The problem with the City of Tucson is and always has been the City Council. No one would ever accuse them of being our region’s best and brightest let alone a group you’d want making policy that affects you profoundly. Examples abound and they just keep on coming.
This is a city whose officials somehow managed to obscure $15 million on the cost of its new Fourth Avenue underpass. They didn’t seem to think the $15 million was properly considered part of the costs of construction since it was not for actual concrete but for design, inspections, testing, and $5 million for walking-around money. What’s the point of having a budget if you don’t adhere to it?
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And which genius decided that the underpass needed to include the trolley that goes from nowhere to nowhere else? If we insist on being the old, old, Old Pueblo, why use trolleys? Horses would be more authentic.
I didn’t measure the clearance, but it didn’t look any greater than the Stone Avenue underpass and somebody routinely rips the roof off a truck about once a year in there. But this underpass has the added attraction of a high voltage overhead wire to power the trolley and streetcar. So when a truck gets stuck under the bridge, it will contact the wire and – well, you can imagine.
I went and took another look at the thing through the eyes of a person who will be contributing to the cost of it and I must say, it didn’t look like $46 million to me. But that’s just a lay opinion.
I suppose it is important to preserve the historic elements of our community. But where are the modern, futuristic elements that would attract more businesses than retirees? Will tourists come from far and wide to see our trolley car? If we had a teleportation device beaming people up and down Fourth Avenue, people would want to see that!
It’s nice that some magazine rated Tucson No. 1 for retirement, but is that the image we want? A bit less lingering over the past and a few more on the future would be helpful.
And then there’s Rio Nuevo. ‘Nuff said.
And who can overlook the fiasco just brewed over preferential rent concessions for businesses in the Historic Depot?
So you see, Mike, it doesn’t matter how the majority in each of the wards vote. Whichever way they do it, we will not achieve any more than token Republican representation. There will be no accountability to the Foothills residents.
It isn’t the comparative tax rates. It isn’t even the services the city provides that Foothills residents must pay for à la carte. It is that Foothills residents just have no confidence in the kind of people usually elected to the City Council. They just don’t have vision. They don’t seem to have the experience. They don’t present feasible ideas for the future of the city. What few ideas they offer are usually harebrained. They spend money on them and then they founder.
Foothills residents — and a great many others living outside the limits of the city of Tucson — are just not willing to let the City Council loose with their money. They can’t be trusted to know how to handle it.
To paraphrase a particularly bad comic, “They’re not good enough, and they’re not smart enough, but doggone it, people like them.”
Well, that’s not enough.
Last week, Inside Tucson Business editorially identified Tucson City Hall as the obstacle to revitalization of downtown, especially citing favoritism.
When Catalina Foothills residents perceive the city government is better than the county government, they will consent to annexation. Until then, forget it.
Contact Lionel Waxman at territorial@waxmanmedia.com or visit his website: www.newflashpoint.com.
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