Among the many boring year-end roundups crowding the media, perhaps the most interesting to news junkies is the annual Top 25 Censored Stories, by Project Censored. Check it out, I promise you'll learn something really intriguing.
Steve takes his column from the prison controversy to the 50,000-foot level, and offers a better idea for how to use that land. I gotta wonder whether Brad Fain is listening, but Steve gets a cookie.
The Courier headline writer tries to soften the impact of Sheila Polk's amazing opinion in the Republic. If you haven't, go read it. It takes my breath away to see something like this coming from our stalwart county attorney, and it adds a lot of lustre to her already sterling reputation as a serious and dedicated public servant.
Linda Stein's story is solid, covering the issue and giving the other side maybe a little too much space to respond, and then going for a neutral view as well. All good. The headline, by pulling "mixed reactions" out of someone's butt, is clearly meant to confuse the picture. Bad editor, no cookie for you.
I'll also bet that Ms Polk's letter came to the Courier offices as well, and is languishing on a spike somewhere. Space considerations, I'm sure.
The unnamed Courier editor comes out clearly, if limply, in favor of widening WVR, and by extension in favor of housing and commercial growth in upper Williamson Valley. It may be that he's only really thinking in terms of his own convenience in maneuvering his oversized pickup, but let's consider for a second the wider implications, so to speak
The City has made it clear that it has no interest in more annexations in the valley. So new homes up there will be on county land, exempt from the state water regime. Williamson Valley is a smaller but significant watershed for the Big Chino aquifer, and exempt wells are a significant factor in whether we can achieve safe water yield.
Closer in, the road serves an area of mini-ranches: horses (and horse-trailers), wildlife, pedestrians without sidewalks, tractors and school buses clog a road that winds through trees, dales and homes. Farther out it's straighter and easier to navigate, but in town there's a reason it's slow.
Widening the road will cut back hillsides, level out dips and hills, clear back trees, cut into properties and put the homes even closer to the road. There's no question that it will permanently change the character of the area, complicate people's lives, reduce quality of life and squash a lot more coyotes, skunks, deer, cats and dogs.
What's the upside? Smoother, faster traffic flow to places that haven't been built yet. If that's your idea of a good investment of public funds, you're welcome to it.
I'm sure a lot of readers are scratching their heads over this. E&P has been the primary trade journal of newspaper editors for a hundred years, and that's why it seems important enough to the editors to place on the op-ed page. Ordinary readers probably know nothing about it, of course, and could care less, so it was more than a little self-indulgent for the editors to do this.
But for those who are curious, check out the Wikipedia entry as a start. It's another casualty of corporate media dominance, and a sad loss to my profession. I hope they can pull something together and keep going.
The prison story broke in the Courier on Dec 17, a scant five days ago, so Councilwoman Lasker's column appears well ahead of the paper's usual two- to three-week publishing schedule for this sort of thing -- which only illustrates that they can get things printed in a more timely fashion when they want to.
I'm not taking a position yet on whether it's a good idea for PV to get into the prison business. I have to say that the idea of public officials panting after this sort of "growth business" is repellent, extending PV's history of rash, tasteless action for its own sake (the zombie civic center, the untenable public debt, the invented downtown, the tickytacky developments, the arena, the traffic cameras, ack). Having for-profit corporations operate such facilities is just wrong-headed as well, for a multitude of reasons. But if the project is necessary (debatable) and this is a good place for it, "not in my back yard" just isn't a good argument against it. And while I live in Prescott, I consider PV my back yard as well. The entire area has a stake in this decision, and PV officials should acknowledge that.
Ms Lasker plays the part of the smart shopper, but with no experience or homework to inform what she's seeing, she's a babe in the woods for a sales job, as we can infer from her comments here. The one thing a corporation will always do better than government is sales.
What concerns me most is the likelihood that a prison-town mentality will develop around it, a mindset that treats people as things. If we're to have a prison here, let's consider how we can do it better for everyone, the workers, the community and the incarcerated. Let's have some new ideas on facility and systems design to create a place where the people coming out are more likely to be better for the experience, and the community is as well.
