Cave Creek voters’ collective wisdom is needed again!
In 2000, Cave Creek citizens rallied to save Spur Cross and voted YES to impose a hefty property tax on themselves. It was time: save it or lose it.
In 2009 annexation to the west, including the preservation of 4,000 acres of open space became a part of the town. It was time: act to protect or risk a high-density development.
Also in 2009 a General Plan Amendment and rezoning were passed by the town council to permit commercial uses south of the Carefree Highway. It is time: that intersection’s best use is for the community’s economic viability.
The north side of the Carefree Highway and Cave Creek Road intersection, located within the Town of Carefree, was rezoned from residential to commercial, which allowed for CVS and Lowe’s stores. The south side of the intersection lies within the Town of Cave Creek and is zoned commercial.
These businesses have not harmed the character of Cave Creek. Neither will Walmart. Supporting the General Plan Amendment and rezoning will not open Pandora’s Box. Rather it will allow respectful, managed development and needed economic diversification to take place near an intersection and two busy thoroughfares.
The town’s previous revenue engine, construction taxes and impact fees, fell victim to the economic downturn. Our own state struggles daily to resolve billion-dollar deficits.
A property tax has been suggested in order to resolve the town’s financial obligations. The only property tax that I as your mayor have or ever would support, is the one that saved Spur Cross (to be retired in 2012). Beware of activists proposing property tax. It’s a sign they’ve given up on the creative power of their God given intelligence to find better solutions.
It’s the right time.
Mayor Vincent Francia | Cave Creek
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Why say YES to Walmart
I love Cave Creek. I love driving through our town core with all our unique art shops, specialty stores, restaurants, bars, feed stores. Cave Creek is a very special place – nowhere can you find another town with the unique charm of Cave Creek. As Cave Creek residents we need to support our town core businesses or our town will go the way of the others.
Our town core businesses say YES to Walmart.
WHY Yes to Walmart?
1. No competition to our existing businesses
2. Walmart will be located in the Carefree Hwy. business district, joining Home Depot, Lowe’s, Fry’s and others
3. Walmart is a community friendly business giving almost $11 million to communities around Arizona last year. Walmart has already begun helping us, sponsoring the fireworks in July and our Film and Arts Festival. Our town businesses need to survive to keep the Cave Creek we all love. Our business community says Yes to Walmart because they feel it will give the town the economic boost it needs.
As a town resident I say YES to Walmart.
WHY Yes to Walmart?
Our town needs sales tax revenue. Walmart will give Cave Creek a huge source of sales tax revenue, helping the town balance its budget. The town, just like the state, is in trouble. The only other places the money can come from are a property tax, which would affect every property owner, raising the sales tax, which further impacts business owners (we already have the highest sales tax in the state), or by raising water rates again, but realistically I don’t think residents could afford that either.
Vote YES on 400 and 401. Walmart will allow us to support our town through tax revenue.
Terry Smith | Chairman, Friends of Cave Creek
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Walmart is a positive step for our town
As a home and business owner living in the town core of Cave Creek, I am keenly aware of how much our town is hurting for improvements to our economic engine.
I have heard skeptics of Walmart and many opponents to commercial development suggest that a Walmart in Cave Creek will eliminate stores and decimate small businesses. I hear proposals that the commercial corridor along Carefree Highway should be built out with small eclectic shops like those in Cave Creek and not big box style stores or chains. Sounds great, unless you consider what is being said, “We will build out the commercial corridor along Carefree Highway with small eclectic businesses that will be selling custom glass, original art, high-end furniture, specialty coffee, and unique restaurants.” Well, then what happens to our town core? Walmart will not compete with our specialty markets; they are in the business of providing necessary goods to consumers at the lowest possible price.
As a business owner I believe Walmart is a positive step for our town. When I speak with other local business owners, my sentiment is reflected by their comments. Walmart has the potential to draw consumers from beyond our current reach which hopefully, entices more to come and check out our eclectic stores and unique restaurants. It adds to our sales tax base and additional revenue that we desperately need. Walmart chose us because they believe they will be profitable. Not much different than Home Depot, Lowe’s, Albertson’s and Fry’s all whom draw from a similar broader market base than the town they are built in.
