Pissing and Moaning Won’t Solve Pima County’s Problems

A Tucson City Councilman is pissing and moaning again, and we are grateful. His questions are good, his answers are absurd, but at least he is acknowledging that there are problems.

Kozachik is calling on residents and area leaders to consider forming a regional government. Why he thinks the same dysfunctional people can come together and form a functional regional government is a mystery.

Since government is GOVERNED, the failures of it are strictly human – bad policy results in bad practice. Incompetent and/or corrupt leaders adopt inane policies and/or find ways to use those policies to serve their purposes.

Kozachik is proposing the idea due to the recklessness and overreach of Pima County administrator Chuck Huckelberry, who appears to be addicted to growing government and raising taxes. Specifically, Kozachik is annoyed that the City is being asked to pick-up the high cost of stray dogs.

Kozachik is right – Pima County is out of control – it has gone to the dogs. In fact, it is so out of control that a group of people kicked around the idea of moving part of the County into Santa Cruz County.

Like Kozachik, that group didn’t want to do the hard work of dislodging the supervisors in office who hold Chuck’s leash. The Pima County Board of Supervisors is comprised of five supervisors, four of which seem to be Chuck’s pups: Sharon Bronson, Richard Elias, Ray Carroll and Ramon Valadez. Ally Miller, the fifth, stands alone: begging her fellow supervisors to adopt Chuck out to a friendly family, who can afford him. Her pleas fall on deaf ears.

The dog handlers have handlers themselves. Bob Gugino, Larry Hecker, Jim Click, Don Diamond, Congressman Raul Grijalva, and former Supervisor Dan Eckstrom – to name just the readily recognizable – control the supervisors. They must like the status quo, they spend a lot of money to maintain it. The residents of the fifth poorest metropolitan area in the country, sit by while the supervisors do the bidding of the entitled in the name of equity.

Occasionally, the supervisors throw a few taxpayer or campaign dollars to Richard Elias’s dad’s printing company, or Planned Parenthood, or Chicanos Por La Cauza, or talking heads, but for the most part, the only way to get anything out of Pima County is to be extremely wealthy, or dirt poor…. or, rumor has it – to have dirt on the supervisors. There is no doubt that there is enough dirt on them to keep all of them under the control of whoever holds it for an eternity.

Steve, buddy, we are with you. The homeless issue is a regional issue. Water is a regional issue. The economy is a regional issue. They require regional responses. However, in order to develop a reasonable response – you have to have reasonable people developing it. We haven’t yet elected enough reasonable people to get that job done.

The truth of the matter is that you might be able to form a reasonable regional government, but it will still have to work with the likes of Ray Carroll, who never met a crony he didn’t want to do a favor for, or Regina Romero, who never had an original idea that did not include creating more poverty. As long any government has to work with – or navigate around – the bone-stealing pack known as southern Arizona’s ruling elite, nothing will change.

Think of it this way Steve – the powers-that-be are a pack of pit bulls. You have some compassion for them as living breathing being creatures of God, but they can’t cohabitate with small children, other animals and the elderly. As a result, they need to be neutered and put in a shelter to live out their days, with a nice walk around the park once a day. In other words they need to be removed from office, unelected, denied publically funded vehicle repair service contracts, sent packing and told to sell their undeveloped land to private interests, and/or denied consulting contracts to any taxpayer funded entity.

We can’t afford the completely inept government we have now, and the cost of another one would take southern Arizona from the fifth poorest to the first poorest area in record time.

Steve, consider changing your condescending and angry tone, along with your puritanical desire to control every aspect of everyone’s life, and fight for change – real change. Run some honest dems to take on Valadez and Elias. Find and honest rep to take on Carroll. There are honest people in both parties, and a hell of a lot of honest independents. Stop pissing an moaning in public and start calling on the public to rise up and run.