Tucson Weekly: The Skinny (July 31

COPELAND CALLING IT QUITS? Republican Dan Copeland's campaign for the Ward 3 City Council seat hit a rough patch last week when campaign treasurer Mary Preble quit.
Preble, daughter of state Rep. Lou-Ann Preble, sent out a stinging resignation letter, alleging numerous violations of campaign finance laws. The letter was peppered with harsh assessments of Copeland and his campaign, including:

"How fortunate for you that every step of the way you have laughed at the laws and people of this community as you put your hand out, took thousands of dollars pretending to be a true candidate."

"I have three children and I know what a dirty diaper smells like."

"One thing is clear. The community cannot afford another con-artist tampering with the public trust."

Preble, who couldn't be reached for comment, detailed in the letter her struggle to get a list of contributors to the campaign and receipts for expenses from Copeland, who has yet to file a campaign finance report with the City Clerk's Office.
Copeland didn't return our phone calls, but our receptionist did get a call from a man who identified himself only as a member of Copeland's campaign team. Our mystery man told us Copeland was in Atlanta on a business trip and that he would be happy to respond to Preble's allegations when he returned.
But one GOP insider tells The Skinny that Copeland will be dropping out of the race sometime later this week.
Skinny OH, NEVER MIND: GOP state Rep. Freddie Hershberger is a nice lady who has generally served her northside district well. But she has to have made one of the dumbest admissions in the history of local politics--and that includes some stiff competition.
Seems Hershberger co-sponsored that controversial bit of legislation that allows new cities and towns to incorporate right next to the borders of existing ones. The law has drawn fire from the likes of Tucson Mayor George Miller, who thinks anybody in the valley who drives through the City of Tucson should be part of it. Hershberger told The Arizona Daily Star she didn't know the bill eliminated any boundary requirement for incorporation; she thought all it did was cut the old six-mile limit to three.
While we don't expect our state representatives to read all the bills that come before them, particularly the amendments thrown in late, we don't believe it's asking too much for them to at least read the ones they're sponsoring themselves.
TV SNOOZE RATINGS: The latest Nielsen ratings are in for local TV news programs: KVOA-TV, Channel 4, is still king of the hill in all four time slots--noon, 5 p.m., 6 p.m., and 10 p.m. Or maybe we should call them king of the molehill, because the dwindling number of local news viewers out there ought to worry the broadcast bozos.
KGUN-TV, Channel 9, is running second in all four local news slots, with KOLD-TV, Channel 13, in its traditional last place. But with the exception of the 6 p.m. slot, the difference between KGUN and KOLD is close. At 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., KVOA has about the same audience as the other two put together, meaning both KGUN and KOLD have pissed away a whole lot of money hiring overpaid consultants and shuffling their over-coifed, plastic Ken and Barbie doll anchors all for naught.
Cumulatively, all three stations are getting kicked in the ass. Only 26 percent of all households watch any of the three local newscasts at 5 p.m., 21 percent at 6 p.m., 31 percent at 10 p.m., and 13 percent at noon. Many of these are the same households watch more than one newscast, so the real news about these numbers is that most people don't watch any of them at all!
The real problem they all face is that the cumulative share of network viewing is slipping off to cable, the Internet and other news sources.
But, gee, that shouldn't affect local TV news, because their only journalistic competition is two weak daily papers. In all these time slots the stations' only real competition is each other--and even with that leg up they still get less than half the population to tune in.
Could it be they're all doing something wrong? Like running an over-abundance of inane consumer and health reports, ass-kissing puff pieces and car crashes while failing to budget for genuine investigative work that could win some bored and disgusted viewers back? As local broadcasters pander to the lowest common denominator, they've blown off the rest of us.
AND SPEAKING OF PISS-POOR NEWSPAPERS: There's going to be a primary election for the Tucson City Council in one month, but you wouldn't know it from reading our town's establishment dailies or watching television news. News directors and editors apparently consider it a non-event, and other than an occasional comment from Tom Beal, The Arizona Daily Star's longtime political columnist, or David Pittman, the Tucson Citizen's supposed political reporter, the Council races might just as well be a school board race in Indian Oasis.
Two years ago we were whining that Star only gave candidates a crummy little box when they announced for office. Now that rag doesn't give them any space at all. We used to rag on the ineptitude of the Star's political reporter. Now they don't even have one. His salary was probably eaten up by a consultant hired to tell them why readership penetration is declining.
