Tucson Weekly: The Skinny (October 2

Skinny BUT IT'S A DRY HURRICANE: As if we needed a lesson in the pathetic pack mentality of television news on the heels of Princess Dead's abrupt exit--which we most certainly didn't--Tucson's TV news clowns slap-happily obliged recently with their ridiculous coverage of Nora, the hurricane that never was.
For at least two solid days last week--Tuesday and Wednesday--the three local commercial stations pissed away precious airtime with their exhaustive coverage of this monumental dud, which should have been named Hurricane Nada.
Get it straight, TV airheads: Yeah, a hurricane would make a great story, but it's unseemly and a even a little bit sick for you to ballyhoo it with such obvious relish so far in advance. So now you look like idiots, and fewer people are likely to be paying as much attention to your blathering when a real storm comes rolling in. A simple warning during the weather segment would have sufficed. Your audience isn't composed of idiots, you know.
Or maybe you don't. KGUN-TV, Channel 9, went so far as to prominently label on-screen what it was doing as "Team Reporting." Excuse us, but every news operation is pretty much a "team" function. It's just that most news-gathering organizations don't play up that obvious aspect of the business--especially when they're covering a piddling few dark clouds in the sky. KGUN's were the stupidest newscasts we've seen in months, and that's saying quite a lot.
Wait! We take that back! The stupidest newscast we've seen in months occurred the week before Nora, when KGUN's weekend crew led their Sunday 10 p.m. show with a phone report from one of their weather men, who supposedly was all set to hitch a ride aboard a Davis-Monthan plane headed into the eye of another hurricane threatening the California coast.
Unfortunately, that flight had been canceled some time before the show--the hapless weather dude never reported precisely when--because the hurricane no longer presented a threat. However, at least two hours before, the Weather Channel had reported the storm was veering out to sea, so you'd think the crack KGUN "team" could have planned a better lede story. As it was, we could barely hear the weather guy over the lousy phone hook-up. Perhaps next time he'll call from the convenience market down the street.
And the second story that night was all about a one-car traffic accident, with sketchy details about injuries. Yeah, that's real news all right. All those Jim Click commercials are starting to look downright informative compared to this crap.
It's well past time Tucson's TV news folks came up with a new way of reporting on this community--the current paradigm is creaky with age. But all we'll probably ever see is more advanced cosmetic surgery and some stupid new slogan.
GASSED: According to recent press accounts, the Tucson "business community" has determined that we all need to pay higher gas taxes for all those roads the Growth Lobby has been feverishly creating the demand for.
Check the quotes from David Pittman's September 25 Tucson Citizen article:
"Business is coming to the conclusion that we have to do something about our traffic problems," says Charlie Bayless of the Southern Arizona Leadership Council and CEO of Tucson Electric Power. "As Tucson continues to sprawl, the problem is becoming more difficult."
Very good, Charlie.
Another member of Bayless' self-anointed "leadership" cabal is former Pima County Supervisor Katy Dusenberry, who's quoted as believing the health of the community depends on good roads. Cough, cough. Dusenberry asks state legislators to give counties new funding sources for transportation improvements. They're calling for at least a nickel increase in the state gas tax.
Now let's see--these are the same folks who tried to raise the sales tax and were slammed by the voters both times. Property taxes are maxed out, and so are bonds--with the exception of the bond proposal on November's ballot, which is careening madly out of control.
Please note that the "business community" didn't say a word about realistic impact fees on new construction as one of the sources of that much-needed road money. Once again, they'd rather have us all pay so they can keep the sprawl going.
Even though they seem to be conceding that growth is what's causing the problem, the thought of exercising some reasonable restraints has never crossed their minds. They have the political equivalent of an eating disorder and don't seem to recognize it.
THE GREAT DIVIDE: There has been considerable grumbling from many who reside in the proposed Village of Casas Adobes that the incorporation group has become a small, self-serving clique. That was probably to be expected from a group that had as its senior advisor former County Supervisor Ed Moore, who's has a penchant for backroom dealing.