I will vote YES on Propositions 400 and 401 and I encourage you to do the same.
Todd Newman | Managing Partner, Cave Creek Coffee & Wine, LLC
Treasurer, Friends of Cave Creek
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The unelected Official
She's at it again, but apparently this time Hitchon is being fed town information, presumably before most members of the elected town council are provided such details. I get it. When you are appointed town leader, without credentials, you probably need something like a pit bull for protection. You feed them just enough to keep them loyal, but not enough to foster independent thought; no biting the hand that feeds in Carefree. That must work.
Even before the announcement of a special town meeting, now scheduled on Sept. 15 (no agenda posted), Hitchon was disseminating information on New Path Networks, the marvels of technology, and the town's plans.
Since New Path had not formally applied for permits from the town, how would an appointed P&Z member be privy to such detail, Mr. Schwan?
First and foremost, it is critical that a P&Z Commissioner remain totally neutral in these matters rather than act as a point person for any potential application. This is especially true in matters where the full impact would be on the east side of town, far from Hitchon's home.
In contrast, she was front and center at several meetings to lobby against Walmart, an issue much closer to her home. This is an example of Carefree objectivity at its worst.
When you listen to all the whining from Schwan supporters about the recall, just consider situations like this and the continuing saga of the building at 8 Sundial Circle; they provide an understanding why the majority of residents are fed up with back-room activities in Carefree.
John Traynor | Carefree
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You’re not right in the head to obey and honor power mongers like Ted Kennedy
Don’t think this is a partisan rant. If Ted Kennedy had been a Republican, I’d still be saying the same thing about him. In fact, I have written the same thing about members of the Dumbo-the-Elephant party, especially about their latest dumbo president. Besides, this really isn’t about Kennedy. It’s about my fellow Americans and directed at them.
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? Clearly, you’re not right in the head to obey, honor, and respect any politician who exercises power over others for other than the protection of life, liberty, and property. There’s nothing honorable or respectable about public officials who force other people to do what they don’t want to do, especially those who rob one person for the benefit of another. Such power mongers are a menace to civilized society and the common good.
Frankly, you’re acting like a hairy ape. It’s as if you’re genetically programmed to unthinkingly follow a silver-backed alpha male and be subservient to him. You might want to stop thinking like a primate and try the uniquely human trait of reason instead.
In your defense, you’ve been programmed all of your life by parents, schools, the media and especially politicians to obey and honor politicians who have pathological power needs, which includes almost all politicians. Well, it’s time to grow up and think for yourself. People with pathological power needs are in need of therapy, not your adoration.
You might say Kennedy should be honored and respected for having done good. Having done good? It is never good to put a gun to people’s heads to remake the world in your own narcissistic image. It is never good to rob Peter and Paul to pay Mary. It is good, however, to help Mary with your own time and money.
Even if Kennedy had limited his power to the protection of life, liberty, and property, he still shouldn’t be honored any more than the mechanic who fixes the brakes on your car. Like the mechanic, he would have just been doing his job.
Neither an auto mechanic nor a politician deserves a swank office, a special dining room, a statue in the public square, or flags flying at half-mast upon his death for doing what he is supposed to do. For sure, no politician deserves praise for going beyond his constitutional job description, just as a mechanic doesn’t deserve praise for going beyond his job description. After all, if you take your car to the local auto mechanic to have the brakes fixed, you don’t reward him for removing the motor and giving it to another customer.
Once you begin treating politicians as special, they begin behaving like they’re special. They’re not special. You’re more special than they are. Yes, you should pay attention to what they are doing so they don’t steal the family silverware, but you shouldn’t show up at their speeches, you shouldn’t cheer when they promise you free stuff, you shouldn’t care about their sex lives, and you shouldn’t pay taxes to have memorials built in their honor or flags lowered to half-mast when they die.
