Tucson Sammy

The following is from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM):

Court Strikes Down State Law Prohibiting Workplace Gun Policies

This decision “gives Oklahoma employers relief from the ‘Catch-22’ position of having to choose between violating state or federal law,” Julie Elgar, SHRM’s Georgia state legislative director and an attorney at Ford and Harrison LLP in Atlanta told SHRM Online in an Oct. 23 interview. It also gives employers in states with similar laws a weapon to challenge the laws, she said. And, in states in which the legislature has fought over but ultimately failed to pass such laws, employers have legal ammunition when the issue comes up again, as it is likely to do in Georgia. “It’s a strong weapon to have in your arsenal,” Elgar noted.

Comment: This is the sort of thing that makes my head explode. A business is private property. There used to be rights associated with private property. Were that still the case, the business owner would develop a policy appropriate for his business, implement it, and shazaam!, resolution! Instead, the business owner, who has the biggest stake in the outcome, must sit on the sideline while state legislatures and feral… sorry, federal courts duke it out. I suppose if one is to be a slave, it’s nice to have competing masters fight over you.

Our Great and Wonderful Council is back at it. They’re considering some form of cell phone ban - in cars for now.

The impetus is typical - Phoenix is doing it. We tend to have a condescending attitude toward our neighbor to the north, yet we continue to copy their bad ideas (the “light rail” effort comes to mind).

Ibarra, Scott, West, and Uncle Bob Walkup all want to see something done either at the municipal or state level. Speaking of the state level, Mr. Light Rail himself, Steve Farley, has been working on it - unsuccessfully so far.

The merits of multi-tasking in one’s car are really not the important issue. The important issue is what this effort says about how you are viewed by your elected officials. Are you an adult with adult judgment, or are you a child who will wreak all kinds of havoc without big brother’s watchful eye upon you? It used to be that laws would help us defend ourselves against force and fraud. Now they seemed to be there to micromanage our lives for our own good. Don’t eat that! Don’t discard that piece of plastic! You can have this kind of car. Keep your hands on the wheel and stare forward! Don’t think that thought or you’re a hate criminal! That’s better… good boy!

I received, in my email, a letter from the Ward VI office that was sent out to those who, at one time or another, signed up for these distributions. Most of these letters disseminate information concerning roll-off services, West Nile virus, mosquitoes, etc. This particular letter was from Councilman Trasoff herself. It talks about the controversial fourteen-dollar garbage fee. Controversial, that is, only during her election cycle. It appears that she not only claims the office of former Councilman Ronstadt, but his words as well.

Here’s the letter in its entirety, and some comments:

Message from Councilmember Nina Trasoff

Reply to all Reply to allForward Forward Print Add Ward6 to Contacts list Delete this message Report phishing Show original Message text garbled?
Ward6 Ward6

Friends,
Let’s talk trash.
More to the point, let’s talk about that $12 Environmental Services
fee that was attached to your monthly water bill three years back.
During my campaign for City Council in 2005, I spoke out against the implementation of that fee – largely because of the way the previous City Council implemented it.

I could be wrong, but I think it was by vote.

· I took issue with how quickly the city putting a
$14-per-customer price tag on garbage collection and how steep the increase was from the existing $2 Brush & Bulky fee!

Tortured grammar aside… pardon me while I guess at the meaning here… The garbage fee was a new fee, not part of the brush and bulky fee, am I right? If the brush and bulky collections are three or four times a year, and trash collection is fifty-two time a year, fourteen dollars seems a bargain.

· It was sold to Tucsonans as a way to pay for more police
officers and firefighters and pave roads. The public deserved a
straightforward, transparent explanation, not a shell game.

If the explanation was a “shell game”, then why does she use the same explanation in this letter, “Let’s be honest. Trash collection never was free. Money from the general fund was used to cover garbage services at the expense of other programs, such as repairing residential streets and improving parks and park programming.”?

· It was short sighted and insensitive that the fee was
implemented without regard for those who could least afford this fee. The waiver system originally adopted was onerous and unreasonable, requiring residents to request a waiver – in person - every single month.

Oh Boo-Hoo! If Mrs. Trasoff is so sensitive, why do we not see new waiver programs for city water, sales tax, parking meters…

· Insult to injury was the fact that at the same time they
implemented the garbage fee, they delayed full implementation of
commercial impact fees by 7 years! Since taking office, I have helped lead the way to rectify these issues:

I’m sure that the original copy said “Adding insult to injury..”, the word “Adding” must have been lopped off in the transcription. Anyway, here’s what Jim Nintzel recently said in the Tucson Weekly:

Trasoff, who wanted commercial impact fees “as soon as legally possible” during her 2005 campaign, now says the Republicans’ old phase-in plan–which wouldn’t have had full fees being collected until 2011–just took too long. She believes that the delay for the new commercial impact fees strikes a reasonable balance.”

· We’ve implemented a fee waiver program that allows residents
to self-qualify once a year by mail rather than having to apply every
month.
· We’ve accelerated implementation of commercial impact fees so that development will pay its share of the cost of increased city
services prompted by growth.
· We’ve separated Environmental Services from the Water
Department and hired a nationally recognized Director of Environmental Services – Andrew Quigley – to put his expertise on important environmental issues to work and to answer the question: how much does garbage really cost?

Hint: Competitive contracting would give us a pretty good idea.

Shortly after I joined the City Council, I did make a motion to
instruct staff to explore the feasibility of repealing the garbage fee.
That effort was defeated 5-2, with only Karin Uhlich joining me in
support.

This was an excellent move politically. It provided cover from any fire coming from voters who may have felt, well, shall we say “misled” by her campaign rhetoric.

Let’s be honest. Trash collection never was free. Money from the
general fund was used to cover garbage services at the expense of other programs, such as repairing residential streets and improving parks and park programming.
And here’s the rub: the garbage fee is now three years old and the
city’s sustainability program, well underway, is dependent on
environmental services being self-sufficient as an enterprise fund.
Residential streets are being repaired, more police and firefighters are on the job, and Parks & Recreation facilities and programming are improved.
So where do we go from here? We’d pay a stiff price [$24-million/year from other services] were we to rescind the fee now — and most communities in Arizona do charge for trash collection – many with fees higher than ours!

That was her Fred Ronstadt impersonation. Not bad, I might add.

I feel good about what we have been able to accomplish: my primary concerns about fee waivers, joining Environmental Services with Water, and delaying commercial impact fees - these issues have all been resolved.
It’s time for us to move forward as a community, together. I’d
value any thoughts or perspectives you’d like to share on this – or
any other – issue.
Thank you for the honor of serving as your representative on the Tucson
City Council.
Nina

Councilmember Nina Trasoff, Ward VI
3202 East 1st Street
Tucson, Arizona 85716
520-791-4601 Office
520-791-3211 Fax

How to Sink a Newspaper
Free news for online customers is a disastrous business plan.
BY WALTER E. HUSSMAN JR.
One has to wonder how many of the newspaper industry’s current problems are self-inflicted. Take free news. News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes a commodity, you have lost much of the value in providing that product or service.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010038

Comment: A fascinating look at how the Old Media is adapting – sometimes successfully, sometimes not so successfully – to the New Media technology.

Boos for Al-Hurrah
Your tax dollars at work in the Mideast.
We’ve been watching the debate over Al-Hurra, the U.S.-funded Middle East TV channel that has lately developed a reputation as a friendly forum for terrorists and Islamic radicals. A bipartisan group of Congressmen has called for Al-Hurra’s news director, former CNN producer Larry Register, to resign–and it’s time he and his supervisors gave taxpayers some answers.
Mr. Register’s defense has been, in essence, that if Al-Hurra doesn’t run anti-American content, no one will watch. He seems to have misunderstood his assignment: Al-Hurra is not meant to compete with Al-Jazeera but to offer an alternative view of the Middle East from those of either its dictators or jihadis.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html

Comment: Look, the Democrat leadership is anti-American, the main stream news organs are anti-American, why shouldn’t our government operated propaganda television stations be the same?

Untapped
By Jamie Glazov
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is John Ghazvinian, a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He has a doctorate in history from Oxford and has written for Newsweek, the Nation, Time Out New York, and other publications. He is the author of the new book Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28236

Comment: An interesting, however brief, discussion of the plight of Africa from an oil perspective. This is not the first time I’ve read something that mentions China’s involvement there, and their long term interests in the continent.

Tucson Region
6,000-square-ft. ‘hobby room’ rejected
No one questioned the size of the hobby room when the Glenns submitted their building plans. But eight months and $100,000 into building the house, Pima County’s chief zoning inspector decided that was too much hobby for one house.
Indeed, she questioned whether it really was a house at all.
“It is my determination that the primary use of the property is clearly for ‘hobby’ and not for ’single-family residence’ ” Chief Zoning Inspector Pat Thomas wrote in a letter revoking the Glenns’ building permit in November 2006 and ordering them to stop.
The Glenns lost an appeal to the Board of Adjustment and now are suing the county, seeking the restoration of their building permit and attorney’s fees.
“We believe the law says that if you follow all the rules and spend all the money associated with following the process of getting a building permit, your right to that building permit becomes vested,” said Patrick Lopez, the Glenns’ attorney. “They can’t take it away.”
http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/182571

Comment: This is an unbelievably raw deal. It’s bad enough that “property owners” have to get permission from the king to build anything, but now the king sees no problem in whimsically changing his mind half way through the project. Maybe the king should reimburse the peasants as a gesture of his boundless love.

The Skinny
By JIM NINTZEL and MARGARET REGAN
MO’ MONEY
One week after County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry released his proposed budget, City Manager Mike Hein showed us his spending plan.
Hein wants to spend $1.25 billion, which is about $152.6 million more than the city is spending this year.
Most of the increase–about $104.3 million–is in money from grants, bonds and other so-called restricted funds that the council has little control over.
The general fund–the portion of the budget that the City Council can play with, which covers expenses like police, fire, transportation and parks–is increasing by about $32 million, thanks to increased revenues and the use of some money the city had stashed away.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Opinion/Content?oid=oid:95952

Comment: Our friend Jim Nintzel delivers the bad news about the proposed City budget, and trashes the fee that the Democratics used to hate (until it was theirs).

Dutch Rub-Out
Wolfowitz and the World Bank’s Euro-cabal.
World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz faces an “ad hoc committee” investigating his alleged ethics violations today, but it seems the committee has reached its conclusions even before he has a chance to defend himself. This fits the pattern of what is ever more clearly a Euro-railroad job.
On Saturday, the Washington Post cited “three senior bank officials” as saying that the committee has “nearly completed a report” concluding that Mr. Wolfowitz “breached ethics rules when he engineered a pay raise for his girlfriend.” The Post also reported that, “According to bank officials, the timing of the committee’s report and its conclusions have been choreographed for maximum impact in what has become a full-blown campaign to persuade Wolfowitz to go.” So there it is from the plotters themselves: Verdict first, trial later.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010008

Comment: Petty and corrupt, now you know why they are called “Euroweenies.” It is sad that a continent with such a rich history would come to this. This is another anecdote that reveals the cultural superiority of the frontier as evidenced by the superiority of America to Europe, and the western states to the eastern seaboard.

When Talk Isn’t Cheap
Campaign finance regulators say speech isn’t free–it’s a form of “contribution.”
Campaign finance laws are increasingly becoming a tool to suppress political speech, and the courts are finally waking up to the danger. Last week a unanimous Washington state Supreme Court struck down an outrageous interpretation of a law that had been used to classify the antitax comments of two Seattle talk-radio hosts as “campaign contributions” subject to regulation–that is, suppression–by local prosecutors and officials who disagreed.
Washington’s highest court struck down a decision by Superior Court Judge Chris Wickham, who in 2005 ordered KVI radio hosts John Carlson and Kirby Wilbur had to place a monetary value on “campaign contributions” they made when they argued in favor of Initiative 912, a ballot measure to repeal a 9.5-cent-a-gallon increase in the state’s gasoline tax. The antitax measure ultimately lost by 6% of the vote, in part because its opponents outspent its supporters by 20 to 1.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110010006

Comment: It’s stuff like this that make people understand that government, more and more, is the problem, not the solution. Most laws we see passed nowadays are immoral, if not illegal. Here we see an immoral law stretched to illegal extremes.

