Editorial: BOS budget talks are smoke and mirrors

It appears that the unnamed Courier editor is somehow concluding that Yavapai County Supervisors Carol Springer and Tom Thurman, heretofore reliable corporate fascists, have been mysteriously abducted and brainwashed into tax-and-spend liberals.

This because they are trusting management recommendations on pay levels and refusing to cut taxes willy-nilly, instead maintaining current levels, and with them vital services.

When a politician moves against type, it's a clue to pay attention. Based on long experience, I have no doubt that Thurman and Springer would happily eliminate pretty much all taxes and government services if they could.

But barring magical intervention, they have the responsibility of keeping county government working -- schools, health, roads and infrastructure, fire and disaster response, law enforcement, courts and jails, codes and permits, farming and ranching, and much more. Allowing any of these services to decay or die due to lack of funding would be not just irresponsible, but illegal. So we can safely deduce that these tax-hating supervisors understand that reducing revenues further will put the county into an untenable position. They can't do it.

And while Supe Davis criticizes them for allowing pay raises for a third of the county workforce, you'll notice that he's not arguing to reduce taxes. Rather, he's concerned about increasing expenditures, further straining the budget. Again, Springer and Thurman are not well-cast as public-employee-coddlers, making this another clue that they're feeling pinched.

An internal report from county management recommends adjustments across the pay structure to more fairly compensate employees for what they're doing. No sensible person can argue that this isn't sound management practice. (A better question is why the structure has deteriorated so far as to require this kind of action.) Springer and Thurman trust their managers on this, Davis apparently doesn't. Again, the unasked question is why.

The Courier editor goes no farther than assuming the county managers are corrupt featherbedders. "No wonder the public (meaning him) distrusts government," he chides. I'll give you that this kind of thing happens, but you really need to look for evidence before tarring everyone the same black.

Speaking as a stockholder in the corporation called Yavapai County, I want to be assured that the investment I've made in employee training and experience returns as much value as possible. Having experienced people leave because pay or conditions aren't up to standard is the worst kind of waste, I don't care what business you're in.

As a consumer of county services to whatever extent, I expect to get full value for my money in skilled, reliable services. Quality matters, and that does not come at whatever price happens to make the editor happy (hint: free). Voters have charged the county with certain responsibilities that we consider vital, and we've given them the authority to adjust tax rates to make that work economically. I think we can trust Republicans to keep those rates as low as possible, when they aren't starving services outright. (I also think we can trust most Dems to keep taxes as low as possible. The idea that politicians like to waste public money is largely a myth.)

The editor can't see beyond his property tax bill, and just falls into his customary unthinking, anti-tax brainfog.  If it were only him, it wouldn't matter much, but he's disinforming readers on a relatively large scale and pushing the easy anger button, causing more distrust without evidence to warrant it. This is a disservice to our community that can do real damage to real lives. At junctures like this we can be relieved that the editor has so little credibility among people in power.

No wonder

If one year equals seven dog years, that makes one day equal to a dog week.

How would you act if you only got fed twice a week?

Editorial: Current hierarchy presents a conflict

Perhaps there really is a conflict, editor, but it seems to me that your primary job entails finding out what the specific conflicts have been and how they have affected our city government and our community.

This editorial and Cindy's news-side story stink of clubby insiderism. Watching Council talk around the issue is not the core of the story, editor. To understand whether Council is addressing the situation usefully, we need to know what the situation really is. This coverage just ropes me off.

And by the way, it only further confuses civics-challenged voters to have you referring to this as a "separation of powers" issue. It's nothing of the sort.

If Council takes the Attorney's office out from under the Manager, it is effectively removing an arm from City administration and attaching it to itself. This is the opposite of what we normally understand as separation of powers, and would be considered a gross usurpation of administrative power by what amounts to our local legislative branch. Imagine the howls if the Congress decided to bring the President's legal team and Justice Department under its exclusive control.

Whether this would be a good idea is another question. If the administrative apparatus has become so corrupt that Council cannot trust the Manager to properly handle internal investigations, I'd expect to see personnel changes from the top down into the middle layers -- it's not the system, it's the people.

Should we infer that Council has known about this kind of problem for a long time and been too weak to deal with it? Or is this why Steve Norwood and his deputy left? I have no idea other than my own experiences with the Norwood regime, and the paper isn't helping me. Or you.

