Steller: Time to consider ending South Tucson's independence

To know South Tucson, by walking its streets and taking in its smells and sounds, is to love South Tucson.

The place has a warm, small-town feeling that defies its shady reputation among many outsiders.

But what’s good about the city doesn’t have much of anything to do with the fact that it’s a tiny, self-governing municipality encompassed by the city of Tucson. In fact, its government is among its shadier institutions, thanks to unending political upheaval and persistent financial chaos.

Which makes me wonder if the 1.2-square-mile city should really exist anymore.

My colleague Joe Ferguson detailed the latest threat to the city’s financial viability in a story last Sunday. South Tucson has a firefighter pension that is “really underfunded” and a police pension that is “incredibly underfunded,” in the words of Michael Bond, a senior lecturer in finance at the University of Arizona’s Eller School of Management who analyzed the plans for the Star.

“Incredibly underfunded,” in this case, means the city has 2.2 percent invested of the $8 million it will need over the next 20 years, when it should have invested about 80 percent. Oops.

This bad news comes after South Tucson’s 6,000 residents lost their garbage service in August over a dispute with Waste Management, which said the city owed the company $300,000. The city of Tucson temporarily leased equipment to South Tucson so the smaller city’s workers could pick up the trash, and an arrangement between the two cities is likely to become permanent.

While the details tend to change, tales of financial woe coming from South Tucson’s city government are a regular theme of local news reports going back decades. In 1983, the city filed for bankruptcy, unable to pay a $3.6 million judgment to a city of Tucson police officer shot and paralyzed by a South Tucson officer.

In more recent years, the little city has been regularly bailed out by Pima County taxpayers. The latest instance was in September, when Pima County bought the building where the Sam Lena Library is housed from South Tucson, writing off about $450,000 in money the city owes the county for animal-control and jail bills as payment for the building, and also restructuring the city’s jail debt.

But this sort of thing has been happening for years. The county bought property from South Tucson and wrote down its jail debt in 2000 and 2008 as well. In 2007, the county paid $500,000 for the construction of two parks that South Tucson built but could not fully pay for.

In 2011, Enrique Serna, then city manager of South Tucson, said of the jail debt: “We can’t afford to let this fiscal obligation continue because it threatens our viability as a city.”

That is, ultimately, what these repeated financial crises come down to — the financial viability of South Tucson as an independent entity. With history as our guide, we can comfortably conclude that South Tucson is not financially viable. Without Pima County’s repeated bailouts over the years, facilitated by former South Tucson mayor and Pima County supervisor Dan Eckstrom and his allies, the city would probably have gone bankrupt again long ago.

Now, with the county budget tightening and South Tucson’s pension bill looming, another South Tucson bankruptcy is becoming a more realistic possibility. So what are the alternatives?

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The most drastic is disincorporation — in other words, South Tucson would cease to be a municipality. That would make it a county island within Tucson, receiving police service from the sheriff’s department as well as routine government services such as planning and permitting from the county.

It might be a good idea — this way at least there would be no question of bailouts and backstopping. South Tucson would simply become the county’s direct responsibility.

But that’s unlikely to happen. Disincorporation requires that two-thirds of the municipality’s registered voters sign petitions in favor of it. Those go to the Board of Supervisors, which can either order disincorporation or put the issue on the ballot for the city’s voters to consider in an election.

There’s likely to be some resistance on a political basis — many South Tucson residents are proud of their city and enjoy its independence. But it’s also hard to get more than a few people engaged in local politics. In the May recall election, only 395 ballots were cast.

“We’re lucky to have a hundred, two hundred votes in any election,” South Tucson Council member Herman Lopez told me. “They don’t vote, they don’t register, or they don’t care.”

Another alternative is that the city of Tucson could annex South Tucson. Again, South Tucson’s voters would have to agree to this, and maybe they would if given the choice. But why would the city of Tucson want to take on a poor, nearly insolvent city? I asked Mayor Jonathan Rothschild.

“It may be several years from now that that could make sense, but right now we certainly couldn’t take on any additional debt or obligation,” he said. “If we’re on better financial ground, you could begin to explore it, and perhaps make it work with some consolidation of services and also with some real focus on trying to bring retail sales into the area. But that’s a longterm project.”

A more likely short-term change is that South Tucson would contract out more and more of its services, as it has with garbage, until the government becomes essentially a city council administering contracts. When I asked County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry what the alternatives were for the city, this is the one he pointed to, noting that in Southern California there are many of these so-called “contract cities.”

The city should move toward any change like this as quickly as possible.

It’s not that South Tucson has no prospects for the future. For one thing, as its former interim city manager Benny Young pointed out, it’s likely to absorb some spillover benefits from downtown Tucson’s rebirth.

For another, as I’ve written before, the acreage that stretches from 36th Street down to the I-10 Frontage Road, including the old Spanish Trail Motel and Tucson Greyhound Park, is ripe for redevelopment. It will happen some day.

But that stretch of land also illustrates why the little city needs to start moving away from its self-governance. The land’s potential for economic development has been obvious for years, but still today, the blown-out, 70-foot Spanish Trail sign stands above the freeway with its arrow pointing toward South Tucson as if to say “This town does not work.”