I recently sent around the photo below of a 1970 front page of the Arizona Daily Star, asking if anyone knew why the subject Motorola plant was never built in metro Tucson.
Immediately below is the answer from a native Tucsonan, a smart businessman who has been lamenting for some time what bad governance and hubris have done to his hometown.
1970: Pima County Planning Commission voted no. A fateful decision. The plant, which would have employed 5,000, went to Austin instead where it’s been creating jobs for over half a century. The mentally challenged assh##### in Pima County thought Motorola would beg the then 3-member Board of Supervisors to reconsider and offer morditas. Nope. Bad move. Motorola said screw you bozos and immediately canceled plans, moving in to Austin. They made a sane and correct decision.
To date myself, I was living in San Antonio in 1970 and preparing to go into the Army as an artillery officer. At the time, Austin was a sleepy college town, and, as the state capital, it was overrun with hidebound bureaucrats. Motorola helped it become the tech center it is today. So did Michael Dell. He started his eponymous computer company in his dorm room at the Univ. of Texas. Dell Computer now has annual revenue of nearly $100 billion.
If a future Michael Dell were to start a comparable business in a dorm room at the Univ. of Arizona, the Tucson establishment would chase him away and he’d end up in Austin, or maybe Phoenix.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
I remember this fiasco, but I also remember that motorola set up a facility in Nogales which also went away after a few years. Yes the idiot politicians thought that JOBS were not a necessity because as a tourist destination there were already jobs for service workers in the hotels/motels of the area (many also moved away in time). We had a bunch of fast food places also. Now we dont have any businesses because of the grijalfa mafia and the things are not going to change. One of the poorest counties in the country and the democraps and rinos are very happy about that. Just like when they wanted to seceed and realized that there was no ECONOMY here to pay for their fantasy ideas. Poor education at all levels does not help matters either yes this includes ua. then there were the NIMBYs who are not as loud as they used to be but are still in abundance in the area. Right now austin is really not a destination area as the idiots have taken over down there, so it is a pretty sad thing to realize that we no longer have the drive to besomething but rather seek to become another run of the mill country as in europe.
I bet today’s Austin would reject Motorola & Dell, because muh datacenters, muh Global Warming, muh eeeeevil Capitalism; for the same idiotic reasons AOC ran Amazon out of her district and left “her constituents” all the poorer for it. Tucson is the same. It is infected with the illiberal mind virus, and like any good pathogen worthy of the name “parasite”, they will kill the host. Maybe if Mr. Pratt wins LA other Blue cities may turn around far enough to survive just long enough to let the culture heal itself. If Bass wins, expect traffic from LA, like airborne Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis spores, to make things here that much worse.