I’ve had a few requests of late to share the comparison chart that I used during my campaign. What I I put together was a snap shot comparison of our Pima County to other western US counties over the 1 million population. I compared population, tax rates, unincorporated population and employees per 10k residents (county wide). I took quite a bit of heat from the media about the chart.

You can argue it from any way you want. The biggest push back I received from using it was that comparing Pima County to the other counties was not accurate. The arguments centered on the fact that other counties have different taxing methods (a few had property taxes and a sales tax), some argued that Pima County was in the hospital business or the wastewater business and that was unfair to compare to counties that didn’t have those burdens. True but let’s look at why and how much it costs us to be in the wastewater and hospital business. 

The hard and fast facts that jumped out at me was the large portion of unincorporated population and the employees to population figures.

For those of you that are interested, here’s the chart (click to make it larger).