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 Who Not To Vote For In The Upcoming City Primary By Tucson Weekly WE'VE GIVEN UP endorsing local political candidates because most of them turn out to be such flaming boogers.
Sadly, we can count these scrupulous local pols on the fingers of one hand--while we're using one of those fingers to pick our nose. And after poking our political proboscis into the current crop of candidates for the September 16 city primary election--and subsequently probing deeply--we've discovered there are two candidates who merit, well, scrutiny. Oh, don't fret, we'll wash our hands: WARD 6. CAROL Zimmerman--Sorry, but for all her talk about how children come first--And, hey, who's going to argue with that?--we just don't trust this woman. For one thing, she's married to Peter Zimmerman, a nice guy, but also a Growth Lobby political point man and pamphleteer who received $100,000 in 1995 to defeat Proposition 200, the Water Consumer Protection Act, which nevertheless passed by 56 percent of the vote. It passed mainly because a lot of people were royally pissed about the smelly, corrosive CAP water that ruined their pipes and tasted like crap. As good as he is at what he does, even Zimmerman couldn't make that CAP crap smell like something else. This time around, however, Pete's Growth Lobby bonus bag is bulging with more than $30,000, for which he's been pushing Proposition 201 on the November ballot. This one would effectively gut the Water Consumer Protection Act, and it has few contributors as of August 27. The lion's share has come from the essence of the Growth Lobby--Broadway Realty and Fairfield Green Valley, who combined to provide $30,000 to the campaign. These self-serving special interests must not care if our children drink crappy water, as long as their businesses continue to rake in the bucks, some of which wind up in the Zimmerman household. Sure, in today's post-modern, pre-apocalyptic world it's possible for a person to have an opinion separate and distinct from his or her spouse, even when sizable fees are involved. We understand Carol has often disagreed with Pete in the past. But, tellingly, she doesn't on this one very important issue--she's the only Democrat in the Ward 6 race who supports Proposition 201.
More serious still is her unfortunate tendency to bend the truth. Last week we reported outgoing Ward 6 Councilwoman Molly McKasson's outrage upon seeing a Zimmerman campaign flyer. In it, Zimmerman took oodles of credit for things which McKasson says never happened, or which were actually accomplished by McKasson--not Zimmerman--after long struggles. Space does not permit us to repeat McKasson's many specific objections to the flyer, but we came away from this brouhaha with a great deal of distrust for Zimmerman's version of reality. For example, we wonder if she's really telling the truth when she says she turned down an endorsement from the Tucson Chamber of Commerce because she disagreed with its opposition to a recent open-space bond proposal. Could it be that Carol is simply playing the slick politician, distancing herself from this wretched--but extremely powerful--organization to garner the neighborhood vote? She needn't worry--the Growth Lobby is solidly behind her anyway. Ward 6 needs someone with a little less baggage than Carol Zimmerman. WARD 3. MICHAEL Crawford--Like Zimmerman, this guy also has a problem with the truth. Maybe because during his last two years on the City Council, he's done diddly squat for the folks in his sprawling, mostly working-class ward. In fact, his record reads like a nightmare for the average citizen, and a wet dream for the special interests: • Crawford takes credit for the city's anti-noise ordinance, which sets decibel levels that allow police to take action against various offenders. But the record clearly indicates that ordinance came about primarily due to the efforts of McKasson and Councilman Steve Leal. Crawford got involved only at the very end of the process. • He also takes credit for the creation of northwest side Balboa Park, which was really the accomplishment of the neighbors in that area. They were forced to band together because the city was doing nothing for them. • When he surfaced at the last minute recently trying to create a park near Campbell and River roads, apparently to prop up his do-nothing image before this election, the move only revealed his complete lack of relations with his constituents and his inability to work with the community. Crawford was eager to allow the bureaucrats to steamroller over any meaningful citizen participation in the process. His scheme would have ruined the natural character of a significant chunk of open space in his ward, but it sure would've looked snazzy on his campaign literature--if only the residents in the area (the very people he was supposedly trying to help) hadn't put a stop to it. • Although the issue was pulled before it came to a vote, Crawford was willing to subsidize a rich developer to the tune of $15 million to build a westside resort at Starr Pass.