The unnamed Courier editor doesn't go far into the details of how he arrives at his numbers, but he concludes that the artificial grass will cost more over the long run and that this will be a good thing considering the water savings. This is a counterintuitive result in context, so I'm inclined to trust it, and the editor gets a cookie for choosing substantial water savings over a small margin of public money.
This goes a long way to clearing up the confusion that Ken Hedler left in the wake of his Nov 27 story on the deal, which implies the actual cost will be lower overall.
Never mind that we're spending public money of this order on sports, that's just stupid and it should be a subject for public debate. But at least they're planning to do it somewhat less stupidly. Now let's keep an eye on the contract fulfillment and see whether the numbers pan out.
An anonymous commenter writes:
"The Courier wrote an article several days ago claiming that a car crashed into the nonprofit People Who Care building at the Prescott United Methodist Church, seriously injuring one of their employees. It turns out they had the wrong agency and the accident actually occurred at Caring Presence, another senior care agency in the area. Despite a call from People Who Care correcting their mistake, the paper never printed a correction."
Lightning bolts, river deltas and dust bunnies! Welcome to the world of fractal dimensions.
Sometimes I despair that the unnamed Courier editor is even capable of seeing past I-me-mine. Today's editorial notes that people are conserving energy (a good thing), and that APS wants higher rates (a normal thing), and jumps to another logic-free connection.
Perhaps someone should explain to the editor that people are conserving energy because they need to save money. If energy were cheaper, we'd have less conservation.
Meanwhile the fuels that APS uses are increasingly expensive and supplies are inevitably diminishing. The grid system we all rely on for electric power is technologically Stone Age and under-maintained, raising both fixed and labor costs. Shareholders demand profits, so managers must demand prices. That's just how it is. Reducing electricity use does not reduce generation -- the potential across the wires is always the same. So the only way to reduce costs in response to conservation is to reduce capacity, by taking generators offline. We're a long way from that kind of savings, and it'll probably never happen to any significant degree. What actually happens is that most of what we don't use here is used somewhere else. The rest is simply wasted as unused potential.
I have to say that higher energy prices -- prices that more faithfully reflect the true costs of the stupid system we have -- are good for us in that they force us to conserve and allow sensible alternatives to compete. Any sane projection for the future includes far higher prices for fossil fuels. Let's get used to it, and make lemonade.
Here's another case of failing to ask the most basic question. Cindy's CYMPO story covers the players on one side of the issue at length. But where is the quote from ADOT on why the river crossing is still on their maps? One phone call.
Notice anything missing from this story? It's the fans, the people the Fains have been counting on to make this unlikely venture work. Ken apparently asks questions of no one but those who are working to sell the idea. Consequently the reader can't trust anything in the article as fact.
Speaking as someone who's done a lot of shows, big and small, I've said from the beginning that the arena would quickly devolve to white-elephant status. Six thousand seats is just too big for people in this area, even including optimistic hopes of visitors, to reliably support. I grew up in an area where minor-league hockey is relatively popular and familiar, and I've seen how counting on that usually leads to bankruptcy. Trying to sell music in a barn like this one is iffy at best, and most ticket-buyers wind up hating it. The optimistic (for developers) population projections that sold Global Entertainment on the area are proving wildly wrong. It won't be long, I expect, before Global cuts its losses and pulls out, leaving PV with the question of what to do with the building. Maybe there's an opportunity here.
Maybe Ken's second half will include the other side of the story. I'll keep an eye out.
Update, Tuesday: Never happened. I'm so surprised.
I'm intimately familiar with what Rep Mason is saying to the District 1 municipalities -- we talk about it every week on The People's Business (2pm Sat and Sun, 89.5 and 90.1 FM) -- and while I wasn't there on Tuesday, I can be pretty confident that she said a whole lot more in her presentation to Council than shows up in Cindy's story. Tune in this weekend for the full megillah from Lucy, or check out the meeting itself on Access13.
The reason the outlook is so bleak is not because we don't have good choices available to us, but rather that the hardline Republican leadership, including our own Mr Tobin, refuses to consider those choices in favor of an ideology that demands taking advantage of every opportunity to kill off government services. Beyond reducing quality of life for all of us, this adolescent approach also stunts the business environment they think they favor.
