It’s time to kill Rio Nuevo.

Not the effort to redevelop downtown, just the name of downtown redevelopment, which has become synonymous with disorganization, mismanagement and misspending.

Some city officials and Rio Nuevo board members might dispute that synonymity, but there’s reality and there’s perception and there’s no disputing that Rio Nuevo has been a public relations disaster for the city.

And for at least one councilwoman.

Make that, one soon-to-be ex-councilwoman.

(continue reading…)

A couple of weeks ago, I argued that the state Legislature needed to convene a special session to deal with the cratering state budget.

Gov. Jan Brewer and legislative leaders have since agreed to a special session, which may convene as soon as this week.

But now after poring over reports from the Joint Legislative Budget Committee the governor’s budget office and the reports from state agencies requested by the governor last month detailing how they would cut up to 15 percent of their budgets, it’s clear the special session I considered vital may well be a waste of time.

The budget can’t be fixed.

(continue reading…)

From the Arizona Republic today (we’re all one big happy Gannett family):

Pew report: Ariz. ranks among worst facing budget woes

by Mary Jo Pitzl – Nov. 11, 2009 10:57 AM
The Arizona Republic
Arizona lags only California in the magnitude of its state budget woes, according to a new report released today.

The state’s high foreclosure rate, year-over-year drop in tax collections and yawning budget gap make it second-worst in the nation in term of budget problems, the Pew Center for the States concludes in a special report, “Beyond California, States in Fiscal Peril.”

Arizona tied with Rhode Island for second-from-the-bottom honors.

The report examines the factors that led California to its epic budget morass and finds common threads in other states.

“They share important characteristics with California, but they may not be destined to follow in the Golden State’s footsteps,” the report summarizes.

However, it paints a grim picture of Arizona’s status – both of the conditions that led to the current $2 billion budget deficit and of the prospects for what lies ahead, as lawmakers and Gov. Jan Brewer face a potential $3.3 billion hole in the coming year.

Arizona lawmakers are expected to meet next week in a special session to cut a portion; estimates range from one-quarter to one-third of the $2 billion total. Still unresolved is Brewer’s call for a temporary sales-tax increase to boost state revenues.

The Pew Center tracks state policy issues and advances solutions. It is supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts and has offices in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

The Pew report found some common elements in the woes that plague the nation’s 10 most budget-challenged states. They are familiar to anyone who has followed Arizona’s downward-spiraling fiscal condition:

• An unbalanced economy. In Arizona, that means a heavy dependence on growth, which screeched to a crawl as the foreclosure rate skyrocketed, eclipsed only by foreclosures in Florida and Nevada, according to data the Pew researchers gathered.
• Revenues and expenditures that are out of sync. Currently, Arizona’s budget calls for $10 billion in spending, but there is only $6.4 billion in projected revenue.
• Limited ability for policy makers to act. In Arizona, voter-approved mandates to increase education and Medicaid spending make it impossible for lawmakers to rein in spending in these fast-growing areas. Likewise, a voter-approved requirement that two-thirds of lawmakers must approve any tax increase makes tax hikes virtually impossible.
• Delaying tough decisions. Arizona lawmakers and Brewer struggled through the summer to find a mutually acceptable balanced budget, to no avail. Brewer vetoed key parts of the budget in September, putting it out of balance, and lawmakers balked at her request to send a temporary tax hike to the ballot.

After California, Arizona and Rhode Island, the other states ranked by Pew as in fiscal peril are Michigan, Oregon, Nevada, Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Read the report (especially the part about Arizona).

There are events in the human saga so extraordinary that they become celebrated or commemorated for decades, even generations.

Some are so exceptional that after they happen, those who were alive at the time remember where they were, what they were doing and whom they were with for the rest of their lives.

Tragically, most of those events are tragedies. Depending on your age, many Americans can recall what they were doing the exact moment they learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the death of President Roosevelt, the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr and the attacks of Sept. 11.

Recalling the exact moment of the triumphs of our greatest struggles in the past 70 years are far fewer, perhaps because the triumphs are rarely as sudden as the tragedies. Few of us know exactly when Jim Crow died, we just know he did.

But every American who is old enough can recall the moment they learned of the end of the war in Europe and Japan or when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.

And every American should recall the events of Nov. 9, 1989, 20 years ago today, a day that may go down in history as the greatest of the 20^th century – the symbolic end of soviet Russia’s domination of Eastern Europe and the collapse of communism.

In October 1989, communist Hungary allowed a few of its captive citizens entry into Austria. Soon thousands of Hungarians rushed to the border crossing. They were supposed to be on holiday, but their overflowing luggage and frightened looks weren’t fooling anyone; everyone knew they weren’t coming back.

The world looked to Moscow wondering when the tanks would roll like they had in 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. But Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, for reasons few understood at the time, kept the tanks in their bases.

Czechoslovakia followed Hungary’s lead and opened its borders. Tens of thousands of East Europeans, crushed under the totalitarian boot of Soviet imperialism for five decades, poured into the two cracks of the Iron Curtain yearning to be free.

