Steller: In OV elections, golf is legitimate concern

All these months later, with a recall election about to begin, Oro Valley Mayor Satish Hiremath continues asking people not to focus so much on the golf courses.

Hiremath’s latest frustrated appeal occurred near the end of Wednesday’s town council meeting. Mike Zinkin, a council member who opposed the December 2014 purchase of the El Conquistador golf courses and clubhouse, asked the council to make town staff explain their financial projections for the courses.

Zinkin noted that the overall operations — golf courses, community center, tennis courts, restaurant — were more than $1 million in the red during their first three months under town control, May through July. He alleged that the town’s revenue projections are too optimistic and will likely compound these losses.

It was not a comforting start for a project that seemed financially questionable from the beginning, because of golf’s declining popularity. But hearing the doomsaying about golf “irked” Hiremath, to use his word.

“Everybody keeps singling out the golf piece. That’s very problematic for me,” he said. “Let’s talk about the community center, let’s talk about the acreage, let’s talk about the tennis courts, let’s talk about the restaurant, let’s talk about the fitness centers. Because it’s a package deal.”

“What frustrates me, and what really irks me as you can tell, is when you keep singling out the golf piece. You can’t do that.”

He’s right, of course, that the town obtained the golf courses as part of a deal that included, most centrally, a golf clubhouse that has become a community center that the town had already been seeking. And it includes other amenities, such as tennis courts and restaurants.

Hiremath is also right that delays in closing the deal — from January to May — meant the town had to wait past the best months for golf to make improvements to the courses that will probably bring in more golfers. So these early numbers, two months of which were already covered in a prior fiscal year, don’t spell doom.

July’s loss of $403,000, offset by $130,000 in sales-tax revenue intended to pay for the new project, nets about a $270,000 loss, he noted.

All that is fine and relevant, but Hiremath is wrong in trying to discourage people from complaining about the golf courses alone. The financial riskiness of going into golf is the reason he’s being challenged in a recall election. Golf is the financial burden that HSL Properties was seeking to slough off when it bought the Hilton El Conquistador.

As I’ve said before, this deal looks a lot like an example of privatizing the profits — in this case, the resort property that HSL kept — and socializing the risks: the golf courses.

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Of course Hiremath wants us to keep the bigger picture in mind, and it’s fine for him to request that as he and his three allies on the council are up for re-election. But the city’s taking ownership of the golf courses is the reason for the controversy, and Oro Valley voters and council dissidents have a right to focus on that.

Now Mesa loses GCU

On Sunday, I wrote about the billboard that pointed to the “loss” of Grand Canyon University as a blemish on the record of the three Tucson City Council members up for re-election. After waffling by the council, Grand Canyon stopped considering trying to build a new campus on the city-owned El Rio Golf Course and instead chose to build in Mesa.

But now they aren’t building there — for sure. On Wednesday, the Arizona Republic reported that GCU is no longer planning to build a new campus in Mesa.

That sharpens the question raised by the billboard — did the City Council really lose us the jobs promised by a GCU campus in Tucson? The answer is looking increasingly like no. It’s possible that the incentives considered by the city would have made a Tucson campus more viable than a new one in Mesa, but there are bigger issues at play here.

One is that GCU is considering reverting from a publicly traded company to a nonprofit entity, and that has financial ramifications.

More and more, what looked like a promising opportunity for Tucson seems to have been closer to a guaranteed fiasco. Either we “lost” the GCU jobs when they chose another city or we would have lost the campus when GCU picked Tucson, then decided not to build here after all.

Poverty ranking is same after 2nd look

Also on Sunday, I noted that Tucson ranked as the country’s eighth-poorest metro area greater than 500,000 in population according to the Census Bureau’s most recent estimate, in 2013. I also noted the bureau hasn’t produced more recent rankings of metro areas that size.

Still, the data is available — it just takes a little analysis. I received this week a spreadsheet of all U.S. metro areas and their poverty rates.

After subtracting out the many small cities, it turns out that Tucson remains eighth-poorest among metro areas of 500,000 or more. The poverty rate has improved, however. It was 20.4 percent in 2011, when Tucson ranked sixth-worst. In 2014, the rate was 18.9 percent.