Terri Proud and ‘tyranny of the minority’

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

While we're on the subject of our colonial overlords in the Arizona legislature disenfranchising the citizens of Baja Arizona and usurping our rights of local control, the Arizona Daily Star today has an editorial opinion taking our colonial overlords to task. GOP bill sidelining Huckelberry unfair to 89% of voters:

In their efforts to take power from Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry – a man they truly, deeply don't like – nine Southern Arizona Republican legislators have proposed a law that is grossly unfair to taxpayers in the city of Tucson and unincorporated Pima County.

The county currently has a 25-member bond advisory committee. Each of the five elected county supervisors appoints three members; the five incorporated cities each name one; the two Indian nations each select one; and administrator Huckelberry chooses three.

The committee makes recommendations to the Board of Supervisors about what bond projects it should ask voters to approve.

The proposed legislation would replace this 25-member group with a six-person committee: one each representing the city of Tucson, unincorporated Pima County, Oro Valley, Marana, Sahuarita and South Tucson.

A majority would give proposed bond projects a thumb's up or down. If it said "yes," voters would still have the final say.

A huge problem with the legislation is that it would give equal power to the representative from South Tucson, which has 5,000 residents, and the member from Tucson, which has 520,000 people.

Indeed, the four small jurisdictions – South Tucson, Sahuarita, Marana and Oro Valley – with a combined population of 105,000, could form a majority and outvote the two people who represent the 870,000 residents of Tucson and unincorporated Pima County.

That's hugely unfair.

But this legislation isn't about fairness. It's about the disdain Republicans in the Legislature have for Huckelberry.

Rep. Terri Proud, R-Tucson, the main sponsor of the legislation, recently called him a "dictator."

Sorry, lady. That would be the Tea-Publican tyranny coming from our Arizona legislature, subjugating the citizens of Pima County and the City of Tucson.

At Thursday's House Committee on Technology and Infrastructure hearing on her bill, Proud explained her position this way:

"For too long we've had one man control everything, and I think that needs to stop."

Proud is certainly entitled to her view of Huckelberry, but the fact is he serves at the pleasure of the five elected Pima County Supervisors. He's a hired hand, not a dictator.

* * *

The deeper political story is that Marana is the driving force behind the bill. And Marana and Pima County remain in a huge payment dispute over a county-built sewer plant that the Legislature ordered turned over to Marana. [Another act of Tea-Publican tyranny]

One of Marana's complaints about the current bond process is that projects and spending are sometimes changed after the fact.

Proud said that amounts to the Board of Supervisors adjusting spending without general voter approval or the approval of the cities and towns most affected.

But county lobbyist Mike Racy testified that 95 percent of the projects from the 2004 and 2006 bond issues have been completed as originally scheduled.

* * *

We agree that there shouldn't be significant changes to bond projects without going back to voters. And all cost changes certainly must have transparent review. That already happens with the existing advisory committee and with the Board of Supervisors.

Political differences will always flare up among local governments, but the answer is not to devise a "fix" in order to neutralize one hired bureaucrat.

Even worse, in their haste to sideline Huckelberry, the Republican legislators would give 11 percent of the population of Pima County veto power over the other 89 percent.

A "tyranny of the minority" by our authoritarian Tea-Publican legislature.