Emboldened East Germans flooded into Hungary to crossover to freedom. The entire Warsaw Pact was in crisis. The only way to stop the exodus was with force. Many in the West speculated that this could be the beginning of World War III, perhaps the end of civilization as we knew it. Tension grew around the world. NATO was on full alert.

In early November East and West Germans began to congregate on either side of the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate protesting the right to freely cross. The paranoid East Germans looked to Gorbachev and he told them to open the gate.

On Nov. 9, East Germany announced it would allow East Berliners to “visit” West Berlin if they wanted and opened all the border crossings.

And that was it, the end of the Cold War. We, the democratic West, had won.

Fittingly, it ended with a party atop the very symbol of communist repression, the Berlin Wall.

We had spent trillions of dollars to fight the spread of communism on every continent on the planet (yes, even Antarctica). Millions died, including nearly 100,000 Americans.

It was worth every penny and, perhaps, every life. The future of freedom and democracy had depended on it.

Today is a great day and we should commemorate it and celebrate it every year, not every decade like it’s some high school reunion.

Pima County Elections Division has updated the results of its counting of the remaining ballots from the Nov. 3 election and it looks like Republican Steve Kozachik has defeated Ward 6 Deomcratic incumbent Nina Trasoff by 1,675 votes.

In the extremely close Ward 3 race, Democratic incumbent Karin Uhlich has held her lead over Republican challenger Ben Buehller-Garcia, though it shrunk to 246 votes.

However, though Buehller-Garcia is within 0.65 percent of Uhlich, it’s not close enough to trigger a recount. Arizona law requires candidates to be within 0.5 percent to automatically trigger a recount.

That said, it appears there are still thousands of bad ballots that may go uncounted. It may be worth Buehller-Garcia’s time and money to find a lawyer and consider forcing the county to prove it rightly mucked those ballots. He’s not close enough for a recount, but too close to just walk away.

And Prop. 400, the Home Rule provision, also appears to have lost, which will cost the city millions of tax dollars.

The county had thousand of uncounted ballots left to count Tuesday, most of those early ballots that arrived in the mail Monday and Tuesday  or that were dropped off at polling places Tuesday. There were also a number of provisional ballots, which are issued to voters who have some kind of problem at the polls, either they lack identification, showed up at the wrong polling place, or records showed they received an early ballot.

Not all of the uncounted ballots were from city precincts. Some were cast for school elections in Oro Valley, Sahuarita and Catalina Foothills. The latest results were posted by the county on its web site at 5:20 p.m.

With all but one precinct yet to report as of midnight, it looks like Ricahrd Fimbres will be the new face on the Tucson City Council for Ward 5.

And the public safety initiative Prop. 200, was crushed, losing by more than 2 to 1.

But everything else in the city election is too close to call. While no one at county elections picked up when I called a few minutes ago, it’s a safe bet that there are still ballots to count – any early ballots turned in Tuesday and any provisional  ballots cast. How many of those there are I don’t know but if last year’s presidential election and the 2006 state election are any indicator there are likely hundreds if not thousands of votes still to count.

If it’s just hundreds, incumbent Democrat Karin Uhlich in Ward 3 may be safe, as she had a roughly 600-vote lead over Republican challenger Ben Buehler-Garcia. Uhlich certainly could have used the nearly 4,000 votes Green Party candidate Mary Decamp likely siphoned off.

In Ward 6, incumbent Democrat Nina Trasoff trails Republican Steve Kozachik by 1,200 votes. Trasoff had a razor-thin edge over Kozachik most of the night, but late returns, likely from the East Side Republican stronghold (the only one in the city), put the Republican ahead. Depending on how many ballots were cast in the remaining voting area still to report and the uncounted balance, Trasoff may be done.

But the big news (I know, I buried the lede) may be Prop. 400 losing by about 600 votes. If this goes down, it will cost the city millions. The vote was for Home Rule, which lets municipalities exceed state spending caps with locally generated revenue. The rule has to be reauthorized by voters every four years.

It has always passed. But the anti-incumbent, anti-tax voting trend of this election may have led voters to vote against it thinking it would save them tax money. It doesn’t, it just screws the city out of money it can’t afford to be screwed out of.

See ya’ll when the sun rises.

City election results as of Midnight from Pima County elections web site:

Ward 3

UHLICH, KARIN DEM 29,769  47.32%

BUEHLER-GARCIA, BEN REP 29,197  46.41%

DeCAMP, MARY GRN 3,855  6.13%

Ward 5

FIMBRES, RICHARD DEM 33,200 53.36%

McCLUSKY, SHAUN REP 28,862 46.39%

Ward 6

TRASOFF, NINA DEM 30,506 48.86%

KOZACHIK, STEVE REP 31,706 50.78%

Prop 200

YES 19,129 29.77%

NO 45,121 70.23%

Prop 400

YES 31,053 49.50%

NO 31,676 50.50%

Tuesday is election day in the city. Go vote. Pack up your criticisms of city government and go to your polling place and vote your conscience for council members in wards 3, 5 and 6 and for propositions 200 and 400. It’s what makes us a great nation.

