Recently, I had the opportunity to have a nice conversation with newly-elected Oro Valley Councilpersons Bill Garner and Salette Latas.
We discussed their astounding primary victories in which both of them managed to net over 60% of the primary vote, placing both of them directly on the Council from the primary: a first for an Oro Valley town election. In doing so, they beat three incumbents, knocking one of them out of the race and leaving the final two playing musical chairs for the final seat in the June general election.
We were joined in our discussion by Art Segal, the Bloggitor (my neologism of blogger/editor, like it?) of the Let Oro Valley Excel, or LOVE, blog. Art is something of a blog hero in my book: he stood up to legal threats and some fairly slimy political intimidation tactics by the Oro Valley Board through their Town Attorney before and during the town's election.
We discussed the many land-use, development, budget, tax, and water issues facing many of the swift-growing cities and towns of the desert Southwest. The conversation runs about an hour. Here is a chronology in case you are only interested in particular parts of our discussion:
1:00 What’s Happening in Oro Valley? 5:00 Motivation for Change 7:00 Transparent Government Popular Uprising 9:00 The Strategic Campaign Plan 13:00 The Vestar Tax Scam 17:00 Citizens Organize to Fight Back 18:00 The Online Campaign 20:00 The Coming General Election 25:00 The Issues the Next Council Will Face 28:00 Arroyo Grande 43:00 Zoning Hi-Jinks 45:00 Naranja Mega-Park 54:00 Growth Politics in Arizona (sorry, some brief audio difficulties)
Any time a wealthy special interest wants the help of local politicians to pick the tax-payer's pockets, they'll seek to justify it by touting the wonderful economic impact their conspiracy will have on the community. The standard method is a figure out a multiplier reflecting how the stolen money will ramify through the community. Then figure out all sorts of tenuous possible impacts that the project, or the lack of it, could have on the local community. Brew it all up and put it in a glossy flier, and you have a prospectus for bilking the taxpayers.
Thus a $10 or $20 million dollar 'gift' to the special interest will be sold as having ultimately a $31 million impact on the economy. Wow! We get 31 million of economic activity in exchange for tolerating a theft of just $20 million? What a deal!
The unspoken assumption is, of course, that there isn't an opportunity cost. That there aren't programs and policies which that money could have financed that would have an even greater economic impact, or even be better used on non-economic values and priorities. Simply put, what else would $20 million buy and what could we have spent it on instead of... baseball?
This is the standard grift being run on taxpayers by supporters of spring training seeking to shake down Pima County for '$10 to $20 million' in improvements to local baseball facilities. The claimed impact of the spring training is claimed to be (you guessed it) $31 million on the local economy by a recent, and despicably uncritical, piece in the Star.
In the United States, the total profit of professional sports is almost exactly equal to the amount to tax preferments and subsidies that industry receives. Since their existence as profitable enterprises depends on it, the professional sports industry has become very, very good at rent-seeking, and pedaling it to the public and their officials as a public good.
The economic benefit isn't their only appeal, however, the mouthpieces for the baseball industry would have you believe that Tucson would be psychologically crippled if MLB leaves town, and other towns will despise us and call us names. Well, that's not exactly what they claim, but it's not far off.
I sure hope our Pima County Supervisors put a little more critical thought into the decision before actually forking over any taxpayer money to this purpose. They need to have a lot better reason than a sense of nostalgia for baseball, as Pima County Supervisor Ramon Valadez expresses in the article. Nor is a 'surge' in public interest, indicated by a 13.7% increase in attendance at spring training games, which Valadez also cites, a good reason to spend the money.
I count 29 events on the Tucson spring training schedule for 2007, if you combine double-headers into a single event. With a total attendance at all games of just over 270K (even with that 'surge' Valadez says we must maintain), that might equate with as few as 10K real fans regularly attending these events in Tucson. If Pima County ponied up $20 million for the facilities improvements MLB is demanding, that's about $2,000 per fan. Good entertainment deal? For those fans, you bet! For the rest of us and for Tucson as a whole? Not so much.
What the MLB boosters don't address, of course, is the opportunity cost of investing public money in baseball facilities while crying needs during an economic down-turn go wanting. I can think of a dozen things that money could be used for that have as much, or more, economic impact in Pima County (including just giving it away!) and dozens more that would be a better use of public funds than tarting up some facilities for fickle suitors like the MLB boys. How about you? Can you think of a better way to spend $10 to $20 million of taxpayer funds?
