Editorial: Added bureaucracy counters plan's aim

The unnamed Courier editor may be right that the county is going in the wrong direction with its plan review, but from this there's no way for the reader to evaluate that opinion, because the editor simply asserts that the direction is wrong because it would add new committees. He does not tell us what the functions of the committees would be, who would be on them, or how they would go about their business. He would have us infer that the people working this issue and recommending this change are doing it for no good reason.

Newspapers are about communication: informing the voters about what's happening, to facilitate better decisions on public policy. That's why the press is in the Constitution. But rather than tell us the what, why and how of this and showing his reasoning, the editor simply states his conclusion based on a single arbitrary factor that he doesn't like.

Perhaps the editor has a reasoning process that led to this. But his editorial reads as if he would prefer to avoid that process and whip up his readers to oppose this idea in as much ignorance as possible. This is a base and basic propaganda technique that deserves nothing but rotten tomatoes.

The alternative is that the editor is truly expressing his entire thought process on this: he sees new committees, so the proposal must be bad. If this is really the case, I have to pity the poor fool.

Okay, so let's take a look and try to parse what the editor is talking about. It seems to derive from a June 7 story by Bruce Colbert about a Development Services proposal to the Planning and Zoning Commission. The July 22 (current) draft (PDF) is here.

I notice that the editor uses the Williamson Valley Community Organization to back up his objection. But it's clear in the preamble of an earlier draft of the proposal that the WV group's primary objection (keeping corridor plans exempt from community plans) is completely different from the editor's (more committees). Moreover that wall protecting corridor plans apparently came down before the current draft.

Here's the part the editor doesn't like:

4. Committee Structure
a. The community planning process shall be organized by a two tiered committee structure as follows:

(i) Plan Advisory Committee (PAC): The PAC is a permanent standing advisory committee appointed by the Board of Supervisors and acts as an overall steering committee for all community plans and a liaison between the County and the community. The PAC shall consist of two (2) DSD Development Services staff members and a representative from each Supervisor’s District, for a total committee membership of five (5). The PAC shall review recommendations from the Community Advisory Committee and provide recommendation on all draft plans or amendments submitted to the County. The PAC shall confirm the membership and organization of the Community Advisory Committee (CAC) for individual community plan processes. Committee members shall serve at the pleasure of the Board for terms of four (4) years and may be reappointed by the Board upon term expiration.

(ii). Community Advisory Committee (CAC): The committee members are suggested by the community and confirmed by the Plan Advisory Committee. DSD County staff shall be included in the CAC committee membership. Committee appointments shall be made with the goal of providing a representative cross section of interests within the community area. The CAC is responsible for conducting the community participation/input, developing the draft plan or amendment and providing recommendations to the PAC.

As I read this, one committee forms from the community temporarily to negotiate and write the plan. That seems pretty basic -- you don't want County P&Z writing your plan for you. The other committee is permanent and designed to oversee these CACs.

If we only have one CAC working at a time, I expect that the PAC would be unnecessary. P&Z could handle the oversight directly. But Yavapai is a large and growing county, and once things get rolling I can imagine three or four of these four-year processes going on at once, maybe more. That's a lot of added oversight work to a busy schedule, and I can see the argument for adding this layer. I'm not saying this is the best way to handle it -- I don't know enough about what goes on inside and the personnel proposal for the PAC could easily favor entrenched interests -- but I can see the argument.

It would rate a cookie if the editor had bothered to cover the issue with even this light a look. But he didn't. Readers have a right to demand more.

Another reason to avoid anonymous comments

I happened to see a little story on Think Progress this weekend that seems apropos of my continuing windmill-joust at anonymous commenting. The US Attorney for the western district of New York is investigating some comments, posted under fake email addresses to the website of the Wayne County Star, about a story involving an immigration raid on a local farm. Example:

“watcha doing to mi wifey, no checky her papeles. she no legal, but she havey benifit card. oh wait, take her and I get me a applehog till I go to Mexico. Viva la Raza!!!”

Someone looked at some source code, and it appears that this and several others, covering a weird racist exchange among commenters, originated in computers at the Department of Homeland Security.

This isn't a difficult hack, and it ought to make readers wonder whether some of the comments we see on the Courier site are similarly cloaked to avoid legal or political repercussions.

Fourier analysis for guitar players, courtesy the University of Nottingham, your instant brain expansion for the week.

Editorial: Common sense takes another hike

Once again the unnamed Courier editor trots out his expertise in traffic engineering, proving by mere assertion that he knows more about it than anyone actually involved and being paid to do it.