The original incorporation committee formed a closed corporation, held a series of secret meetings, and made the kind of paranoid decisions you'd expect from a bunch of folks listening to Moore. Among their decisions: suing Tortolita in an attempt to screw over that town's incorporation, a lawsuit the Casans have yet to drop, even though Tortolita was incorporated by the Board of Supervisors.
Now a new group of Casas Adobes incorporation advocates has emerged. They're called Citizens for Democracy and Open Local Government, and they're highly critical of the original committee. They find the actions of Jeff Coleman and Tim Brown, the two principal leaders in the original incorporation committee, to be arbitrary, capricious and self-serving. The new group, led by Pete Tescione and Ted Schlinkert, point to the grandiose budget proposed for the new town--$28 million and a whole bunch of employees--as the reason another view is needed.
Schlinkert and Tescione are also concerned that the original group plans to get the Board of Supervisors to appoint them as the first village council. In setting up an alternative group, Tescione and Schlinkert are giving the Board some other options.
And the events have been further complicated by the formation of a political action committee by some members of the first group, who, we're told, are Moore loyalists. Apparently the original incorporators are having divisions of their own.
What impact all of this will have upon the November election among those who actually live in the proposed town has yet to be seen, but the longer this drags on, the more inclined some folks may be to vote against it, particularly as the actual costs of incorporation are debated more fully.
BATTLE OF THE BEAN COUNTERS: Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik is steaming mad. County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry, after concurring at least by omission in the costs of law enforcement to new towns via contract, suddenly came up with figures that were close to double Dupnik's estimates.
Dupnik's people had modeled proposed costs based on what the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department charges the 39 contract cities it serves.
Dupnik says the the new numbers are flawed for several reasons: They don't differentiate between high and low crime areas, and include virtually all services the Sheriff's Department now provides. Many of those services are used by currently incorporated areas, but would not be needed in some new towns. Example: The Safe Streets Program is run mainly in the City of Tucson, even though the county pays for it--not the city. Furthermore, Safe Streets would hardly be applicable in Tortolita, where there are few streets and fewer gangsters.
The driving force behind Huckelberry's more expensive full-cost-recovery model is Supervisor Raul Grijalva, a foe of most new incorporations. Interesting that Grijalva wants tons of county road money spent in the City of Tucson, which is hardly "full-cost recovery" for that service, but would deny any subsidy for cops in new towns. Millions for roads but not one cent for law enforcement?
The issue would've probably been resolved in a reasonable fashion had not the leaders of several incorporation drives gone before the Board of Supes and basically demanded to have it their way on contract services, threatening to form their own police forces as other towns have done.
Most folks have seen Dogpatch's finest and prefer doing business with Dupnik's troops. To talk about forming your own police force, or even hiring Rural Metro, just gives incorporation opponents one more reason to urge a "no" vote.
SLOSSER UNAVOIDABLE FOR COMMENT: Incorporation foes have now organized in Catalina Foothills. We've noticed that unlike Casas Adobes, Catalina Foothills organizers tried very hard to include as many people as they could in their incorporation process. Unfortunately, that isn't the perception most people have, because the only person who appears to be representing the pro-incorporation group seems to be former--and future--Board of Supes candidate Sally Slosser. Thus the impression too often given is that Catfoot is a Slosser operation.
Suggestion to Catalina Foothills folks: Find an alternative spokesperson. You're about to make Slosser the issue, not incorporation. As an all-but-announced candidate for the next Board of Supes election, she's vulnerable on the charge that her involvement is personally and politically motivated.
Should incorporation pass, Slosser will be a big winner. Should it flop, she'll be the goat.
THINGS CHANGE: So there we were, parking on Church Street to go do our workout at F.I.T., which might just be the finest workout place in the history of Spandex. Good citizens that we are, we got out some change to put in the parking meter, well aware of the fact that the City Council had recently voted to double the meter rates.
That's not all they did. Apparently, someone at City Hall has decided that the new official spelling for the name of the American five-cent coin is "NICKLE," since the meters read, "Six Minutes: Nickle."
One two-headed monster on Church sports one meter with the new spelling and the other with the spelling most everyone in America has used forever.
To commemorate the rate increase and the spelling change, we wanted to pay with nickles, but all we had were diems, qworters and a few penneys.

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