According to 13 News in Tucson, the Tucson city council is considering a $3 per month Clean City Fee to fund “graffiti abatement, homeless encampment cleanup, illegal dumping response, community cleanups, and a homeless work program.” Supposedly, this will help to close a $30 million budget deficit.
The story didn’t say if that’s $3 per household, per person, or what.
In any event, it’ll take more than three bucks to clean up Tucson, but give them credit for realizing that the “Dirty T” has a problem, a problem that has been decades in the making, corresponding to decades of bad governance.
Ugly aesthetics are anathema to a tourism economy. They are also a repellant to corporate executives looking for a locale for their high-wage offices. Widespread seediness and shabbiness send a message that crime is high, civic-mindedness is low, and local government is out to lunch.
It speaks volumes that the city is considering a separate fee for a basic service such as cleanups, as if this is something special and not an essential part of what a city should be doing as a matter of course. What’s next? Fees for traffic lights? Fees for law enforcement? Fees for using parks?
Meanwhile, rides on city buses are free, thus making bus stops, transit centers and buses magnets for deranged drug addicts, who are mischaracterized as the homeless or unsheltered, as if the root problem is a lack of housing. Hardly a week goes by without one of them stepping in front of a car and being killed. In some parts of the US, moose, elk or deer are a hazard to drivers. In Tucson, it’s human beings.
The suburbs aren’t much better, and in some respects are worse. That’s because a whopping 36 percent of metro Tucson is unincorporated county; that is, a government that is better suited for rural areas than suburban ones—or for cattle instead of people.
As I’m writing this, the Cologuard golf tournament is being held in the unincorporated Foothills, on a course that abuts the main east-west artery of Sunrise Rd. In attendance are players, TV crews, corporate sponsors and fans from other cities—especially pristine cities where professional golfers tend to live.
As such, one would think that the county would have spruced up that section of Sunrise. But the county has left it looking as it always looks: with bare dirt, stumps and scraggly shrubs in medians and on shoulders, instead of attractive landscaping of crushed granite, riprap, native trees, succulents and cactus.
And in a sign of desperation in a low-wage economy, the scores of illegal signs planted by shady outfits have been left along the right-of-way, advertising everything from junk removal to DNA testing. Well, at least there isn’t a sign advertising colonoscopies—not yet, anyway.
In other words, the landscaping along Sunrise doesn’t look like this:
But it does look like this:
If metro Tucson governments weren’t so parochial, they would replicate what some other cities have done to be aesthetically pleasing. They have required businesses and other property owners to keep their frontages and the public right-of-way clean and nicely landscaped up to the curb. And, as part of a widely publicized campaign, they have honored citizens, volunteer groups and businesses with lunches and awards for picking up litter.
Eventually, such efforts become part of the local culture, thus enabling the cities to spend less and less time and money on cleanups and compliance. At the same time, in a virtuous circle, they are able to increase the tax base by attracting high-wage businesses and jobs.
I’ll bet you three bucks that nothing will change as a result of Tucson’s Clean City Fee.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
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