Tag Archives: Wickenburg

They Just Don’t Get It

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Some people are just too stupid to get the point.

They think I bitch about Wickenburg’s questionable politics and its poor economy and its lack of decent paying jobs and its part-time population and its mediocre dining experiences because I don’t like Wickenburg.

Hell, if I didn’t like Wickenburg, I wouldn’t live here. My work is portable — I can live anywhere I want. But I live here.

I complain because I want Wickenburg to be the best it can be.

I want politics to be clean and politicians to vote according to the majority of their constituents. But if voters don’t know what’s going on, how can they change it?

I want to see businesses in every single storefront downtown, with visitors and residents strolling the sidewalks and doing business. But if people don’t notice the empty storefronts, how can they fill them?

I want businesses to come to Wickenburg to offer good-paying jobs for career-minded young people and the goods and services we need right here in town. But if people don’t see the problems with the local economy, how can they focus on fixing it?

I want new homes to be bought by people with their lives still ahead of them, people who can enrich our town with their participation in activities rather than complain about high prices and do all their shopping at Wal-Mart in Surprise. But if people don’t realize that our part-time population spends most of its money outside of town, how can we encourage businesses to keep them shopping in town?

I want good (or at least interesting) restaurants where I can get food I can’t cook at home, prepared better than I can make it myself. But if people don’t see the opportunities to meet this need, how can qualified people come forward and fill it?

The narrow-minded, stupid people in the Town government and the Chamber of Commerce just don’t get it. They think we should all sugar coat the truth and live with what we’ve got. They want to lure people in under false pretenses, like saying that Wickenburg is “the West’s most western town” (what a line of bull that is), without even trying to make their claims remotely true. They think we should ignore the forces that are stripping away whatever’s good about Wickenburg to turn it into just another mediocre Phoenix suburb.

And I won’t sit by quietly and watch that happen. Not in my town.

Now if only I could figure out how to draw them a picture.

Want to Get Angry?

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Come to a Wickenburg Town Council meeting.

If you’d like to see an example of the failure of democracy in this country, go to a Wickenburg Town Council meeting. That’s where you’ll see a Mayor and Council, with an agenda entirely different from the majority of the people they serve, ignore the will of the people and defend their agenda-serving policies. And if you’re as unlucky as we were yesterday, you’ll get to see the Mayor belittle and insult his constituents, too.

Yesterday’s meeting was a farce of epic proportions. The public input session lasted a full hour with about a dozen people coming forward with requests to reconsider the unfair rejection of a petition to bring a high-density housing project to a vote. (You can get the details on wickenburg-az.com‘s Opinion pages.)

The mayor punctuated the session with inappropriate comments addressed at his opponents. At one point, he made a comment to Ray Johns, the man who had submitted the petition, about the fact that he hadn’t been to a council meeting in three years (this is unconfirmed) but yet he submitted a petition. The comment was rudely delivered, obviously meant to belittle the man or at least insult him. Understand that Mr. Johns lived in Wickenburg for over 40 years when his house washed away during the February 2005 floods. He is now living in a trailer someone loaned him. As an elderly man and long-time resident, he deserves our respect; as a flood victim who lost everything he owned, he deserves our sympathy. It appears that the mayor isn’t compelled to respect or sympathize with anyone.

Each speaker was only given three minutes to talk. When one of the speakers, who is nearly deaf, asked the Town’s lawyer a question, she responded so quietly that most of the room didn’t hear her. When he asked her to repeat herself, it used up nearly a minute of his time. The buzzer rang and the mayor told the speaker to get off the podium. “Time’s up.” I guess the mayor has a new way to keep citizens from talking too long — just respond in a whisper or slowly so it eats up all the speaker’s time.

Another man told the assembled group that he had in his possession a copy of a letter from the developer’s lawyers addressed to the town telling the town exactly how to handle the petition that was subsequently rejected. The man made it clear what he thought about a developer’s lawyers directing the mayor and council.

