Frank Antenori was quoted in the Star as calling the TUSD board ‘pathetic’ for not making deeper cuts into our schools. Excuse me? Antenori represents the Vail district, which gets a free ride at the expense of the rest of us. Let me explain.

The Research Park owned by the University of Arizona is host to a number of high tech firms, for-profit entities such as IBM, Raytheon, Canon, and others. This is a great thing for the economy and local job market, and the research park does an excellent job managing their property with a 98% occupancy rate. But they don’t pay any property tax, because the park is owned by the University of Arizona. When this was brought up to the legislature, their solution was to give free space to Vail Academy and High School. Again, this is great for Vail students, who not only have high quality school resources, but also get to intern with high tech firms and learn valuable job skills. That part is wonderful. But the rest of us don’t get any compensation for the loss of property taxes, and then Antenori has the gall to call our elected representatives ‘pathetic’ and tell them to make deeper cuts to Tucson schools

Antenori has also sponsored several anti-Tucson measures in the legislature. I seem to recall something about ‘cities over 600,000 but less than 2 million’ having restrictions on their ability to pass revenue measures – why not just say ‘Tucson’ and be done with it? And this guy is thinking about running for regional office?

Antenori, you owe the TUSD board and community an apology. I don’t allow my kids to engage in namecalling, I wouldn’t put up with it if I heard it at their schools, and we shouldn’t have to hear it from someone who supposedly represents part of our community. I request that you apologize.

This letter is also mailed directly to Antenori’s email. I’ll let you know if he responds.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2011 at 8:57 am and is filed under Community, kids and schools, Politics & Government. Tags for this post: Antenori, property taxes, schools, taxes, tusd, Vail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.