What's really interesting is the editor's emotional response to even having a proposal about bike lanes heard by Council. I doubt that anyone among the cycling advocates is even marginally hopeful that Council will approve this idea. But the editor is sputtering in anger that Council would even entertain it.

I wonder whether the editor ever noticed that we have bike lanes in regular use along MonteWhipple, a major artery carrying more traffic than east Gurley at higher speed through more complex terrain. We have lanes in use along Rosser, a much more complex and narrower roadway with entertaining obstacles and random parking. And we have a whole lot of streets narrow and wide all over town that serve bikes and cars at the same time with no separated lanes. Yet the Courier has apparently failed to cover all the blood in the streets that the editor so vehemently purports to fear.

Maybe the rest of us are just better drivers than the editor is.


Here's sometihing the editor hasn't read on bike-lane engineering.

Elks renovation contract up for approval

Surprise, surprise: hardly begun, the Elks project is overrunning its budget, and the City is tossing the object of the restoration over the side hoping to save the high-priced contract it failed to negotiate properly.

This is what comes of having people who know nothing about theatre operate one.

The City is trying to do a major renovation of an old but structurally sound specialized building with no money, no significant expertise, and no responsibility for the outcome. Every move it has made in the Elks has been wrong-footed and impeded the next. The socialites who are raising funds for it are good-hearted, but clueless about the actual cost of what they're proposing or how to make it work.

Mark me, this project will ultimately cost over five million clams, and at the end of it we'll have a pretty but essentially function-free white elephant. That will put the Elks in permanent danger of abandonment and demise.

Turning this around before it becomes completely hopeless will involve bringing in our community's theatre professionals and refocusing the project on creating a space that will serve real acts in a real economic context, not the cloud-cuckoo land that the foundationers imagine.

Finally, just to maintain my reputation for shouting at traffic: it is not, never has been and never could be an opera house. Gad, I wish people would stop calling it that, it's nothing but hick chic.

Reporter rates WYGC one of the top places to recover

This little celebrity piece points to something that I've always found interesting about Prescott: the healing and rehabilitation industry is huge here. From the Veterans' Hospital to the many alternative healers in private practice, we have healing going on everywhere. The rehab sector by itself is very big relative to the size of the town, attracting people statewide as well as out-of-staters, celebs included.

If this is something that Prescott is especially good at, I think we ought to do more to encourage it as an economic engine, which in turn will help mitigate the impact of the inevitable small percentage of failures on our streets, under our bridges and in our flophouses.

The rehab industry gets a bad rap for the people who fall through the cracks, but I think I'd rather have those impacts than the effects of more big-box retail, for example.

Thursday featured comment

Re the non-coverage of the 'tea party' protest last Friday, Midge in Prescott:

"I have great respect for the Tea Party people at their grassroots level. Unfortunately, the Astroturf elements took over and used your legitimate protests for their own ends. You know who I mean -- the biased TV and radio personalities looking for ratings, the white supremacists who used your venues to try to increase their memberships, the birthers and other conspiracy theorists who garnered notice at your expense, etcetera ad nauseum. Your legimate complaints have been overshadowed and tainted by being associated with those others. The political blowback has been fierce. Hence, your own legimate movement has lost its good name and newsworthiness. It's a dam' dirty shame. Carry on your cause without the wingnut circus, and you will eventually be heard."

The radical rightists have yet to realize that their antics are driving people away from the whole side. They won't listen -- thankfully, for both their entertainment value and their political effect, i.e. pulling the respectable clothes off rightwing ideas and showing them for what they are underneath -- but you tell 'em, Midge!

Editorial: Let's stress light, not heat in races

Overall I can go along with the sentiments that the unnamed Courier editor expresses here. But there are a couple of subversive elements to the piece that I have to point out.

The first is his setting up the online comments as useful in indicating something about public opinion more generally, and giving himself a pat on the back for putting the facility into the site. I needn't say much about the logical disconnect there.

More subtle is his assertion that "The mike was theirs. They all said everything they wanted to say about themselves to make their case," and by implication the Courier is acting as a transparent conduit from the candidate to the voter. This is false. The editor or his writer has been injecting information into the candidate stories from outside the interview context, things the candidate is not saying, without identifying the difference. That skews the articles, in at least one case in favor of public controversy showing the candidate in a negative light.

I would have chosen a more investigative, fact-based "who-is-this-person" approach, but the Courier editor volunteered to do what amounts to electioneering for the candidates. To then go in and slyly undercut the ones the editor doesn't like is dirty pool.

