Has DiCiccio found a way to skirt council?
Two Phoenix City Council members, mayoral aspirants Kate Gallego and Daniel Valenzuela, will figure prominently in next year’s special elections.
Add a third name to that list: Sal DiCiccio.
DiCiccio, one of the few conservatives on the council, plays a key role in two initiatives that may qualify for the ballot in a May — or possibly August — special city election (the mayoral election is scheduled for March).
In both instances, he is attempting to legislate via referenda what he couldn’t do at the council.
Petitions for the one of the initiatives — this one, to effectively halt Phoenix’s light-rail expansion in its tracks and redirect non-federal dollars associated with the project to street maintenance – were turned in last week. About 20,500 valid signatures are needed to qualify the measure for the ballot; supporters submitted roughly 40,000.
The “Building a Better Phoenix” initiative has largely been credited to lightrail opponents in south Phoenix.
And that’s partly true: A group of concerned business owners and activists in that community believes that the light-rail plan, which calls for narrowing Central Avenue down to one lane in each direction for several miles, would kill, outright, the livelihoods of many businesses that lined that portion of the roadway.
The coalition doesn’t care that city residents had previously voted on light rail. They say the specific changes called for with the South Central line are sufficiently devastating enough — failed businesses, traffic congestion, increased crime, etc. — that voters need to revisit light rail.
At stake is not just the South Central line but five other extensions that are also in the works.
DiCiccio was an early key architect of the initiative. He had intended to kill two birds with one stone: Halt an expensive transportation project that some, including fiscal conservatives, despise, and more quickly hire police officers and firefighters.
In fact, the first petitions pulled — there were several versions with different wording — called for doing exactly that: to divert money from light rail to street maintenance and to hire first-responders. They also included an out if it was determined that the city is too late to stop the South Line extension; that portion of the project would then be revised to feature two lanes of traffic in each direction (instead of one) along the affected stretch of Central Avenue.
But that earlier version of the initiative was scrapped, partly because some activists opposed the idea of funding a police department that historically had contentious relationships with minorities in south Phoenix and partly because of concerns the ballot language violated the single-subject rule of ballot propositions.
(DiCiccio disagreed with the conclusions about the latter; he interpreted the single-issue rule — in this case, not commingling transportation funds with allocations for law enforcement on a measure — to not apply to citizen-initiated proposals, especially at the municipal level.)
The ballot-box effort was also a calculated gamble to force the council to reconsider the south Phoenix extension. The council, filled with supporters of light rail, wouldn’t capitulate on that.
The present version of “Building a Better Phoenix” initiative provides what DiCiccio considers a shot at the next best thing: Have voters stop a project that would irreversibly damage south Phoenix and divert the money to infrastructure that opens the door for more investments to that poor area of town.
The other ballot proposition that may make it before voters in a special election is pension reform. It wouldn’t reduce the massive sums the city faces to fully fund pension obligations of its employees, but it would materially change how Phoenix calculates those debts and lock up any extra cash the city has by committing the dollars toward better funding of pensions.
It’s the second pension-reform try by DiCiccio. Earlier this year, DiCiccio abandoned the first effort — after he had sunk, he said, some $65,000 of his own money and then realized that the campaign overlooked a critical fact: Many of the signatures collected were no longer valid, because they expire six months after the date of collection.
This time around, other supporters had to come up with their own money to underwrite the signature-gathering process. Petitions with between 32,000 and 33,000 names are expected to be turned in later this month.
We should know in two or three months — the city clerk’s office must vet every submitted signature — just how outsize a presence DiCiccio and his supporters will have in special elections in 2019.