Editorial: Another whine about the world enforced by our own politics

I love it when the unnamed Courier editor moans about energy prices, as he does in today's editorial. Today's villain is our local electrical monopoly, APS. Can you imagine what the rates would be like if this behemoth were unregulated? Yet the Courier editorial board regularly pimps for the deregulatory libertarian paradise and candidates who promise it. He claims to love renewables, but sides with the NIMBies every time (see below). Our rising energy prices are largely driven now and more so in the future by the worsening scarcity of petro fuels, but getting past that dependency isn't "practical" if it involves a five-cent rise in the editor's fuel bill.

This is exactly how the shortsightedness of American "conservatism" leads to chronically unhappy conditions. Would that the editor could make a few painfully obvious connections.

Editorial: No easy solution for septic dispute

Western PV residents don't show up when officials summon them to talk about their septic tanks. I'm so surprised.

It does no good to speculate on whether they'll support a plan to improve their waste systems, editor. You and PV and county officials ought to go out and talk with them.

These largely lower-income residents are struggling already, holding multiple jobs or hunting for work, juggling kids at the same time. I expect a larger than usual proportion of homeowners are non-resident or in foreclosure. It makes no sense to conclude anything from a small turnout at an obscure public meeting.

If the editor would like to contribute to resolving the problem, he could do more to publicize both the problem and the community's efforts to resolve it, as well as to urge PV and county officials to be more proactive and circumspect with their outreach to the affected homeowners. What he's done here is lame.

The continuing hassle over comments

Promoting this from a comment on the previous post, by "Coyote Contraire™":

Mr. Ayres,

I know this is off-subject to memorial day, but the cartoon reminded me of the subject of comment burial by the Courier, and I've nowhere else to turn.

The majority of my recent comment submissions have been "disappeared" by the Courier ed. staff. None have been in violation of their Terms of Use, and most have been relatively on-subject. Navigating their capricious minefield of approval is tricky at best, but would probably be less difficult if only I would just type really nice, soft things -- like, "I like bunnies and kittens". Sometimes they quickly post stuff I'm sure they wouldn't touch, then they disappear something utterly innocuous.

To wit: I wrote a comment to this article, and it got posted.

Two commenters made inquiries to me about the recent addition of the ™ symbol to my pseudo. I wrote and submitted five different comments in attempting to respond and they all have been s**t-canned. The Courier, of course, is a private enterprise and is therefore under no obligation to consider the principles of freedom of expression.

What bewilders me, though, is that all five submissions were inoffensive, vaguely humorous, and in no way in violation of the TOU. I'm beginning to think it's personal.

I appreciate your concern, and it's this sort of arbitrary and apparently capricious interference with comments that led me to begin this blog in the first place. It's impossible to determine why this is happening, but from other comments it's clear to me that it is and it's obviously not good.

My response is to repeat my open invitation to any Courier commenter to post deleted, censored or edited comments here. Post them as comments on any entry, regardless of topical pertinence -- I'll create a pertinent thread and move them to it. Make a habit of copying your comments before posting them to the Courier and saving them as backups until they appear.

My own experience has been that since I started raising a regular stink over it, editing and disappearance of my comments has ceased. Interference also seems to have lessened since Ben Hansen left, but it's difficult to guage.

NB: I notice that comments frequently appear on unrelated stories, implying that the editors (or perhaps commenters) may be mistakenly attaching them in the wrong places, and that could account for some 'lost' comments.

Editorial: Those nasty solar panels again

In today's "Solar panels cloud homeowners' futures," the unnamed Courier editor makes clear that he agrees with the slant in Jason Soifer's story yesterday (see below).

I have to wonder why the headline isn't "Neighbors cloud solar plant's future." Open land inside the town limits -- there's a lot of that in Chino Valley -- is to be the site of the kind of energy-production facility that every community in the country needs to secure the future. The owners are promising to put serious money into preventing the neighbors from seeing a clean, low-traffic, emissions-free facility. The setbacks are huge. Still, the neighbors are able to raise the specter of "reduced property values" and grind the whole process to a halt.

This is the same town that last week voted overwhelmingly to allow a KOA campground into another residential neighborhood, with its attendant traffic, noise, waste and water draw.

The editor concurs with the property-value argument, based on exactly zero research. Maybe there are people who would be put off by the idea of living next to a solar plant, but it seems awfully likely to me that they're far outnumbered by people who would prefer it. I'll happily put my name on that list.

