Sewer system revenue bonds
by Rick LaPoint

May 3 2004

Originally published in the Tucson Citizen

Once again, the Board of Supervisors comes to us with a plan to eliminate waste. Unfortunately, they are targeting the wrong type of waste in this case.

As proposed, this sewer bond package leaves questions that need to be answered by county officials:

Why aren't sewer infrastructure improvement and development costs being offset by increasing connection fees?

Do these costs for Tucson's sewer system have to be financed by increasing the property taxes of all county residents, including those who don't utilize the products and services provided by this small urban-centric county agency?

Cox Cable charges a connectivity fee for a new development yet cannot tax all county residents involuntarily for providing that service, which is fair.

The builder - whether an individual or a corporation - absorbs the fee and is free to increase the price of the property proportionately.

Since this service actually adds value to the property, it can be thought of no differently than the addition of air conditioning or a pool to a property.

Some will cry foul at this process, but it is quite simply how the free market works. Such connection fees are a minuscule portion of the overall cost of building in Pima County.

To say it's unfair to expect new development to pick up the tab for expansion is both myopic and communistic.

To say this will somehow arrest development in Pima County is just plain silly and typical of proponents of an omnipotent state.

Where, exactly, is the money to be spent, and will it be fairly and equitably dispersed amongst the geographic region representing Pima County?

What the supervisors are proposing amounts to nothing less than county officials driving up to a homestead in Rio Rico and demanding funds for Tucson's sewer system from the property owner while pointing a shotgun at him or her.

Oddly enough, it's also the same as having county officials armed with Glocks walk up to one of the rented tract homes on the South Side, knock on the door and demand money to finance plumbing for the latest townhome development on the opulent Northwest Side.

This type of taxation is neither fair nor proportionately applied to all county residents based upon use. For that reason alone, it should be dismissed outright by voters.

How can Pima County encourage "open space" protection in a taxpayer-financed land-grab, yet earmark a percentage of future tax revenues on further expansion of Pima County Wastewater Management's system?

Expansion of this system will become necessary because of increased development, which the supervisors also wish to control as if were some type of faucet that one could turn on or off at will, or more important, by paper edict.

There is very little privately owned land left in Pima County, and having the supervisors decide where we can and cannot live in the future is simply an affront to the people's free will and rights of self-determination.

Many landowners actually purchase property for the purpose of preservation, even work outside of the state apparatus, and claim no shiny badge of tax relief for providing their land to the creatures that inhabit it.

If the supervisors have some type of Soviet-style five-year plan for development in the works, it would be nice of them to present it to county residents. Even the Russians were afforded that level of accountability by their government.

There are existing revenue streams from which the county can collect an offset of costs incurred by development and infrastructure expansion. They are called connection fees and manifest themselves in the cost of running utilities to any development, normally paid by the builder/developer.

In a truly free market, this charge would include the costs of engineering and planning, hardware, labor and a mystery fee - arrived upon within the syndicate, of course, based upon historical data - which would recover costs incurred for building a new sewage treatment plant or other necessary capital improvements to sustain incremental development.

In the world of Pima County, we eschew all planning, indebt ourselves to the tune of more than half a billion dollars and ask the community to just "trust" our leaders - thrice in the same decade, even!

The Citizen itself points out "only 20 of 57 road projects have been completed almost seven years after voters gave their approval (to the 1997 bond election).

"Sixteen projects have been put on hold because money has run out."

One has to be convinced that a 35 percent completion rate is acceptable for planned projects, and luckily, Pima County residents are not that gullible.

Way back in 1997, Pima County taxpayers approved not one, but two bond packages, and we have yet to see the fruits of that debacle.

Given the obvious duplicity supervisors display in regard to development activities within the county, Pima County residents should be naturally inclined to "just say no" to the magical Bond Fairy and to demand more accountability and adherence to free-market principles from their leaders.

Rick LaPoint is a plastics engineer and treasurer of the Pima County Libertarian Party.