What, then, isn't a land-use regulation?

The city of Tucson has a love-hate relationship with so-called "big box" stores. On the one hand, your average Joe or Jose shops at the superstores, from the early-morning opening to the late-night closing. Tucsonans like the big-boxes so much that where they can--outside city limits--many stay open 24 hours. It's also no secret that Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowes, and Food City (in addition to the anchor department stores at the various malls) make Tucson a weekend shopping destination for quite a few Sonorans.

On the other hand, the big boxes, especially Wal-Mart, are the target of quite a few affluent NIMBYs, who for varying, mainly aesthetic, reasons--it's a symbol of the auto-driven sprawl that they like for themselves but would prefer others would decline--would rather such stores didn't exist and who go to bizzare lengths to make it difficult for the big-boxes to do business within city limits.

Take, for example, Tucson's ordinance requiring that retailiers meeting the "big box" criterion can only devote 10% of their floor space to groceries, that is, unless it devotes greater than 90% of its floorspace to groceries. Instead of letting the businesses assume the risk of determining what consumers want, the City Council, back in 1999, pretended to do so for them.

Of course, the Councilmen didn't have the consumer in mind at all. We can't even say that the ordinance was a misguided effort to "protect" small business; the effect was to "protect" Albertson's, Food City, and big-box law flouting Fry's (notorious for using freight containers to keep itself under 100,000 square feet) from Target and Wal-Mart. Mark Kimble laid it out clearly in last Thursday's Citizen: the grocery restriction was included the big-box ordinance at the behest of the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union, the same, nefarious group trying to strong-arm Basha's--Arizona's only family-owned grocery chain and a regular contributor to various good causes--into unionizing its employees without a vote. Wal-Mart is, famously, union-free.

On the heels of securing neighborhood support and a favorable City Council vote for a Supercenter at 36th and Kino, Wal-Mart decided to go one further and petition to put the "Consumer Choice Initiative", repealing the grocery provisions of the big-box ordinance, on this November's ballot. 11,615 valid signatures were required, over 22,000 (one of them mine) were collected.

In the face of this seemingly strong support to at least see the question put to a vote, the City Clerk rejected the petitions, claiming that land-use regulations cannot be amended by the ballot initiative process. That may or may not be true; it's not enshrined in the State constitution, but it was the result of a 1997 court case.

The supposed reasoning behind the decision--if anyone can locate it, please leave a comment!--was that ballot initiatives would undermine the public participation supposedly central to the zoning process. The catch is: the big-box ordinance, with the grocery provision, was passed without public discussion!

Furthermore, land-use regulations are concerned with such matters as traffic, lighting, parking, noise pollution, and the like--externalities--and not with everything that goes on inside a store. A law saying Ace Hardware may not sell nails, only screws, or that drugstores can't sell newspapers unless they also sell Harry Potter, is not a land-use law, no matter where it's found in the statute, unless, like "public use" or "interstate commerce", every law is a land-use law.

Wal-Mart was ready to take the city to court, but has backed down for mysterious reasons. Was there a threat to renege on the variance involving 36th and Kino? Who knows. As a signer of the petition, I could be a plaintiff myself, but I'm too busy and too broke.

I've heard plenty of FUD and a few truly legitimate gripes about Wal-Mart, such as the corporate welfare it's been given in Prescott, but for the first time I can say that the company has let me down.

Postscript: It's clear which of Tucson's two newspapers is more favorable to enterprise--and to individual liberty in general--and it isn't the Daily Star. Keep that in mind when your subscription renewals come up.

Scanning the headlines...

From yesterday's Star:
125 here are hit by 'Ponzi scheme'

Of the roughly half-million retirees in the Tucson metro area, only 125 are saying "I paid 15% of my income to the Social Security system for fifty years, and this is what I get?"

(Real update--about ballot initiatives--to follow soon!)

Kromko's lost his mojo!

Until recently, if you'd have asked me who to go to for advice about ballot initiatives, I'd have recommended John Kromko. While we occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum, he an old Great Society leftist and I someone who'd name his 'blog after Barry G. But he's the rare low-tax leftist, and on local issues, such as last year's RTA swindle, we're usually on the same page. More to the point, he is--or, rather, was--Arizona's expert in initiative politics.

Strange of him, then, to not only back but actually write a guaranteed loser! Having failed to collect the requisite amount of signatures to kill the so-called "garbage fee" (the one that isn't tied to service, can't be opted out of, and gets one's water shut off if one dosen't pay) two years ago, largely because he broke his arm and didn't ask for sufficient help, he's come back with a grotesque mashup that is not only ill-wrought but will also almost certainly violate the single-subject rule.

Called the Tucson Water Users' Bill of Rights, it proposes to repeal the garbage fee, forbid the association of any fee for any service other than water delivery with water usage or the water bill, and ban so-called "toilet to tap" use of treated effluent for drinking water.

Fair enough, although it already runs afoul of the single-subject rule. What comes next, however, is laughable. The measure would forbid the privatization or private outsourcing of garbage and water services! The last time I checked, private garbage service works well in unincorporated Pima County--better than the government-run service in the City--and aquifier-by-aquifier cap-and-trade privatization was the only means to acheieve sustainable water use in the desert. Apparently a now-and-forever ban on such things is worth it to Kromko because it prevents an end-run around this bill's provisions.

It gets worse. The last section of the initiative is a virtual poison pill, requiring new water connections to cease if CAP flows diminish more than 20% or when 140,000 acre-feet per year of delivery is to be exceeded. Rather than establish a water market wherein (e.g.) a golf course may sell its yearly use rights to a developer if it's profitable, Kromko would have development--infill, renewal, and sprawl alike--cease.

