Tucson Weekly: The Skinny (August 14

CAN COPELAND COPE? Republican Dan Copeland has found a new treasurer to replace Mary Preble, who resigned after alleging that Copeland was accepting contributions without keeping accurate records regarding his campaign finances.
The new treasurer of the Copeland campaign is Dan Copeland himself.
Preble isn't the only member of Copeland's staff to defect in recent weeks. His campaign chairman, Vernon Lewis, stepped down at the end of July without citing a reason for his resignation.
Copeland has also found a new chairman for his campaign: Dan Copeland.
Copeland's inability to staff his campaign with anyone besides himself suggests his campaign isn't exactly charging ahead with the momentum of a runaway freight train. Copeland himself won't return our phone calls, which makes us wonder how much more he has to hide. He has yet to file a campaign finance form with the City Clerk's Office, despite telling us he planned to do so on August 5. City Clerk Kathy Detrick has notified him via registered mail that his campaign may be in violation of Arizona campaign finance law.
The long arm of the law may be closing in: Preble says last week she spoke with a detective from the Tucson Police Department, who's now investigating Copeland's fundraising activities.
WELCOME TO VICKIVILLE: Real estate broker Vicki Cox-Golder, who lost her bid for the Board of Supervisors last year, is now leading the charge for incorporation of the Catalina area in northwestern Pima County.
Cox-Golder, who's also said to be planning a bid for the state House of Representatives in District 12, faces an uphill struggle in the incorporation move, because many Catalina residents seem opposed to the idea. And unlike Casas Adobes, Foothills, Tortolita, and Tanque Verde, Catalina isn't facing a hostile incursion from Tucson, Marana or Oro Valley.
Skinny In fact, Catalina would appear to be the one place even the Town of Oro Valley doesn't covet. And Catalina already gets above-average county services. There's a Pima County Sheriff's substation keeping response time down, and a state highway running down the middle of town that locals will never have to maintain. So most Catalina residents see no advantage in coughing up another 2 percent on their sales tax to suffer under a new layer of government.
So why do Cox-Golder and a few others want to incorporate?
She may have revealed her true motivation in a recent Tucson Citizen interview, in which she noted that as a town, Catalina would have "bonding authority."
Oh yeah? For what? With bonding authority, you can sell bonds for projects and then pay off the bonds with a local property tax. Gee, wonder what Vicki has in mind that might improve the value of her and her husband's large land holdings in the area?
MIKEY DUMPS ON FOOTHILLS RESIDENTS: The Pima County Board of Supervisors voted--twice--on the issue of how the county will fight the City of Tucson's lawsuit to void the statute allowing new cities to incorporate. On both occasions, Mikey "The Flaky Waffleman" Boyd voted for minimum participation by the county, which is the defendant in the suit.
Boyd opposed the county's hiring outside counsel, arguing that expenses should be paid for by the communities attempting to incorporate. Only problem with that logic: Those communities are not yet legal entities, and Pima County is the city's legal target. The suit would prohibit the infant communities' recognition by Pima County after all the current legal requirements are met--so for Pima County to take a dive on the lawsuit, as Boyd desires, would let the city win it.
In taking this position, Boyd dumps on the heavily Republican portion of his district that's pushing for incorporation, setting himself up for an election-day rematch with one of the incorporation leaders, Sally Slosser, who gave Boyd a run for his money in the 1996 GOP primary.
We'd like to say Boyd did this out of a courageous belief in some principle, but we're talking Mike Boyd here--he's never had an original thought, let alone fought for one. We chalk this up to bad political analysis, combined with an attempt to suck up to his biggest political ally, Democrat Supervisor Raul Grijalva, who generally opposes new incorporations and defends the city's position.
THERE'S NOTHING THE MATTER WITH A JOB AT THE STAR THAT A MASSIVE DOSE OF PROZAC WOULDN'T HELP: The latest piece of bureaucratic idiocy at The Arizona Daily Star helps further explain why the daily is as dull as it is. Seems one reporter called another reporter a "dork" in the newsroom. We're told Star brass saw that as a major breach of Star etiquette. They not only reprimanded her, but made her undergo counseling sessions--in other words, mandatory brain-washing. Another reporter observed aloud that this was "bullshit," and was also reprimanded. For the record, both reporters were Hispanic females.
Someday, perhaps, Star brass will try encouraging reporting for a change, and stop wasting its time on stupid micro-management minutiae. Besides, there's more than one dork over there.
SCUT WORK: While we're weary of correcting Insipid Tucson Business "editor" Rod Smith's hackneyed Scuttlebutt column, we feel we must, once again, set the record straight on a few items he published this week.
Our favorite local copycat suggested that a cadre of mysterious "guys" were considering suing our little publication. "Devaluing The Weekly, printed by Thomson Newspapers in Phoenix, with the expense, so the strategy goes, would make a local buyout possible."
First off, we're astonished anyone--particularly someone who thought we needed help with our grammar--would willingly publish such a hopelessly mangled sentence. That aside, we'd like to point out that The Weekly is locally owned and assembled in the heart of downtown Tucson. (In fact, last time we checked, it was Rod's rag that was owned by a Sierra Vista-based corporation, Wick Communications--which, come to think of it, has expressed an interest in us in the past.) We'd love to have it printed here in town but, as you've no doubt noticed, The Weekly is a thing of terrible beauty, and the press over at Territorial Newspapers is--quite frankly--simply too lousy to handle our baby's demands. And, for reasons that are obvious enough, we're just not ready to get into bed with Tucson Newspapers, Inc., just yet.
More importantly: We're sure "Bent" Rod and his Growth Lobby pals would love to shut us up, because we have this horrible habit about revealing unpleasant things about powerful people--things they'd much rather you not know. With us out of the way, they could get back to their usual business of quietly blading and grading the desert, at taxpayer expense whenever possible.
That crowd can threaten all the lawsuits they want, but it won't deter us from telling our readers about the fixes, the scams and the dirty deeds across our valley. It's a sad truth in journalism today that threatened lawsuits hamstring too many newsgathering organizations, scaring them away from controversial investigative stories and steering them toward some sick little watered-down "positive press." The result is all too dismally on display in our daily newspapers and on our television screens.
To see Rod cheering such an approach only confirms that he's at best a second-rate PR flack who has no business running a newspaper.
JIM'S PERFECT RECORD REMAINS UNBLEMISHED: KVOA-TV, Channel 4, reporter Nancy Harrison called the other day to inform us that rumor we mentioned last week--that her story on the Jim Click Automotive service department had been suppressed--was just that, a rumor. Harrison said she's never done such a story.
Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw any TV or daily newspaper reporter in this town do a story about the quality of service at any local car dealership?

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