A few months back Rep. Antenori at the request of the Green Valley Chamber of Commerce, took aim at the MTCVB for lack of love going down Green Valley way. Antenori worked up a bill to allow funds to be diverted to the GV Chamber. The bill was stopped and appears a deal was struck.

(From Green Valley News – Follow below link)

Pressure helps bring tourism dollars to GV

By Daniel Newhauser, Green Valley News

Published: Tuesday, June 9, 2009 7:17 PM MDT
Green Valley will see an influx of money to help spur tourism thanks to months of negotiations and pressure from a bill that would have changed the way hotel bed-tax money is doled out.
In an agreement with the Green Valley Sahuarita Chamber of Commerce, the Metropolitan Tucson Convention and Visitors Bureau, which receives 3 percent of county bed taxes from hotels in unincorporated areas, will use a percentage of tax money that comes from Green Valley hotels to promote tourism in the community, said Jim DiGiacomo, chamber president.

“It’s a milestone for the chamber and this area,” he said. “It’ll bring more people here and, in turn, it helps businesses.”

Rep. Frank Antenori, who represents Southern Arizona and Green Valley, mediated the discussions between the two organizations in his Phoenix office. He said the contract stipulates that the visitors bureau will calculate the total bed-tax revenue collected in Green Valley and give one-third of it in the form of a grant to the chamber to use to promote tourism.

“We sat down, hammered it out, and came up with a deal,” Antenori said. “Now, (Green Valley is) going to be able to pull the resources of all the hotels and resorts in the area and get a good marketing effort together.”

DiGiacomo said the money will be used to pay upkeep for the chamber office as well as produce and distribute pamphlets showcasing tourist attractions and beef up online promotions.

The agreement also gives the chamber representation on the visitors bureau’s marketing committee and a chance to be on the board of directors, he added.

The change will take effect July 1 and last for three years after which both parties have the option to renegotiate.

Jonathan Walker, the Tucson visitors bureau’s president and CEO, said Green Valley should see more tourist spending as a result of the efforts.

“We’re going to figure out how to work hand-in-hand to better market Green Valley as a tourist destination,” Walker said. “We’re trying to do something positive for the Green Valley area.”

He added that the bureau has similar agreements with other Arizona communities.

The change comes on the heels of a now-dead state bill that, if passed, would have change the way bed-tax money is divided.

Currently, Pima County levies a 6 percent tax on hotels and motels in unincorporated areas such as Green Valley; the tax netted $8.7 million in fiscal year 2007-08. Half of that, per state law, is designated for the county’s “recognized tourism promotion agency.” The only such agency in Pima County is the Metropolitan Tucson Convention and Visitors Bureau, whose Web site — www.visittucson.org — describes it as “the chief marketing agency for Tucson and Southern Arizona.”

With four major hotels and a number of bed-and-breakfasts, Green Valley pays a significant amount of money into the bureau’s funding stream but doesn’t get its fair share back, said Randy Graf, chair of the chamber’s governmental affairs team.

“We felt that most of that was being concentrated in Tucson itself. We didn’t feel like enough of it was coming here,” he said. “The word ‘metropolitan’ in there sort of indicates that they are working for the greater Tucson area.”

So chamber officials proposed to Antenori HB 2487, which would have allowed more than one recognized tourism promotion entity to receive part of the distribution from the county. That would give the Green Valley Sahuarita Chamber of Commerce, or any number of agencies from unincorporated areas, the opportunity to get a piece of the county funds.

Instead of seeing the bill through the Legislature, however, chamber officials met with visitors bureau officials several times since March to negotiate a way to share existing funds, Graf said.

“Bills like this can get people’s attention, bring stakeholders to the table,” he said. “If they can get together, negotiate, then the bill is no longer necessary.”

After the deal was struck, Antenori said, he killed the bill.

“The bill had its desired effect, which was to basically level the disparity in how the bed tax was done,” Antenori said. “I think everybody wins. In the long run, I think it’s going to pay off big time for Southern Arizona.”

And he added that the agreement could serve as a precedent for other unincorporated communities: If they organize chambers of commerce and a solid marketing plan, they could appeal for a chance to get funding, too.

