Tucson, where bad fiscal ideas thrive
Reprinted in part from the Arizona Republic by Doug MacEachern
Look, I don’t want to bad-mouth Tucson …
Well, that’s not entirely true. I do kind of enjoy trimming the sails of Arizona’s most ostentatiously “progressive” community.
Let’s not even talk about Speedway, the ugliest main drag in America. At least traffic moves on Speedway. Tucson is a community that somehow created for itself a suffocating, twice-daily, rush-hour gridlock without actually having a lot of cars or places for people to work.
How? Call it a “weird trick” discovered by environmentally conscious Tucson voters, who wanted to keep their community free of those awful Phoenix-ish freeways. You just vote down transportation-improvement plans and — voila! — everything freezes in place.
Once you force yourself to come down off picturesque Ina Road and Skyline Drive up in the Catalina Foothills, which is where all of Tucson’s most well-heeled liberals live, you must drive downward into, you know, hell. Which is to say Tucson proper. Which in nearly every respect is a basket case, especially financially.
The most successful Tucson ballot proposition in several years was Proposition 401, which last year passed with 62 percent of the vote. Prop. 401 doesn’t authorize a new project or hike spending on, say, education. It simply allows the financially troubled city to spend $50 million more per year. In Tucson, this is what passes for enlightened progressivism.
Which brings us to Rio Nuevo. No city in the country knows how to make the public’s money disappear like Tucson, and almost no urban-development money pit has sucked in taxpayer resources like Rio Nuevo. In Tucson, “Rio Nuevo” is Spanish for “Where did my freaking $230 million go, you incompetent thieves?”
I’m not kidding. In 2011, an Arizona auditor general’s report found that the community’s 10-year, $230 million plan to renovate downtown Tucson produced nearly nothing of value thanks to “bad judgment, bad management and misplaced priorities.”
But because the report pointed no direct fingers alleging criminal behavior, elected leaders citywide breathed a collective sigh of relief. This is what in Tucson is considered progress. Welcome to Tucson, where incompetence isn’t an indictable offense!
But, really, for real-deal, Tucson-quality incompetence, nothing can match the Tucson Unified School District.
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