Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

Steve Emerine is a frequent reader of this here blog, and he also sends me copies of his columns for Inside Tucson Business. In a column printed on Friday, he went off on local leaders who he thinks are ignoring the economic downturn. Some of it (like his attack on Tim Bee for focusing on gay marriage rather than other pressing concerns) I agree with. But I have to take issue with one particular item that he included:

As the county announced it would close its only major landfill on the northwest side because it’s almost full, County Bond Advisory Committee members revived plans for $700 million or more in new bonds that would either raise property taxes or at least keep them from going down when old bonds are retired.

Environmentalists want $285 million of those bonds to buy more vacant land, not for a landfill, but so the county can keep other people from using it. Yet the county can’t protect the thousands of acres it now owns.

Seems like an obscure issue to many of you, but I actually know a bit about it since I sit on the Pima County Bond Advisory Committee that he is writing about.

Emerine leaves the impression that we on the bond committee irresponsibly “revived” plans for the full $700 million about the time that the problem with the landfill emerged. Far from it. Ever since November, when the full effects of the sub-prime collapse on future county revenue became obvious, the members of the committee have been wrestling with the possibility of not having a bond election at all, or how much we could trim from the package to make it both fiscally and politically feasable. The $700 million figure was arived at some time ago as an initial target from our first round of cuts to well over a billion dollars in requests from local governments and community organizations.

The $285 million for open space has been cut back to $213 million. The amount probably isn’t that important, since his argument would be that any purchase of land for the sake of “open space” is silly. Since most of the areas that the county has already purchased in past open space acquisitions are open to recreation, the only aggrieved party are the developers that can’t built tract homes there. Gosh, wouldn’t that be awful?

(By the way, our need for landfills is not being ignored for open space. There are requests totaling over $11 million to expand existing landfills.)

One of the requests is for an open space purchase is for a tract tentatively called the “Western Preserve.” This is being requested by the wild-eyed tree huggers of the Green Valley Coordinating Council.

By the way, there is an additional $10 million requested to purchase of open space south of Davis-Monthan. This is done not at the behest of environmentalists, but because the Air Force says that development in the area could result in the closure of the base.

The example of the open space bonds is given by folks who want to pretend that the requests are somehow frivolous (of course, I don’t consider the open space bonds frivolous). However, many of the requests are for needs that have been unmet for years, even decades. For example, take a quick perusal of the requests put forward from the Justice and Law Enforcement Subcommittee. Requests, by the way, already whittled down from $700 million in requests from local courts and law enforcement agencies to a shade under $60 million:

• $8 million for six new courtrooms and facilities for attendant staff. Currently, two judges are “floating” with no assigned courtroom. There is also a statutory need to accomodate an additional three judges, which is not possible with current facilities.
• $1.7 million for a new sheriff substation in Drexel Heights. The area is projected for a great deal of growth, and has grown a great deal since the current substation was built in 1963.
• $28.9 million for a juvenile remand facility. There are juvenile offenders that are too violent to be put in the juvenile population but cannot be put in adult jail because they haven’t yet been convicted. This facility should handle the projected number of violent youthful offenders for the next ten to fifteen years.
• $20.7 million for a new justice facility on the Northwest side to handle new caseload in the region, particularly for juvenile court and probation.

This is a small part of what we’d like to, in a perfect world, present to the voters. If we decide to present a bond package, which has to be approved by the voters, it will be cut back quite a bit. Other projects include rebuilding the antiquated Theresa Lee Clinic, new park and recreation facilities (Pima County is far below the national average in per capita park acreage), and improvements to the sewage treatment plant (improvements that should have been done decades ago and could lead to huge fines against the county). These projects address important needs and unfortunately, some will be underfunded or unfunded all together because of fiscal reality.