Fortis Should Realize the Tucson Hard-Left is Deadly Serious about TEP Confiscation

For some time now, there’s been this ongoing drama surrounding who provides electric power to the [Peoples’ Republic] City of Tucson.  Since 2013, the successor ownership company to Tucson’s star-crossed, city-franchise electric provider, TEP (i.e. Tucson Electric Power), has been Fortis, a giant multi-national utility company HQ’d in the Canadian maritime province of Newfoundland-Labrador.

Fortis has to renew this TEP city-franchise, electric-power agreement in 2026, and has been timidly playing all kinds of nutty & fruitless, consultant-inspired strategies with the increasingly angry legions of Hard-leftists that have come to inhabit Tucson city government.  Controlling virtually every seat on the City Council (At-Large elected) and the PimaCo Board of Sups, save for one (former auto dealer Steve Christy), they’ve made no secret of their intention to use TEP as the basis for a new, muni-owned electric company.

On Palm Sunday (3/29) the Left’s newsrag-o-record, the Arizona Daily [Red]Star, published a major op-ed entitled, “TEP is an Existential Threat to Tucson”.  Seriously, does this sound like something the Phoenix paper would opine about the (Salt River Project), or APS (Arizona Public Service)?  But it’s S.O.P. for the Tucson local perspective.

And the more the embattled Fortis/TEP bends over backward to be nice-guy, Canadian soyboy & soygirl types, the more emboldened the Tucson Hard-Left sees it as weakness and conniving greed.  Recently, all this has finally gained the attention of Wall Street utility industry analysts, who are starting to run the spreadsheet numbers on the very real possibility that Tucson could force Fortis out of the SE Arizona desert, and takeover what remains.

I’ve written 2 previous pieces on this ongoing, ever-typical-Tucson/TEP-dumpster-fire, you can read the first here, and the second one linked as well.

In my mind, the very thought of such a “legal” municipal confiscation prompts 2 important conclusions:

• Number One: The regressive, Hard-Left universe of today’s Tucson is the direct result of a past, impotent civic leadership that allowed a Marxist-Socialist cancer to grow and spread, beginning with the late-Cold War, Mayorship of Tamas Jan Volgy (1987-91), a Hungarian-born ‘fellow traveler’, and of course, a University of Arizona Professor of Political Science.

• Number Two: Were the incredibly lightweight people currently installed by the Griftjalva Gang’s gynocrat mafia to actually succeed, takeover, and run TEP, it would spell the end of any attractiveness Tucson still clings to for purposes of economic development.  Kiss that goodbye, along with a litany of other economic & tech assets here, totally taken for granted by these demented CoT ideologues.

My advice all along to TEP’s own blinkered management has consistently been: Go On the Offensive.

You need to remind Tucson, in the most brutal way possible, what happens if option #2 above, comes to pass.  Why ‘brutal’, you may ask?  Very simple: stop thinking you’re trying to persuade a population of erudite people like yourselves… you’re not, not in the least.  Fortis doesn’t have that fanciful luxury anymore.  Tucson is a banana-peel away from the demographic doom loop I’ve been writing about; that totally comes to pass if #2 occurs.

Think basic, and tell these people the basic reality of what happens in the hardships of their oft-struggling lives when a bunch of loopy college-Marxists start trying to make and sell power.  It’ll be the same thing they’ve done with public safety, roads & streets, urban planning, and public education.

It’s not a pretty picture.

Sellers is a Southpark, Roosevelt-Republican (Teddy) living in incorporated Oro Valley; his background is federal technology commercialization