Women are lining up to condemn the dirty tricks by Karlene Keogh Parks and her supporters in her bid to unseat Phoenix City Councilman Sal DiCiccio. DiCiccio has come under heavy attack this election cycle for his campaign against the regressive food tax levied primarily against working families.
Former Vice-mayor of Phoenix and current Executive Director of the Coalition to End Arizona Sexual Exploitation, Peggy Bilsten, and Representative Katie Brophy Magee both issued statements questioning the tactics and the credibility of other women who have suddenly come forward to complain about DiCiccio’s treatment of them.
According to Bilsten, the “attacks are baseless and factually unfounded.”
Bilsten issued a statement in which she said that she found it “very interesting is that these attacks are coming from former employees that worked in the City’s budget and financial divisions.” She noted that DiCiccio has been a “budget hawk and a steward of taxpayer dollars, fighting for fiscal reforms” and implied that because his “job requires him to protect the taxpayers and call into question the budgets and proposals that staff puts forward.”
It is the scrutiny of DiCiccio that has rankled many who are in favor of the lobbyist and union run City government. Bilsten defended DiCiccio by saying his scrutiny of government spending was “not personal. It’s his job to be fiscally responsible to all of us.
Bilsten said pointedly that the “slanderous false attacks are coming from friends and contributors of Karlene Keogh Parks.”
Representative Kate Brophy McGee said that “baseless claims against Sal DiCiccio “demeans all women who desire equal treatment. Resorting to unsubstantiated and unproven claims to win an election is a desperate and underhanded act.”
According to Brophy McGee, the “women purportedly making these unsupported allegations were never employees of Councilman DiCiccio. They were employees of the City of Phoenix and reported to the City Manager, and are probably now dipping into their generous pension plans. The Mayor and his City Council colleagues speak frequently with great pride of the City’s protective policies about women and minorities.
Brophy McGee said that she has known DiCiccio for many years and has “many opportunities to disagree with him on some issues. He is direct and focused in expressing his concerns, but he is not, and never has been, disrespectful to women.” Brophy McGee called the attacks “despicable.”
Laurie Roberts, a columnist with the Arizona Republic called opposition to DiCiccio a “black ops group,” Roberts wrote that opponents of DeCiccio; “the resident spendthrift on the Phoenix City Council,” are “telling the voters that DiCiccio “wants to get rid of the food tax yet used a sizable chunk of it to give the city manager an obscene pay raise. So says the Campaign for Better Neighborhoods, a group with a red-white-and-blue sounding name and a black-ops mission. A group that I suspect supports those pay raises and pension perks — and, by the way, the food tax.”
“But then, you’re not supposed to know that,” writes Roberts. “The group’s front people — allies of the city’s most infamous food tax supporter, Mayor Greg Stanton — are using a loophole in Arizona’s campaign-finance laws to attack DiCiccio without having to tell you who they really are.”
Roberts asserts that the group wants DiCiccio off the City Council, “Enough to try to put one over on voters, who in August will choose between DiCiccio and challenger Karlene Keogh Parks.”