The editor goes on: "it's unclear just how much of the 20 megawatts of power expected to be generated will stay local," implying it would therefore be worthless and clearly indicating that he has no clue how grid power works. (In a given electrical system, the power is everywhere at once, so it's both never "local" and always "local.")

In the end he dourly warns, "It could be your backyard next." First, editor, it's not their backyards. It's adjacent property. It's clear the editor would prefer to have the property adjacent to his occupied by random people, but for me the prospect of a solar plant behind my property says peace and quiet -- no barking dogs, no midnight screaming matches, no revving engines or gangster rap, no creepy drums full of unknown liquids, no crop spraying, no industrial noise or dust, no screaming children, no crazy teenagers, no target practice. I'd love to see a line of trees.

The arguments against it are so nonsensical I have to consider that some see solar power as a political threat. We're on a sinking ship, and these people want to toss the lifeboats overboard. And here we see the editor, the supposed champion of renewable energy, pitching in to help them.

Today's chuckle

First comment on today's traffic-related editorial:

"The solution is obvious. Radar activated machine guns. It would slow people down and it would be totally awesome. I have suggested this already, but the council doesn't care about what the voters want."

Solar farm casts shadow

Jason Soifer covers the inevitable conflict between a proposed Chino Valley solar-farm project and NIMBY neighbors. But rather than just tell the story, he gets in a few editorial characterizations to fuel the silly fire.

Starting with the head and subhead, we get a decidedly dark view of the project. The first adjective Jason applies to the project is "sprawling," carrying firmly negative connotations compared to, say, "large." Later he writes,

"The plans includes a 41,000-square-foot substation, water tank and tower, communications building, fencing topped with barbed wire around the farm, and trees between the fence and the roughly 70 properties that will eventually watch their serene backyard views turn partially to black."

Leaving aside the idea that "properties" can "watch" anything, notice the contrast between "serene" and "black," even though he's just described a screen of trees that will clearly improve the view of treeless hardpan that we see in the photo. Maybe he thinks they'll be black trees. The graf should have ended with "70 (bordering) properties."

Jason runs two different versions of the "ram it down our throats" quote, but apparently never asks town officials to reply to this characterization of their actions. He also gives a lot of ink to a letter from a purported prospective property buyer that happens to agree with the homeowner. Clue, Jason: one opinion does not constitute a survey, and you didn't verify the letter was genuine. The faked letter from the assessor should raise red flags about how far people are willing to go on this, and should have been more carefully followed up.

People have a right to concern about what happens on the other side of their property line, and the paper has the right to publish an editorial opinion. But keep the editorials out of the news pages, please. This sort of thing is bad for the community and bad for the paper.

Finagling 401

Former Council candidate Mike Peters gets in a letter today about Council's work to "clarify" the successful initiative to require a vote of the people before approving expenditure on any project to cost more than $40  million.

The commenters variously want to go back and debate the value of the pipeline, the value of the initiative process, the venality of Council, and the qualifications of Mr Peters to speak. Another random food fight, in other words.What most seem to be missing is that this is an important issue of process.

I didn't favor the initiative myself, but it became law fairly and we have to respect that. The initiative didn't demand the end of the pipeline project. It requires a vote on it, that's all.

If we hold an election on the pipeline plan and it wins, it validates the value of the project and the process to get us there. It would put the issue permanently to bed -- or at least until it bankrupts us or gets us stuck for years in lawsuits over easements, etc.

But by dragging its feet on the clearly mandated election process, Council is only casting further doubt on the public value of the project as well as its own integrity. They may find a legal workaround, but that will inevitably lead to more court battles, citizen anger and delays. It may be tactically astute, but it's strategically stupid.

The developer combine pushing the pipeline seems to be  underestimating its ability to sell voters a bum steer -- we did wind up electing John Hanna, after all. That tells me that they really don't think they have the goods to win a popular vote, and need to try to get what they want the old-fashioned way: weasel tactics.

Gosar Goes Progressive

Heads exploded yesterday in Tusayan when Rep Paul Gosar (R-American Association of Reactionary Dentists) called the New Deal WPA model a "really good" idea for addressing our unemployment and infrastructure problems, volunteering that "the CCC is another one." The sound is pretty bad, but someone got it on video:



Evoking a stopped clock, Gosar is correct. It worked before and it could work again. But forgive me if I'm a little skeptical of his sincerity. For Republicans these days, talk like this can get you a visit from the reeducation squad.