Racetracks campaign for slots as budget solution

Rep Tobin wants permanent casino gambling at racetracks, including our own fairgrounds, to address the dearth of state revenues, and sets this up as the alternative to temporarily raising the sales tax. The industry estimates that this might bring in close to half a billion clams to state coffers in 2012. That of course does nothing about the problem we have right now, and Joanna's story leaves out the actual budget gap of over two billion and rising.

Expanded gambling looks like free money to Mr Tobin, and to a large extent I suppose it is, since local rather than state authorities will be left to pick up the tab for the resulting societal problems. But more to the point, it would allow the Legislature to look like it's doing something about revenues without taking on the structural problems that got us here in the first place. Neither gambling nor a temporary sales tax will fix the deficit, that's a false dichotomy. The gorilla in the room is residential property taxes, among the lowest in the nation, designed to promote unsustainable growth in housing.

Like any other homeowner I'm not wild about paying more in property taxes. But I'm also unhappy about what's happening to the state and my community as a result of our collective unwillingness to provide the funds necessary to maintain quality of life. More gambling and its social impacts reduce quality of life for all of us, and sends truckloads of cash out of state to shady interests. We should make a better choice.

Wednesday open

Now it can be told.

Editorial: Honeymoon ends for Obama

The unnamed Courier editor writes, "it's heartening to see that he is no better or no worse than any of his predecessors." Read that again.

One might argue that the editor just isn't very good at communicating what he means, but on reflection I think this reveals an inadvertent truth: the editor does not want an extraordinary or effective president, and by extension does not want effective government. This reflects the fashion for radical libertarianism that weighs down this country so heavily.

This further reduces doubt that the editor will consider it victory if our president fails to win effective health-care reform, fails to get us out of Iraq, fails to bring bin Laden to justice, fails to repair our economy, or fails to rebuild our education system for the 21st century. Our editor is clearly more interested in cheerleading for a political team than contributing to addressing our very real societal problems.

For shame.

Police deploy Peacekeeper

The Prescott PD gets to roll out the new toy it unveiled last week -- to bust a nonviolent non-offender with an entertaining penchant for self-decoration (and, perhaps, because of it). This is clearly a case of having a new hammer and looking for nails. How much did this pointless exercise cost? What would it have cost last week? Who ordered this deployment of both equipment and expensive personnel? Has it become PD policy to roll a SWAT team for every apparent break-in?

This incident amounts to outrageous buffoonery that diminishes the credibility of the Prescott PD as well as us as a society. Will the Courier follow up with appropriate questions? I won't hold my breath.

Editorial: Good journalism died with Cronkite

The unnamed Courier editor leaps onto Walter Cronkite's descending coffin decrying the state of journalism today and setting himself up as the last bastion of goodness and light. I'm sorry, Editor, but Cronkite would take one look at your work and send you to the mail room.

The key to maintaining your ethics is constant self-examination. Ask yourself the tough questions, seriously, challenge yourself to be toughest on your own biases, and drive the snakes out of your own nest.

Short of that, and given the Courier's history of political favoritism, the headline reads rather like triumphalism.

Talk of the Town: Permit holders are not the threat

Matt and Sherrie Seibert deliver the NRA position in response to the editorials against the booze & bullets bill. Dismissing the objections to the new law more or less out of hand, the Seiberts, who make their living by certifying people to carry concealed weapons, spend the bulk of their column space pushing the paranoia button, attempting to convince the reader that people with hidden holsters are our only dependable defense against the crazies who are presumably out looking daily for knots of undefended people just to kill us all.

The illogic and fearmongering here speak for themselves, and are hardly worth the trouble to refute. What I'd like to focus on is the Bizarro world that these people and their followers live in.

Let's leave aside their financial interest for the moment and assume that they're sincere. They truly believe that on some random day there is a reasonable chance they will face a nut with a gun intent on killing them or others, and that their training and ready weapon will allow them to eliminate that threat with deadly force.

Ignore the actual likelihood of this scenario arising. Ignore the actual statistics on what happens to amateurs who pull guns on professionals. Ignore what happens to bystanders at gunfights. I just want to look at the psychology here, because while I think relatively few Americans buy fully into this John-Wayne mythology, many of us keep one foot in that world.

What they're describing is a world fraught with deadly danger. I dunno about you, but if I were to even suspect that I were in that much danger on a daily basis, my survival mechanism would move me out of there posthaste.

So I have to conclude that for these people survival is not at risk. Rather, they are attracted to the role of invulnerable hero, the white-hat cowboy who never takes more than a flesh wound in the left arm as he wipes out the black-hat gang. Many go further, seeing themselves as the reliable defender of American values against the forces of evil, particularly their own government -- meaning in my book, the rest of us.