Elections matter. If you've been resisting involvement in politics -- unlikely if you're reading this, I'm sure -- get up off your lazy duff and do your part to understand the issues and elect better people.
Our legislators, continuously frustrated that voter protections keep it from exerting control over a large portion of the state's budget, are looking at how they can change the law to allow them to graze the forbidden fruit.
The unnamed Courier editor characterizes this as focusing only on "money that is not being spent," and while some lawmakers may be saying that, it would be supremely naive to imagine that any breach in the initiative firewall won't lead to wholesale withdrawal of any funds the Legislature wants. And bear in mind that our Legislature is currently owned and operated by the radical right, which risks the decimation of any program created by voter initiative that's to the left of Jesse Helms.
The editor goes further, imagining that the Legislature can simply repeal inconvenient initiatives. This betrays a gross lack of understanding of the Arizona Constitution. The initiative process is designed specifically to prevent legislative meddling in voter-created laws. It just don't work that way. This also implies a complete misunderstanding of the legislative process, in that programs and funding mechanisms generally go hand in hand, so repealing an initiative repeals its funding as well. That's a no-gainer, budget-wise, so you have to essentially siphon off taxes that the people have dedicated to a specific purpose and apply them somewhere else. That tends to piss people off.
There are a lot of good reasons for amending the Constitution to eliminate or restructure the initiative process. Voter-protection of funding really does impair legislative work to build constitutionally mandated balanced budgets, and as these protected chunks have built up over decades, everyone agrees the system is now seriously out of balance. Large out-of-state and corporate interests have also discovered that an initiative can be packaged and sold to voters like corn flakes, and this can be very convenient for snaking something into law that even the most expensive and devious lobbyists can't get through the normal process. We have a lot of bad and clunky law on our books as a result, and other states have found themselves facing bankruptcy over such idiocies.
What's happening now may result in the Legislature creating legal fig leaves for borrowing voter-protected funds to pay back later, while a Constitutional amendment goes forward to change the initiative process. This cannot legally change previous voter protections except by other specific initiatives, the Supreme Court will see to that. There's no going back, we can only go forward.
The editor's glib conclusion, that we should just "enact smart spending at all levels," is easy to say, but very hard to manage both politically and practically. The essential part he leaves out is gathering the necessary revenue and building a dependable tax structure, no surprise as he's never seen a tax he liked. We can only hope that our lawmakers are able to cobble together a more useful understanding of the complexity of our situation and more respect for voters and the law than our editor exhibits in this piece.
Update, 5pm: It seems our governor and legislative leadership aren't even competent to count days. ABC is reporting that tomorrow's special session will be too late to legally do anything about the March ballot measures on the agenda. (Readers of the linked story will note that Ken Bennett used to be Senate President, now he's Secretary of State, of course. Gad.) Now they're talking about a May ballot. Why not do the session anyway, aiming for May instead, rather than put it off again? I swear.
The unnamed editor is cribbing from an article in The Arizona Capitol Times you'll find here. (Did the Courier carry this in the paper version, maybe?)
The first thing that jumps out at me is that the editor equates obscenely large bonuses for executives of big corporations with standard-practice longevity bonuses for non-executive employees of municipal authorities. The logic there is undeniably weak.
But his central point is that it doesn't make sense to pay bonuses to some employees while laying off others, not too strange on the surface, especially for the majority of people, who've never received workplace bonuses other than as holiday gifts and such.
A newspaper editor is supposed to have wider knowledge than that, though. "Bonus" is a hot-button word in the media context of big-bank bailouts, but that doesn't change its real-world value as a normal part of the pay package for many. It's clear from the Capitol Times piece that this is standard practice among Valley municipalities, and it's offered to reward and retain experienced employees.
Let's bring the numbers into human perspective. This year Phoenix is putting 14.3 million clams, from a budget of over a billion, into bonuses for about 7,000 employees. This amounts to an average of a little over two grand per employee. Not a huge differential, if you ask me.
Perhaps the editor forgets that the quality of municipal services depends on the quality of the people furnishing them, and that an experienced employee is usually far more valuable than a new one. The editor's corporatist worldview tends to see workers as interchangeable and disposable, but real-world business knows better. Quality specialized workers are in constant demand, regardless of the economic weather, and municipalities are never at the top of the list of high-paying employers.
