Inside Tucson Business: Tucson’s leaders can't lead when they're in self-denial

Tucson’s leaders can't lead when they're in self-denial

By Steve Emerine, Inside Tucson Business
Published on Friday, January 02, 2009

What if you borrowed a big sum to expand your business and then learned the people who promised the money for you to repay the loan were talking about keeping their cash instead?

Would you tell reporters that although you haven’t talked with your money sources, you doubt they will pull the plug because you’ll be able to convince them not to?

Would you call the report “speculation and rumor” and say commenting on it would be premature?

Would you dismiss the information, saying you won’t “invest energy worrying about something until there’s something to actually worry about?”

I hope not.

But that’s exactly what Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup, City Manager Mike Hein and City Councilwoman Nina Trasoff (respectively) told the Arizona Daily Star upon learning Republican legislative leaders may yank state financing they approved in 1999 and 2006 for the Rio Nuevo downtown redevelopment project.

Tucson just incurred an $80 million debt by selling bonds to finance a part of Rio Nuevo. If legislators cut off the state funding Tucson planned to use to retire the bonds, the city and its taxpayers must either pay them off themselves or try to convince a court to order the state to do it.

Two Tucson Republicans, Senator-elect Jonathan Paton and Representative-elect Frank Antenori, confirmed last week that Maricopa County GOP legislators are indeed considering taking back the tax-increment financing authority now earmarked for Rio Nuevo.

Antenori said he’s inclined to vote with them.

The obvious question is why Republican Mayor Walkup, the six Democratic council members, Hein and other city officials didn’t meet in November or December with majority Republicans and minority Democrats to head off the threat to Tucson’s downtown plans.

The Star’s responses from Walkup, Hein and Trasoff indicate they’re in a state of denial.

City officials used similar excuses a year ago when the Colorado Rockies, who lease Hi Corbett Field and other parts of the city’s Reid Park for spring training, said they would leave if their landlord didn’t make improvements promised for nearly a decade, plus some other necessary upgrades.

Tucson officials said they didn’t have money to improve their own field, so someone else would have to pay for it.

When backers of Tucson’s annual Mariachi Conference asked council members to cut the rent for using the Tucson Convention Center, officials declined.

Fortunately, Cox Communications stepped up with a large donation to keep the conference going.

City officials regularly hear sponsors of Tucson’s various February gem shows complain about available hotel and exhibition facilities.

As Las Vegas is completing a multi-million-dollar gem skyscraper with state-of-the-art display spaces near several new hotels, Tucson continues to stall erection of a convention hotel and arena, plus rehabilitation of its convention center.

Yet local officials voiced surprise that Las Vegas was making pitches for some or all of our gem shows. One official admitted not taking the reports seriously because none of our shows have left.

Not yet, anyway.

Instead of discussing more new building requirements and higher impact and water-connection fees in a city where almost no one is building anything, Tucson officials should be talking with legislators throughout the state about the need to leave Rio Nuevo financing alone.

Walkup, the city’s titular head and only elected Republican, should lead this effort.

Instead, the mayor has been so absent from any crisis discussions that fellow party members criticize him privately.

Republican National Committeeman Bruce Ash does it publicly on his radio commentaries and in other interviews.

Above all, city officials need to actually do something.

One of them did last month. Five-term Democratic Councilman Steve Leal announced he won’t run for re-election this fall.

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 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. and from noon to 1 p.m. weekdays on The Voice KVOI 690-AM. This column appears weekly in Inside Tucson Business.