In its essence this is the adolescent expression of powerlessness. But like adolescents, frightened, powerless adults with adolescent fantasies are dangerous to society. I'll agree with the Seiberts that most gun-owners will hurt no one. But a few of them, with the help of drugs or lack of drugs or emotional trauma or yes, alcohol, will become the very crazies they fear.

Or is it just fear? Perhaps for some it's the hopeful anticipation that one day they will be able to pull that weapon and become the flag-wrapped hero. Either way, I really don't want to be there when it happens, and to the greatest practical extent I want to eliminate that pathology from my community, because it is the gateway drug for school shooters, letter-bombers and fascists, most of whom, I notice, think of themselves as flag-wrapped heroes.

Eliminating guns won't eliminate this problem, but what we can do as a society is limit our exposure to it while we educate against it and treat the pathology.

Busy Monday

I got stuff to do. So you talk.

Editorial: Foreclosures still spreading

The unnamed Courier editor once again treats us to a rambling mumble about the macroeconomy, predicting dire consequences if the gubmint doesn't get out of the way and let the "free market" (stifled guffaw) solve all our problems based on a few gobbets of received wisdom from the rich guys who created the mess in the first place.

Editor, when you've actually studied some economics and have something credible to say, you'll be allowed to wear your pundit button. But you're not an economist, nor do you apparently have anything to say that isn't already a large-print headline on Fox News. No one reading you can do anything with what you say except get mad. Do you not see the childish futility in that?

PV police get statue

The scariest point in a deep recession is probably the worst time to roll out public art, whether it's ugly or not. People revert to their heritage of serfdom and see the king putting fancy gargoyles on his castle when they don't have enough food. It pisses them off. But TM's coverage anticipates that reaction and addresses it up front, pointing out in the headline and high up that the town commissioned the ugly thing last year with '07 money. Judging from the comments it's not enough to quiet the mob, but TM and the headline writer deserve a cookie for this awareness of community feelings, unusual in the paper.

Election: Katan

In the candidate coverage up to now, it appears that the articles have derived from interviews with the candidates. This time I smell a rat, and I've verified with Paul that Cindy's story includes information from outside that context, reference to his protest a couple of years ago that got some public attention but is probably seen in a negative light at the Courier. That was the only inserted information. From this I think we should be concerned about editorial interference with the election, and watch this coverage more closely for bias.

Verde Independent: Meteor Crater Staycation

I first saw Meteor Crater in 1970 amid a three week-death march around the Southwest plotted by my ambitious but largely clueless dad. It was cool then and it's still cool. It suffers a bit I expect from its roadside-curio image left over from the Route 66 tourist traps, but today besides the Really Big Hole it features a pretty good set of modern museum displays on astrophysics and space stuff. if you haven't been it's worth the trip, and thanks to Steve Ayers for this little feature on it.

Column: Rodeo can help drive economy

Something odd is going on here. Normally a piece like this will be labeled "Talk of the Town." Here it's just called "Column" to distinguish it from the letters. Is this a new idea for the editors, or is it some form of special treatment for George, who I'm sure is not on the editors' list of faves?

As to George's idea itself, I dunno. I would not like to see the middle school grounds turned into a baseball park, and while an equestrian center is more 'traditional' for Prescott, it's still devoting a lot of resources to a sport, exclusively serving the small number of residents who are into it. I gather George is imagining that businesses would lease the City property more or less permanently, and that's better than offering a big developer a sweetheart deal on public land to build something really awful, like say a hockey arena.

Update, 6:30pm: Mayor Wilson, in the comments, says, "With a new multi-use facility, the Prescott Rodeo Grounds could be used for many other functions, such as concerts and other events. The possibility of a permanent “Rawhide” type attraction has also been discussed." Oh, lordy.

Let's see, the City already owns an underused theatre that with some investment and commitment would be great for concerts, etc. There's also a really good facility at Yavapai College that can't draw enough people to break even, and a really big multi-use facility in PV that if it maintains its current success rate will likely be an antique mall in another ten years. Concerts are not turning profits here, Mayor. And a faux-cowboy show for the tourists? Are you serious? Completely apart from the lowbrow creepiness of the idea (sort of an update of the old Smoki shows, I suppose), are you saying you'd sell the fairgrounds to an attraction producer? I gotta wonder whether the voters might like to have word with you about that. With ideas like these floating around I'd just as soon see the whole place in weeds.

But we all ought to notice that the Mayor is describing a process in which the voters are apparently not considered stakeholders, working out what to do with public lands behind closed doors. I for one would like to hear a whole lot more about that.