Wiederaenders: Schools should already be 'real creative'

Tim takes the PUSD Facilities Manager to task for his expression, "Short of a bond, we are going to have to get real creative," inferring from the comment that the school district is talking about borrowing money before "creative" options are explored. And I thought I was Prescott's most annoying pedant.

This my be a class-related idiom, but when a working man says to me, "we're gonna have to get real creative," I take it to mean that the next step is cutting corners and skirting good practice. In certain situations it can mean going around the law. It's sarcasm, Tim, and it bodes an ugly result. The college-guy translation would be, "Without bonding, our services and facilities will suffer unacceptably." Make a note.

I'll bet if you dusted off your old reporter's hat, showed up at the PUSD Facilities Department and asked a few questions, you'd be surprised at how creative our public employees are and have been in dealing with their diminishing budget. You may also notice that though you deserve it, they don't take a poke at you for insulting them so ignorantly and publicly.

Tim was a bit less clear with his anecdote about fundie Xtian Dave McNabb (an old radio colleague of mine) asking the school board to stop teaching evolution as fact. If I take the section at face value, Tim seems to be smiling smugly about his advanced knowledge that evolution is (just) theory. I've long known that Tim believes in the Big Guy In the Sky, but I shudder to think that our local print monopoly might be run by someone no smarter or better informed than your average Afghan Taliban.

Note to Dave: What do you care? You're lifting off tomorrow.

We also learn that until the recent school-bus crash, Tim didn't know that our local districts go out and pick up kids in adjacent districts if their parents want them to attend a different school, they do it at no cost to the parents and they've been doing it for years. This is just one of many silly results of kowtowing to the god of competition in public services.

I happened to be talking about this at dinner the other night with one of our local school bus drivers, who offered one fascinating story after another about the ridiculous contradictions drivers deal with on a daily basis, starting with the lack of seat belts and other basic safety measures for the kids. Again, Tim, consider asking a question of a working stiff once in a while.

Casserly again

Today JJ turns in a column that might be marginally useful in the Vitality section, but is of course completely out of place on the Op-Ed page.

It's always a slog to get through JJ's turgid and often incoherent style, and what he's saying was already well covered thirty years ago, but I'll try to say something positive about this one: other than it's placement in the layout, it's mostly harmless.

Amster: Shall we wall in the entire nation?

Great column by Randall today -- erudite, well reasoned, well written, passionate and persuasive. Just go read.

Editorial: Teachers can't seem to get a break today

The unnamed Courier editor gets it right today in calling the HUSD Board on its egregious disrespect for the retiring teachers it put on the agenda to honor. It's fine as far as it goes.

What bugs me is that he can get exercised over whether the board got the ceremonial pins right, but he can't get interested in improving teacher compensation and working conditions, what we most need to attract and keep those great teachers he claims to appreciate. That's the kind of "break" our teachers -- and our kids -- really need.

Good point: "Tri-City Educator" comments --

If the Courier is so concerned about the recognition, then why haven't they honored these tremendous individuals in the newspaper?

Rooting for Rapture

They tell us that devout and carefully vetted Xtians will float off the planet on Saturday, and I'm all for it. It'll wipe out our unemployment problem, taxpaying businesses will be able to move into the abandoned church real estate, and we'll be able to replace half our Legislature with representatives who are better grounded, so to speak. It may also relieve us from letters like Holly Schrader's today.

PS: The word "rapture" derives from the same Latin root as "rape," originally meaning to be carried away. Need I say more?

Update, Saturday: Drat. It appears that either the math was off again, or perhaps the Big Guy in the Sky looked down and decided that we're all gonna have to go through the Tribulation together. (What if you gave a Rapture and nobody qualified?)

Your tax dollars at work

I'm moving the post below slightly because of consistent hack attacks on it.

Editorial: Community garden helps in tough times

Community garden in Alpharetta, GA

I love the community-garden concept. It brings people together to build community and improve the environment while providing better food and teaching self-sufficiency skills to young and old. Had the editor focused on those values, he'd be munching a nice cookie right now. Instead heruns down a rabbit trail that has to be amusing for every home gardener, and shows pretty clearly that the editor understands neither gardening nor its economics or larger values.

The editor comes at it from the angle of high food prices, implying that gardens like this provide cheap food, and apparently concluding that a third of an acre of vegetables can have a significant economic effect.

I imagine home gardeners all over Prescott having a deep chuckle over this. The editor seems to imagine that growing your own food is free.

