Dear Supervisor:
As you know, I have been a strong supporter of yours for the dozen-plus years I have lived in Picture Rocks. When you faced opposition in the primary election a few years back, I put out a letter urging my neighbors to vote for you.
I supported you then because you had been good to our community. Without your active support we probably would not have the pool, BMX/Skate Park, various grants, and other amenities that have enhanced our community.
But that was then. Now you have lined up with forces that see the Avra Valley as a dumping ground for their money-making schemes. In embracing them, you have abandoned us. Consider the following:
- Your continued strong support of County Administrator Chuck Huckleberry and your silence about his proposed Interstate 11 route through the Avra Valley that will hurt our communities, including the Tohono O’odham Nation, impede wildlife, and destroy ancient archaeological sites, while enriching millionaire real estate speculators like Wil Cardon and Don Diamond;
- Your tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from fat cat developers at Rusmar Development, Karber Holdings, HSL Properties and Diamond Ventures, from DKL Holdings who imposed a garbage dump on the families of Silverbell West, and from a half-dozen corporate PACs;
- Your continued vocal support for the Sonoran Corridor leg of I-11 despite its rejection by the voters in the bond election; whatever happened to respecting the will of the people? And what about the free highway Diamond Ventures’ planned Swan Southlands development will get from that convoluted route? He gets a highway while we can’t get our dirt roads graded. Not fair;
- Your lining up with Sun Corridor Inc., formerly TREO, which receives taxpayer money and on whose “Chairman’s Circle” you serve with a Board of Directors uniting cronies from fat cat corporations, banks, construction, real estate, insurance and medical industries. Sun Corridor’s lawyer chaired your bond committee and Yes campaign while, according to KVOA’s NT4 Investigators, an unexplained $15,000 that possibly came illegally from TREO’s $441,000 annual taxpayer dollars was funneled through the organization to the Yes campaign;
- While you argue that your policies favor job creation, with “transporta-tion logistics” “essential” to “connection with Mexico” you ignore the job losses that Interstate 11 planners of “integrative manufacturing” expect with R&D in the US and manufacture and assembly in Mexico where ADOT expects wages to be lower than China; with stealing good American shipping jobs from the West Coast to the expanding Port of Guaymas; to crippling tourism at Saguaro Park, Desert Museum, Kitt Peak, etc.; to destroying existing jobs that serve the I-10 corridor;
- Your support for doubling a regressive county sales tax on us and increasing the state gas tax while lavishing tens of millions in tax breaks and subsidies on the crony corporations you are close to, such as World View Space Port and its scheme to charge “space tourists” $75,000 each for a balloon ride;
- Your providing a county building for Caterpillar, which, with a $52 million Arizona taxpayer-paid incentive, is killing jobs in Milwaukee to move here at the behest of the Rio Nuevo Board made up of the same commercial developers that make up Sun Corridor Inc. (with Caterpillar now laying off workers locally while the building is spiffed up for executives by the county);
- Your total ignoring of your own vote and policy, Board of Supervisors Resolution 2007-343, opposing any I-10 Bypass in Pima County.
In short, Supervisor, after 20 years you seem to have lost your way. You are catering to the fat cat cronies who care more about lining their own pockets than about the people who live and work in Pima County. Twenty years is more than enough.
For all of these reasons I will not be voting for you this November.
Albert Lannon
Email: albertlannon@powerc.net
NO I-11 IN THE AVRA VALLEY !
(This message written and paid for by me and not by any candidate, party, PAC, or other organization)