“That’s a fair way to do it,” he said. “I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”

dnewhauser@gvnews.com

Check out the full post over at Arizona 8th regarding last nights council meeting.

If you remember, last week the council sailed through approving the budget and spent almost 4 hours squabbling over outside agency funding like the Humane Society and the arts community.

Trasoff pushed for artist that ‘feed the soul’ and told the Humane Society to figure out another option.
At this weeks council meeting we had two protesters show up in full dog drag demanding the dogs have a voice too. Genius!

Some of the best signs they brought included:

1st the renters, 2nd the strippers, now us (the dogs of course)

If you want help would you want a cop or a warehouse full of artists?

Nina I’m Hungery, Feeding My Soul Aint Going To Do It!

Our fellow blogger over at Blog For Arizona took aim at the Republican legislators for using end around to take control of Rio Nuevo from the City of Tucson and to institute non-partisan elections. Safier even goes as far as to rally the democrats in Southern Arizona over these issues in the 2010 elections;

Target every Republican who votes to allow Maricopa to dictate to Southern Arizona about local matters. Let them defend turning us into a colony of our imperial Maricopa overlords, or a wholly owned subsidiary of Maricopa, Inc.

News flash, Maricopa doesn’t care. We aren’t taken serious. We are tolerated and thrown a bone once in a while to keep us happy. Just like cousin Eddy from Vacation. We show up, drink all the beer, empty the sewer tanks on the RV and act like we own the place.

How about taking aim at the complete incompetence surrounding Rio Nuevo from the ruling city council (all Democrats – I did say ALL because we aren’t claiming the Mayor anymore). The miss steps, inside deals, starts and stops and choice in people to run the various programs are absolutely, unequivocally a direct sign of TERRIBLE leadership. Blame Maricopa, blame Republicans, blame their mothers for not cuddling them enough but don’t ever take personal responsibility.

As for non-partisan elections; Tucson has been Democratically controlled for decades – take a look around……how’s that working out for us? Take the politics out of the equation (we all know it’s not possible but maybe, just maybe this is a step in the positive direction) and focus on the basics of local government.

Thanks for doing what you do Blog For Arizona. The different views are always appreciated.

Was the City of Tucson’s goal of canceling 4th of July truly budget issues?  Was it a dramatic ploy to show us citizens just how bad the budget really is? 

Does it make sense to cut a widely attended 4th of July event that cost our local government just $34,000 and continue funding other community events to the tune of $300,000?

One more example  of knee jerk reactions, short sighted planning and total lack of vision.

Have you had enough yet Tucson voter?

Reading May’s political tea leaves

By Emil Franzi, Special to The Explorer

We’ve had local elections, and some further away, along with enough positioning and posturing to give us some hints about our political futures.

Californians of all stripes overwhelmingly told their government “no” to higher taxes in the multiple forms they were presented. Those supporting a statewide election to raise the sales tax to bail out Arizona should note that if you can’t pass any tax increase in a lefty state with bigger budget troubles than ours, good luck here.

Early on, I called for a sales tax election combined with constitutional amendments repealing all the spending ballot props that voters suckered for that the legislature is banned from modifying. Give them an “either – or,” but it’s too late for that. Republicans should not have been afraid of the voters. They even figured it out in San Francisco.

Up the road in Casa Grande, voters rejected a sales tax hike for a new spring training stadium by 77 percent. I hope the local Sports Authority noticed and will quit lobbying the legislature to enable Pima County to waste money on an election that will get the same result here. File that Marana Stadium next to the Rainbow Bridge over the Santa Cruz.

Two local elections gave local Democrats mostly negative results, who are attempting to breed future partisan legislative candidates by electing them to non-partisan school boards and town councils. I find no fault with this — the GOP should quit being onlookers and do the same.

In Sahuarita, the Dem pick was Rosanna Gabaldon. This partisan activity created a backlash and partly motivated Republican Kara Egbert’s candidacy. Both Gabaldon and Egbert won the two seats, making it a push.

