Never mind the fact the electioneering by City Manager Mike Letcher and other bureaucrats skates close to violating Arizona’s political activity laws because these people are using their positions, their titles and their taxpayer salaries to try to influence the outcome of an election.
And while bureaucrats — and city council members, if they want to — can threaten to raise taxes, even they acknowledge their ideas to increase property taxes, sales taxes and sell bonds will require them to get further voter approval.
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Supporters of Proposition 200 believe city leaders either aren’t listening to them or are ignoring what they see as government’s priorities.
In a curious bit of timing, just last week Letcher announced a series of eight budget priority “dialogues,” as he called them for public participation with city leaders and council members. And all just so coincidentally scheduled in these days leading up to the Nov. 3 election.
These people say that if it passes, Proposition 200 would cost the city $156.6 million over five years to hire an additional 350 police officers and 70 firefighters to meet the requirements for 2.4 police officers for every 1,000 residents (up from 1.9) and respond to fire and 911 medical emergency calls within four minutes, part of the current National Fire Protection Association standard. Capital improvement projects would add another $80 million in costs.
While these government leaders are making these arguments, residents have witnessed a city government that has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars trying to revitalize a downtown that’s as dead as it has been in the last 50 years. They see a city government that needlessly meddles in projects. They see a city government that plays favorites, giving money and special treatment to select organizations and people while ignoring others.
The election campaign is heating up. Just last week in separate announcements, a rare alignment of three organizations has come out in opposition to Proposition 200: Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, cable provider Cox Communications and the Pima County Interfaith Council. They may have valid reasons for their support, but all three also directly rely on being in the good graces of city leaders’ for their survival.
The main supporters of the proposition are the Southern Arizona Home Builders Association, Tucson Association of Realtors, Tucson Police Officers Association, Tucson Firefighters Association and auto dealer Jim Click.
Public safety is one of the basic infrastructure necessities provided by local government. Tucson’s leaders talked of increasing staffing levels, but when it came to putting money behind the talk, other items were given higher priorities.
If Proposition 200 should be approved it will be about forcing the city to listen and redirect priorities. It’s not about unfunded mandates.
Comments
Joe Bucket wrote on Oct 16, 2009 4:56 PM:
p.s., there were 200 volunteers who collected many of those signatures.
p.s.s. most of the balance of the "facts" he cites are incorrect to begin with "
Brandon wrote on Oct 6, 2009 2:08 AM:
How many police officers were fired?
Answer? None.
Firefighters? Again, none.
And yes, the still gained a record number of signatures...that is the point of having paid petitioners...to get more signatures. More important though, is what the signers were told. My guess is that most of the important info was left out of the pitch, if the petitioners ever knew anything about it in the first place.
Rio Nuevo? Sorry. "Downtown revitalization." We are talking about the same pool of money and calling it by two different names. Either way, the author clearly doesn't understand how those funds are and are not allowed to be utilized.
And no, I must not have read the article. I dismantled it nearly line by line (waiting on a response for the rest of that, by the way) and cited specific excerpts from the text, all without ever reading it.
Anyway, it's still an unfunded mandate. The people who wrote it were either too stupid to think up a funding source or too stupid to realize that they needed one. Voters aren't going to like that much. "
Robert R. wrote on Oct 4, 2009 9:17 AM:
And about the signature gathering. Paid signature gatherers have been used before. They still got a record this time.
If you want to talk priorities, how many people has the city laid off in this recession? There's your city priority. "
Brandon wrote on Sep 29, 2009 9:28 PM:
Next, Yes they did gather 18,000 signatures, using PAID signature gatherers. Additionally, what are the odds that those circulating the petitions said anything more than "Sir, would you like to see more police and firefighters in Tucson?" Pretty slim, I'd bet. I would be surprised if they gathered 18,000 signatures by pitching the truth "Sir would you like to suppport a group of business interests and their unfunded mandate to put more police and fire fighters on the streets of Tucson at the expense of everything else in the city budget?"
Next, your comparison of prop 200 to rio nuevo is downright wrong, and I have heard confused supporters like you make this claim before; "If we can afford the rio nuevo boondoggle, why can't we afford prop 200?" The answer is simple and anyone writing an opinion article on this subject should already know it: Rio Nuevo and it's funding is state approved. If we discontinued the rio nuevo project tomorrow, we wouldn't suddenly have a pile of cash sitting around with which to pay for other stuff. We just wouldn't have those funds at all, period. You see, rio nuevo funding can only be spent on rio nuevo. Not unfunded city initiatives.
Amazingly, you make the claim that public safety has taken a back seat to other, higher priorities. How can this be, when public safety is already funded with 64% of the general fund? Public safety spending itself amounts to a far, FAR larger portion of our general fund. Nothing else even comes close. Um...have you ever even looked at the city budget?
Your last two sentences are the best. This is about the council's priorities, not unfunded mandates. Right. Well as was already mentioned, they have prioritized public safety, but for the purposes of my next statement, I'll even set that aside for a moment.
Even if the council hadn't made public safety their first priority (which they have, by far), you would STILL have missed the point. Whether or not you want it to be, this IS about unfunded mandates because prop 200 is itself an unfunded mandate. The cause has nothing to do with it. You can't cook up a dangerous and wildly expensive unfunded mandate and then expect people to ignore the fact that it's a dangerous and wildly expensive unfunded mandate.
Now, pile that on to the fact that crime in tucson is and has been falling in nearly every catagory for 14 years, the city is in a $48 million hole, revenues in Tucson are contracting and the "standards" within prop 200 have been thoroughly discredited and you have the most obvious and reckless poitical gimmick in Tucson's history. "