Governor addresses building brouhaha over bargain with builders

Gov. Janet Napolitano: Getty Images PhotoCoercion or political calculus: How you view Gov. Janet Napolitano's method of enlisting the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona in her plans to pay for a transportation package depends on which side of the issue you line up on.

For Tom Jenney, the deal, first reported in Monday's East Valley Tribune, is an example of "extortion." For Napolitano, it's just how you get things done.

"This is a pretty ugly case of political extortion," said Jenney on the NPR station KJZZ today. "The governor has gone to the developers and said 'we're going to stick you with some pretty heavy fees'" if they refused to donate $100,000 and work to collect signatures on behalf of the ballot initiative.

EspressoPundit.com's Greg Patterson dubbed it "Chicago Style" in his blog about the story:

"Imagine what would happen if State Representative Russell Pearce was working on an employer sanctions initiative and a business group, say, the Arizona Association of Landscapers complained that the law would devastate their industry and Pearce responds that he would exempt them from the initiative...in exchange for their contributing $100,000 to the campaign?

Could that possibly be legal? If the agreement became public wouldn't it be a huge scandal?"

All indications are that it probably won't be.

First of all, one person's outrage is another's negotiation, which is exactly what the governor's office has dubbed the deal reached with the home builders last week.

"There’s nothing wrong with this," said Napolitano's Chief of Staff Dennis Burke in the Trib story. “This is how you negotiate.”

Developers had opposed propositions like this in the past, and were likely to oppose this one.

The original proposal would have stuck developers with part of the cost of the 30-year, $42 billion transportation plan to keep up and expand infrastructure. Instead, according to the details of the plan as laid out in a letter by HBACA President Connie Wilhelm, they will give $100,000 to support the balloting and passage of the measure and work to collect the 153,000 signatures due by July 3 to send it to the voters in November.

Second, transportation seems to be one of the issues where Arizona voters see value in subjecting themselves to taxes in order to improve infrastructure.

Maricopa County residents in 2004 approved of extending a half-cent sales tax to pay for such projects as the light rail, and in 2006, voters in Pima County descisively cast their ballots to create a half-cent sales tax that also now goes exclusively to transportation.

"Though we're in an economic downturn, we need to keep moving forward as a state," said Napolitano on KJZZ, saying that the tax wouldn't take effect until 2010, when she hopes the current economic downturn in Arizona and nationwide will have abated.

Despite opposition from such quarters as The Goldwater Institute and Jenney's Arizona Federation of Taxpayers, who favor privately built and maintained toll roads instead of a statewide sales tax increase, Napolitano is sticking to her guns.

She stated that a sales tax-based solution is appropriate because "everybody in the state is going to use transportation," and that a sales tax is the only method that "yields enough to be able to [expand and maintain transportation] on a real-time basis."

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• POLL | Was Gov. Janet Napolitano's deal with the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona unethical, as some critics charge?