In Marana, Dems supported Kelle Maslyn, one of four finalists for two council seats including Republicans Jon Post and Larry Steckler and Democrat Carol McGorray.

Local GOP types were mostly onlookers in both towns with the exception of GOP National Committeeman Bruce Ash, who formed an independent committee whomping on Maslyn for raising almost all her funds from outside Marana. Post led the ticket followed by McGorray, with Maslyn third. Ash-GOP 1, D’s 0, even though some Dems have attempted to spin and claim McGorray, whom they didn’t support.

Spin will be high on the Dem agenda next year. You can tell by the almost insane rhetoric in the letters columns and elsewhere about education spending. With all the intellectual depth of the last Banzai Charge, the Democrat / public employees union coalition wants us to believe Republicans hate schools and teachers and keep our children ignorant so they won’t be smart and educated enough to vote for Democrats.

Is there anybody out there who actually believes this slop?

Typical is the recent letter about the GOP violating “teacher’s First Amendment rights” from Robert Cozad, who failed to note that he is the founder of the Oro Valley Democrat Club. Cozad claims a bill passed by the GOP legislature bans public school teachers from lobbying. No, it makes them reimburse taxpayers if done on school time.

As a former public employee, the husband of a retired one, the past vice-president of AFSCME local 449, and a former member of the Pima County Merit Commission, I realize public employees may apply for time off they have earned to do whatever they want. They have no constitutional right to lobby legislators on the taxpayer’s dime.

One final May item, the headline in the remaining daily informing us that the TUSD Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen was hiring seven new administrators while laying off teachers because they were needed for her “vision.” That exposes the real agenda and mindset of the Democrat / union / administrator coalition. It isn’t about the children, it’s about the power.

Seems like a case of too much leverage, too much supply and a decline in tourism landed 6 Phoenix developers in major hot water.

Read the Wall Street Journal article HERE.

Southern Arizona’s La Paloma and JW Marriott Starr Pass changed hands in the last few years.

Word is La Paloma’s financing deal was predicated on a 10 to 15% increase in revenues (that didn’t happen). A deal between lenders and NCH Corporation has been worked out and the new owners live for another day.  The next hurdle is that major room and amenities upgrades are long over due. The remodel was part of the original plan but given the current market conditions an over haul is unlikely.

The La Paloma sale info HERE.

The Starr Pass refi info HERE.

We have word that Tucson’s Mayor and Council have voted to settle with Clear Channel Outdoor over the ongoing dispute over locations of many of their billboards.

The crux of the argument revolves around a large number of Clear Channel billboards that aren’t exactly where they are supposed to be. Back in the Eller Outdoor and Whitco Outdoor days it seems that installers ‘inadvertantly’ put dozens of boards in ‘company advantageous locations’.

The man that single handedly has made it his mission to battle Goliath is Mark Meyer. From The Tucson Weekly’s Chris Limberis, Jan. 2004:

Mark Mayer will tell you–with the obsessive passion of a researcher seeking a cure–how many billboards are in Tucson, how many are just outside the city limits, how many are out of compliance with zoning and building codes and why. He will tell you if one is 20 feet or 50 feet beyond a setback, which ones are too tall or too big, which are illegally lit and which are out of place in historic zones.

Mayer will tell you the taxable value of the 410 or so billboards in Tucson, and why he thinks media conglomerate Clear Channel, which has a virtual monopoly on Tucson billboards, is evading 97 percent of its tax bill.

Put Mayer in the middle of the audience at a political forum in which participants are deep into proposals on health care for the poor, and he’ll change the tone with a question to test the candidates’ resolve to remove big and ugly billboards.

But don’t call Mayer passionate. Don’t call him obsessive. And be damn sure to not call him an anti-billboard activist.

He’s heard that before and considers it “a diss. It is an attempt to discredit what I do.” If he is an anti-billboard activist, he reasons, then Clear Channel and its hired guns are “anti-regulation activists.”

“It’s not so much a passion for an issue, but rather being a junkyard dog against the atrocious things the industry can do,” Mayer says.

Besides, Mayer is a professional.

From 1995 through 2001, Mayer was a hired gun for the city, which has fought an intense and costly battle against outlaw billboards since 1985.

