A Bunch Of Drips Battle It Out. By Emil Franzi CALL IT A growing pain. Tucson Water is digging a hole about 2,000-feet long by 50-feet wide, by 34-feet deep under Thornydale Road near Tangerine Road, roughly 15 miles north of Tucson's city limits. The purpose of this gargantuan undertaking? To supply the water needs of big new housing developments and golf courses--not for Tucson, mind you, but for the Town of Marana. According to City of Tucson officials, that water will be delivered at half its actual cost and Tucson Water ratepayers will be forced to make up the difference. Nobody seems to care. And quite possibly nobody even would have noticed this project had not Pima County Supervisor Ed Moore bolted early from a February supervisors' meeting. Moore's premature departure caused him to miss a discussion about a permit Tucson Water had requested, a permit required before the utility could tear up the county's roads and inconvenience the 2,000 or so drivers who take that route daily with a three-mile detour then expected to last for three weeks. (According to County Manager Chuck Huckelberry, the detour will cost motorists a total of about $1,200 a day, using IRS mileage calculations.) Then, several weeks ago, Moore was reportedly caught by surprise when detour signs sprouted near Thornydale and Tangerine roads, and his constituents began bitching. But Moore's latest outburst comes while he's been engaged in a lengthy war with Tucson Water. And Moore's previous wild 'n' crazy actions in that war have driven most of Tucson's so-called journalists into blindly accepting Tucson Water's version of reality--a big mistake. While the battle between Moore and Tucson Water is a little like that one between Stalin and Hitler--they could both burn in hell as far as most people were concerned--the real problem is, the ratepayers are Poland. The city's response to Moore's rampage was to sue the county, based on the logic that Tucson Water has the right to do what it pleases in other jurisdictions. City Attorney Tom Berning demanded a criminal investigation of Moore, who, Berning alleged, may have violated the county's "non-interference ordinance" when he "illegally" removed the detour signs. The "non-interference" ordinance was an ill-conceived and probably unconstitutional attempt by the Board of Supervisors to prevent self-important dorks with dictatorial tendencies like Moore from hassling county bureaucrats who are supposedly only trying to do their jobs. But allowing such a law to stand would, in effect, define the job of county supervisor as that of "county onlooker" and reduce the supervisors to the same irrelevant potted plants the members of the Tucson City Council have become. Pima County's top lawmen--Sheriff Clarence Dupnik and County Attorney Steve Neely--declined to play the city's game, so Berning's ridiculous demand for a criminal investigation went nowhere. Of course city officials shot back--cheaply--with the remark that Dupnik and Neely both must go to Moore for budget approval. The inference being they took a dive--an inference that went unchallenged by the media, revealing which side they're on in this war. On June 18 the supervisors re-addressed the situation, unanimously agreeing to compromise by granting the city 45 days--not the three months the city later decided it wanted--to complete the Thornydale Road project. While the county will have little legal recourse if the city fails to meet the new deadline, Berning threatens to play court games again if speeding up the contractor on this job costs the city more money. None of which addresses the basic question: Why don't the rapidly metastasizing Town of Marana and the developers who'll benefit pay for their own goddamn water? The answer, of course, is because the developers who control our local politicians want one humongous water company in this valley, so they don't have to bother with supply- assurance issues--no matter what it costs the rest of us. For current Tucson Water ratepayers, this corrupt utility is definitely a growing pain.

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