Hunting for the story in O’Dell’s Rio Nuevo article

by David Safier

Lurking inside the Star's Rob O'Dell is a journalist's conscience which demands he put all the relevant facts into his articles. It's just that O'Dell says to his conscience, "I don't have to put the facts I don't like in the opening paragraphs, do I? I can bury them in the last sentence of paragraph 5 and in paragraph 13, right?"

The story is about a hearing on the Rio Nuevo audit. The important context of the hearing is,

The majority of speakers were either tea-party members or other well-known political activists.

That sentence, at the end of paragraph 5, lets you know that the room was packed with activists, mainly right wingers, with the occasional John Kromko thrown in to add some spice. You need to read all the way to paragraph 13 to find out these anti-government spending folks want to spend another $1 million to create a more extensive Rio Nuevo audit. "Go get some blood out of this," Ken Scoville says in the quote that ends the article.

Whether the folks who packed the hall were right or wrong, their political leanings are vital to put the story in context. But O'Dell likes to keep his laser-sharp focus on everything that's wrong with Tucson's city governance, and he won't allow any distractions early in the story.

Interestingly, O'Dell posted on Pueblo Politics yesterday at 5:05pm — I think it was in time to make the deadline for today's paper — that the Tea Party folks want the FBI and newly elected A.G. Tom Horne to start a criminal investigation of Rio Nuevo.

The activists are “questioning whether there was a deliberate policy designed to violate state law and deploy a system of shoddy record keeping in order to mask a conspiracy to reward favored consultants and contractors with public mon is as well as to siphon district monies to the City of Tucson in order to sustain the political careers of certain elected officials.”

I expect to see this information in the paper soon. O'Dell probably wants to put it out on a slow drip so he can get as much anti-Tucson government, anti-Rio Nuevo mileage out of it as possible.

(h/t to Caroline Classen whose post on her blog pointed me to O'Dell's online piece. It also lists many of the people who spoke at the hearing.)