According to economists, the Great Recession ended in 2009. The numbers show a slow, steady improvement to the national economy since June of that year.

But that doesn’t mean the effects of the recession are over. They will be with us for years to come.

So will its costs. The massive downturn in the economy also devastated government, especially those that rely heavily on taxation of retail economic activity to provide the bulk of their operating funds, like Arizona and Tucson.

Anyone who drives a car (or rides a bike, for that matter) in metropolitan Tucson knows the roads suck. Budget cuts have forced Tucson and Pima County the past three years to eliminate annual road maintenance.

Those two governments were already behind the curve keeping up with annual maintenance – keeping a road surface in good condition to prevent water from infiltrating cracks and turning them into holes. Even our measly 12 inches of rain a year is enough water to turn a good road bad in just a few years if it’s not properly maintained.

But at least the county and city had the money to keep poor roads from failing. For the past three years all they’ve been able to afford is pothole filling. And without proper maintenance, the poor conditions of the roads exponentialized.

The Tucson Department of Transportation last week told the city council that 52 percent of city arterial roads are either in fair, poor or failed condition and a whopping 86 percent of neighborhood roads are in one of those three categories.

In January, county roads officials told the County Administrator that roughly 30 percent of county arterial roads are in poor or failed condition and about 60 percent of neighborhood roads are failing or failed.

The estimated cost to turn those sucky roads into good ones?

About $1.2 billion over 10 years.

And that’s not accounting for costs necessary to resume normal annual maintenance operations to prevent the cycle from repeating itself.

Neither the county nor the city has the money to pay for it. That means that either we all have to get used to driving on asphalt crumbs and paying for new tires and struts every couple of years, or we have to pay a tax to fix the roads.

The great tragedy is that all of this could have been avoided. The recession was truly a bear, devouring government treasuries with shocking speed. There is no question that spending had to be reduced. But craven state legislators refused to make difficult choices, including raising revenue to hold the line on critical spending such as educating children or maintaining transportation infrastructure vital for the economy.

Instead they resorted in part to theft, so-called fund sweeps of shared revenues the state normally returned to counties and cities but instead chose to keep more for itself the past three years to fund the state police and the department of motor vehicles (the fund sweeps started a decade ago but the state doubled down on them during the recession-caused budget crises).

Some of the 18-cents per gallon state gas tax we all pay is kept by the state to pay for state highways. The rest is sent back to the counties and towns where the taxes were collected so that the people paying the tax benefit from it.

Tucson and the county relied heavily on that shared tax to pay for streets maintenance. It made sense; a gas tax is a good way to pay for roads. The amount cut from the city and county the past three years totals more than $20 million. Since road maintenance is a lot cheaper, and lot more cost effective, than road reconstruction, that $20 million would have gone a long way toward preventing the roads from becoming as bad as they are.

And so both city and county leaders are pointing fingers at the state and blaming it for the cruddy condition of the metropolitan roads.

But some of the blame lies at their feet as well.

They also had hard decisions to make the past few years. They knew they had to either lay off cops and deputies (law enforcement accounts for the bulk of the city’s and county’s budget) or raise a tax if they wanted to replace the money the state stole for roads. They chose to do little of the first and none of the second.

Instead they let the roads crumble.

And now we all have to pay a lot for what would have cost only a little if our leaders had a little more courage when the times were tough.

[Ed. Note: I've had a couple of questions about this editorial offline suggesting counties and cities are barred from using general operating funds for roads. Not so. Those governments are barred from using state shared Highway User Revenue Funds for anything but roads, but local governments are free to augment those funds with local taxation. Most, if not all, choose not to. I'm suggesting they should in dire times in which the cost of doing nothing is far greater than the cost of doing something.]

The U.S. Postal Service this week announced that it will go through with plans to close its Cherrybell mail processing plant here. Phoenix will now process Tucson’s mail.

The net effect of that on Tucson will mean a first class letter will arrive at its intended destination about a day later than usual.

That’s hardly cause for the garment rending and teeth gnashing by Tucson’s political leaders the past few weeks.

The elimination of about 150 jobs is despairing yet necessary if the USPS is to survive and continue its critical role in American society and economy.

