Much has been made of a report that came out at the end of 2009 ranking Tucson 95th out of 101 cities for business. Translated: Tucson was one of the 10 worst cities in the country for business.

Some of the resulting reaction has been positive, such as the Tucson GLBT Chamber of Commerce organizing the region’s nine chambers of commerce to present a powerful unified voice of common issues to local governments.

The ranking was also a reason for the recall effort against Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup and city councilwomen Regina Romero and Karin Uhlich.

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The trouble is the report by MarketWatch, a division of Dow Jones & Co. which also publishes the Wall Street Journal, is being cited for causes that have little or nothing to do with the methodology that came up with the rankings.

The rankings didn’t even consider small businesses, entrepreneurship or trying to do business with local governments.

Looking at it another way, the two biggest positives in the report were that Tucson is the corporate headquarters for UniSource Energy Corp., and Providence Service Corp., which contracts with governments to provide social services. Both companies are part of the Russell 2000 small cap stock market index.

But Tucson didn’t get credit for being the headquarters of the missile systems division of Raytheon Co. or the storage division headquarters for IBM, both major employers. The region also got no credit for the Sanofi-Aventis’ Chemical Sciences Center or Roche Holdings’ Ventana Medical, the world’s leading supplier of automated diagnostic systems to the anatomical pathology market.

It didn’t even count that Tucson is one of only two locations in the country where Stanley Inc. has a high-speed U.S. passport production facility or where Target.com operates a fulfillment center. Nor was any credit given for the fact that the La Costeña brand’s only cannery in the United States is located in Tucson.

All of those operations bring in dollars from outside the region and are valued parts of the economy. But half of the 10 metrics used by MarketWatch counted such things as how many firms a city had, per capita, that were on the most recent Fortune 1000, Forbes Private Companies, Standard & Poor’s 500 and Russell 2000 lists.

Without any headquarters on those first three lists, Tucson’s ranking was destined to be near or at the bottom. Tucson also fared 10th worst among cities using 2006 Census data measuring the concentration of companies, their satellite operations, annual payroll and employment.

Other metrics in which Tucson showed poorly were having the seventh worst job loss rate among cities since the recession began.

On the plus side, the Tucson region was among the top 20 percent of cities for population growth over the past 10 years and with a below-average unemployment rate. Tucson was also in the upper half of cities in gross domestic production, as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. 

When all of the statistics were tabulated, Tucson wound up with 298 points, one point ahead of Augusta, Ga., and five points behind Detroit. (The best in the country was Des Moines, Iowa, which got 851 points. Phoenix ranked No. 41 with 550 points.)

It’s an embarrassment to be ranked behind Detroit in any metric regarding economic development. What’s worse is that Tucson and Detroit are the only two cities that made repeat appearances among MarketWatch’s bottom 10 worst business cities. But where was the outrage a year ago?

There’s plenty to be frustrated about when it comes to doing business with local government in Tucson — especially the seemingly uncaring bureaucracy and lack of will by most elected officials to do much about it.

And while it’s important for businesses to try to change those attitudes, let’s not confuse the issue with the need for a continued push for economic development.