I sincerely doubt that anyone growing less than an acre of single crop in this area is producing anything for significantly less on average than they could get it in a store, even if they don't account their hours of labor. The water, the seeds and seedlings, the compost and other soil amendments, the critter barriers and repellents, the support structures, the weather barriers, it adds up fast if you want a nice tomato.

Ask a family farmer. Those folks aren't exactly rolling in dough lately.

No, editor, if it was about cost we'd all be picking over the trash bins at Wal-Mart. Growing your own is about knowing where it comes from, exactly what's in it, and the satisfaction of making something beautiful and tasty. These are values you can't buy, so there's no way to compare the pricing.

When you fold in the amount of time it takes, a garden absolutely cannot compete with agribusiness on a dollar basis. The idea is ludicrous.

A community garden is a great place to learn and share, and I have no doubt that for the 70 or so households able to participate in this one, it'll be fun and rewarding. For the rest of us the project can serve as an example and inspiration to spur similar projects elsewhere in the community. We have underused plots of land all over town that could be in production right now, cultivated by neighborhood groups, churches, schools and businesses.

Many of our neighbors actively participated in the wartime Liberty Garden effort not so long ago, designed to help reduce retail demand and therefore transportation and labor costs in response to labor* and fuel shortages. Need I point out that current conditions are economically parallel?

Gardening is a great idea in many ways. It's too bad the editor fails to see them.

[Addendum] Note *:  Referring to the shortage of agricultural workers as we scare off Mexicans, of course.

State pulls funding for 9th grade technical classes

Paula gets into the weeds on the budget numbers, but the most important information in this story is missing: a clear explanation of the effects of the cuts.

She references "technical classes" for 9th-graders. What is that? Woodshop? Beautician training? Basic physics? No idea. How does this alter a kid's career path or employment opportunities? No comment. What are the follow-on effects for the community. Eh?

A core reason why many people are so blithe about cutting public spending is that they just don't realize how it will affect them, their neighbors or their families. Here was an opportunity missed.

City manager: What makes "the best" candidate?

In today's "Council direction on city manager search expected at Tuesday meeting," Cindy quotes Laurie Hadley saying that locals "thought it was important to go out there and really search (for the best candidate)" for city manager, and that spending money on a headhunter would accomplish that. To me this clearly illustrates the aridity of the terms of this debate and a generalized lack of both vision and logic at City Hall.

Nowhere in the discussion have I seen any reference to our criteria for hiring the most powerful person in our local government. What exactly makes a good city manager, and how will we find the right fit for Prescott?

In the past these searches have apparently been based entirely on whether the person has previously managed another city of comparable size, and whether he (always he so far) has done an adequate job. In my experience this has led to a succession of generally competent but dully conservative occupants for the office, and unremitting mediocrity in the results.

In my 17 years as a resident, Prescott has failed to progress in any positive way, and has clearly lost some quality of life. We have more big-box shopping at the cost of smaller retailers, more mall space with fewer people shopping in it, fewer middle-income jobs relative to population, more official attention on traffic and less on scenic or neighborhood beauty, and still no sustainable water plan. Our infrastructure spending is at best barely keeping up with maintenance needs. Our economic development department is now focused on tourism. Quality-of-life improvements like the trails network or the YMCA have been exclusively private and nonprofit initiatives. We seriously have to ask ourselves whether this is how we want to continue going about things.

In our form of city government, the Council is equivalent to a board of directors, and the manager to a corporate president. S/he not only carries out the policy requirements set by Council, but s/he also generates many initiatives from staff experience and input. S/he remains in the job as Council members move in and out, and holds the keys to institutional memory and vision. S/he must be both politician and technician, a leader to staff and a servant-leader to Council. Having been involved in City process and observed closely for many years, I'm convinced that the manager has far greater influence on policy and how it's exercised than any elected official can.

So if we're to get off the dime, join the 21st century and have a shot at having Prescott live up to its potential as a great place to live, beyond ordinary managerial skills, the person we pick for that chair must have visionary goals and a chess-player's mind for achieving them. That person is not likely to be out of a job and showing up on every headhunter's list. I think we have to be the headhunter.

Rather than look for the best person available, we should be looking closely at the most successful towns our size across the country and discover what they're doing and how. Then we look for who's making those efforts happen, and when we find a fit, make an offer to attract someone who's already happy in the job.

Will it take a search firm to do that? Probably, but success demands clear direction from us about how to look. I tend to doubt we can find the qualities we need for 20,000 clams. Look what it's got us up to now.