PATHETIC POLITICOS: The Tucson City Council finally managed to figure out how to look as petty and stupid as the Pima County Board of Supes: They booted Councilwoman Molly McKasson from City Hall at the request of Mayor George Miller. This, of course, indicates the same pathetic lack of priorities for which the supervisors are well-known. The real reason for this action is that Miller is pissed off at Molly, particularly since she supported the Citizen's Water Initiative last November. It's one more example of the real George Miller--a petty, vindictive, nasty man. Unfortunately, the rest of the council chose to join him in being petty, vindictive and nasty in dumping on McKasson and making her move--at taxpayer expense. This sorry episode raises some questions: When a council member's ward is reapportioned, will she have to move again if the office isn't properly located? Was Miller goosey about having Molly's friends on the same floor as his because they could see with whom he was spending his time? And the big question: Just exactly why is it so damned important to have a council office in the ward? Theoretically, that should make it easier for some constituents to meet with their council member, but it also makes it harder for those same council members to monitor the activities of city bureaucrats bent on screwing over those same constituents. Maybe when the rest of the council gets the brown stains washed off their noses from kissing Miller's ass, they can decide what they're going to do about a city manager, a chief of police, an annexation head and a city water director who've been making their own policies for some time and who could care less what any council member thinks about anything. Perhaps an appropriate move would be to house all of them with Molly, who has become the only council member who's not a de facto rubber stamp for an increasingly arrogant bureaucracy. AND SPEAKING OF ARROGANT BUREAUCRATS: Tucson Convention Center officials continue to bitch about losing money, and now they want to charge citizens more for using the joint. City Manger Mike "The Spike" Brown hired a new out-of-town director for us, Daniel Huerta from Dallas, for more than $100,000 a year. We also should report Huerta has three deputy directors now--Clarence Boykin, Joe Rzonka and Juanita Williams--all drawing more than $70,000 each per year. And we thought big American corporate CEO's were the only waste in the current economy. Hey, sleeping council members--that's almost $400,000 a year with bennies. Can you spell "budget"? MIKEY THE FLAKY WAFFLEMAN: The Pima County Board of Supes recently re-elected Paul Marsh chairman 3-to-2 on a straight party vote. After months of whining that Marsh is an ineffective chair who allows Supervisor Special Ed Moore to get away with murder, sometimes-GOP Supe Mike Boyd voted to keep Marsh in that chair. It's clear that Mikey's support, like the rest of Mikey, doesn't run very deep. At the very next Supes meeting, Marsh was trying to get the rest of his colleagues to appoint members to his newly formed Citizen's Budget Review Committee, which the two Demo supes, Raul Grijalva and Dan Eckstrom, refuse to support and have labeled a subterfuge showcase. Marsh's attempt died on a 2-to-2 vote, with Boyd having left the meeting early, lending credence to the rumor that Mikey's handlers have told him to avoid looking like he's supporting Marsh and Moore too much, but also to avoid continual confrontation with them. So Mikey just took a walk. Expect a lot more of that between now and the September primary. HOW TO SAVE MONEY BY SUBSIDIZING MORE LAWYERS: Pima County Supervisor Special Ed Moore's voodoo economics never cease to amaze us. He's led the charge to subsidize more lawyers than any other local politician in history, including some of the lawyer-politicians. From the attorneys hired to handle the "trial" of former County Assessor Alan Lang to the $300,000 spent to defend the actions of Moore and his pathetic GOP toadies when they took over and fired a whole bunch of top-level staff in early 1993, Ed ought to be voted Bar Association Wacko of the Decade. Here's the latest. He wants to cut a special deal for an outfit called the National Law Center for Inter-American Free Trade and let them occupy space below cost in the former Great American Tower. The cost of remodeling the space to house these people is about $250,000. They're currently living in squalor at the offices of the Miller-Pitt law firm around the corner. And you thought NAFTA only screwed us out of jobs. Seems we now have to pay for space for lawyers to study it. Fortunately this one requires a unanimous vote of the entire board, and we're hoping there's at least one sane member when Ed tries for his latest giveaway. SOAKING THE MASSES: The geniuses who run the Central Arizona Water Conservation District--a bunch of clowns we get to vote