of research on the HURF (Highway User Revenue Fund) money over the last 10 years, (and) $340 million is unaccounted for,” Miller said.
But Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said whoever put together “Fact Sheet No. 1” on the website of Arizonans for a Brighter Future (azbrighterfuture.com) got some very basic facts wrong. As he put it in a May memo to the supervisors: “The Arizonans for a Brighter Future need to turn up the wattage, as their website conclusion is somewhat of a dim bulb.”
Huckelberry wrote that Arizonans for a Brighter Future took some figures from a report to the Board of Supervisors about decreases in state transportation funding and came up with a “foolish” conclusion: Essentially, the group took the amount of money that the county received from the state via HURF dollars and then subtracted the total amount that the county spent on repaying bonds and a pavement-repair program. It then claimed that the difference, which came out to $345 million over 10 years, was “unaccounted for.”
But Huckelberry said the money is accounted for—and the details can be found in budget documents that the county has posted online. The money in question went to running the county’s Department of Transportation, including costs for the transportation staff, traffic engineering and design work, street signs, utility bills and all of the other expenses that come with running a transportation department.
Miller, who touts her background in accounting in the private sector as one of her main qualifications for office, said that when she looked into the figures that Arizonans for a Brighter Future put forward, she didn’t find any problem.
“Everything that I looked at, it rings true,” said Miller, who had not seen Huckelberry’s memo. “The data is exactly as they’re stating here.”
However, none of Miller’s GOP primary opponents in District 1—which includes the Catalina foothills, Oro Valley and parts of Marana—share her outrage over Arizonans for a Brighter Future’s assertion.
Mike Hellon, the former state GOP chairman and national committeeman, was the most dismissive.
“It’s my understanding that allegation … as far as I can tell, is simply false,” Hellon said. “Now, you can argue about whether they should have spent it the way they spent it, but that’s an entirely different matter.”
State Rep. Vic Williams said he’s hasn’t looked into Arizonans for a Brighter Future’s claims.
“They’ve never sent me any of that information,” Williams said. “I would be interested in studying it, but I can tell you this: I’ve seen other people in this race misrepresent facts. I’ve seen other groups misrepresent facts. Until I get everything in front of me, I can’t comment as to the validity of this claim.”
Stuart McDaniel, a former mortgage broker, told the Weekly he wasn’t very familiar with the Arizonans for a Brighter Future report.
Miller said she doesn’t know who is behind Arizonans for a Brighter Future, because she received the information anonymously via email. But she dismissed Huckelberry’s explanation, because when he’s questioned about budgets, “he always says everything is a misread.”
Miller isn’t the only one in the dark about Arizonans for a Brighter Future’s backers. Despite their promise of sunny days ahead, the group is determined to remain in the shadows.
“The purpose of our organization is to help the business community by working with state and local governments to improve the image of our community,” the group states on its website. “Our goal is to change the environment to be more ‘business friendly’ in order to help local companies expand and attract new business to our community.”
But the Weekly was unable to speak with a representative of Arizonans for a Brighter Future, because the organizers refuse to identify themselves.
Deb Weisel of TagLine Media, the public-relations firm that created the Arizonans for a Brighter Future website, said the people behind the new nonprofit want to “keep their identities under wraps,” because they are too frightened to come forward. Weisel said that the group’s backers are worried about “repercussions for people when they start putting messages out there.”
The organization filed its organizational paperwork in Delaware rather than Arizona. The Weekly has filed a request with the Delaware Division of Corporations for the information, but Delaware officials say it could take weeks to process the paperwork.
TagLine Media has worked with a variety of Republican candidates and other organizations, including state Sen. Frank Antenori, unsuccessful council candidate Shaun McClusky and the reconstituted Rio Nuevo Board.
This year, TagLine is not only working on behalf of Arizonans for a Brighter Future; it’s also on the payroll of Miller and two other Republican candidates for the Board of Supervisors: Sean Collins, who hopes to unseat Supervisor Ray Carroll in the Aug. 28 GOP primary, and Tanner Bell, who is running against Democratic Supervisor Sharon Bronson in the Nov. 6 general election.
