Imagine if you will, that the largest sponsors of sprawl, and growth for growth’s sake in Southern Arizona and beyond – the construction and materials industry, the road builders, the car merchants, the mortgage lenders, the land speculators – got together to create a transportation plan. What would you expect such a plan to look like?
“Let’s have lots of expanded and new roads on the edges of town to facilitate new development and generate lots of new traffic and growth. Say 58% of the total package. And let’s not have any funding to maintain these new roads; leave that to local authorities to pay for. Then we’ll lard in some funding for some granola crap to make it look good.”
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Now image how they might pay for building all these new roads which are predominantly outside the core population areas.
“Hell no, we won’t allow impact fees on new development to pay for new growth. Certainly not bonding either – those have to be paid for eventually out of general funds and those are already stretched paying for new police, fire, parks and road maintenance to keep up with current sprawl – property taxes might have to be raised on our McMansions. How about a new regressive tax on sales county-wide – say 2 billions worth over the next 20 years? Sounds great. Let the groundlings pay.”
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Now imagine how they would sell it to the public.
“Let’s throw in a bunch of money to expand bus service. Oh, and lets give the UofA that nifty rail to downtown they’re wanting to connect up their newly bifurcated Rio Nuevo section of campus. Those are pretty wiz-bang and look good to the ‘public transport’ voters. And don’t forget the greenwash to make the plan seem progressive. But let’s make sure to spend most of the money on roads, and let’s make sure we can make program ‘adjustments’ after the fact to squeeze out some of that granola crap.”
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Now imagine how they might set up a governing mechanism to spend this 2 billion dollars.
“Let’s have a regional authority, separate from the existing local governments, but under their ‘control’. Looks sorta democratic. Only let’s give each of the ten governments involved a single vote, even though 90% of the people and taxes are represented by just two of those governments: the City of Tucson and Pima County. It’ll be so much easier to bribe and manipulate the majority of votes if they are controlled by the pissant little corporate-sponsored governments we already basically control. We’ll use the Republican establishment’s lap puppy Steve Huffman’s new legislation to create a regional transportation authority,
steer a pro-sprawl plan through a carefully stage-managed process and
stick it on the ballot, way before anyone figures it out what’s up.”
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So, imagine how they might try to present a growth lobby authored tax subsidy for sprawl as a community consensus growth-management planning concept.
“Well, we better get some citizen involvement so we can say this was ‘citizen’ plan. We’ll throw in a little bit of green wash, but control the process very tightly so none of the ‘public citizen’ crap gets too jumped up. We’ll use the Southern Arizona Leadership Council to steer the process! The RTA’s Citizen Advisory Committee Chairman will be former SALC chair (and possible future Tucson City Manager) Rick Meyers, and the Vice-Chair will be Katie Dusenberry, who is also a member of SALC. Well also make RTA board members out of SALC board members John Bremond of KB Homes, Steve Christy of Steve Cristy Chrysler Jeep, Joe Coyle of Raytheon, and Bruce Wright of the U of A’s Science and Tech Park. S.L. Schorr, also a SALC member, will be the RTA’s representative for the Arizona State Transportation Board. With all our cronies and shills firmly in charge, we can be sure the ‘right’ people stay in control of the process. Then we’ll be free to put some hand-picked community activists on the advisory committee to demonstrate some carefully controlled and limited ‘community imput’. This way, it’ll seem like a community consensus plan.”
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Even so, how are they going to get people who’ve turned down a transportation sales tax five times to vote for this thing?
“Let’s spend a million dollars or more promoting it. Surely, if we just spend enough money, those ignorant voters will just vote for it, as long as we hide our tracks and making this seem like far-sighted planning and a wise community-created policy, not just a huge taxpayer subsidy of more sprawl, more traffic, and more pollution. It’ll be a couple of years before they figure out they’ve been duped. Hell, the rapture might have already come by then, so why worry?”
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Now what would happen when people start to question if all this money is actually going to be spent in the manner the ballot measure claims, considering there is a clear mechanism to reprogram substantial funds?
“Oh shit! They’re on to us. Quick, pass a resolution saying we promise to spend the money like the ballot says, despite that reprogramming authority. What? It’s not binding? Shit, just call it a binding resolution, dumb ass! People are too stupid to know it’s not binding if you call it binding!”
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Does all of this bear a striking resemblance to Questions 1 and 2 on the upcoming May 16th election?
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Should you vote NO on this misbegotten pro-sprawl plan that is only going to make our transportation headaches worse, while offering only meagre crumbs to relieve congestion and commute times within Tucson and makes only minor headway on the region’s pitiful lack of public transportation alternatives?
If you reject this plan, it is not the last chance at a workable regional transportation plan, as the proponents of 1 and 2 would have you believe. Voting NO will force the RTA to go back to the drawing board and create a plan that reflects the real needs of the region, instead of the sprawl lobby’s vision of those needs. The RTA is not going to go away if 1 and 2 are rejected. It is created as a permanent governing body by state law and it is required to submit regional transportation plans and funding mechanisms to pay for it until voters think they got it right and vote YES. Can the Tucson Metro area better afford to wait for real plan than to tax itself silly to subsidize sprawl?
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