The USPS is in trouble. It’s losing billions of dollars a year. The U.S. government doesn’t want to subsidize mail delivery. It wants mail users to pay for the cost of delivery.

The inefficient and labor-intensive processing system must change if the USPS is to survive. To do that, it has come up with a modernization plan that will eliminate about half of its nearly 500 processing plants. It also wants to close rural post offices, eliminate Saturday mail delivery and make a handful of other reforms in order to save about $20 billion in annual operating costs by 2015.

Standing in the way are numerous members of Congress spurred on by local and state leaders who want the USPS to reform its operations elsewhere. It’s kind of a reverse NIMBYism. Call it KIMBYism for Keep It In My Backyard.

But the Congress suffers from multiple personality disorder when it comes to the mail. It wants the USPS to pay its own way but it doesn’t want it to raise postal rates, close any facilities or layoff any mail workers, especially not in an election year.

When USPS leaders explain their problem and plans to solve it, it’s as if the Congress sticks its fingers in it ears and says “la la la la la, I can’t hear you, la la la la.”

Corporations are lobbying hard to keep postal rates low while the postal workers union is lobbying hard to preserve jobs. The USPS can’t do both.

The fact is, few Americans actually use the USPS. The overwhelming majority of mailed communication, first class or otherwise, is by business, mostly advertisements, then catalogs and bills.

Blame it on the digital age. The digital transformation is having profound effects on many industries. It’s an effect well known to TucsonCitizen.com where three years ago this editorial would have been written in a bustling newsroom of about 70 people. Instead it was written in a small, quiet office by one of the company’s three remaining employees.

Most of the communication we used to do via the mail is now done via the Internet. People send personal communications, photos, cards and letters via e-mail and social media and more people every year are using the Internet to pay bills or do their banking.

This digital transformation is only accelerating and will further reduce the volume of mail and therefore the number of postal carriers, postal processing centers and post offices needed to deliver it.

Yet there will likely be a need for USPS for many decades to come. Many Americans still can’t afford or don’t want to be part of the digital age and many written communications will still need to be hand delivered.

But the USPS doesn’t need a  bloated, inefficient system to handle that diminishing amount of mail. Like all industries affected by the digital revolution, it needs to downsize and the Congress needs to let it.

Either that, or all those KIMBYs clamoring to keep their processing centers and preserve the USPS like it was still 1980 need to open their wallets and pay up.

About a $1 a stamp ought to do it.

[Ed. Note: A few weeks ago, the Star mistakenly published on its op/ed page a flippant blog post I wrote about the wisdom of closing Cherrybell. The article spurred about 50 people to express their disagreement with my conclusions and their displeasure with me and a few of my ancestors. A little less than half of those communications came by telephone. About 20 came by e-mail and 8 came via the U.S. mail. I can think of few better ways than that to illustrate the point of the trouble the USPS is in and why it needs to reduce the size of its operation.]

Are the annexation wars about to begin again, now that Tucson has a new mayor? If so, good, sometimes it takes a war to solve a problem.

Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, as all Tucson mayors have done for nearly 20 years, mentioned in his state of the city speech this week the importance of getting more county residents into municipalities.

About a third of county residents live outside of a municipality. That costs the region money because several state taxes – sales, income, vehicle and gas – are shared by the state with municipalities on a per capita basis. Counties get some shared taxes, too, but an unincorporated county resident gets counted only once, while a city liver gets counted twice.

For years regional leaders have tried to get more county residents into cities, including creating a shell city run by the county that ringed Tucson. That idea went nowhere about the same time Oro Valley and Marana started growing like weeds, annexing huge chunks of land. Some of that land was vacant and soon sprouted homes, but when the towns had budget troubles, they started pining for established commercial areas rich in retail sales taxes to their south, areas that Tucson was also covetous.

At the time, Tucson Mayor George Miller had a manifest destiny attitude when it came to the state shared revenue deficit – it was better for Tucson and the region if county residents joined Tucson than the suburban towns. Marana and Tucson were soon suing each other over a disputed annexation.

The fight heated up in 1997 when the state Legislature passed a one-year moratorium of veto rights existing cities had over the creation of new towns within six miles of their borders.

