What started as a Hail Mary pass in the last game of a win less season ended last night in a 7-0 vote to stop plans for a tax payer funded $200 million hotel. No one worked harder that Mayor Bob to build a hotel which critics all the while were calling this 535 room hotel;

• too expensive,
• not fitting to our market and
• too politically charged for our current city financial condition.

With the hotel vote last night the Mayor was dealt a political blow that he may not recover from. Rio Nuevo has been a financial and political embarrassment for the City of Tucson and there has been one man at the watch the entire, Mayor Bob.   We’ll see if he’s smart enough to realize that the jig is up and it’s time to ride off into the sunset.

The best quote from the O’Dell article from today’s paper:

Only Mayor Bob Walkup proposed something other than rejecting the hotel. He tried to delay terminating the hotel project to give the negotiation process more time, and then he tried to get the council to vote on a Plan B for what to do next, which it rejected. Walkup eventually voted with the rest of the council against the project.

Other losers include, Fred Ronstadt, Tucson’s former councilman, Michael Guyman new government liason for TREO (Tucson’s economic development group), Brent Davis, former Tucson Councilman and Larry Hecker, local politically connected attorney who is 3 and 0 on getting hotel projects done. All three of these people were paid out of the $17 million in feasibility study money by the hotel developer, Garfield Traub. Had the hotel been built Traub would have received a percentage of the $190m construction cost for developing the project.

Congrats to councilman Kozachik for being the canary in the coal mine on the hotel for the past year and a half. Elections have consequences.