Mayer was paid nearly $93,000, according to his and city records, to construct a catalog of billboards in Tucson and then to document those that were out of compliance. He then worked for the city attorney and city manager by providing technical support during multiple rounds of litigation.

A brief history.

For Mayer, the billboard battle in Tucson was akin to the “person driving down a lonely road and coming upon an accident with the person half dead, and doing what I could do.”

The accident in Tucson was years in the making. Life magazine famously dubbed East Speedway Boulevard the “ugliest street in America,” more than a dozen years before the City Council in 1985 followed other cities by cracking down on billboards. It was an intramural fight of sorts, because Karl Eller, a Tucson High School and University of Arizona grad, is a one of the nation’s billboard barons, having twice built huge sign companies based in Phoenix. He sold Eller Media to Clear Channel in 1997 for $1.5 billion, although he remained on board as the CEO of the Clear Channel subsidiary. He has aggressively and abrasively fought all attempts to restrict the number, size, placement and lighting of billboards.

Another industry titan has Tucson roots; Arte Moreno, a Tucson native, split from Eller and pioneered various multinational sign operations that helped him amass nearly $1 billion. He recently used some of that cash to purchase baseball’s Anaheim Angels.

Attempting to cut existing signs, around 670 in 1985, the city enacted the so-called vacant lot provision that required removal of billboards on lots undergoing development.

For fortification, the council sent the matter to voters in the general election that year, and the referendum passed 2-1, despite the billboard lobby outspending proponents by 20-1. Voters did reject a measure to buy up billboards, however.

Billboard executives were not about to take it lying down. They quickly went to court to defeat or retard the city plans to eliminate the signs.

Despite the city’s aggressive stance, it was hamstrung by huge gaps in city records. Billboards that were, according to drawings in one file, to be on the south side of a lot, were actually on the north side. Details were often blurred about setbacks from streets and sidewalks, and, as a result with some on Speedway, they hang too far into the right of way. Many were erected without proper zoning–check the billboard sign at the Quick Mart on Mission and Silverlake roads. Years of other priorities, including commercial and residential construction booms, forced bureaucrats to focus on matters other than billboard plans.

At the same time, the number of companies controlling the billboards was shrinking. Companies swallowed others, and they were incredibly vigilant in keeping their numbers of signs in the face of a developing city were new buildings meant no billboards.

Mayer says the seminal incident during the fight came during a subcommittee meeting of the city sign code committee, where billboard reps said only a few billboards were out of compliance, for instance, with bottom-mounted lighting that ruins Arizona’s dark skies treasured for astronomy.

“In June 1994, I went looking at every billboard in Tucson,” Mayer says. “There were 50 with bottom-mounted lights. They might not have known or they might not have cared.”

The details and court challenge:

The billboard bar used the new law to block the city’s action on 89 illegal billboards. The city lost in Superior Court. And on Oct. 31, the state Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, saying the city’s zoning powers are derived specifically from the state. The Court of Appeals also said the city was wrong to believe that the 2000 state law set a two-year time limit on enforcement for only newly discovered billboard infractions.

The tally of how many boards existed in 1985 and how many were proper, along with how many remain and how many of them are proper, can be maddeningly elusive. From the city’s and Mayer’s count, 260 of the 670 billboards prior to the 1985 vote have come down–a 39 percent reduction. Mayer insists 215 of the 410 up today are illegal for various reasons. Not surprisingly, the billboard companies disagree.

At issue in the case the Court of Appeals decided in October was the city’s complaint in Superior Court that 122 Eller billboards violated city sign and zoning codes. The number was chopped to 51 after the city amended its complaint.

Dunbar, in her first term on the City Council in northside Ward 3, was in the state House of Representatives in 2000 and voted with that slimmest of margins–one–to approve the bill that put a two-year cap on city billboard enforcement. Dunbar insists any one of her majority colleagues could have been the swing vote.

