Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

Yesterday’s Star featured the headline “Dems Get Lion’s Share of Bond Funds” above the fold for all who pass the vending machines. The headline leaves the impression that bond money is distributed on a partisan basis, while the story itself only covers one particular set of bonds.

The story talked about neighborhood reinvestment money from the bonds passed way back in 1997. The original money was to only be distributed to two supervisor districts, South Side District 2 and West Side District 5. The reasons for this at the time were that the stressed neighborhoods were all located in these areas. In fact, at the time “stress index” data was not available for areas outside of city limits, which mostly happen to be in the areas represented by Republican supervisors.

In 2004, more money was available as the project was expanded county-wide. But still, most of the money money is not being spent on the far East Side (represented by Republican Ray Carroll) or the Foothills and North West Side (represented by Republican Ann Day). A big part of the problem is that County Manager Chuck Huckleberry set caps for money to be spent in these areas that is arbitrarily low ($500,000 per district, which would pay for one project). The other reality is that even without these caps, less of this money would get spent in these areas because they simply don’t contain the same number of “stressed neighborhoods.” A quick perusal of the “stress map” that I posted above (you can click for a bigger version) shows that the highest stress areas Central, South and West Sides, in districts represented by Democrats Ramón Valadez and Richard Elías. An expansion of the map to the whole county would show high stress indexes for Ajo and the Tohono O’Odham nation, which are represented by Democrat Sharon Bronson.

The overall impression that is given is that the county is doling out money on an entirely partisan basis. Not only does this argument ignore where the needs are, it misses out on where millions of dollars from other bonds are being spent. Carroll’s East Side district, for example, gets millions from that same bond package to cover transportation needs in the area (which has had very high growth). In contrast, areas in the city represented by Elías and Valadez have been virtually zeroed out when it comes to transportation money. Is this because those areas are represented by Democrats? Of course not. No doubt that Carroll would be the first to tell you that the reason is that those areas are incorporated and have other sources of transportation money, and don’t have the same growth. Local circumstances are different; local needs are different; money that gets spent there is different.

This story is of the classic “yes but” category. It would be the equivalent of the AARP grousing about how little student loan money goes to senior citizens, or a congressman from Manhattan complaining about how little his area gets in farm subsidies. If the needs aren’t there, why should the government spend the money there?

NB - The Stress Index Map above is one I downloaded from the County’s GIS Division website. I was able to get boundries for incorporated areas, but the site did not draw supervisor district lines. It color codes supervisor districts, which was useless given I had already color coded for stress index. It did give the labels, which I hope gives you the idea of what areas are represented by who.