Two towns incorporated between Oro Valley and Marana but Tucson sued again and the courts ruled the law unconstitutional, forcing the two towns to disincorporate.

Miller was followed by Bob Walkup in 1999 who called a truce to the annexation and incorporation wars.

All of which means that in the 20 years or so since regional leaders started wringing their hands about the large cadre of unincorporated residents and the subsequent lost revenue, not much has changed.

County residents are mostly happy living in the county and see no need to join another government. Likewise, retail shopping center owners have little incentive to join a municipality, mostly due to higher sales taxes there. Developers can get a deal on new housing subdivisions anywhere (assuming there will be new housing subdivisions again).

And so when the Legislature reopened the door to incorporation last year, few people in the county took notice. A community with a population greater than 15,000 could incorporate now without asking for permission from a nearby town, assuming voters there agreed to create it.

Or communities smaller than that could incorporate with permission, but if permission is denied it starts a six-year clock ticking, reducing the six-mile sphere of influence by a mile per year until the new community is eventually outside of the sphere and able to incorporate, no permission needed.

All any of the communities interested in incorporation need is motivation. Tucson can provide that by resuming the annexation wars.

Rothschild’s speech last week was a little more aggressive when it comes to annexation than Walkup’s “Come on over, if ya wanna” speeches have been the past few years. That may be a signal Tucson is ready to start cherry picking commercial corridors and new housing subdivisions again.

That should get Oro Valley and Marana off their haunches (all three municipalities drool over the Foothills Mall’s retail sales tax revenue) and fire up their annexation machines.

And Sahuarita’s a player in the annexation game, now, too, looking both east and west for possible areas to annex that could add to the town’s bottom line.

Once the annexation fires are lit, communities that don’t want to be carved up by the competing municipalities may look to incorporation to save them.

According to Rothchild’s speech, what matters most is that more county residents live in a municipality, whether it be by annexation or incorporation, so it doesn’t sound like he sees Tucson’s destiny as manifest as Miller did. Perhaps, then, he’ll keep the lawyers out of it this time.

So let the war begin. It doesn’t matter who wins, because in the end, we all do.

Excerpt of the annexation/incorporation portion of Rothschild’s SOTC speech:

Annexation and Incorporation
We must address the fact that our model of unincorporated growth is neither smart nor sustainable. And let’s be honest about our history—policies that got us here will no longer work. The governmental model we have lived with for 50 years has remained static as this valley grew from 50,000 people to a million. Let’s recognize some hard facts. 84% of the people in this country now live in incorporated areas. Maricopa County is 93% incorporated. Contrast that with Pima County, which is 64% incorporated. This matters because the State shares revenue based on the percent of people living in incorporated areas. We lose out on our state-shared revenue.
We must correct this obvious imbalance. We must collect our full allotment of state-shared revenues. Our valley loses tens of millions of dollars every year to the state general fund—money that is not returned to us because of our refusal to incorporate. We can no longer allow our tax dollars to go to Phoenix. If we collect these monies, we can use them to address our long-term needs and lower our local tax rates. Lower local tax rates will lower the cost of doing business across the region. It will be good for all of us. But we must annex.

For years, we’ve heard the reasons for annexation, but we have not heard how we go about annexing. It’s simple; we have not put the necessary resources into the project.
Annexation requires 50 percent of the property owners in a qualified area to sign a petition. We will look at where annexation makes sense—where revenue sources exist to meet service area needs. We will train a small staff and a core of volunteers who will go door to door and make the case that will help bring this valley back to economic viability. I have invited the Mayors of the satellite cities in this region—Marana, Oro Valley, and Sahuarita—to join in this effort.

And for those areas that are currently unincorporated, I can tell you now that it will be cheaper and far better to join a city with an award-winning police department, fire department, water department and parks department than to strike out on your own. If you do not want to be part of an existing municipality, I invite you to consider incorporation. Incorporation is required for our economic and business survival.
We ask our county government to be a cooperative partner in this effort. Regionalism is important to our community. But regionalism will not work until we get the government structure that gives us the best chance to succeed economically. That is an incorporated valley.