It's too bad Kromko didn't bring more people to the table when drafting this. We could have had multiple single-subject initiatives proposing sensible solutions, instead, we're treated to a multi-subject mess of nonsense, which, tellingly, Tucson Citizen political gossip columnist and economic ignoramus Jim Nintzel calls intelligent.

An idiot in the AG's office, and how Arizona's Congressional delegation voted on HR 1252

Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard has, infamously flaunted his ignorance regarding the economic mechanisms setting gas prices.

To quote a sample:

Gasoline retailers and their trade associations claim that gasoline stations must immediately raise their prices in response to a threatened supply disruption because they must raise enough money to pay for their next shipment of potentially higher priced fuel. They call this arbitrary and speculative behavior “replacement cost” pricing. Whatever the reason, gasoline retailers actually seemed to be competing to raise prices during the Katrina episode. I personally observed that as soon as one station posted higher prices, others in the area quickly matched it. To do otherwise, retailers told my Office, would be to risk being overrun by customers and pumped dry.

Yes, avoiding being pumped dry is what replacement-cost pricing is all about. If you could undercut another retailer and be sustainably flooded with customers--or at least get more--you would. That's the process in effect when gas prices "come down like a feather." Apparently Goddard has yet to hear of "competition".

Read the rest. It's funny in a sick way, and stands as evidence that the man doesn't have either the brains or the knowledge to be a responsible Attorney General. Ignorance-based prosecutions are as intolerable as malicious ones.

Arizona's House delegation had the opportunity earlier this week to show whether or not they, unlike Goddard, get it, and whether or not they'd vote on something either pointless or blatantly unconstitutional for the sake of political posturing. Here's how they voted on HR 1252:

Aye AZ-1 Renzi, Rick [R]
Nay AZ-2 Franks, Trent [R]
Nay AZ-3 Shadegg, John [R]
Aye AZ-4 Pastor, Edward [D]
Aye AZ-5 Mitchell, Harry [D]
Nay AZ-6 Flake, Jeff [R]
Aye AZ-7 Grijalva, Raul [D]
Aye AZ-8 Giffords, Gabrielle [D]

Flake's "Nay" is predictable, as are the ayes of Grijalva and Giffords.

I'll throw in the first dollar for a collection to send each "Aye" voter a copy of Gwartney et al's Common Sense Economics, preferably by some postal method involving a whack on the head.

Good ol' Russel Pearce

Courtesy of the troglo-conservatives at PHXNews.com comes the latest zinger from arch-bigot Russell Pearce, a claim that "Illegals" don't have the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.

Presumption about the immigration status of May Day marchers aside, the claim is patently false, both by the plain language of Article 2 of the Arizona constitution and the Federal bill of rights, and based on numerous precedents such as INS v. Lopez-Mendoza.

One can't write Pearce off as an ignoramus. He is a liar, making such claims repeatedly to fan the nativist flames. He's had plenty of time to be set straight, and he continues. I repeat: Russel Pearce is a liar.

The claim that "'illegals' have no rights" is a popular right-wing myth, and as it continues to spread, the likelihood of a right-wing race riot increases. Pogroms are what happens when the notion that people have (de facto or de jure) no protection of law is added to their being objects of irrational hate. Men spreading such ideas do not deserve the honor of and are unfit for the responsibility of public office.

Arizonans discovering that the so-called "laws of economics" aren't right-wing propaganda

Way back in October 2006, before Obama was an outright socialist, when ugly talk of ILLEGALS dominated the comment sections of the local rags and soft-libertarian Jim Kolbe was still my congressman--a long time ago, in other words, I remarked that, if Arizonans passed a minimum wage increase,

Teenagers, those coming off the welfare rolls, and those in transition between occupationss--none of whom are represented in the AFL/CIO--will be hurt most of all, albeit in a manner invisible to all but the professional economist.

I was wrong. The effects are so obvious that the Arizona Republic reports them without surprise or false sense of irony. Of course teenagers are finding less work. And of course the developmentally disabled are finding themselves unemployable.

The Arizona Industrial Commission, for its part, asked Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard to say it ain't so, that the voters couldn't have meant to raise everyone's wage, that after all, the Federal minimum wage doesn't apply to the disabled! (The voters couldn't have meant to approve the union spying provisions, but that's another matter altogether.) Unfortunately, Goddard got this right; the new state law supersedes Federal law.

Of course, the voters meant it. A minimum wage law is, plain and simple, a ban on selling one's labor for less than a prescribed amount. The economic effects--fewer employment opportunities at the margin--have been well-understood for years, and a vote in favor of such a measure means either (A) the voter doesn't know and doesn't care to know, or (B) knows and doesn't care.

The legislature is trying to fix this; HB 2318 would amend the law to create an exception, subjecting the disabled solely to Federal minimum wage laws. Such a remedy, however, would likely be thwarted by the stipulation that amendments to ballot initiatives must "further their purpose". If the purpose of the minimum wage law is to make the state Candyland or a worker's paradise, (now there's some judicial activism for you!) then that's fair enough. If it's merely a price control, then fat chance!

One of these days Arizonans, and Americans, may wake up and suddenly realize that price controls--and economic central planning in general--don't work, have never worked, and can never work. Until then our hope in this matter is that the legislature forces a special election and voters at least realize that driving the retarded out of work and onto the welfare rolls was a stupid thing to do.