Posted inPolitics: National

Solemn obligations

Here is how the pension "issue" is usually framed.

For the major corporations that still offer pensions, they are a drag on earnings growth. In the public sector, they are making every city into Detroit or Stockton, Calif., paving the road to bankruptcy.

Very large numbers are thrown around, often without context, sometimes outright fabrications. This column is not about the numbers. As a nation, we spend too much time under green eyeshades. Numbers, "just business," economics are supposed to provide definitive answers.

Of course it depends on whose numbers are used (liars figure) and there's a reason that the dismal science was once called political economy. Even at its most rigorous, economics is a brawl — and like the sums we are supposed to accept as gospel, the inputs matter (garbage in, garbage out). People are living longer! Well, not by much, it varies greatly among ethnic groups, and the ones that do live long tend to be very wealthy. Etc.

Nevertheless, a majority of the white working class — which is a majority of the electorate — believes that union thugs are bankrupting their cities and states by demanding that pensions be paid to takers on the public payroll. Republican politicians and judges are burnishing their popularity and "seriousness" by working to destroy the pension system.

In certain situations and moments, many of those thugs and takers are called police officers, firefighters, and teachers. Heroes.

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Phoenix 101: Sun City
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Sun City

SunCity

The curvilinear streets and golf courses of Sun City.

Fifty years ago, Del Webb began Sun City. It was just south of Grand Avenue and the Santa Fe railroad amid the flat farm fields of Maricopa County and near the tiny railroad sidings at Surprise and El Mirage. I first saw it from the train — there was no Sun City station, for this was a development built for the automobile. For most Phoenicians, it was a curiosity — or a joke. Pat McMahon's misanthropic, demented Aunt Maud character on Wallace & Ladmo was from Sun City. Photos of oldsters riding around in their golf carts provoked much mirth. When an older lady asked my grandmother if she was going to move out there, this daughter of the frontier was aghast. "Why would I want to be stuck out there with all those old people?" she asked. The older lady was shocked.

Yet Sun City would prove to be one of the most influential events in the history of modern Phoenix, setting in train a series of business, demographic and social changes that have proven to be very mixed blessings. Before Sun City, Phoenix was something like a real city. Tourism and snowbirds were part of the mix. But so was a huge agricultural economy, along with a large — for its population larger than today — and growing number of technology, aerospace and defense businesses. Resorts were limited. The artist colonies in Scottsdale and Carefree were more important than retirees. After Sun City all this would change.

Del Webb had been building in Phoenix for decades before Sun City. Go to the iconic Phoenix Towers at Cypress and Central and you'll see his name on the building, erected in 1956. Downtown sidewalks from years before had it etched in the concrete (although here Webb competed against "Frenchy" Vieux). He grew rich in the New Deal. In World War II, he built military facilities, as well as the concentration camp — there's no polite way to put it — at Poston to hold interned Japanese-American citizens and other Japanese living in America. By the time he envisioned Sun City, he was no longer "ole Del," but a very rich man, friend of celebrities, part-owner of the New York Yankees — and, among Phoenicians in-the-know, trailed by the odor of associations with organized crime and war profiteering.

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Posted inPhoenix

The model modern city manager

One joke around Phoenix involving Frank Fairbanks was that he could never retire as city manager, because then all the scandals would come out. Of course, everybody loves Frank. Except for the ones who don't. Given the lack of curiosity and resources in the local press, we'll never know how true the joke might be. I never ran into evidence that Fairbanks was anything but clean. His problems were more complicated. Since most will be offering rapturous praise as Fairbanks is apparently stepping down, a more serious assessment is necessary.

The zeitgeist of Frank Fairbanks' City Hall was to move across the waters without making waves. He was not a creative thinker or a risk-taker — think of the guy on the Shredded Wheat ad who says, "We put the 'no' in innovation." His career spent with the city led to an unavoidable parochialism, along with perhaps a fatalism that the city's trajectory couldn't be changed, or a willingness to drink the booster Kool-Aid by the gallon. He was in an awkward spot in a systemically dysfunctional city government, mostly trying to keep the peace, even as Phoenix hit a grave turning point. All this would have profound consequences for Phoenix and its future.

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