Tucson Weekly: Growth War Myths (June 4

You Say You Want A Revolution? Well, First Dump Our Legislative Turkeys.
By Emil Franzi
TWO WEEKS AGO, the Pima County Board of Supervisors approved a series of "controlled-growth" ordinances involving buffer zones, a native-plant ordinance, and a new desert-protection plan. By mid-summer, there will be more on the way.
Since the meeting, environmentalists have been hailing an early millennium, while the Growth Lobby has been preaching gloom and doom.
Time for a reality check on both sides. We've had controlled growth for years. Guys like legendary land speculator Don Diamond have controlled it.
Currents County government in Arizona has limited powers--and it will soon have even less later this year, when a law passed by the state Legislature prohibiting down-zoning takes effect. An even bigger reduction will occur if voters approve Gov. Jane Dee Hull's "Smart Growth" referendum, which is constantly referred to by media ignoramuses as an "initiative." It isn't. Those come from the folks. This one was written by lawyers for the development industry and passed on to us by the pols.
Pima County voters could have increased the power of local government by passing the charter government proposal in 1997. Unfortunately, the polyglot committee elected to draw that charter got into so many sidebar issues that a combination of folks from both sides of the growth issue decided it would be more grief than assistance to everybody and stomped it at the polls. So we're stuck with the county government we've got.
So, while there has been a definite paradigm shift in attitudes, nothing much is really happening substantively to change the future of this valley. County government doesn't have the power to do much of anything on a permanent basis, nor does it even have jurisdiction over vast tracts of empty land.
Every one of Pima County's spanking new ordinances can be amended, repealed or--more practically--just waived any time a developer or land speculator can get three supervisors to vote in his favor. None of these ordinances is carved in stone, nor even ice. It's the chimera of regulation that has been pursued by neighborhood and environmental types for the past several decades. This stuff only lasts as long as a three-vote majority lasts. And the smarter builders and developers and speculators know it.
And it only affects turf not within the corporate limits of some town. The environmentalists, mostly Tucsoncentric types with a Sam Hughes or WUNA mentality, seem to have forgotten that none of these rules count in Marana or Sahuarita or Oro Valley, let alone Casas Adobes, if it's still with us. And the enviro yuppies have mostly ignored the valiant preservation fight by my posse in Tortolita.
Marana and Oro Valley alone have enough zoning and specific plans on the books right now to handle the next million people who'll be moving here. If Tortolita and Casas Adobes are disqualified as towns, add another 15 or 20 square miles of vacant land Marana and Oro Valley will grab in further annexations. The folks hailing our environmental salvation because of the new county ordinances are blithely ignoring the maps that show the vast areas those ordinances don't even cover.
And the Growth Lobby knows that. While they bitch that these new laws will stifle growth, they know damn well Pima County could put a complete building moratorium on every last square inch of dirt in the unincorporated areas and the bulldozers would keep rolling.
THE POLITICAL NAIVETÉ and failure to grasp what has to be done by these "feared" environmentalists is incredible. Heady over having their issues finally given lip service by flakes like Supervisor Mike Boyd, they're building a whole preservation system based on the irrational belief that a state Legislature that just reduced the power of local governments to control growth will somehow grant them enabling legislation increasing the power of local governments to control growth. Huh?
The Growth Lobby owns Governor Hull and the state Legislature at the top, as well as the towns where the real action is, like Marana, at the bottom. Thus, new county ordinances don't mean a damn thing, even assuming the Pima County supervisors stay the course they've recently set.
To be really effective in preserving our unique environment, we'd have to change the rules of the game, and we'd have to come up with a concerted plan to change the rulemakers. We'd have to throw some stooges and turkeys out on their asses. In case you've forgotten, that sort of thing is called "political action."
We could start with the Marana Town Council. They've got 72 square miles of mostly empty land and hardly any people. Elections are cheap--the Growth Lobby's been buying that burg's pols for the price of a cheap lunch for years. Pay attention to Marana, treehuggers, because the other side has. Or don't you care about all the trees and saguaros standing in the way of "progress" there?
And some Pima County legislators are going along with the screwing Phoenix is giving us. For openers, a couple of big rollovers on the down-zoning bill in the state Senate were Republican Ann Day, the Republican who represents District 12, and Ruth Solomon, the Democrat who represents District 14. Both have ambitions for higher office, and both are sucking up to the Don Diamonds of the world to get there. So quit wheel-spinning on new, enviro-friendly planning processes and first plan how to get rid of these turkeys and replace them with legislators who vote right and won't take a dive.
The truth is, the Growth Lobby has a glass jaw. The last few elections, from the Pima County Board of Supervisors to the Town Oro Valley, have proven they aren't that hard to beat. And plenty of voters are fed up with the environmental destruction and higher taxes the Growth Lobby's subsidies entail. It's never been more possible to elect reasonable alternatives. Let's find some.
Surf's up. Time to kick some butt.
Jeff Smith, whose cantankerous, egocentric opinions normally pack this space like too many beans in a bad burrito, apparently had better things to do this past week. His column will resume when he damn well feels like it.

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