On Wednesday, one of the local soft news publications on the northwest side ran a “special” propaganda letter by Pima County’s enduring bureaucrat Chuck Huckelberry. Wasting no time in hurling insults, his second sentence callously dismisses any voices that express concern over the county’s financial status as “[a] small assortment of Chicken Littles”. That’s what you think of us, Chuck?
His main point is to use the county’s credit ratings from Fitch and Standard & Poor’s as clear, irrefutable, incontrovertible evidence of the county’s solid fiscal state. He grossly exaggerates and wildly overstates the significance of the ratings while undermining the voter’s clear direction in last year’s bond election defeat by calling the measures’ failure a mere “political football”.
Chuck, your derision and contempt for the taxpayers is showing.
The people of the county saw the waste and grift in Huckelberry’s bad bonds from last year. Make no mistake Chuck, we see through this kind of malarkey just as well.
Of course the county is well-positioned to pay off its debt: we have a tax-and-spend Board of Supervisors–save for one Supervisor, Ally Miller–and therefore revenues sufficient to pay the current debt service. The formula is simple: Continue to pay principal and interest on time and as billed, and forecast tax revenues to continue to grow, and the credit rating on your municipal bonds will remain strong.
Huckelberry cites “aggressive repayment schedules” for previous “investments in the community” as a way to save taxpayers “many millions of dollars”. Which begs the obvious question: Why does Pima County continue to leverage itself enough to incur “many millions of dollars” of interest costs? Could Chuck really be spending that many taxpayer dollars that the county doesn’t have? Could the county instead pay for its desperately-needed road repairs if it wasn’t paying interest on all of Chuck’s debt?
He mentions roads in a cockamamie line about the results of the county’s spending: “bigger, less congested roads” (except that the roads in the county continue to be poorly maintained, pothole-ridden, and serviced by construction projects that run for years instead of months), “state-of-the-art wastewater management” (except that the county only narrowly avoided throwing gobs of money at the treatment facilities unnecessarily and did not show fiscal responsibility in that budgeting process), “exceptional public healthcare” (except that taxpayers foot the bill for illegal entrants who land here), “excellent parks” (except that the new park monument signs are non-lighted and difficult to read), “exquisite open spaces” (except that all the open spaces in the county will now afford a view of a balloon launch that cost the taxpayers millions), “and much, much more” (except that everything he already listed was more than the taxpayers should have to bear).
He does drive home one point that is dead accurate: “As the … political rhetoric heats up, it’s important that our residents know the reality of the county’s financial health.” Oh, Chuck, we know darn well the reality of the county’s finances: You get whatever you want gaveled in by a complicit Board, you throw money at your cronies without regard for the taxpayers, and the residents in this county get stuck footing the bill. It is irrelevant what the credit rating says, it matters how our leaders use the dollars they already have. You, Chuck Huckelberry, and almost all of our actually-elected leaders, do an abysmally poor job of that.