• His motion effectively broke the city's word with regard to not putting a permanent landfill on the southside, thus adding more ugliness and stress to the lives of Tucson's working-class folks. • When city staffers proposed to go from two-day-a-week trash pick-ups to one, Crawford was quick to argue against holding public meetings to determine how citizens would feel about the move. "Do we need to talk to the people?" he asked rhetorically. "We know more about this than they do anyway." • And the back-to-basics program, which puts money back into local neighborhoods? Although Crawford took credit for it at a recent Nucleus Club meeting, that one came from Leal, too. • Although he eventually--and reluctantly--came around, at first he tried to help the Tucson Chamber of Commerce kill the city's Women and Minority Owned Business Ordinance. • In his role as Growth Lobby suck-up, he eagerly took the lead in putting two gravel pits, a landfill and an asphalt batch plant in a residential area along a northwest-side scenic corridor. • He voted to take half the cash away from a $200,000 project to build sun-sheltered bus benches to accommodate people in wheelchairs, directing the money instead be spent to study several minor road projects. • He's also consistently argued for grade-separated intersections. Crawford supports a city plan that would build five such intersections--at $22 million each--merely as an "experiment" to see if we like them. Excuse us, but instead of creating these experimental white elephants at a total cost of $110 million, couldn't he better spend our increasingly scarce transportation dollars on tried-and-true projects that would provide far greater benefits to his ward and the city at large--say an efficient jitney service or something? • He voted to increase fares on the wildly inefficient SunTran bus system, thus further oppressing working men and women. And he was quick to call for replacing striking bus drivers with scabs, apparently oblivious to the SunTran drivers' strong arguments about the relative unfairness of their low city wages compared to other city employees. • In an apparent effort to suck up to the good ol' boys in Tucson's film industry, Crawford allowed his staff to ruin the perfectly good city Film Office, bad-mouthing its competent, fair-minded director, Tom Hilderbrand, to other municipal film officials around the nation. Hilderbrand quit in disgust. The movie business here is now deep in the toilet, with virtually no chance of a quick recovery as long as the Film Office, which formerly reported to the city manager, remains under the control of its new overseer, the city's special interest-ridden Economic Development Office. • In an era when the Tucson City Council and the Pima County Board of Supervisors should be working together more closely to deal with our area's exploding growth, Crawford, who seems at times not fully mature, is repeatedly accusatory and antagonistic toward the county and the supervisors. His attitudes and actions have further strained an already difficult relationship. • He also defended to the end former city manager Michael Brown, who was removed, in part, for mishandling Tucson Water, and for taking millions of dollars that could have gone to aid the more stressed parts of the city--including neighborhoods in Crawford's ward--and instead using the money to cut deals to for annexations to further sprawl. • Crawford's chief aide, Ted Abrams, is a lawyer and son of prominent developer Stan Abrams. Crawford, a lawyer himself, hires only lawyers as aides, and pays them at the top of the city scale--a sort of young lawyer welfare relief program. We wonder how the secretaries in his office feel about their pay. • Crawford pushed for a rezoning in his ward to put an auto body repair shop, with its noxious and potentially harmful fumes, next to an apartment complex. He also pushed for a couple of ill-advised liquor licenses on South Sixth Avenue, despite the protests of residents, who complained of a possible increase in crime. The other council members eventually voted these down. • Finally, Crawford's done absolutely nothing for our kids, and nothing for our schools. ZIMMERMAN AND Crawford have run the best-financed, slickest campaigns in the primary election. Given the poor job the daily press does of covering local issues, as well as the voter apathy among our highly transient population, unless we vote wisely on September 16, these two unworthy candidates will probably win. That would be too bad. It would mean the people will get lip service and thin soup, and the Growth Lobby and special interests will continue to have their way with the city's future. The deck will be stacked against meaningful community participation, and the unjust distribution of city resources will continue.
Tucson's two-bit robber barons will continue their long, sleazy
celebration of greed.
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Of course, there are a few good politicians around who've earned
our respect. A few. They're honest people who speak the truth
plainly and work like hell to fulfill their campaign promises
to promote the general welfare; folks who successfully resist
the easy slide into whoredom for this cowtown's Growth Lobby and
other self-appointed privileged classes.
Furthermore, since we first pointed out this obvious fact, she's
declined to participate in any more interviews with The Weekly.
You can run, Carol, but you can't hide.
• He's argued against additional police protection in the
parks in the Catalina and Santa Rita neighborhoods, which have
suffered from serious homeless problems. Guess he'll change his
tune when those problems surface in his ward.
