‘Someone’ at the Arizona Daily Star has a bug up their behind

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

A most curious report in the Arizona Daily Star today: Rothschild kin benefit from fund that owns crumbling barrio house. Front page lede onto page four.

The Star's creative headline writer is suggesting something nefarious, nay, perhaps even llegal. Do tell:

A significant, but crumbling, adobe building on South Convent Avenue, in the heart of Barrio Historico, has been an eyesore, a magnet for transients and a blight on that neighborhood south of downtown for years.

Still, residents say they fear the 125-year-old building, owned by a law firm pension fund benefiting the family of mayoral candidate Jonathan Rothschild, will be demolished.

That concern is based partly on the fact the run-down row house has essentially sat vacant since the 1960s, declared uninhabitable by the city, and partly because that's what the pension fund representative threatened to do when the city wrote the property up last August.

Uh- huh. So? Nothing nefarious or illegal here.

[Jonathan] Rothschild, who was the managing partner of the Mesch, Clark & Rothschild law firm until he stepped out of that role to run for mayor, is not a beneficiary of the pension fund. His father, Lowell Rothschild, and attorney Doug Clark are the only beneficiaries of the profit-sharing plan that bought the 5,600-square-foot building in 2006.

Rothschild says he is an advocate of preserving historic neighborhoods, and said the property should be preserved. But as mayor, he said, he won't vote on anything that has to do with the law firm because of a conflict of interest.

So Jonathan Rothschild is not a beneficiary of the pension fund, he is an advocate for historic preservation, and he quite rightly says he will recuse himself from voting on any matter that would benefit the partners of his former firm. An ethical man running for office.

So what's the problem? Get to the point already. "Some" neighbors have complained:

[N]earby property owner and developer Warren Michaels, who notes that the home is rapidly approaching what he calls "demolition by neglect," because it's nearing the point at which stabilization efforts will start failing. "I'd love to see it renovated, but just boarding it up and throwing plaster on the exterior isn't going to stabilize it."

* * *

Susan Frank, the owner of a downtown exercise studio, has lived next door to the house for four years. She continues to have concerns about safety, since last year at this time, fireworks were set off in the yard, which has a large amount of debris.

What Rhonda Bodfield fails to report is that there is another nearby neighbor, a certain editor of the Arizona Daily Star, who has been grumbling about this property for some time. That's a failure to disclose who prompted this waste of column space in the Star today, Rhonda. Add some quotes from your editor and fully disclose who prompted this report.

And maybe the Arizona Daily Star can take up a collection or start a fund to "preserve this historically significant building" (a matter for reasonable debate) that "will be a multi-million-dollar project," as the Star reports, if it's so all-fired important to this editor. Be proactive, dear editor, and remove that bug from your behind.