Mayor speaks about plans for economy, streets, homeownership

“In my 30 years in business, I learned this: You cannot cut your way to prosperity,” Mayor Jonathan Rothschild told 1,100 in the audience at the Tucson Convention Center Tuesday. “At some point, you have to invest.”

The city has cut its budget in many ways, including cutting one in five jobs and deferring maintenance projects, he said.

The city will likely be asking city voters to say yes so a half-cent sales tax increase, but the details of the proposal are a work in progress, Rothschild said.

Here’s what the mayor said on a few more key topics.

Economy

City tax incentives “are helping to spur $170.6 million in private capital investment” and creating more than 2,500 jobs, Rothschild said.

He listed major new buildings under construction in the downtown and university areas and said, “I can assure you, looking at available properties and interest from investors, we’re not halfway to where we’ll be in five years with downtown redevelopment.”

He wants to expand the area in which businesses can apply for the Government Property Lease Excise Tax incentive program, which is a property tax abatement program used by many of the projects now under construction.

Rothschild also highlighted steps the city took to protect existing major employers Raytheon Missile Systems and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, and he said new nonstop flights between Tucson and Guaymas are “opening a new era of cross-border trade and tourism for our region.”

Next, he said, Tucson needs to help deliver water and other utilities to large tracts of land that aren’t developed yet but could be marketed to businesses as shovel-ready sites for new distribution centers or factories or marketed to builders as sites for building speculative industrial space.

Roads

The $100 million street bonds program — narrowly approved by city voters in 2012 — is “under budget and ahead of schedule,” the mayor said. The program already has repaired 600 lane miles of city streets and has 500 more to go.

He said commuters can look forward to the next phase of Downtown Links, which is a plan to connect Barraza-Aviation Parkway to Interstate 10 and to the expansion of Broadway between Country Club Road and the downtown area, “which will add multimodal features to one of our major streets and pave the way for businesses to flourish along this arterial.”

Homeownership

The mayor announced a new goal to increase homeownership in the city over the next four years.

The city will promote programs to help homebuyers and homeowners, including prepurchase counseling and down-payment assistance.

“Many renters are struggling to afford rent when homeownership could be a better bet for them,” Rothschild said.

“We’re going to work with builders, lenders and Realtors to provide favorable terms to homebuyers who agree to be owner-occupiers.”