It doesn’t appear as if Arizonans for a Brighter Future has made much of a splash with its claims. A YouTube video that makes a similar claim about missing money had received just 126 views since it was posted on May 2. The group’s Facebook page has just five “likes” (including Ally Miller) and mostly has links to videos and expressions of outrage over potholes.
But political nonprofits like Arizonans for a Brighter Future are increasingly being used as vehicles for well-heeled special-interest groups to air negative attack ads.
Hellon was puzzled by the reluctance of the group’s organizers to come forward.
“It seems to me that if you are interested in debating a public-policy matter, and you think you have your facts right, then you shouldn’t be afraid to let people know who you are,” Hellon said.
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2012.
Anyone who believes any group calling for a “brighter future” is a dim bulb.
Anyone who believes Huckleberry isn’t incompetent and/or corrupt is a fool. Vote him out.
Anybody who believes Chuck Huckleberry is an elected official is also a fool.
This story is a good example of truly horrible journalism. Do you see anywhere in the story where an impartial source actually demonstrates that the supposedly “debunked claims” are false? All you see is Chuck Huckelberry saying, “Oh, no, those other expenses are all in there. Nothing to the story.” Then Nintzel takes his word as gospel. If you actually visit the site mentioned in the article, and study the financial reports that are collected and explained there, you find that Huckleberry is dead wrong. They methodology employed by the group is nothing like this story claims.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some other errors or misstatements, or that what the group says is true. But if the Weekly is just going to take the word of whichever side they like and declare it “truth,” we’d be much better off just reading The Onion.
DFranklin: I’ll try to make this as brief as possible and if you have more questions, feel free to weigh back in.
Arizonans for a Brighter Future makes a very specific claim: That $345 million in the last 10 years of county transportation spending can’t be accounted for. This is a false claim based on bad data. On the group’s website, there is a graph that shows “Total Revenue To Pima County from State of Arizona for HURF and Vehicle License Tax,” which is accurately stated as $525 million. That $525 million is broken down into three categories in a pie chart: $167 million in bond payments, $15 million in pothole repairs and $345 million in “accounted for funds.” In other words, their methodology is exactly what my story describes.
You can then go the county’s Web site–as I did–and take a look at the actual county budgets, rather than the reports that ABF’s bogus report was assembled from.
Here’s the Website, in case you’re interested:
http://www.pima.gov/finance/reports.shtml
Then you can look at a random budget year, say 2008-2009. You can see there, on page 14-2, that $48 million was spent on the transportation department.
If you go further into that budget, on page 14-10, you can find a long list of transportation projects that total $45 million in the active capital improvement projects.
These figures–and others like them–do not appear in any of Arizonans for a Brighter Future’s “Fact Sheet.” If you want to explain why that is, knock yourself out. All I know is that neither Ally Miller nor anyone representing Arizonans for a Brighter Future wants to explain it–and what’s more, the people behind Arizonans for a Brighter Future admit that they don’t want their identifies known. This raises red flags in my mind about the “Fact Sheet”; YMMV.
So my impartial source is the actual county budget documents (which, as the story explains, can be found online).
I think it’s telling that none of Miller’s GOP opponents in this race think there is enough to Arizonans for a Brighter Future’s claims to look into them, other than Mike Hellon, who says the claims are false. (Hellon serves as another source, besides Huckelberry, to debunk the report–a point you overlook in your efforts to discredit my story.) Hellon makes a very important point: You can disagree about how the money was spent, but you can’t say that it’s unaccounted for based on the data that Arizonans for a Brighter Future and Ally Miller are using.
One of the biggest problems in journalism is that we too often are willing to say: “One side says this and another side says that” and, in the process, give equal weight to people who are telling the truth and people who are not telling the truth. In this story, I thought I’d be doing readers a disservice with that route (especially when neither Miller nor the anonymous political operatives behind Arizonans for a Brighter Future were willing to stand behind their claims once I tried to follow up with them), so I said what’s plainly true: The allegations in “Fact Sheet” are bogus. If you were hoping that I’d catalog every expense in the transportation budget over the last 10 years to establish that, I can see why you don’t think I did my job as a journalist.