Buy your own goddamn stadiums, boys. They aren't public assets, they are rich boys toys and the tools of corruption capitalists for extracting wealth from the communities that support them. You want to leave town for greener pastures? Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
I just love to watch a good sparring match. I prefer mixed martial arts, but Emily Bittner (AZ Dems' Communications Director) taking apart House Republican Spokeman Barrett Marson is nearly as fun—and almost as bloody. Of course, your view of who wins the this ep of Horizon's One On One depends entirely on your sympathies heading in—there's not enough time to really have a substantive debate in this format, and Emily clearly knows that. So, she goes for the take-down and the tap-out like any good cage fighter. Enjoy!
Unable to summon the political will to control spending though they control the state legislature, the Republicans want to put the state on a starvation diet that will affect the health, education, public safety, and welfare of every Arizona citizen.
Their means for accomplishing their evisceration of the public fisc is House Concurrent Resolution 2038, which if passed would go on the 2008 ballot for voter consideration. Now that Taxpayer's Bills of Rights (TABORS) have been roundly discredited by the meltdown of public services in Colorado as a result of the adoption of a constitutional TABOR, Republicans seek another means to accomplish their goals. A lowered constitutional cap on the percentage of aggregate personal income government may spend is the means they've chosen in Arizona.
Arizona already has a 7.41% cap on government expenditures. The Republicans want to lower that by over a percentage point (about $2.2 billion in 2008). The resulting mandatory cuts would prevent our government from deciding to save, force massive cuts in services, and have many of the same deleterious effects as a TABOR.
The people of Arizona originally saw fit to limit the state's spending to 7% of aggregate personal income. In subsequent years, as the state was given responsibility for the health care of many citizens, long term care of the elderly and disabled, and construction of our children's schools, slightly more leeway was needed to meet these new obligations. That we have been able to get by with a modest additional 0.41% since the state's founding is quite remarkable and testimony to the normal parsimony of our elected officials.
These Republican anti-tax anarchists now want to slice more than a full percentage off the cap, regressing to far more below the original cap. There is no way the state government will be able to function and provide the essential services that a modern civil society requires. They want to return us to some ideological Golden Age of the 19th century in which government did little or nothing for its people, except, of course, for those already wealthy.
Their plan is irresponsible, underhanded, and disingenuously presented as a fiscal restraint, when it is actually just fiscal suicide.
(TASL) No matter how you slice and dice the number, the possibility of cutting 282 positions from TUSD is terrible news. This isn't about trimming fat. It's about cutting into the live tissue and muscle of the school district.
The final number of cuts probably won't be that high. Typically, a District first reports the highest possible number of positions to be eliminated, then it figures out how to save some of the jobs. But if the number is half that, it will be terrible.
A perfect storm is sweeping across the nation, laying waste to state and local governments. We're in an economic downturn, so tax revenues are dropping, while the price of oil and other goods and services is increasing. Meanwhile, the federal government is cutting back on educational grants.
If we were funding education adequately before, if we had accumulated a sizable rainy day fund, we could ride this out with some judicious trimming. But we're starting with bare bones education, and we have no prior surpluses to fall back on.
This country is obsessed with the self destructive notion that our state governments are vastly overfunded and we're paying a ridiculous amount of taxes. So whenever the Arizona economy is good and the state has a nickel and a dime to rub together, the Republican legislature uses that as an excuse to cut taxes. Then when things get bad, we have no cushion.
The conservatives insist that cutting taxes further will stimulate the economy, and everything will be all right. Why we even allow them time to pack their bags before we run them out of town is a mystery to me.
Mike has been gently nudging me to write about a topic I’ve been avoiding – Tim Bee’s bill to allow all school districts in Arizona to participate in, and get the extra dollars for, the state’s “Career Ladder” teacher pay program.
I’ve ducked and dodged until now, and not because I don’t want to heap praise on Bee. I just don’t think this bill is really about equalizing funding or giving more money to more teachers. It’s about institutionalizing merit pay statewide, and I have serious problems with merit pay.
Here’s the idea behind the bill. Right now, a limited number of school districts get extra money from the Career Ladder program, which gives some teachers a salary bump for outstanding work. This has been going on since 1984, and only a select group of districts participate. Bee’s bill would extend the program to all districts.
That sounds fair, and it means more money for teachers, so I should be happy.
But so far as I can tell, “Career Ladder” is another way of saying “Merit Pay.” And I am very, very ambivalent about merit pay.
Let me ask a bunch of questions here, in no particular order, that express some of my concerns about merit pay.
Can an art teacher get a merit pay boost as easily as a math teacher?
