On Wednesday, the Pima County newspaper of record proudly published a story about a local call center’s plans to hire residents for mostly low-paying jobs. The story made headlines because jobs in the eighth poorest metropolitan area in the country are hard to come by.
On the same day, Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry wrote a memo asking the members of the Board of Supervisors to approve a new contract with Sun Corridor.
Barely more than a month before Huckelberry’s ask, Pima County staff scrambled to prepare responses from Supervisor Sharon Bronson for an article in an upcoming edition of Biz Tucson. Sun Corridor employee, Laura Shaw, referred the article’s author, Romi Carrell Wittman, to Bronson’s staff.
In her email, Carrell Wittman asked very basic questions about the region’s economic development.
Upon receiving the author’s email, Bronson, who serves on Sun Corridor’s “Chairman’s Circle,” sent it to Pima County’s brain trust: Deputy County Administrator, Jan Lesher, director of the County’s Communications Department, Mark Evans, and Huckelberry. Her message read: “How should we proceed?”
Lesher then tasks Evans to write Bronson’s answers.
To the question: “What are we doing right? What could we be doing better?” Evans responds in part:
“We have major employers here now who have dozens if not hundreds of open jobs that they can’t fill with local employees because they don’t have the education, training or job skills to do the job.”
Clearly, if Carrell Wittman was hoping to write a factual piece, she was not getting any help from Evans.
The attachment to Huckelberry’s memo includes a Sun Corridor sales pitch/pamphlet. Like those previously issued when Sun Corridor was called TREO, the pamphlet it is filled with fancy. In the pamphlet, Sun Corridor offers little more than promises of potential jobs mixed with expansion of mostly County subsidized corporations.
In Pima County, it is hard to separate fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, trite propaganda from true promise. However, a quick review of the help wanted ads for the region this week show little more than the low-paying call center jobs celebrated in the aforementioned headlines.
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