But be realistic about your vote for council. You will have participated in a process to select members of a seven-member public body. You did not elect a dictator.

The people who do get elected are not stupid, lazy or corrupt. They are just struggling with the incredible complexity of governing a city with as many competing interests as there are people.

(continue reading…)

Although it’s an esoteric issue, the Arizona Supreme Court today handed down perhaps one of the most important public records decisions in its history.

The court unanimously ruled that public records kept in an electronic format are public records and the native format must be released if requested.

Here’s what I wrote about it last month on the eve of the court hearing oral arguments in the case:

As open records cases go, this one is pretty dry. It’s hard to get the public excited about whether something you can’t see is a public record. But it might be as important of a public access case as has ever been before the court. The case has generated at lot of interest with at least four friend of the court briefs filed in the case, including one from the First Amendment Coalition, which represents numerous government openness advocates including news media, private investigators and government watchdog groups (Full disclosure: I’m a FAC board member).

The case revolves around records Phoenix police officer David Lake requested from Phoenix PD in 2006. Among the records requested were the typed notes of one of his supervisors. When he got the notes, he suspected his supervisor had altered the date they were typed. He requested the metadata to determine if that were true.

The city denied the request, saying metadata wasn’t part of the public record. Lake sued and the Superior Court and later the Court of Appeals agreed with the city that metadata is not a public record.

That’s wrong.

Think of metadata as akin to the black box of a commercial airplane. When you get on an airplane, you can see the wings, fuselage, tail, engines and all of the other visible parts of the plane that make it able to fly.

But what you don’t see when the plane is flying is all of the thousands of electronic signals and switches the plane’s computers are controlling to keep the plane in the air. All of that electronic information is stored in the plane’s black boxes.

The recording devices don’t really play a role in the plane’s flying and nobody really cares that they’re there until something goes wrong. Then everybody cares.

It’s the same for metadata, though metadata do more than just record what happens to the document, such as when it’s opened or saved, they are the document: The document and the metadata are symbiotic – one can’t exist without the other.

When you’re typing something in Microsoft Word, you don’t really care that metadata is allowing you to see what you’re typing or embedding behind the scenes the electronic wizardry that makes e-mail addresses and Internet links live (all you see is they changed to blue). Until your computer crashes, then you care that there’s metadata.

In its ruling, the appellate court went to great lengths to argue that there are government records and then there are public government records. The court argued that just because metadata exists doesn’t mean they are public records. Amazingly, the appellate justices ruled that the printed version of the electronic record Lake requested was public but systemic parts of the electronic version of that record were not and therefore could be withheld.

The court, obviously, rejected the appellate court’s arguments. Key to the win was the work of FAC attorney Dan Barr and the examples of what metadata are provided by ASU journalism professor and computer assisted reporting guru Steve Doig.

Below are the Court’s ruling and amicus briefs filed by FAC that include Doig’s explanation.

Supreme Court Ruling Lake v. Phoenix

Brief of Amici Curiae First Amendment Coalition, et al.

FAC Amicus Brief: Exhibit_A

FAC Amicus Brief: ExhibitB

We’re in serious trouble.

The state’s economy has yet to hit bottom and tax revenues continue to fall while demand for state services and benefits increase with the number of unemployed.

The state is broke and getting broker, having to borrow $600 million from the federal government to pay rising unemployment insurance benefit claims, according to a story Thursday in the Arizona Republic.

Legislators need to get back under the copper dome and fix the budget mess.

So what’s the Legislature’s plan to solve these burgeoning fiscal problems?

Wait until January when the next legislative session convenes (or maybe next month, according to a Republic story Friday.)

That’s ridiculous and cowardly. We need action now.

(continue reading…)

I was doing my usual flipping through the 10 p.m. local news broadcasts and came across a report by KGUN-9 about a protest downtown by various groups wanting the city to fess up on how the Museum of Contemporary Arts managed to get a sweetheart deal from the city for use of the old TFD HQ.

Among those protesting was Tucson Police Officers Association President Larry Lopez, who claimed that the city had rigged the bidding process and that he had a source in the city who told him there had been other, oral bids for the building. But then he refused to say who told him that.

At which point KGUN played a clip lifted from YouTube, of all places, of Joseph Welch’s famous retort to Sen. Joe McCarthy “Have you no decency sir?”

Wow.

I teach a reporting public affairs class at the UA J-school. I teach my students not to use superlatives and hyperbole in their writing. They rarely work and usually make readers, especially educated, savvy, older readers, roll their eyes.

I guess now I’ll have to warn them about using outrageous, sensationalistic, editorializing comparisons of horrible historical characters that are out of context and have no real relevance to the story being reported.

Larry Lopez as Joe McCarthy? Gimme a break.

[I tried to figure out how to get clip the off my DVR and on here so you can see it, but I'm out of time and have to go to the County BOS meeting this morning, so if anyone out there has a link to the clip, send it my way or post it in the comments below]