Are test scores used to determine which teachers are outstanding, and if so, is that a valid measure of excellence?
Are there set criteria for the salary boost, so a principal can’t award the winning football coach a pay increase and deny one to the teacher who points out problems the principal should be paying more attention to?
Will we soon find ourselves in a revenue-neutral situation where the salary schedules are flattened, and the lower compensation for the majority of teachers will pay for the increased salaries of the “outstanding” ones?
I could go on, but these questions express some of my general concerns. If anyone knows more than I, or wants to show that my concerns aren’t valid, please chime in.
I would happily shower Bee with praise if he managed to find money to raise all teachers’ salaries (I am, after all, a Tax-And-Spend Liberal). But I suspect this is a backdoor bill to institutionalize merit pay. Does no one else see this?
Either everyone else thinks the idea of merit pay is terrific, or they’re blind to what’s going on here. I said in an earlier post that I don’t know how to play three dimensional political chess, but this looks more like a simple game of checkers to me. Bee just scooted his checker past everyone’s guard and said, “King me!”
Note: Thoughts a Day Later. It looks like the Career Ladder ship has already sailed. I went through newspaper articles dating back to 1991, and I could not find a discouraging word about the Career Ladder/Merit Pay concept. I also looked at the websites of a few Districts with the program and found they have elaborate, district-wide career ladder processes that involve training, mentoring, research and evaluation. The Districts that have received state funds have apparently taken this seriously, and they deserve credit for that.
I'm speculating here, but I think the reason the Career Ladder program has been greeted with such universal acclaim is because schools are starved for any money that promotes teacher training and improved educational practices. If your belly is grumbling, you'll grab the food someone hands you without thinking too much about the strings attached. If Arizona funded its schools more generously, the pros and cons of merit pay might have been discussed more heatedly. I still maintain that merit pay is, at best, a way to approach educational reform on the cheap -- let's see if giving a few bucks to a few teachers will improve our schools -- when we need a generous infusion of well-spent educational dollars. Long term, it can actually end up keeping teacher compensation low by rewarding some teachers with reasonable pay raises and covering the raises by keeping other teachers' salaries unacceptably low.
(TASL) As I read the Star article, Classroom’s dollar share drops over breakfast this morning, I found myself asking, “Are all the analysts idiots?"
Everyone was trying to explain why Arizona is spending a lower percentage of our education dollar in the classroom. They all got it partly right, but mostly wrong.
The simple reason is, the less the state spends on education, the lower the percentage that ends up in the classroom. If that seems counter-intuitive (“Boy, if we’re spending less overall, we have to make sure that most of it goes into the classroom!”), here’s the obvious explanation.
You can’t lower costs for light, or heating, or water. You can’t spend less to transport students to school. If buildings need repairs, they need repairs. These and dozens of other fixed costs can’t be lowered appreciably.
So where do you cut costs if you can’t cut them in these non-classroom areas? The answer is, you make your teachers do more with less. It doesn’t cost a penny to add five more students to every classroom, or to have high school teachers see one more class every day. Teachers are paid a fixed salary. They don’t get paid by the student.
It also doesn’t cost a penny to use old, worn out history texts dating from the Eisenhower era instead of replacing them, or outdated biology texts that say some day we’ll find a way to catalogue human DNA.
When you scrimp on education, it’s always going to come out of the classroom. The only effective way to stretch your education dollar is to stretch teachers -- to the breaking point.
I’ll go into more detail on this topic later.
Brought to you by the Tax-And-Spend-Liberal (TASL) News Service.
Sheriff "I Just Love, Love, Love the Hispanic Folks" Arpaio has been spending RICO funds to train Honduran police in a region of Honduras, a tropical paradise known for its sunny climes and great scuba-diving. 34 paid officer work weeks, over 30K in direct expenses, and an unspecified amount of equipment have headed south of the border in connection with the program. The Phoenix New Times broke the story and channel 12 reports:
Hmmm. Considering recent controversial jail closings justified by budgetary constraints and the generally tight budget environment, one wonders why this is a priority for Sheriff "Want Some Paid Vacay, Hendershott, My Boy?" Arpaio? We'll see if sheriff department employees will still be headed south in March as scheduled, now that the cone of silence on the program is gone. The U.S. invaded Honduras on March 21st, 1907, perhaps Arpaio's boys are going down to participate in a historical recreation of the event?
