The City of Tucson’s $1.25 billion budget is a big sum, but each of the seven members of the mayor and council was elected with no experience in public office and told to spend the money and guide the ship.

Each had to learn politics, government finance and public administration on the job.

Mayor Bob Walkup is now in his third term, Councilwoman Shirley Scott in her fourth, and Councilman Steve Leal in his fifth. Councilwomen Nina Trasoff and Karin Uhlich are each in their third years of their first term, and Councilwoman Regina Romero and Councilman Rodney Glassman have been in office five months.

Pima County has an even larger budget of $1.5 billion.

Supervisors Ann Day and Ramón Valadez served in the state Senate before winning their county posts. Supervisors Sharon Bronson, Ray Carroll and Richard Elías came on board without having held elected office.

The low level of experience may be one reason not everything works well in the governments of Tucson and Pima County. Budgets above a billion dollars can be intimidating to political newcomers who suddenly must deal with big sums every day.

The supervisors have partially avoided the problem by giving County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry almost total power to run day-to-day county operations. And when asked, he often announces board members’ policies, even when they haven’t yet set them.

When James Keene was city manager, he had many of those same powers. His successor, Mike Hein, has tried to let bureaucrats he inherited handle routine matters but to refer major policy decisions to Walkup and the council.

Huckelberry won high marks from his county bosses, the daily newspapers, environmentalists and neighborhood activists for his Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan to limit growth in unincorporated areas and buy thousands of acres of land from other government agencies, ranchers or developers.

But his costly anti-sprawl crusade has led to greater sprawl as developers and builders moved to Pinal, Cochise and Santa Cruz counties to build homes that were more affordable for Tucson workers than they would have been if they had been built in this county.

Huckelberry’s efforts to reposition the county from the area’s sewage handler to a major player in regional water policy have met resistance from most of the area’s real water providers while risking lawsuits from the county’s one-time ally, Marana.

Results inside Tucson have also been unimpressive.

The city persuaded the Legislature in 1999 to approve a district containing Tucson’s downtown area and a strip along both sides of Broadway all the way to Park Place, where incremental revenues from state sales taxes would go to finance Rio Nuevo downtown revitalization.

But apparently no one under Keene or Hein really knew how to revitalize a downtown. Just as the fictional emperor feared his subjects would realize he had no clothes, city bureaucrats have feared Tucsonans would realize they were naked with no ideas of how to fix downtown.

They have rejected or ignored some proposals from private investors, invented reasons to delay others and insisted on complete control - plus city ownership if possible - for most downtown proposals.

Now, city officials are hesitating to build a new downtown arena because they aren’t sure when they can build a convention hotel to go with it.

They haven’t started the hotel because they’re not sure they can afford the arena.

West of Interstate 10, the city apparently has delayed its planned underground parking garage because of uncertainties over whether the University of Arizona and other parties will build their museums, which depend on the parking facility.

So Tucson’s downtown has no arena or museums, an obsolete convention center, a run-down high-rise hotel and a large hole in the ground.

The city has no strong and experienced elected leader, and it continues to show.

Contact Steve Emerine or e-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Emerine, a Tucson resident since 1960, has run Steve Emerine Strategic Public Relations since 1994. He is a former local newspaper reporter, editor and columnist and served as Pima County Assessor from 1973 to 1980. He is a regular Monday guest on the John C. Scott radio talk show, which airs from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. and from 11 a.m. to noon weekdays on The Voice KVOI 690-AM. This column appears weekly in Inside Tucson Business.