Art Segal, who started and writes the Let Oro Valley Excel blog has posted two fascinating blogs about the debacle in Oro Valley last week when Town Manager David Andrews was quit-fired by a split town council.
Segal is an OV political insider and gadfly. He was the heart and soul behind an effort to overturn tax incentives the town gave several shopping center developers in the early 2000s.
He was an active and impassioned member of several successful and failed council candidate campaigns and was often privy to all the insider gossip from town hall. One council member even used to leak to him results of executive session discussions.
He’s remained an insider and confidant to some since starting the blog, but that insider’s knowledge hasn’t always shown up there.
Apparently he was so incensed by the Andrews mess that he decided to tell a few tales out of school in these posts.
It’s an interesting look at the often petty world of small town politics.
I covered Oro Valley either as a reporter or an editor for 10 years during some of its most tumultuous and petty times.
From what I read in Segal’s posts, petty is back big time in Oro Valley.
More’s the pity.
Whether it results in the turmoil that plagued the town for nearly a decade – four recall elections in six years – remains to be seen.
For me personally, the most interesting insight of Segal’s blog answered a question that has bugged me since the vote last week – why did David Andrews point a finger at Councilman KC Carter and tell him to stay off his property? (EXPLORER newspaper photographer Randy Metcalf managed to capture that brief confrontation.)
According to Segal, Andrews and Carter had some kind of father-son relationship and Carter had a key to his house. Apparently Andrews caught Carter snooping around his house when he wasn’t home.
It’s stunning to me that a town manager would have that kind of personal relationship with a council member. Nevertheless, the apparent level of betrayal here by Carter is staggering.
I’ve tried talking to some of my old sources in the town to find out what’s going on, but many of them are no longer involved in town politics. From what I have found out, the presumption that all of this is tied up with the police officer’s union is incorrect. But then, no one will tell me what really is behind it, other than it has to do with some kind of animosity between Oro Valley Mayor Paul Loomis and Andrews.
I’m loathe to dive back into the bizarre worlds of Oro Valley and Marana and I’ll leave getting to the bottom of this to Segal and his LOVE blog and Patrick McNamara at the EXPLORER. I can’t wait to read what they dig up.
What a strange, strange turn of events.