The Arizona Republic breaks the towing scams in the Valley wide open!
Towing companies, the story says, confiscate cars they shouldn’t, won’t let people get personal items out of the cars once they are towed, demand fees of $150 or more in cash to reclaim cars … and even arrange kickbacks with property owners.
(That last, for example, creates an incentive for the lot owners not to label the tow zones clearly.)
But wait! you say. The legislature passed a bill outlawing a lot of these practices earlier this year!
What happened?
The push for reform at the state level has gained support from some tow-truck company owners, who blame the abuses on a few bad actors giving their industry a bad name. Still, towing legislation in 2008 and 2009 could not gain approval in the state Senate.
This year, as more cash-strapped motorists complained about being fleeced, the Legislature passed the strongest towing-reform bill in Arizona history.
But Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed it, saying it would cost too much to enforce.
Thanks, Jan!
This was her rationale for vetoing the bill:
“[Law enforcement agencies] would need to reassign officers away from law enforcement duties to private towing oversight functions.”
But that’s an argument against any piece of legislation. It’s a prime argument against SB 1070, in fact, not to mention most drug laws.
It’s even a great argument against laws against murder!
“Why, if we make murder illegal, then cops will be pulled away from other law-enforcement duties!”
What’s the difference? The people facing the brunt of the enforcement of SB 1070 are harmless and poor immigrants.
For the towing bill, it was scumbag local towing companies.
Brewer’s concerns extended only to the businesses.
Now, PHXated doesn’t feel that sorry for the people getting their cars towed. Too many drivers are thoughtless at best and radiate a sense of I’ll-park-my-SUV-wherever-I-want arrogance at worst.
They deserve to be towed.
But if there are towing abuses, there’s a right way to correct them: Charge local towing companies fees that would pay for someone in government to handle complaints and enforcement for their industry.
But that would be a tax on small business!
The result: Another example of Republican political philosophy that, conveniently, protects corporate crooks … and fucks over the populace.
The Republic story on the matter, which ledes the paper today, is long and seemingly in-depth.
But read it closely and you can see there’s very little in the story beside people asserting that there’s a towing problem in town. The two case studies the story offers are entirely one-sided. In both cases the towing company involved isn’t named, much less offered a chance to respond.
10:13 AM
Everything that's wrong with Arizona, encapsulated in a quote from one Barbara McGovern
From a front-page feature in the Republic this a.m.:
Five times a week, Barbara McGovern leaves her east Phoenix home to make the 15-minute drive to Piestewa Peak, the mountain she has loved climbing for a decade.
But, in the coming weeks, as she pulls into a parking space, it will be with a bit of resentment. Because starting Aug. 1, it’s going to cost McGovern and anyone else who parks at one of the Phoenix mountain parks or preserves up to $5 a day.
“I’m kind of flabbergasted,” McGovern said Friday, upon hearing about the new fee system Phoenix Parks and Recreation board members approved Thursday. “It seems like we’re getting taxed right and left. They shouldn’t be charging for this. It’s going to be a financial burden for some people.”
It’s possible McGovern isn’t what she seems to be: a classic Arizona Republican, one of those who’ve been electing, year after year, the destructive and clownish folks in the state legislature and then stand around whining when reality intrudes.
If she isn’t, well, then, she’s that other species of local resident, the Arizonicus boobicus—someone not entirely clear on the concept.
Parks cost money. Either you get taxed for them … or you pay directly for them.
I’m pretty sure that, between the short-sighted local statehouse and the nutty Bush tax cuts, “east Phoenix residents” like her have been treated very solicitously by the IRS over the last decade.
It’s intellectually coherent to say, “Why should we be taxed for parks? Let the people who use them pay for them.”
Or to say, “Parks are a public trust that should be paid out of public funds for the benefits of rich and poor alike.”
But neither? Does McGovern think money for parks grows on trees?
p.s.: Indeed—does the Republic? A nonsensical person like McGovern should not have been quoted that high up in the story. It gives it an imprimatur of coherence it obviously doesn’t deserve.
8:42 AM
2Everything you wanted to know about Arizona's budget problems ...
… except who was responsible.
From the Republic:
Debt has been a quick but uneasy solution to budget pressures.
As state tax collections lagged and demand for state services grew, lawmakers and Gov. Jan Brewer scrambled for ways to balance the budget. They drained the state’s “rainy-day fund,” cut spending and delayed big-dollar payments to schools. It wasn’t enough.
They anguished for more than a year before sending Brewer’s temporary 1-cent-per-dollar sales-tax increase to the ballot, where voters last month passed it.
Meanwhile, lawmakers borrowed to patch over the holes in the budget….
Arizona’s legislature is of course dominated by the GOP and has been; aside from one elliptical reference to the legislature’s being “conservative,” the story doesn’t dwell on that fact at all.
7:24 AM
The Arizona Republic: Reviewing operas, four days later
Richard Nilsen, the paper’s fine fine-arts critic, had a review of The Barber of Seville on the front page of the Living section today.
It was a rave:
[A]s Arizona Opera’s “Barber” began, the audience was prepared to hear a perfectly adequate performance. We awaited our favorite arias and, for about five minutes or so, everything went pro forma.
Then Figaro entered the scene, with his “Largo et factotum,” and it was as if someone plugged it into 220 volts. From that moment on, this became one of the best “Barbers” ever.
But the review said he’d seen the opera Friday. The show ran Saturday and Sunday as well; PHXated saw it Sunday afternoon and there were empty seats. Wouldn’t it be better to get the thing into the paper earlier?
It took some digging, but we found Nilson’s Nilsen’s review posted online Saturday afternoon. (In weird but typically Republic fashion, it was reposted with the rest of the paper at midnight last night as well.)
The problem, we suspect, is that the paper’s Saturday deadlines are too early to accomodate a review of a Friday night performance.
What about Sunday? Well, you may find this hard to believe, but it may be true that the Republic, like many papers, has Sunday deadlines too early for a Friday evening review.
(None of these decisions, you will note, are done for the benefit of readers. They are done to make the printing schedule more convenient for the paper, and by “the printing schedule more convenient” I mean “the whole process cheaper.”)
Anyway, so why didn’t it get printed Monday?
Well the answer to that question is tougher. The section had a very important wire story from the Washington Post to run. It was about how some churches have to “meld cultures” (i.e., with, say, English and Spanish speakers).
Obviously pressing news.
It also had another very important wire story about how American Idol’s ratings are falling. (That was one was from the Post as well.)
Oh yeah, and yet one more wire story, this one from USA Today, about the lessons of the swine flu—which, you will remember, wasn’t really called swine flu, but rather the H1N1 virus, but whatever.
The paper also on Monday had to make room on the front page of its living section for a blurb about saving “40 percent at Basha’s on Shamrock Farms products,” and no, that wasn’t an advertisement, though it sure reads like one.
But wait—why couldn’t the paper run Nilsen’s review inside the section on Monday?
Well, because it had to run a story about fancy doghouses.
This carried the hedline “Posh pads for pampered pooches.”
Presumably because the alternative, “Delightful digs for discriminating doggies,” didn’t fit.
(By the way, you can see here that the “pampered pooches” phrase is an alliterative well the paper has come back to at least five times this year alone.
(Note that this story joins the paper’s recent investigative reports about dogs on Twitter and dogs on Facebook.)
The pampered pooches story was a wire story as well, of course.
Anyway, the moral to this story is the moral to all the others. Newspapers are dying because they don’t care about readers, and they don’t care about their community. If they did, they would lift a finger to get a rave review of one of the city’s premiere arts organizations by one of the paper’s more serious writers into the paper sooner than four days later.
12:54 PM