“We are not walking away from litigation,” Fletcher McCusker told the public at yesterday’s Rio Nuevo Board meeting. With that statement, McCusker took up the mantle of former Rio Nuevo District Board members, Jodi Bain and Rick Grinnell.
He is joined, or was won over, by the two remaining watchdog Board members, Alberto Moore and Jeff Hill. McCusker’s pronouncement will not be welcome news to Tucson City Council member Steve Kozachik, Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, or City Attorney Mike Rankin.
The three have been on a desperate campaign to force the District Board to drop lawsuits against the City over land disputes. The contracts, which were mostly handled by Rankin, are the source of much of the missing or misspent $230 million. Rankin cannot let those contracts come under the scrutiny provided by a lawsuit.
In many instances, the City sold properties to the District over the years, took the money, and never handed over the deeds.
Instead, the City had the District pay millions of dollars for the planning, remediation, and development of land over which the District ultimately had no control. The City had little to show for it either, but, they wanted the lawsuits to go away so they wouldn’t be held responsible for the Ponzi type scheme.
One example of the City’s land scheme is the downtown Tucson City Fire station. The City sold the property to Rio Nuevo, and then built a City of Tucson fire station on it. At the same time, the City handed over the former fire station to the Museum of Art for $1.
The City’s attorney Mike Rankin is challenging the counsel’s decision that the District’s Notice to proceed was proper, and may proceed with the development of public/private partnerships.
As a result of the City’s maneuvers to block the District from doing anything other than pay the City’s bills, the District dropped plans for the Manning House. McCusker said that “it had become a matter of the tail wagging the dog. The public was silent when all of that money was wasted, but when we try to save a real investment they get all excited.”
The City created a stir about the Manning House in order to maintain leverage against the District in the matter of the lawsuits. It is imperative that the City force an end to the litigation one way or another. One District insider said, “If they succeed in forcing us to drop the lawsuits, we have nothing, they have everything. In that case, the state should just shut us down. But we shouldn’t pay their bills, ever. If they neutralize us, they get a free pass.”
This week, Councilman Kozachik pushed the point in his newsletter. He wrote that the City “can now move ahead in approving projects with the new Rio board” but “before any new Intergovernmental Agreements are drafted though, the first order of business is for Rio to have dismissed through whatever legal means are appropriate the $72M in outstanding litigation that has been filed against the city.” The City must partner with the District in whatever projects they eventually decide to do.
One way or another, if Fred Boice, Jim Click, and Jonathan Rothschild have anything to do with it, the City will most likely get that free pass. Rio Nuevo has until January to prove its value to the public. It is very likely that the Legislature will shut it down.
For now, McCusker and Moore got exactly what they claim they wanted; potential private sector investors to save the historic building and to force an opinion from the State’s Legislature’s counsel as to what exactly the District can and cannot do.
The District hopes that the public will see through the City’s maneuvers to end the District without any repercussions, and maintain ownership of all the property. More importantly, the City wants the freedom to go back to business as usual.
Business as usual was addressed by auditor Susan Vos. She advised the Board that the City of Tucson has still not handed over receipts and relevant materials for the Westside audit. Vos went so far as to offer her staff to assist the City’s Finance Director, Kelly Gottschalk, in any effort to locate needed documents. Vos said she was “at the mercy of the City.”
The documents were promised weeks ago. At that time, Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik insisted to the public that he would see to it that the documents were delivered. However, earlier Kozachik was insisting that the City had turned over all relevant documents to the City, and the District was just pretending that the City was obstructionist.
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