Tuesday, March 27th, 2007...12:20 pm
Another Latas Runs
I recieved an e-mail from a reader the other day who gave me a link to Salette Latas’s website and requested that I put it in my “Election Aught Seven” section. Even back when I had the old Blogspot blog, I tried to keep the list down to candidates that I could actually vote for. Otherwise, I’d end up with a list of thirty people, which would be useless to everyone.
But, this doesn’t prevent me from writing about Mrs. Latas.
Latas, whose husband Jeff Latas ran in the CD 8 Democratic primary last year, was the first candidate to jump in to the race for the Oro Valley Town Council. Like her husband, Latas is a Air Force veteran. She has a bit more of a pedigree as Baja Arizonense than Jeff, since she attended the University of Arizona before begining her Air Force career. She has served on a number of Oro Valley town commissions, and done volunteer work as a CASA.
Oro Valley seems to have finally gotten over its growing pains of a decade ago when it seemed that recall elections were more frequent than regularly scheduled ones. But, for anyone who followed last year’s Vestar imbroglio would know that politics in that outwardly quiet collection of golf courses and three car garages is anything but calm and cool, especially when it comes to growth and economic development issues.
Okay, the golf course comment is unfair. But it tells you a bit of the problem: the community has changed drastically over the last two decades from a confederation of country clubs that seemed to fund itself entirely by that speed trap on North Oracle to a serious suburban community with a variety of people that, although wealther than most of us, reflects the ethnic makeup of the rest of the county in a way that would suprise most Tucsonans. But, with the recent growth spurts and relatively rootless residents, the place has developed rough and tumble politics. To me as an outsider, it looks like much of the activism is neighborhood by neighborhood, subdivision by subdivision, rather than by wide swaths of the community. It seems like it would be an incredibly difficult community to govern. I’m not sure how anyone comes up with a decent consensus on economic development or growth issues. Creative, dynamic leadership can work a way through this. But, from what I’ve seen, the current council seems to be stuck in the mentality of that “old” Oro Valley.
The election is still a year away (or, two recalls, under the 1990’s version of Oro Valley politics), but Latas has a campaign going. Despite this, I found little about her in the Northwest Explorer, save for a few articles about her stand on internet porn in the libraries. God help us if this is the most important problem that the Northwest side’s paper of record thinks faces Oro Valley.
1 Comment
March 28th, 2007 at 9:13 am
My degree is from the University of Arizona so I really don’t know what your point about pedigree is about.
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