against soon because, although obscure, they're duly elected officials--have decided CAP water has an image problem. No kidding, folks: It has an image problem because it has a reality problem--it stinks. So how do these Sherlocks decide to fix the problem? By granting a $60,000 public relations contract to an establishment Phoenix PR firm, Nelson, Robb, Duval and DeMenna, to convince us this horse piss is really good for us after all. Turns out the conservation district drips already have a full-time public information officer, also hired with our tax money, but that clearly isn't enough. They need the big PR guns from Phoenix to really sell this gunk to the rubes in Tucson. WASHED UP LEADERSHIP: Tell us we're dreaming. Last November the voters of Tucson overwhelmingly approved Proposition 200, which required that various, non-drinking options be looked at for CAP water. But on January 8, the Tucson City Council, by a vote of 5 to 2, decided people will drink CAP water. Maybe not now, maybe not in the next few years, but eventually we will drink it, the Council has declared. Pardon our asking, but wasn't one of the points of Proposition 200 that the Council should at least consider non-drinking uses for CAP? Plus, if the decision has been made to drink this crap, why fool around with all the PR and a bunch of fake public hearings? Just tell the voters they're stupid, they did a no-no when they voted for Prop 200, and George Miller and his cohorts will take care of all our water problems, just like they did in the past. The Council's vote was ostensibly to convince the feds to build a reservoir for CAP water, because the people of Tucson somehow "deserve" a lake. Guess what, folks: We've squandered our ground water on golf courses and plowed over the native vegetation in favor of the green lawns gracing our stucco houses. Every time we have to choose between a homebuilder's profit and preserving our natural resources, our elected officials roll over for the developer. Anyone remember Honeybee Canyon? Maybe we should spend more time trying to preserve the Sonoran Desert and less time trying to build theme parks. To suggest we "deserve" to have water piped across the entire state so it can evaporate in Lake Kino is nothing short of folly. CAMPUS CREEP: Now that the location of the University of Arizona's new school, Sprawl U, has been set at the IBM site way the hell out on the southeast side, the City of Tucson can begin falling all over itself on annexing the area. After all, if city taxpayers can provide free fire service and unlimited staff support on projects and pick up half the tab for a seemingly endless array of consultants to do planning for the UA's main campus, then why not do the same for the new folks? Within a few years the administrators of Sprawl U will be whining about the lack of public transportation to their campus. They'll want roads built to make access faster, as if having the place half-way to Benson doesn't have something to do with it. Plus they'll have a laundry list of other expensive "requests" from the city. Here's betting that your city administration gives them everything they want. They'll be very understanding of the Board of Regents regrets that a downtown campus just wasn't feasible, even if it was in the best interest of the community. Then the city will go spend your tax money subsidizing the new campus. SMALL WORLD: The Skinny goofed a few weeks ago when we mentioned that the state's mighty Constitutional Defense Council had voted to give $10,000 to the Defenders of property rights to help Nevada's Nye County battle the federal government. The actual amount was $20,000--twice what we reported. And friends tell us that Defenders of Property Rights is run by the husband-and-wife team of Roger and Nancie Marzulla. Roger is a Washington, D.C., lawyer who works for the firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld--the same law firm that employs attorney John Dowd, who is defending none other than Gov. J. Fife Deadbeat III against all those criminal allegations. In his bankruptcy filing, Symington reported owing the firm $666,397. You might recall he recently set up a legal defense fund to pay 'em off--maybe the CDC can kick in a few bucks. By the way, we're not the only ones who were dismayed by the CDC's decision to contribute to the Nye County action. The state attorney general's office wasn't too thrilled, either. "This is not an Arizona issue, it's not something that's affecting us right now," an AG spokeswoman tells us. "Our advice would have been to stand back and look at it a little while longer.... I don't know we really needed to jump over state lines and jump into that one." Democrats in the state Legislature, incidentally, have sponsored a bill to eliminate the CDC. Don't count on that one making it out of committee.

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