I made a 2-minute speech about the First Amendment where I pointed out that Mr. Johns’ First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances was violated by the unfair rejection of his petition. He had submitted it in good faith, I argued, using a format he knew to be successful in the past. The town should accept it. I think my big words were too big for the Mayor and council members. They obviously didn’t understand what I was saying. The audience did, though. I got a nice round of applause. But I may as well have been talking to a brick for all the impact it made on the town’s representatives.

At the end of the public session, the Mayor began his defense. During the course of his ramblings, he let it slip that he rejected the petition to avoid a lawsuit by the developer. He also tried to cloud the issue by telling us that he’d looked up the word cluster in the dictionary. Yeah? So what? Just another attempt to lead us off the main issue. It didn’t work.

The councilmen spoke, too. Most rubber-stamped what the mayor said. Dave Lane let slip in his mumbling, stumbling response that the development had been approved so the town could get more revenue from property taxes on all those new homes — a disclosure that got a murmer of disapproval from the audience. (Give Lane enough speaking time and he’ll talk his way into a noose.) Only John Cook was reasonable, siding with what is so obviously right. It’s nice to see that the mayor’s puppet strings can sometimes shake loose from council members.

Personally, I can’t believe the people of the town of Wickenburg would vote in a man like our current mayor. His attitude and complete lack of respect for anyone — including his constituents — makes him arrogant. Yet when he talks to you one-on-one, you can see that there’s nothing inside that head of his — nothing except plans to make himself look bigger and more important than he really is. He’s building an empire in Wickenburg, annexing land and approving zoning changes for high density housing without the infrastructure to support the new homes or the jobs for new residents within town limits. And the whole time, rumors are flying around town about payoffs and ulterior motives.

It’s a dark time here in Wickenburg; I can’t wait to see the light here in town again.

Sedona Update

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Good news for pilots flying into Sedona.

I did a Sedona charter today. It was a birthday gift for one of my passengers. His girlfriend had me fly the two of them up to Sedona where they went on a Jeep tour with the Pink Jeep Tour company there. Then I flew them back to Wickenburg.

Both flights were great — smooth and uneventful. I flew the helicopter from Wickenburg to downtown Prescott, then skirted around the south end of Prescott’s airspace over Prescott Valley, crossed over Mingus Mountain at the 89A pass, flew past Jerome, then toured the red rocks north of there all the way into Sedona. Although I expected the flight back to be hot and bumpy, I was very pleased to be wrong. Bumpier and hotter than the trip out — yes. But not too bumpy or hot to enjoy. We flew from Sedona past the south end of Cottonwood, over the tail end of Mingus Mountain, over the weird mountain town of Crown King, and straight into Wickenburg. Total flight time: 1.7 hours.

The good news for pilots flying into Sedona is this:

First, the restaurant, which was supposed to close for good in May (this month) is remaining open. So you can still get breakfast or lunch or dinner on that wonderful shady patio or indoors — with red rock views either way. I had lunch there today while waiting for my passengers and really enjoyed a nice, leisurely meal in the shade, with a cool, comfortably breeze keeping me feeling refreshed.

Second, the terminal now has wireless Internet access. So if you show up with a laptop or other computing device that uses wireless networking, you can hop on the net, do your e-mail, or surf to your heart’s content. That’s a nice thing when you find yourself waiting a few hours for your passengers.

It was a nice day out — the first flight since my surgery — and it felt good to be in the sky again. I had great passengers and I think they really enjoyed themselves.

Sedona is still my favorite charter.

The Sleeping Tiger Stirs

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I get pretty fed up about what’s going on in Wickenburg…and start to do something about it.

Small town politics sucks. There’s no doubt about it. And it sucks even more when the politicians are fighting over a desert crossroads town with a weak economy and a part-time population.

When I moved to Wickenburg ten years ago, it was a small western town with a year-round population of about 4,000 people. Just enough shopping and services to make life convenient. Lots of space between the homes on the outskirts of town where I live. Privacy. Quiet. Clean air. Little crime. Slow pace of living. Just the thing a pair of New Yorkers needed to get a grip on their own lives.

One of the things we liked best about Wickenburg is that it didn’t have a lot of high density housing. Sure, it had some condos and apartments and the homes in the older downtown area were small and on small lots. But the rest of the town was zoned for one house per acre (or more) and the outskirts of town were zoned for one house per five acres. (We have 2-1/2.)