But the big fail here is that the editor doesn't bother to ask the most fundamental question: do Prescott, PV or Chino Valley include this sort of bonus in their pay packages? If so, we have something to talk about and some numbers to look at. If not, he's wasting everyone's time, as no one cares what the Courier thinks about what Mesa is doing.
Following up on Karen Fann's two-part Talk of My Ass two weeks ago, today we see a letter from the Yavapai County Contractors Association neatly juxtaposed with the editorial saying essentially the same things Mayor Fann did, adding exactly nothing to the argument.
All three of these entities argue quite reasonably that our infrastructure is in sad shape and needs revamping. I agree completely. But none bothers to lay out any ideas for how to pay for it other than vague references to federal stimulus funds.
None seems to notice that we gave up trillions in revenue with the Bush tax cuts for the rich, that we've run our economy on the rocks with insane spending on pointless, self-defeating wars, or that we're giving away hundreds of billions to patch the mistakes of crazed profiteers in financial institutions. These are a big part of why there's no money, folks. And they all -- the editor, Ms Fann and I'll bet Ms Griffis -- supported every one of these stupid decisions to the hilt, so I wouldn't look to them for sensible solutions to the problem.
We're where we are, so what can we do about infrastructure? First we have to look at the problem in realistic context. A given bridge or highway is the responsibility of a municipality, the state or the federal government, so funding for the repair has to come to its governing authority. The federal government legally can't do it all, as our commenters imply. Even if it could, the money has to come from somewhere, just printing it at the mint would rob us all in a hundred ways. So we have to grit our teeth and admit that we have to pay for it.
At the state level, expenditures this year are still running around 20% ahead of revenues even after the draconian cuts the legislature has instituted, and the numbers continue to head south. Everyone who's paying attention on left and right agree that this derives from structural problems in the budget, specifically an overdependence on sales taxes (generated primarily by home construction) and neglect of more dependable revenue sources, specifically income and residential property taxes, both among the lowest in the nation. This is a bit like basing your weekly budget on your Xmas bonus.
We can do a lot to fix that and it won't hurt much, by raising the income tax a little or by broadening property taxes and lowering the rates. Our legislative Democrats are waiting with the ideas in hand for when the Republicans finally realize that their ideas can't work, cut their radical fringe loose and grudgingly let the Dems into the room. There's really no other good option on the table.
At the federal level, we need a massive rethink of our spending priorities, particularly on our war machine. We're like a 16th-century mounted knight, weighed down with so much armor that we can't stand up on our own (our Chinese squire propping us up), while our adversaries have switched to light infantry with economic rifles. Our dependence on war as an industry is serving everyone's interests but our own. Diverting just a small part of the resources we devote to warmaking instead to clean energy development would build us an industry for the future as well as bring that value back into our economy as vital long-term infrastructure.
On the revenue side, we still have to repair the damage done by the Bush administration. Allowing those tax cuts to expire will be a huge help and won't hurt anyone at all, and moving a portion of those funds into New Deal-style infrastructure-building is exactly what the doctor is ordering here. Going further and reregulating the financial industry, starting with reinstituting Glass-Steagall (the repeal of which was a Clinton-era mistake) will help stabilize our economy and get us back on track to sensible growth by repairing our credit infrastructure. This will require steady public pressure, as it appears the Obama administration is substantially favoring Wall Street over Main Street.
You may notice that while they are coming from the political left, all these ideas are deeply conservative at their core. Sensible revenue-generation, sensible spending on things that will have lasting value. The years-long binge by the political right has reached its inevitable sad end, much as it did in 1929, albeit with far less extreme results, and now we have to be adults and deal sensibly with the mess.
I've been getting more frequent spam in the comments, so I've added a little security step to the routine. Sorry about that. It's too much like taking your shoes off at the airport for my taste, but the bad guys just never let up.
As of yesterday morning KJZA/KJZP is running on 90.1 in Prescott in partnership with KAWC in Yuma. Hope you like it!
Okay, so I stole the idea from Science Friday on NPR. So sue me. And yeah, I'm a day late. No cookie for you.
How snakes slither:
