The Desert Gadabout

An honest Arizona map

Fixing Arizona

Jon Talton, the way-too-smart-to-be-a-blogger blogger a.k.a. The Rogue Columnist, has written a manifesto of sorts for fixing Arizona.

A future state senator from Mesa?

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Arizona isn't broken. Sure, everything is fine if you prefer:

• A public education that gives a student just enough information to make it to one of our overgrown community colleges. I'd love to call someone on this and check the validity of it, but I was once told the most common class taken by the 250,000 students at Maricopa community colleges is remedial math (sub-100 series). Having spent several years at MCC, it rings true. I was one of those students.
• An economy based on consuming finite desert that was never designed be inhabited by so many people at once. In terms of violating ecological science, Phoenix is the poster city for reengineering nature in unnatural ways.
• Politicians that are more likely to view global climate change as a socialist conspiracy than legitimate science.
• A leadership void so vast that someone like Joe Arpaio is allowed to achieve cult-hero status.
• Bragging rights is valued in population numbers rather than quality of life issues such as per capita income, as Jon so eloquently describes.

What's irritating is ideas like Jon's set are written off in this state as intrusive government or just plain liberal, as if the Republicans who run this place don't love Big G any less. Those "limited government" voices tend to disappear when their own expenditures are on the line. Not that I'm for bigger government, but pragmatic, logical populism always makes more sense to me on a local level than grand philosophies that ignore fundmental issues.

Perhaps the most inspired idea in his post was the idea of creating a new county consisting of Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler -- against their will, I think -- that would likely win some award for it's lack of gov't spending and regulation oversight. At some point Zion County would face the same problems Mesa is facing -- trying to keep together public services like garbage collection that even good Republicans expect their government to take care of -- just on a much more massive scale. But until then they could run their county any way they wish while I move to reconfigured Maricopa County, where the absence of certain East Valley influences might just open up a conversation beyond stale neo-con hyperbole.

The Battle for Lake Powell

It doesn't even bear our name, but post-WWII Arizonans have always considered the Colorado River water belonging to the "Grand Canyon State" by birthright. With the help of Dennis DeConini and Barry Goldwater, the U.S. Government has agreed, more or less, and aided by fending off claims for more ownership from desperately dry California.

But as Shaun McKinnon notes, the upper basin states -- Utah and Colorado -- have never claimed their full share of water because they've never needed it.

Until now.

Utah isn't blinking at the $1 billion price tag to open a pipeline from Lake Powell to growing St. George.

It took 17 years for Lake Powell to reach its peak volume at 1980, and has fluctuated ever since, with levels under great decline after a decade of drought. The growth that vastly expanded the populations in Arizona, Nevada, and California has begun to impact the water needs of Colorado and Utah, and they are now looking at tapping into their available water at the lone large resource river in the Four Corner states.

The Colorado has already been put under great strain, and we've actually created an environmental crisis downstream at the Colorado Delta.

Those who have a financial stake in growth, which is virtually anyone who owns real estate in the West, aren't going to like the solution: Cap growth, cap water usage, eliminate agrobusiness in arid climates, and stop building new massive suburbs in places that were never designed to support large populations.

More on arenas and tax dollar scams

I mentioned in a recent post how Arizona and Phoenix residents had been bamboozled into building arenas and stadia with the promise of providing an economic boost. Over $1 billion later, Phoenix is still as co-dependent on the real estate market as ever, while the local pro teams suffer ticket loss due to declining incomes and buying power. We've spent $1 billion to support an industry that does nothing to sustain our economy while our state is committing gross negligence in school funding. We don't spend money on the types of things that diversify an economy over time.

Thanks to a tip from the DG Hotline, we've been given access to super-secret documents on the City of Phoenix's original America West Arena deal.

OK, it's just an archived article from a late 1996 edition of the Arizona Republic, but if you've tried to find archived articles of the Republic before, you would think they're kept in an encrypted CIA database.

The first thing that jumps out at me is the article was written by Bill Muller, who I sorely miss. But I don't want to get sidetracked.

Back to the issue at hand. According to this story dated December 15, 1996 (final chase edition), the city's $35 million investment was agreed to return a surplus, including:

• $128 million in shared profits to the city over the 40-year term of the Phoenix Suns' lease at what was once known as AWA.
• $104 million -- 81 percent -- to be paid in the final 10 years of the lease; $87 million in the final four years.

Four years after opening the doors, the city had received $200,000, which should have been our first clue about the negligible benefit of building these things before we built two retractable-dome stadiums, a hockey arena, and a fleet of spring-training facilities.

If you're not seeing the problem here, you need to understand the arena was built in an era when sports structures weren't expected to last 30 years -- they would be out-dated as we started incorporating digitally-enhanced beer or wet-wired real-time stats (or whatever the Sports Fan of the Future would require to continue supporting over-paid athletes). That time period is now shrinking closer to 15 years.

So when Phoenix is due it's primary return on investment, it's more likely the Suns will either be in a new arena built by some new suburban superpower (Maricopa? Florence? Apache Junction?) or in another city (Yooooooooour ... RENO SUUUUUUUUUUNS!).

