Last Wednesday (Feb. 18), about the time I normally would have been reading Steve Emerine’s weekly Valley Views column before editing, I was instead attending his memorial services.

I had come to look forward to Wednesdays as a highlight of my workweek. Emerine brought so much to those columns; he knew the players, he had the institutional memory and he certainly had a viewpoint.    

Aside from the shock of his untimely death, I’m still in a state of denial. What divine providence would take Emerine from us right now?

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Think of all that is going on that could be fodder for his weekly commentaries. The ironic timing. As a former Pima County Assessor (1973 - 1980), Emerine went in for surgery this month the same week the assessor’s office sent out the latest notices of property valuations for tax assessments. Mostly, the valuations were down. But what did that mean? I couldn’t turn to Emerine to ask.

The city of Tucson is going through another rough patch regarding downtown redevelopment facing state lawmakers who want to take away at least some of the funding mechanism for the latest efforts. I can’t think of another issue where Emerine’s institutional memory was more important (as is shown by the reprint on page 5 of his first Inside Tucson Business column from June 20, 2005). 

Emerine loved Spring Training and I believe he was truly discouraged by local politicos and bureaucrats who outwardly showed little concern over the real threats of losing the annual March visits from Major League Baseball teams.

Soon we would have seen Emerine begin to rally the notion for candidates to step forward for this year’s City Council elections. He had already written a column arguing in favor of legislation being sponsored by state Sen. Jonathan Paton, R-Tucson, that would change Tucson’s city elections to non-partisian.

The best part, though, was just talking with Emerine – listening to what he had heard, bouncing ideas off him and asking him for help tracking down stories. Indeed, I was doing that very thing the week before he went in for surgery. He said the surgery was nothing that would keep him from producing his weekly columns. As I noted in this space last week, that was not to be the case.

Emerine seemed more concerned and frustrated over what the economy was doing to the media. He used an expletive when we talked of the layoffs at Clear Channel last month that cost Dave Sitton his position as vice president of the Southern Arizona for the billboard division. In what turned out to be his penultimate column, Emerine lamented the pending shutdown of the Tucson Citizen and the talented individuals there who would be put out of work.

Sadly, Emerine’s throught-provoking commentary is print media at its best. Not a week went by that someone, somewhere didn’t tell me how much they appreciated Emerine’s point of view in Inside Tucson Business as something that was missing elsewhere.

I can only imagine how much his family and closest friends miss him on a personal level. The rest of us should be thankful for the gift we had in Steve Emerine while we had him. We’re going to miss him too.

 E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com.Contact David Hatfield at dhatfield@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4237.