In early 1950, the popular NBC radio quiz show, Truth or Consequences, in attempting to transition to television, announced they’d air its 10th anniversary from the first town that renamed itself after the show. One small town in south central New Mexico jumped at the chance, and Truth or Consequence, NM was reborn. Originally named Hot Springs (1916) after its major attractions; they weren’t helping the town recover from its postwar downturn. Some new pizzazz was required for the coming ‘TV Age.’ The name stuck.
I submit Tucson should do the same today, but with a new moniker. One reflecting its broad opposition to modernity in general, and the City’s scuzzy welfare-mentality in particular. A new name to reflect its self-entitled, anti-growth sanctimony, a [proven] academic hubris, and its bloated, expensive, and dysfunctional local government.
My new name for Tucson, “We-Can’t-Do-That, Arizona”, reflects the many critical things I’ve personally observed since the Cold War’s end (30+ yrs), which has bedeviled …here in one of America’s best all-around states, its 2nd largest urban Metro.
Let’s start with the following, but this is by no means a complete list:
Depleting the Arizona State Budget: Its major source of sinecured state jobs for *Paper Belt émigrés, i.e. the University of Arizona, has a basic S.O.P. of take-take-take . Despite continuous Hoo-Rah propaganda, they have created little or no sustaining, secondary or tertiary economic activity from which the state can derive more income. It’s not even 5% of what ASU contributes to the Phoenix Metro in outside investment.
Water & Agriculture : Even being the #1 Federal Land-Grant-University, UA has spectacularly FAILED to give Arizona’s agriculture and urban & rural communities this single greatest asset necessary to survive. Their lazy-ass, entitled academic answer is always more conservation and government control vs. creating any kind of unique supply side solution to water-in-the-desert (and less than 150 miles from the ocean). And also forgoing a future desal-techno-export model Arizona could exploit.
Public Safety & Criminal Justice: Laura Conover, PimaCo’s Soros-funded County Attorney, has been an absolute disaster for any sense of public safety. Now the same political gang plans a total revamp of the elected local judgeships, turning the County into a wholesale revolving door of borderland criminality, like the very worst of New Mexico’s Bernalillo County. It’s only a matter of time before remaining investment flees Tucson, like it did in Albuquerque.
Border Invasion & *Paper Belt émigrés: In 2019 Tucson defeated a ‘Sanctuary City’ ballot initiative; had it passed, can you imagine where we’d be now with Joe Biden’s invading millions? Conover and PimaCo law enforcement (remember their ex-Police Chief was Biden’s 1st Border honcho?) are deliberately malfeasant. The Metro’s unincorporated, privately-protected wealthy enclaves are still filling with retired invaders of a different sort, those from the Northeast *Paper Belt’, and oh-so-eager to $$$ fund every looney-tune liberal cause out there. They keep the Grijalva Gang’s ongoing ”political enterprise” in business. By 2030, the demographics in PimaCo will be profoundly different for the geriatric *Paper Belt crowd.
Economic Development: While the Phoenix metro was just named #1 for manufacturing growth for the 4th year in a row , I doubt Tucson’s metro is getting even 2% of its multi-billion $$$ industrial spillover. Nearly 40% of the Tucson million-plus Metro is unincorporated; it hasn’t a single cross-town freeway, refuses to build any I-10 bypasses, and ordinary urban development has become a massively frustrating endeavor for those with real skin-in-the-game. “Novelty” to this insular crowd is more lame music juke-joints, weed outlets, retiree eateries, ridiculous festivals, etc. No clue about using the unique natural attributes right in front of their faces, like an aerial tram up to Mt. Lemmon, or commuter air service to the Baja. No surprise: the Milken Institute’s 2024 review of best performing cities just listed Tucson in its rock-bottom tier.
Voting Rights & Political Structures: This one triggers my ire the most. Uber-wealthy members of the Metro’s elite have sanctimoniously decided Arizona needs to share Tucson’s abysmally dysfunctional 1929 (voting population ~13,200 then vs. ~595K today), hybridized “at-large” council election scheme. This via a constitutional ballot amendment, giving the state a kind of ranked-choice, magic-show voting plan. It’s the sheer arrogance of these people, who have failed in their own organization’s quarter-century tenure (SALC) to fulfill their own stated mission. They now have the unmitigated gall to lecture the rest of Arizona, demanding seminal political changes favoring their incredibly blinkered world-views. It’s right out of eminent black conservative Thomas Sowell’s book, The Vision of the Anointed.
*Paper Belt: the sorry corridor from Washington DC to Boston, dealing in “newspapers, advertizing, money & finance, and diplomas—all paper, fading in power” re: Michael Gibson, author and venture capitalist.
Part 2 coming: “ The Geopolitical Crystal Ball Rotates too: Reasons for Optimism” (retooling a broke Tucson)
Sellers is a Southpark Republican living in incorporated Oro Valley; his background is federal technology commercialization