The story wouldn't be so satisfying to this cynic (it does give me justification to say, "I told you so") if the Republic hadn't actually caught the primary players, Jerry Colangelo in particular, being so earnestly quoted. When asked if the Suns would still be around in 2,022, the man with the deific initials said:

That's very subjective. Because I don't think anyone really knows what's going to happen 30 years from now .... You could build a strong case for saying, you know, because of this back load, this is something the city may never get.

JC later went on to bury the D-Backs so deep in debt his partners levied a coup and ran him out, leaving him to sell off the Suns so he could have something on which to retire and reflect on his, um, legacy.

What's more disconcerting is the Coyotes bailed as soon as they realized they had also been hoodwinked with their AWA lease agreement, not realizing just how many seats would be impacted by blocked sight lines. They're in Glendale now, and the Suns ownership group is headed by a banker who is smart enough to know one should never pay on a backloaded deal if one doesn't have to.

In five years or less we'll start hearing how unfit the arena is, how the floor boards are endangering players, and any day now a girder may fall and crush a dozen or more veeps from the BofA and Verizon in the front row. Cryptosporidia in the hot tub! Black mold in the showers! Dogs and cats, living- er ... you get the idea.

The point won't be the Suns will actually want to leave for a smaller market, they just won't want to pay on the $100 million they'll owe the city. The point will be they'll want a new lease that keeps the slender profits flowing to San Diego or wherever else the investors actually live and not into city coffers that first allowed the Suns to revitalize themselves.

Civic boosters will tell you this is "the cost of becoming a big city," because they only think in linear terms. The cost is not the $35 million originally spent, but one of perspective on the role of government and what actual civic investment really should be.

The veep name game

CBS says Obama-Napolitano ticket could never happen because it sounds too much like a gourmet coffee. (HT: Espresso Pundit)

One wonders the potential if only Obama could bring over John Sununu to the ticket: Obama-Sununu! Barack wins the Klingon vote and Sununu claims the Federation. Now that's reaching across the aisle!

Closer to home, Napolitano needs to decide which side of the middle she's on. She picks her politics like she's at a church potluck dinner.

Stadia and the economic engine

Espresso Pundit posted a strong, but surprisingly tempered, rant about the popular belief that building stadiums and supporting the home team via public coffers = jobs. EP quotes a WSJ article, and I quote it here:

Yes, stadiums do create high-paying construction jobs for a year or two. But the vast majority of long-term employment is low-wage concession jobs. A Congressional Research Service study of the Baltimore Ravens stadium found that each job created cost the state $127,000. By comparison, Maryland's Sunny Day Fund created jobs for about $6,000 each.

I don't know how much Arizona taxpayers have spent on stadia since 1988, but it would be a fantastic enterprising project for the azcentral.com data team (hint hint). I do have ten fingers to count with, though, so let's count the projects in that time:

• America West Arena
• Bank One Ballpark/Chase Field
• UOP/Arizona Cardinals Stadium
• Jobing.com Arena
• Maryvale Stadium
• Tucson Electric Park
• Peoria Sports Complex
• Surprise Stadium

Those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. The Cardinals stadium cost $450 million by itself. AWA had some hefty renovations and I'm sure Chase Field is due for some new paint. That's at least $1 billion in stadia so we could produce ... $6-an-hour contract vendor jobs?

Well-meaning PR flacks will tell you having all of this is important to the business climate, that no one will take you seriously if you don't have big-league teams carrying the local banner. Colleges have been using this selling point for 100 years to build what is by far the healthiest "non-profit" industry on the planet.

Economists, on the other hand, have been equally firm in what really stabalizes an economy for the long-term:

• A committment to education
• Diversified industries
• Earnest planning to stay ahead of technological curves

Basically, the three things Arizona has always lacked. Imagine if Arizona instituted an additional one-cent sales tax to pay for things like school building improvements or research grants for local research facilities. The locals would have a cow. We can only tolerate such taxation for two things: More freeways and more stadia.

It's why our economy is broken and why we are always locked into the whims of the real estate market. Jerry Colangelo had the right idea -- let's build up downtown Phoenix -- but he had the wrong implentation. We didn't need a baseball team or retractable dome. We needed a Google or a Microsoft -- their core campuses, not just their call centers.

Getting past our ingrained libertarian dislike for academic elitism and just properly funding ASU and UA would go a long way to solving these problems. Google and Yahoo! were founded on campuses in the Bay. They're permanently located there. Apple was founded in tech crazy San Jose. It's permanently located there. You want these types of employment centers, you have to grow them on your own, on your own dime. We don't have a private education giant like Stanford, but there's no reason we can't have great state institutions like Cal-Berkeley and UCLA.

Arpaio, Immigration, and Reasonable Doubt

There aren't many days where I feel justified in bragging about the quality of journalism in Arizona, but I am compelled to point everyone to the Tribune's outstanding series on the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office "crime sweeps" in Mesa, the MCSO's weak label for what is obviously an immigration task force to send gardeners and construction workers back to Mexico. Avoiding typical hyperbole, the Trib dug deep into the data as well as having people well positioned to reveal credible and serious accusations of profiling.

You know the Trib has done their job when KPNX, the Gannett-owned NBC affiliate and partner to the Arizona Republic, finds it so newsworthy to hail them in their broadcast. Joe Dana, perhaps the only local broadcast journalist willing to question Arpaio, was obviously impressed.