In my view, this is clearly a case of a thinly justified use of RICO funds to send favored employees on paid vacations using seized booty. The training program likely has some real benefit to Hondurans, and there does seem to be some approval by the Maricopa Board of Supervisors and the Governor's office for a training relationship with the Hondurans, but it is unclear that the extent of the program, or the paid man-hours involved, were directly authorized. Looks to me like Joe got the thin edge of the wedge in by getting the Supes and Governor to give a nod to some donations of equipment, and then tacked on junkets for his cronies himself.
Regardless, all of this is of questionable value to the citizens of Maricopa. I think they likely expect and deserve that seizures and forfeitures from criminals operating in Maricopa be used to ameliorate the effects of crime in Maricopa, not Honduras.
I like to know the officers on our streets well-rested and recently-laid, as much as the next guy, but there's a fine line between treating employees well and misuse of public funds. Lowered stress for these public servants is certainly a public good, but this program certainly gives the impression of being a slush fund for deputies to head south for a little paid vacay in exchange for giving a few lectures or demonstrations. If Sheriff "How Do You Say 'Per Diem' in Spanish?" Arpaio can produce some proof that these were really working vacations with 8-hour-a-day training schedules justify those man hours, I might change my mind about whether this program is actually corrupt, but regardless of any taint of corruption it seems like a wasteful use of limited resources.
It seems apparent that some enforcement agencies are getting up to some questionable stuff with these non-budget recovery assets, such as RICO funds. Recently, both the Maricopa and Pima County Attorneys blew a big wad of such non-budgetary funds on big glossy public information puff-pieces that were clearly campaign literature on steroids. Both offices justified the publications with the plausible public purpose of educating the public about their services and programs, and helping to prevent crime, but like these trips to Honduras, there is clearly also a plausible private benefit derived from the expenditures. The policies as to how and where these funds can be deployed clearly could use some tightening to avoid any appearance of impropriety when we discover some are being used to buy Margaritas in Honduras.
The episode with the county attorneys and some controversial billboards featuring Governor Napolitano have prompted some action in the state legislature to restrict the use of any public funds for public communication that could be deemed to promote an incumbent candidate for office. Such legislation, if properly drafted and implemented (two caveats that I do not give the current majority caucus the benefit of the doubt on), could be useful, but it only addresses one aspect of the problem. Sheriff "I wonder if any police agencies on the Riviera need some training?" Arpiao's little Honduran adventure indicates that the legislature's response may not be nearly comprehensive enough.
UPDATE 2/27: Well, it didn't take long for Sheriff "Does my tail look good tucked between my legs like this?" Arpaio to shut down his Honduran sub-station.
And it turns out that County Attorney Andy "Arrest the Press!" Thomas is the public official with the responsibility of seeing that RICO funds are spent wisely. Why am I not surprised that he approved this little boondoggle for his buddy Sheriff "Andy, my boys could use a tan" Arpaio.
The Maricopa County Democratic Party released the following statement about the scandal:
Sheriff Joe Arpaio has caved in to public pressure and the media and
has suspended his controversial foreign aid project to Honduras, telling
KTAR that "until we get out of this budget crunch, we're going to put
it on hold." The MCSO attempted to provide cover for this waste of RICO
funds saying it was to track the MS-13 gang, but never explained why
they have never sent anyone working on gangs to the country, and
instead sent two traffic investigators, a homicide investigator and an
aviation expert. Let's just hope that this doesn't end the
investigation.
A new report by Channel 12
states that the operation spent 34 of payroll, 125 hours of overtime,
nearly $6,800 in shipping costs, and charged to a MCSO credit card
$2,976 to buy measuring equipment, traffic accident templates and
fingerprint kits that were given to the Honduran government--all paid
for with YOUR tax dollars. Again, if this is an anti-gang project, why
do they need traffic accident templates? What is even more revealing is
that the story reports Maricopa County Attorney Andy Thomas is the
person responsible for approving these funds!
One other small problems with Sheriff Joe "All them brown folk are interchangeable anyhow" Arpaio's excuse of MS-13 as the basis for he program: MS-13 originates from El Salvador and operates to a lesser extent in Guatamala and Mexico, but not in Honduras.
MS stands for Mara Salvatrucha. Get it? El Salvador? And Mara is La Mara, a street in El Salvadoe. If Sheriff Joe "Get me an atlas" Arpaio doesn't even know that about MS-13, color me unimpressed by his anti-gang efforts.
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Why George W. Bush and the GOP are Tyrants The nature of tyranny is unchanging and there is a clear and incontrovertible case that the GOP and Bush are acting like tyrants...
Patriot Change: The UniTax Hate it when people complain about how their taxes are unfair? Here's the solution they can't argue with, and it's progressive, too!
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