Fast forward to 2004. A developer proposes a high density housing development at the 9-hole golf course known as Wickenburg Country Club. He promises to expand the golf course to 18 holes. All the golfers want it. But the people who will soon have condo roofs in their back yards don’t. And neither do the people who see that one high-density development will open the floodgates to others.

Voters put together a referendum to get the issue on the ballot. Proposition 421 was the result. And the voters voted the development down.

Let me make sure you understand what I just wrote. The majority of voters who voted on Prop 421 voted against it. They were saying that they did not want the development to proceed.

Fast forward to 2006. The Mayor and Council voted in favor of allowing a virtually identical development on the same site by the same developer.

Huh?

Silly me. I thought we lived in a democracy.

But it gets worse.

Another group of voters put together another referendum to stop the development again. It was submitted the same way as the first one and should have been accepted. But they Mayor decided that because an attachment was made with a staple rather than a paper clip, it was not properly submitted. He directed the Town Clerk to reject it.

What?

I’ve been sitting back watching all this bullshit unfold for the past three years. Occasionally, I’d write an article or a letter to state my point of view. But I pretty much kept out of things — there were other people writing for my Web site, wickenburg-az.com who were saying pretty much what I would have said anyway.

But now I’m pissed. This little twerp who was voted in as Mayor — I couldn’t vote because I live outside of town limits, but I never would have voted for him — is making decisions that are not only beyond his authority, but they’re clearly against the will of the people.

This is wrong.

And I’m not going to sleep through this one. I’ve already made my first contribution to the voters efforts by writing an article about the paper clip rejection. More to come.

I promise.

Unnatural Causes

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An Adam Dalgliesh mystery by P.D. James.

Unnatural CausesI mentioned in a previous post that I’d taken two novels with me to the hospital for something to do while recovering from surgery. In that same post, I also mentioned that drugs kept me unable to read for the entire time I was there. I caught up yesterday by reading one of the two books I’d lugged down to Phoenix and back: Unnatural Causes by P.D. James.

I’m a big reader of mysteries, but for some reason I’ve always shied away from P.D. James. I think I must have had a bad P.D. James experience in my past. You know what I mean. You get a book from the library and have every intention of reading it, but when you open the book and begin to read, the book fails to grasp your attention. You put it aside, planning to pick it up later to read it, and wind up just returning it to the library — late, of course — with a new idea in the back of your mind: you don’t really care for that author’s work.

I don’t remember this happening to me with a P.D. James book, but it must have. There’s no other explanation for why I have avoided her work for so long.

The Great P.D. James Avoidance, however, ended last week when I picked up one of her books at Wickenburg’s local library. And yesterday’s reading of Unnatural Causes dissolved any preconceived notions I had about her work.

The book, which was originally published in 1967, concerns the discovery of a dinghy carrying the body of a dead man whose hands have been cut off. The dinghy washes ashore at the seaside town where it originated, which is also the same place the victim lived: Monksmere. The town has an unusually high percentage of full- and part-time residents who are either writers or crititcs. The dead man was a writer.

The book is nearly 40 years old now and it shows its age. Not in a bad way, mind you. More like a “look back” way. A part of the plot concerns the typing (on a typewriter) of the dead man’s manuscripts with and without carbon paper. If you’re old enough to remember typewriters, you’re likely to remember carbon paper, too. Not only did it give you the ability to make a copy of a document as you typed it, but it preserved that document on its shiny blue or black side — until you reused it so many times that you couldn’t read the carbon. Remember the days? Glad they’re gone? Me, too!

I won’t go into any more detail about the story line or suspects because I don’t want to spoil the book for any future reader who likes a good British “cosy” mystery. That’s what this is, through and through. P.D. James and Agatha Christie were cut from similar molds, although I think James has better use of the English language and much better descriptive skills. Her desciptions of the coastal town were so clear that they brought me there — from central Arizona! — and I was able to hear the waves and feel the dampness of the sea air. There’s something to be said for an author who can do that.

My final word? If you like mysteries and haven’t read any P.D. James, Unnatural Causes is a good place to start.