AWOL
By Robert Spencer
Has it ever happened before, in the history of the world, that almost six years into a major conflict, half of the intelligentsia of a nation fighting the war was not convinced that there was even a war on? Such was the implication of a moment during Thursday’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate. When asked, “Do you believe there is such a thing as a Global War On Terror,” candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, and Christopher Dodd raised their hands. John Edwards, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel kept their hands down.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28084

Comment: Spencer goes on to point out that words mean things, and that it is quite dangerous to give the war cute names like “The War on Terror”, when it is, in fact, “The War on Jihad”. John Edwards (aka “The Breck Girl”) appears to be slipping from the group of those who pose as serious people, to the group of moonbats.

After Imus
No more witch burnings for PC offenses.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Don Imus, Bernard McGuirk, Trent Lott, Larry Summers, the Duke lacrosse team, Jimmy the Greek, the kid who yelled “water buffalo” at Penn, Howard Cosell, Jon Stewart, Chief Illiniwek, Jackie Mason and “South Park” all have in common only one thing: They have not been Politically Correct.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110010019

Comment: At last, someone has finally stepped back and looked at what has happened to our culture. The Stalinist enforcers of Political Correctness have achieved outside the government what tradition totalitarians used to do within the government.

Tucson Region
Havasupai suit over research tossed
A suit against the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and researchers claiming they misused blood samples from Havasupai tribal members was dismissed by a Maricopa Superior Court judge, but tribal officials say they intend to refile the suit.
Carletta Tilousi, a plaintiff and Havasupai tribal councilwoman, said the tiny tribe’s leaders maintain ASU researchers used blood samples authorized only for the study of diabetes instead for research into schizophrenia, inbreeding and migratory patterns.
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/181455

Comment: O.K., we can all agree that there should be clarity, and certainly no fraud when sampling for scientific research – but I do not think that that is what is going on here. This is political. American tribes have acquired a great store of political capital that is contingent on imagined glorious cultures that existed, unaltered, from the beginning of time to 1492. That is why scientific research is a threat, and will be fought at every opportunity. I suspect that this is the primary motivation here.

Tucson Region
National prayer day in Tucson
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.04.2007
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/181486

Comment: Uh…um…. Other than a photograph caption, there is no text to go along with this “story”? Does that seem odd to you? Do you suppose the reporter was less than enthusiastic about it? Perhaps there was not an enthusiastic reporter working for the Red Star. Just speculating. Oddly enough, there were seven comments on this story with no words.

The Skinny
By JIM NINTZEL
MARKET FORCES
One of The Skinny’s favorite haunts, the Book Stop, is leaving Campbell Avenue after four decades.
Why? Because the center’s leasing agent/part owner, Richard “Dick” Shenkarow, is a total tool.
Book Stop owners Claire Fellows and Tina Bailey are gonna walk before he makes them run, escaping to Fourth Avenue before Shenkarow raises the rent.
The unassuming bookstore, just north of the intersection with Grant Road, was full of an ever-changing collection of treasures–shelf after shelf of classics, pulp fiction, best-sellers, obscure lit mags, hideous cookbooks, old yearbooks and so much more.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Opinion/Content?oid=oid:95664

Comment: Our friend Jim Nintzel reflects on one of the local bibliophiles favorite “haunts.” He also brings us up to date on the presidential race, including where Arizonans stand.

It would appear that Councilman Nina Trasoff has really stepped in the cowpie this time. According to an article in the Red Star by Bob Odell, published on April 29, 2007 (here’s a link: http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/180653.php ), Nina set up a complex real estate sale/lease deal that would have subsidized a downtown arts group to a six figure tune, with the potential of costing the City $1.2 million if things did not go well.

I wonder, considering the complexity of the deal, how firm a grip Nina had on this thing. I could be a case of “Staff Gone Wild!” either in the Ward, or the City Real Estate Department, or both. Either way, it belongs to her.

It’s interesting that the rest of the Council did not “circle the wagons” around one of their own – particularly a fellow Democratic. They also did not let the thing be removed from the agenda without discussion – something that they do for each other to avoid embarrassment, according to a friend of mine who served on the Council.

This does not bode well for her political future, particularly when she appears to be short on friends in high places, and her popular support is waning. Fortunately, her next election is 2009. There is plenty of time for people to forget this episode, and see her lovely smile on television – not to mention the coquettish charm she has in person.