Suppose you bought some real estate from someone and that someone asked if he or she could leave a few items for a while in a storage shed on the property. You’re a magnanimous person and say it’s OK. But that little while turns into months, then years.

After a year of the previous owner and coming and going and using the storage shed, you decide that something should be done. You call up the previous owner and ask them what they’re going to do with their stuff. They tell you they want to keep it right where it is. But it’s your property and you don’t like that idea. You tell them to either come get it or start paying a storage fee.

They argue they’re entitled to keep using it and if you don’t let them, they’re going to take it back.

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Sound far-fetched? Well, that’s what’s been happening with the Rialto Theatre in downtown Tucson. We can’t take credit for the analogy. Somebody called us and used it. But it is a good one for this case. 

At one point the key players in the current management of the Rialto Theatre, including the theater’s executive Doug Biggers, owned most of the block surrounding the theater. While the City of Tucson’s Rio Nuevo district acquired the theater building itself, most of the rest of the block was sold is now owned by Scott Stiteler and Don Martin who wanted to develop a multi-million arts and entertainment complex there.

Through a bungled and drawn-out negotiating process, the foundation running the Rialto Theatre insisted they needed to take back ownership of a side building being used for storage and a separate building it was using for offices and a green room.

Despite the fact that all concerned knew there was a looming deadline - it was June 17 - negotiations went down to the wire with a final version of the complicated document delivered to all concerned the Friday before a Tuesday meeting that was the City Council’s last opportunity to approve it before the deadline.

Partly because the agreement was too complicated and confusing, the council members unanimously voted to delay action.

But that was the final straw in the negotiations. Stiteler and Martin said enough is enough. They had bargained in good faith to a deal that was worth significantly less to them than what it had been initially. It got to the point that it was a borderline call for them to pursue it.

Stiteler and Martin still own the surrounding property and can look to developing it in other ways. But it’s their property and now they want to collect rent from the Rialto or get the theater to move out of their buildings.

As the carousel continued spinning last week, the city council voted to begin looking into taking Stiteler’s and Martin’s property by eminent domain. And guess who is going to pay for the appraisal? None other than the Rialto Theatre Foundation.

Going back to our analogy, the lesson city leaders are trying to enforce would be that you were the stupid person in the first place for buying the property.

Of course now that we know what kind of people we’re talking about, we can only imagine how many more decades it will be before anyone else wants to deal with the city on a downtown project.