Hairy apes behave like that. You’re not a hairy ape, are you? If you are, please pick the lice off my back
Craig Canton| Scottsdale
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It seems to me
It seems to me that something is dreadfully wrong when OUR government finds a way to NOT give Cost of Living Adjustments to social security recipients.
While this continuing attack on American seniors is taking place the criminally transparent current administration continues to waste uncontrolled, unapproved amounts of OUR MONEY on unapproved, un-elected "czars" to control our lives.
What are their salaries, what are their benefit packages?
WE THE PEOPLE have a right to be informed on what the appointments of these communists, tax cheats and union thugs are costing us.
Yes, these gangsters in the current administration continue spending OUR MONEY with NO CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT on people we have not approved or voted for.
My opinion is that anyone I didn't have an opportunity to vote for, Congress has not approved and is not SPECIFICALLY called for in our Constitution has no legal standing and their employment should be terminated.
Tom Carbone | Via e-mail
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Health care
I am one of those who you are labeling, "Opponents of reform are loud and raucous." I went to Trent Franks’ town hall meeting. You won't see that in the media because the 1000 to 1100 people were just normal concerned citizens. Are you not aware that everything our government takes over goes belly up?
Have you actually tried to read the health care bill? You won't be able to because it is a language all in its own. Try and read it!
They are trying to shove this through. Why? It would not take effect until 2012! They rushed the stimulus package. Has that stimulated you yet?
So, am I to understand that every employee of AARP feels this way? If so, you should change your name to LARP – L for Liberal.
The people in charge of our very lives are so far removed from reality or their duty to our country it is sickening to me. We are all in this together and the reason we have a United States is because we left big government behind.
The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitution of government.
“The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon.” – George Washington
Well AARP in closing, I stand with my founding fathers and I just wish President Washington were here to have a say in all of this.
Renee Gratza | Peoria
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Health care secrets
Chris Dodd keeps his Senate bill under wraps
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203946904574301050879872972.html
#mod=djemEditorialPag (The Wall Street Journal, page A12)
President Obama has promised a "new era of transparency" in Washington, so perhaps he should talk to the Senate about getting with his program. On July 15, six weeks ago, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee passed an amended $1 trillion health-care bill, with acting Chairman Chris Dodd calling it a "historic achievement." Too bad the committee won't reveal this history even to other Senators, much less to the public.
Three weeks ago Republicans on the committee wrote Mr. Dodd "to reiterate our request for a full copy of the bill as amended, in the four-week mark-up." Mr. Dodd has refused to comply. The Senate bill that is available on the committee Web site is 790 pages long. While that is some 300 pages shorter than the House health bill, that's in part because it doesn't include nearly 200 amendments that passed when the committee redrafted the bill.
Amended sections of the bill might as well be written in invisible ink.
The whole process was so haphazard that at one point during the committee mark-up Barbara Mikulski, the Democrat from Maryland, declared: "Giving me language on little pieces of paper on which I'm going to commit the sacred fortunes and honor of the United States for decades, this is not the way to go. We can't do this on the backs of envelopes."
We called Mr. Dodd's committee office last week to ask why the bill isn't posted, and a spokesman explained that it is still being "worked on." Will it be ready by October? "Don't count on it," the staffer said.
Meanwhile, President Obama has been saying that critics are "misrepresenting" his proposals. But who's to know what's reality and what's a myth when the public and Members of Congress aren't able to read a bill that would restructure one-seventh of our economy. We don't have any idea what the bill will cost or how many people it will provide insurance for, because the Congressional Budget Office can't score it. No wonder the public is increasingly skeptical of this entire exercise.
Toby Payne CTS | Cave Creek
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Health care debate
National health care? Puh-lease! When the government can PROVE to me they can handle our Veteran's healthcare then I will believe they can take care of all of us. By the way, most of my Canadian relatives now have to buy private health insurance in addition to the exorbitant taxes they pay for their healthcare. It's the only way to get decent care there.
Linda des Groseilliers | Desert Hills
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