The Hard-Left’s broad assault with the institutions of local government in Tucson & Pima County now suggests they’ve stepped-up their game. To wit:
- Tucson Unified School District, the bloated government jobs-program masquerading as a public school system …fresh from its attempt to introduce early, broad, and lurid sex education, now plans to create cadres of environmentalist warriors in their high schools.
- The [new] Mayor of Tucson’s office, cementing the Grijalva Gang’s grip on power, has quickly devolved into an expat branch of the City’s infamous Center for Biological Diversity. Tucson elitists supported this Latina debutante mayor, who couldn’t run a C-store.
- Get ready for “Tucson Sanctuary-City, Part II, the Sequel”. Now that Governor Doug Ducey has taken a prohibitive constitutional amendment off the agenda. Clearly, Phoenix business interests “don’t feel our pain” in Tucson; when did they ever?
- Tucson’s reliance on outside federal government subsidies could be severely impacted in a broad US recession. McCain’s gone at Armed Services and AZ’s congressional delegation has ZIPPO SENIORITY. Tucson didn’t think IBM would leave either.
- Am thinking, unlike my friend Chris DeSimone’s take that Los Angeles is “Tucson’s muse”, the THL & PHL (Tucson-Pima Hard Left) actually wants to emulate Portland Oregon. “Hey, look at us! We’re a desert version of the Rose City….clap back at ya, huh?” But Tucson’s economic gravitas is nowhere near Portland’s.
Portland has direct access to the Pacific, uber-cheap power, water, global & national transport links, and an abundance of adjacent food-class agriculture & forest industries. And their college grads stick around because of high-paying tech jobs. You know—all the things elitists should be concerned with.
Those of you in the Tucson elite, who fancy yourselves “movers & shakers”, really need to take another look at your policies & actions. If they were working, we would have seen an entirely different Metro Tucson than we’re seeing now. I don’t have to detail it for you; it’s quite plain (& measurable).
So what to do? For my money, #1 is this parasitic monstrosity & fossilized relic from the 19th Century: Pima County Government. Defund it ASAP, and reduce its footprint in local government by at least 75%. That won’t be easy, you’re breaking into the Grijalva Gang’s Dinosaur Petting-Zoo; but it’s got to be done.
How? Organize & support the municipal incorporations of the major 4-5 CDPs (“census designated places”) of the Metro’s 13 CDPs, that now form ~40% of the unincorporated Metro Tucson conurbation. It’s the defining characteristic of successful urbanity, like it or not. Moreover, it totally disrupts PimaCo’s corrupt plantation-poverty operating model.
The beleaguered people in those enormous swaths of dumped-upon-PimaCo need help to get organized, and you have to trust them to act in their own best self-interests, once they do.
And maybe by that time Arizona will have a competent & courageous state Attorney General, who’ll care about government corruption in Pima County.
(Coming: How Tucson’s disastrous 1929 Charter guaranteed its economic retardation)
Sellers is a South Park Republican who lives in incorporated Oro Valley. His background is federal tech-transfer commercialization.