WELCOME TO SUBSIDY CITY. MAY WE TAKE YOUR ORDER, PLEASE? Like a strange dumpling burbling to the top of a fetid kettle of toad's brain soup, the weird idea has resurfaced that Tucson taxpayers should subsidize that proposed near-westside luxury resort out of potential sales tax revenue.
Mayor George Miller and, oddly enough, Councilman José Ibarra are apparently supporting the plan along with professional developer stooge Michael Crawford--Miller because he loves that big-government crap, and Ibarra because he thinks it will buy lower housing densities in his ward.
Councilmembers Steve Leal, Molly McKasson, and possibly Janet Marcus are opposed to subsidizing yet another greedy, rich company. And Councilwoman Shirley Scott, in an apparent case of her innate fiscal conservatism becoming tangled in her own bourgeois pretensions, appears undecided at the moment.
So here's something to think about, Shirley: If you subsidize a near-westside resort, that move will make it damn near fiscally impossible for anyone to build a decent hotel downtown, next to the Convention Center where accommodations are really needed, for years to come. Uh, unless you plan on subsidizing that one, too.
The developers claim the city will make millions and millions off the sales taxes associated with their proposed resort over the next 10 years, and they're probably right. But they want a big, fat wad of that cash up front. We say, if you're going to sell these arrogant dudes our farm, why not do it one year at a time--pay them, if you must, whatever they want, but only after we taxpayers have gotten our cut.
Of course, if the developers' figures are pure BS, as we suspect, they'll back away from that corral quicker than a Southern Baptist at the naked-lesbian rodeo.
Furthermore, any money the city makes from such a deal, however ill-conceived, should go toward rehabbing downtown Tucson into a vibrant business and fun spot. We say it's time Tucson got serious about revitalizing its barely palpitating heart, too. Downtown Saturday Night and the arts community have done a great job so far, but it's time to take the whole shebang to a higher level.
One small example: Why the hell can't we figure out some way to shade a few measly downtown streets during our wretched summers as a way of boosting foot traffic and encouraging trade to blossom?
COPYCATFIGHT: Regular readers may recall that last week we showed how Inside Tucson Business editor "Odd" Rod Smith, who pens a breathtakingly irrelevant column called Scuttlebutt, ran an item that was, word for word, nearly identical with a Skinny niblet that had been published more than a week earlier. This week, Smith fired back at The Weekly in his July 28 column.
While Rod didn't really address the curious similarities between the two columns, he did say that "the guys uptown think Scuttlebutt has no better source for what's happening than The Skinny... we were flattered by the attention and welcome them as readers."
Didn't you mean to welcome us as writers, Rod?
Rod's weak defense was accompanied by a cartoon featuring an overweight, tie-wearing Skinny editor sleeping at a donut-covered desk with a copy of Inside Tucson Business across his eyes. While we do tend to nod off when reading Inside Tucson Business (who doesn't?), we'd like to say we find the cartoon inaccurate because nobody around here ever wears a tie (unless we're supposed to make a TV appearance).
Rod's column also critiqued another Skinny item, which reported that Zimmerman and Associates, the public relations firm that Ward 6 City Council candidate Carol Zimmerman co-owns with her husband Pete, has been paid close to $24,000 from Safe and Sensible Water, a Growth-Lobby-supported political committee which is seeking to overturn the successful 1995 initiative that banned direct delivery of CAP water. Hey, we think that's the kind of news you ought to know before you cast a vote, even if none of the other papers in town gives a damn.
Rod had a different spin: He said The Skinny sounded "like the Republicans attacking Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 over his little dog Fala." Well, to the best of our knowledge, Fala never made $24,000 working on a political campaign.
Scuttlebutt took a third shot at The Skinny for our suspicion that the so-called "leaders" on the recently created Southern Arizona Leadership Council were essentially political powerhouses who had one main goal in mind: supporting the Tucson Growth Machine.
Rod was positively glowing with the plutocratic possibilities: "There is always the potential for progress when the likes of Charlie Bayless, David Wright, Greg Shelton, David Mehl, Hank Amos, Larry Aldrich and Si Schorr get together." Yeah, right--and when you're done kissing the big boys' asses, Rod, why don'tcha ask the folks in Marana about how they get screwed by folks like Schorr and Mehl every time they try to overturn a rezoning decision by the Dogpatch Town Council? Hey, we don't doubt these fat cats have political muscle--we just think that when they flex it, it's usually so taxpayers can help them get richer.
Finally, Rod found something to talk about besides The Skinny--he mentioned that Mayor George Miller had to move his car during a GTEC meeting at La Paloma. Stop the presses!
Given that 75 percent of Rod's column was based on stuff he'd read in our pages--and the remaining quarter was pointless drivel--we're pretty sure Scuttlebutt doesn't have a better source for what's happening in this town than right here in The Skinny. Cheers!

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