Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik could not contain his satisfaction with the recent removal of two of the Rio Nuevo District Board members last week. In his newsletter this week, Kozachik began with a sophomoric jab at watchdogs Jodi Bain and Rick Grinnell and concluded with a sophomoric attempt to change history and legislation.
Despite the fact that at this week’s Rio Nuevo District board meeting, current District Board member and highly respected community leader, Alberto Moore, exposed the long history of the City of Tucson’s corrupt and incompetent spending of over $230 million for a new arena and hotel that never materialized, Kozachik wrote that he hopes the new District board will drop the lawsuits against the City and spend more money they don’t have.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Board member Jeff Hill told the public that the District was broke. A city employee also revealed that Rio Nuevo bond monies that the City of Tucson had hoped to spend were no longer available for projects. She advised the District that those monies had been available until November 2011.
The City had hoped to get the new District board members, Fletcher McCusker and Christopher Sheafe to join Board members Janie Cox, and Mark Irvin to vote to spend those monies before the public learned the monies were unavailable.
The expiration of the funds was not known until a recent audit commissioned by the District. The City attempted to create public support for spending those unavailable funds, before it became public that the funds were actually unavailable. The audit was going to be made public on June 18.
Kozachik is now hoping to get permission to spend those monies from the bond trustee. He writes, “In order to spend any of the remaining 2008 Bond money Rio now has to get approval from their Bond trustee. If they do not, the approximately $6M left unspent will simply go to debt service at the end of the fiscal year.”
Kozachik says that paying their debt “sounds ok,” but instead he wants to win approval from the trustee and use the District’s funds to pay for repairs to the TCC, for which the City is obligated.
“Now, within a week of the changing of the guard they’re looking seriously at the opportunity,” Kozachik writes.
Kozachik now argues that “because the Legislature tied the hands of the District to use TIF money only for existing debt service, the TCC or a hotel” the City should lobby the state to let me spend money they don’t have. Kozachik writes, that “It’d be helpful if the Legislature made a simple tweak in the statute by which the new board was authorized to spend TIF money on something other than just a hotel or an arena.”
The City of Tucson is obligated to repair the TCC, and has been collecting taxes for that purpose but swept those tax revenue into the general fund instead.
Kozachik is celebrating the fact that “within a week of the changing of the guard they’re looking seriously at the opportunity,” to get the District to pay for their failure again.
At Tuesday’s Rio Nuevo District Board meeting, Board member Jeff Hill told the public that “the debt service on the bonds which we are going to discuss today is $12.3 million a year. That is just debt service that doesn’t count any expenditures to run the district. The TIFF funds, which out of bond proceeds, is the only money this Board receives. In fiscal year 2009 was $8.9 million, in fiscal year 2010 it was $12.9 million. Annualized for this fiscal year, ending on June 30 its $9.8 million. As you can see, the history of the TIFF money, the only year that has ever reached just the debt retirement , it has not reached the operating budget was the last fiscal year. Therefore, every year, unless the TIFF money increases, we are going to be dipping out of some pile of money the City has. They have not turned over all of the funds they have to the Board and they are ensuring that these bonds are paid. Clearly we don’t have the money to pay the bond, let alone and start contracting for some other items.”