I’m headed off to a meeting of the Pima County Bond Advisory Committee today. My understanding is that Terri Proud and some other sponsors of a bill to cripple the county’s ability to sell bonds will be there.
The bill would give Sahuarita, Oro Valley and Marana the ability to effectively veto projects. Ostensibly, this is being done to protect those communities, but those communities also have reps on the bond committee, request some big money projects and, near as anyone can tell, haven’t asked for this bill.
But hey, why miss a chance to bash local government? Especially one run by Democrats. Facts be damned.
Oh, by the way, if this is about protecting smaller communities, why not South Tucson? Just curious.
I’m working on an op-ed about the bill. Look for it.
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Pima County’s bond debt exceeds the sum of all the rest of the counties in Arizona which includes Maricopa. Bonds are in fact taxes on Pima County voters. Cities in Pima County are telling Huckelberry to stop adding to the crushing bond debt.
Hate to say this, but Walt’s right. Also, Pima County should get out of the sewer business. Chuck’s regional wastewater racket is a goldmine for his pals over at CH2M-Hill, but it’s horrible for taxpayers.
Walt, could you please tell us what “cities” are telling this to Mr. Huckleberry? The reason why so many big-ticket projects are addressed in County bond packages is because the jurisdictions we are talking about lack the capacity to do these projects themselves.
They also lack the votes. If folks in Tucson were not voting for these packages, nothing would get built in Marana or Oro Valley. Yes, the suburban dwellers may hate us for being, in Antenori’s words, pot-smoking hippies, but they owe us a big time.
I was talking to a lobbyist who works on these kinds of issues just the other day and it sounded like a pretty substantial coalition is building up against this, putting the lie to the idea that this has some kind of broad support, from “cities” or anyone else. This is just another manifestation of the divisive conservative victim-hood bunk that Antenori and Proud trade in.
As far as Mr. Liberal’s assertion, it is flat wrong on its face. First, the County’s responsibility over the sewer system pre-dates Mr. Huckleberry’s term as County Administrator, so the conspiracy theory is bunk. As for your second assertion, the numbers do not bear this out. For any individual jurisdiction to control its own sewer system is simply not economical in the long run, as Marana will find out pretty soon.
Conspiracy theories and fact-free villianization are great politics, but they are terrible policy.
I’m afraid that dog won’t hunt Tom. Your allegation that Tucson voters graciously vote in county bond monies to help outside cities is ludicrous. Housing prices drop as a result of the bubble burst and the first thing Huckleberry does is raise the property tax rate. Is this a tax on the rich or did it cause middle and low income home owners to go further under? I could go on but the bottom line is all this spending will stop when the BOS run out of other peoples money to spend. Huckleberry is getting ready to retire so his legacy will be that he had the highest bond debt in Arizona history among other mismanagement problems.
Walt,
Have taxes gone up or just the rate per assessed value? I can personally vouch that my taxes have gone down each of the last two years.
In the region values have generally gone down the most on the outskirts. So those folks would have seen the largest drop in their raxes due to the decrease in property values.