https://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/elections To paraphrase former Scottsdale city councilman Bob Littlefield: How bad does Scottsdale’s General Plan update have to be, to have garnered so little support from the council majority, the Chamber of Commerce, and the movers-and-shakers who think nothing of dropping $100 to get their supporting arguments published in the election pamphlet? I dutifully handed […]
Honor and Truth
With the ongoing protests against providing temporary housing within an otherwise-empty Scottsdale hotel property (which I’d think would be good for the local economy), for legal asylum seekers complying with federal law, a news item about US Army Private Marcelino Serna, caught my eye today. I wrote about Serna a couple of years ago, in […]
Arizona water shortage looming
Lake Mead is currently 16 feet below where it was this time last year and the reservoir is only 37% full, while Lake Powell is down 35 feet from last year and sits at just 34% of the lake’s total capacity.
Leasing public school property to a private soccer business
Mark Liebner on SUSD’s Tonalea campus lease to Phoenix Rising Football Club [I attended the first part of this meeting, and I can vouch that there was outright hostility from some of the neighbors toward Phoenix Rising’s proposal, and toward SUSD administrators’ poor handling of it. Mr. Liebner does a good job of covering most […]
Scottsdale Toad Enforcement
A neighbor of mine has been plagued for years by an adjoining AirBnB (aka “transient,” or less than 30-day) rental, which has now turned into an interminable demolition/remodel nuisance. He has carefully documented many of the zoning code violations, and contacted the city dozens of times at all levels from code enforcement (which is where […]
Caputi’s True Colors
Tammy Caputi’s recent opinion piece in the so-called “Independent” demonstrates exactly the reason I recommended against her for city council in last year’s election. I’ve reproduced her letter below my comments. It is full of half-truths and outright dishonesty, with one goal in mind: Usurping the very purpose of the General Plan and our zoning […]
Scottsdale’s Election
If you are visiting ScottsdaleCitizen for the first time because you received my letter, welcome! The information below is all in the letter, but forwarding this article to your Scottsdale friends is a great way to leverage it out to a larger audience of voters. And I’ve included convenient hyperlinks to the websites of the […]
Otis and the SCOTT Project
I received an entertaining, late-night email from Otis Norton in my inbox this morning, in which he threatened me for mentioning one of his friends in a social media post. I’ve been around and involved long enough to have been threatened by a few folks. So, while I always take threats seriously, this one mostly […]
Fitch Downgrades Scottsdale, AZ IDR, Excise Tax Revs to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA’; GOs Affirmed at ‘AAA’
The downgrade of Scottsdale’s IDR [Issuer Default Rating] to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA’ is due to concern that the city’s financial resilience cushion, combined with its constrained independent revenue-raising ability, increase its vulnerability to periodic downturns given the heavy dependence on economically sensitive revenues… — Read on www.fitchratings.com/research/us-public-finance/fitch-downgrades-scottsdale-az-idr-excise-tax-revs-to-aa-from-aaa-gos-affirmed-at-aaa-13-05-2020
And Then Came the High-Rises
In the past, I’ve been critical of former Republic columnist John Talton’s loose cannon, anti-automobile ranting. I haven’t seen much from him lately, but his older piece, Phoenix 101: What killed downtown, Part II, recently came to my attention, and contains a nugget worth noting. Hey, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in […]