Best Political Happening
READERS' PICK: If you folks have ever taken political power into your own hands, it was when you got together and booted County Assessor Alan Lang out of office two years into his first term. Lang was a drunken bully who reveled in his power to torment women and abuse his other employees. He and his cronies happily twisted the values of our property, forcing them up while handing out big breaks to their rich friends--all while a bunch of attorneys and consultants made a bundle in the process. After the Board of Supervisors spent hundreds of thousands of your dollars on public hearings to prove they were incapable of doing anything, you put together a recall and then didn't let a half-dozen candidates derail your true objective: kicking the sonofabitch out of the county courthouse and into the street.STAFF PICK: The voters defeated Proposition 300. An all-too-vague word for a complex concept, "takings" is shorthand for private property-takings legislation, which is all the rage with the GOP these days. Proponents of takings laws believe that if the government enacts a regulation that causes a property owner to lose some of the value of his property, then the government owes him for the loss. A simple enough concept, until you consider the result of such a law--mainly, entangling the regulatory process in so much red tape that government agencies can no longer afford to enact or enforce rules to safeguard the health and welfare of most citizens. As an added bonus, we'd get to financially reimburse property owners who claim their land is worthless because some damn rule says they can't build toxic waste dumps over the aquifers on their property, robbing them of all those potential hazwaste plant profits. In short, it means good-bye to the Endangered Species Act, good-bye to wetlands protection, good-bye to food inspection. Takings is subtle legislation; supporters wrap themselves in the flag and Constitution, while all along the real agenda is to make themselves the beneficiaries of the biggest entitlement program since LBJ's Great Society. When the Arizona Legislature passed what it called the Private Property Protection Act back in 1992, the eyes of the nation turned to our state to see the result of takings legislation. But before the law could take effect, a coalition of environmental groups hit the streets with petitions to put the law up to a public vote through referendum. After they turned in more than enough sigs, the law landed on the 1994 ballot as Proposition 300. Folks on both sides lined up with massive campaigns to sway voters, but in the end, the environmentalists triumphed--the law was defeated by a 6-4 margin. Of course, that wasn't the end of the story--last year, plenty of takings legislation still surfaced in the Legislature, and since the GOP revolution in Washington, Republicans have been pushing takings on a nationwide level. But you can feel free to pat yourselves on the back for this one--the good guys won one for a change.
