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.

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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.

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Does the public have the right to know why public officials are fired or forced to quit?

The public pays the taxes that pay the salaries and elects the public bodies that do the hiring and the firing, so the obvious answer is yes.

Good luck finding out though, since elected public officials lately are refusing to reveal their reasons.

Last week, Oro Valley Town Manager David Andrews was told by the town’s mayor he was going to be fired and Andrews asked to be allowed to resign instead, according to stories in the Arizona Daily Star and the EXPLORER, a weekly that covers Oro Valley and Marana.

Despite a raucous and acrimonious town council meeting Wednesday, the four out of seven council members who voted to “accept” Andrews’ resignation refused to say why they were ostensibly firing the guy.

Only nebulous statements of there being “issues” with Andrews were offered.

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Thursday, the Arizona Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a public records case that has far reaching implications for the right of the public to know what its government is up to.

The question before the court is whether the public has the right to see hidden data, called metadata, that is contained in electronic public records. In January, Division One of the Arizona Court of Appeals said no.

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.

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Happy Labor Day.

Not that anyone much cares about labor or the labor movement anymore.

Labor Day is an anachronism of more turbulent times. Humanity was being ground in the gears of the Industrial Revolution in the 19^th century and by the end of the century humanity started fighting back through the labor movement.

The first Labor Day holiday was enacted by New York City in 1882. By 1894, an act of Congress added it to the short list of unpaid federal worker holidays, after the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.

Celebrating American labor on Labor Day has waxed and waned with worker prosperity over the years. When it first started, Labor Day was as big as Independence Day, with hundreds of thousands turning out for parades and fairs. It reached its apex during the Depression when in 1941 in Los Angeles an estimated 100,000 people marched in the parade and more than 500,000 people lined the streets to watch it.

Today it’s more of a celebration of the end of summer, a last hurrah before the start of the school year (in most states). It’s a time to go camping, roller coaster riding or beach combing. The labor of Labor Day gets nary a nod or tip of the hat.

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As years go, 2009 is a real stinker.

The stock market has lost half its value from its 2007 record high. One in 10 Americans are unemployed. Banks, stock brokerages and car manufacturers have teetered on collapse only to be bailed out by a broke government that’s spending money like drunken sailors on shore leave.

In Arizona, the economy is among the worst in the nation and the Legislature has lost its mind. We’re nine months into the year, three into the fiscal year, and we still have no state budget.

Locally, the stench of 2009 includes the over-promised and under-delivered Rio Nuevo finally grinding to a halt and the schlemiel City Council firing City Manager Mike Hein for reasons no one really understands.

Layoffs are legion, shops and fave restaurants close weekly and the monsoon was a bust.

And to add to the year’s piling funk, people we love (or, a lot of you anyway) keep dying: Ted Kennedy, Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, even the “Kung Fu” king, David Carradine, for crying out loud.

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President Obama in his speech in Phoenix last week before the VFW annual conference said the conflict in Afghanistan was “fundamental” to U.S. security.

He said that by fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, American soldiers were protecting “Americans here at home.”

Neither statement is true.

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We Americans love to complain about our government, which is not too surprising considering we’re a nation born out of rebellion. But more than often not, and more often than most are willing to admit, government gets it right.

The often-maligned Arizona Department of Transportation deserves no aspersions for its nearly completed $200 million, three-year reconstruction of Interstate 10 between Prince Road and 29th Street.

The project is about six months ahead of schedule and under budget. It should be finished by Christmas.

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The best thing state Democratic legislators can do in this budget crisis is get out of the way.

They’re pretty much irrelevant as it is. They’re in the minority and there are no more moderate Republicans to come over to their side at the last minute to make them relevant as happened the past two years.

So they should just go home. No more protests and rallies on the Capitol Mall. No more jeering from the gallery. Just get up and walk out.

And in a year they will have a good chance of rising like a Phoenix to take back control of the Legislature and possibly the governor’s office.

Why?

Because the Republicans seem hell bent on destroying their party and the state.

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President Obama’s push to make minor changes to U.S. health care policy has the demagogues out in full force.

Conservative talk radio is all aquiver about Obama’s and the Democrats’ efforts to cram “socialized medicine” down the throats of the U.S. public.

Republican senators and representatives are making speeches about how passing Obama’s health care plan will be the end of the world as we know it, which is the same thing Obama and the Democrats say will happen if the plan isn’t passed now.

It’s all horse puckey.

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