Tucson Weekly: Wildcat Fever (July 23

This week's winner!
By Various Spies
THIS WEEK'S WINNER comes from Brenda Even, the eight-year member of the Tucson Unified School District Board who's hoping to oust Ray Carroll from the Pima County Board of Supervisors seat once held by her late husband. Even's legendary strategy (or peculiar habit) of answering questions by promising to study the particular problem has been well documented by The Weekly. She earns recognition for fumbling a relatively easy development question about rural lot splitting, known as wildcat subdivisions. She offered this windy take to the Pima County Republican Club on July 7:
"Well, that is something that deals with those areas that can, in fact, be subdivided, uh, privately subdivided into at least five different lots that can then be built up. What I'd be concerned with is, we don't really have any regulations that are watching them and taking note of what they are doing. I don't know if they are as, what--I guess my best way to say that, my kindest way is, I don't know how well they are being observed, how much they have to follow all of the zoning requirements and all of the, uh, the word escapes me, I knew it would, but I don't believe they have to follow through as well on roads or sewers, roads, sewers, et cetera, as far as all of the infrastructure that is needed in the area. And, if in fact, uh, they are doing all of that and each one is doing all of that, that's fine. I'm not sure that is the case. In fact, I know it is not. And that's why I've commented on that. I think you needed to have stronger regulations for such development areas. I guess basically what I would say is that we may want to limit how much the lot can be split. That's one thing. I think we also have to be sure that we follow through and make sure that all of the infrastructure is, in fact, included and that none of the elements that we as taxpayers would have to pay for in terms of such infrastructure would be taken care of. So I think that, I think that, applies to others who are in other development areas as well. So I'm not trying to say that they have to be different from. I just think they have to be equal to."

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