RAPID PROGRESS

posted by James Reel

    Well, here’s a fine howdy-do. After arguing for a very long time about whether or not Tucson really needs a big new arena, and then becoming sympathetic to the Tucson Convention Center’s complaint that it can’t accommodate big conferences—sympathy that intensified about a month ago, when the biggest annual conference here bolted for Phoenix—the city council has all of a sudden approved a big new arena and TCC expansion. The trigger was pulled when, less than a week ago, downtown property owner Allan Norville (a longtime thorn in the city government’s side) unveiled his own arena proposal. That got the bureaucrats moving fast, rushing their own proposal before the public perhaps months ahead of schedule. A couple of weeks ago, when I was researching an article on TCC expansion for the Downtown Tucsonan, I asked my various sources if it were true that they were going to put a proposal before the council around the middle of this month (which is the rumor I’d heard). All they’d say is that they’d be going public “by the end of the summer.” Well, they even managed to get it done before the end of spring! Very interesting, what will motivate a bureaucracy.
    Now, of course, that Downtown Tucsonan article of mine is good for background, but it has no worth as a news story.
    Next question: Does earmarking all that money for the arena constitute a slap in the face of those at the University of Arizona who proposed gobbling up almost all the available Tax Increment Financing for a science center on the west side? (For more on that, go here and persevere.)