Her stance on billboards is made clearer by her recent City Council vote to not appeal the Oct. 31 Court of Appeals ruling that upheld the two-year limit on enforcement of all wayward billboards–new and old. This time, she, Ronstadt and Republican Mayor Bob Walkup were short one vote, and the city has taken the matter up with the Arizona Supreme Court.

More on the billboard controversy HERE HERE HERE

The Tucson Citizen’s new online presence has evolved into basic blogging 101.

Good luck with the new venture guys and welcome to blog land. Having some real journalists is going to raise the stakes for all of us.

Take a look – HERE.

Photo courtesy of Western Sky Communications – visit them for your all your graphic design and photo needs.

“I have a vision of trying to maintain the essence of Tucson as we grow,” Trasoff says. “I’m going to bring an ability to guide the growth and have it be more intelligent growth, more future-thinking growth.”

The former TV newscaster, who has spent the last two decades doing public-relations work and serving on the boards of various local non-profits, says Ronstadt has sold out the city to special interests and balanced the city’s budget on the backs of the poor, the children and the elderly by enacting tuition fees for KIDCO, an afterschool program, and creating a $14-a-month “garbage tax.” (See “Numbers Racket, Oct. 13.)

“I morally objected to putting on a tax that had such a dramatic impact on working families and the elderly,” Trasoff says.

It gets better…

He also points out that for all her complaints, Trasoff has offered no alternative to balancing the budget without the trash fee. Trasoff says she hasn’t had enough access to the city budget to determine how to eliminate the trash fee, but vows that if she’s elected, she would trim it back until it was eliminated.

The candidates also clash over downtown redevelopment. Ronstadt says there’s a lot going on, even if it doesn’t appear that way.

“I respect and understand people’s perception that nothing’s happened,” Ronstadt says. “The reality is that a lot of stuff is happening and had to happen the way it did.”

Among the projects that Ronstadt cites: The completion of the historic train depot; ongoing work on several condo projects, including one at the site of the long-abandoned Thrifty block along Congress Street; the remodeling of the Rialto Theatre; the ongoing reconstruction of the Fox Theatre, which is scheduled to open on New Year’s Eve; and the proposed Science Center.

Trasoff says progress has been too slow and the city should have funded reconstruction of the Convento, one of the Tucson’s earliest settlements, on the west side of the Santa Cruz River.

Ronstadt says the council hasn’t done that because it didn’t make sense to put in a park before a master plan for the entire area was fleshed out.

Trasoff squashed Democratic primary opponent Steve Farley by a nearly 2-1 margin in the September Ward 6 primary. As of Oct. 3, she had raised $42,452 and received the same amount in matching funds from city taxpayers. She still had $46,603 going into the last month of the campaign, according to reports filed last week with the city.

Ronstadt, who declined to dip into the city’s matching-funds program, had raised $75,330, with $19,402 coming between Aug. 25 and Oct. 3. He had $49,883 entering the final month of the campaign.

Trasoff calls Ronstadt’s decision to not use public funding another example of how he has sold out to special interests.

Ronstadt says he decided to not participate because the money comes from the city’s general fund. He says if the campaign funds came from some other kind of revenue source, he’d probably use the program.

“It’s wrong to take tax dollars to run a personal campaign,” Ronstadt says. “It is absolutely wrong.”

 

Photo courtesy of Western Sky Communications – visit them for your all your graphic design and photo needs.

I want to update you on our progress as we draw close to adopting a budget.  Here are some of the measures that we have taken:

●       Cut City Departments 7.1% (held Public Safety cuts to 2.5%);
●       Eliminated more than 400 city staff positions;
●       Transferred $28 million in one-time revenues to cover core public services;
●       Required five unpaid furlough days for city employees that will reduce average salaries 1.9% (public safety employees excluded);
●       Required city staff to contribute more to their pension andbenefits;
●       Cut City Council’s budget by 50 percent (eliminated federalgrants, community support funds and youth employment funds along with7.1% cut in office budget);
●       Reduced Parks and Recreation Center hours and staff.

Our City is facing complex challenges that are not easily addressed by
simple solutions.  Mayor and Council must make difficult decisions to
balance the budget.  We have to cut departmental budgets, reduce
services, and we also have to increase fees and new revenue.