Latest to fall in the various Arpaio scandals is
Captain Joel Fox, which is surprising only inasmuch as I thought he'd already been kicked out along with Hendershott and the rest of his cronies.
Locally, the
Tempe mayoral race is shaping up to be interesting. We've got Harry Mitchell's son Mark, owner of a local flooring business, running. There's CPA Linda Spears, who I don't know much about but who discusses maintaining city parks and repairing city water mains, which are good ideas.
The guy who's getting most press at the moment, and who's gotten the current mayor's endorsement, is Michael Monti, owner of Monti's in downtown Tempe. And I'm going to take a minute to talk about why that's important.
Downtown Tempe is historic. It's got the old Hayden Flour Mill (our main street is called Mill Avenue) and other buildings that go back generations. Monti's is across the street, in a building originally constructed by town founder Hayden in 1871.
The 1990's saw Downtown Tempe largely transformed into corporate cookie-cutter bullshit. Out went Changing Hands and Long Wong's, in came Borders and Hooters. Mill lost its character, and started looking like any other corporate-run shopping area in America. (I remember, walking in downtown Jersey City in 2005, first thinking "This place is a dump," and then doing a sort of double-take as I realized there wasn't a chain in sight; every single business was local. At that point I decided, dump or no, I preferred it to Mill.)
The trend continued until the real estate market collapsed. Gentle Strength Co-Op got torn down and the damn lot is still empty; a couple blocks away we've got two ugly-ass towers that were built and then abandoned when the developer killed himself; at least somebody's finally bought the damn things and is going to do something with them.
On the plus side, Mill's slowly and steadily being overtaken by local businesses again.
What Monti has to do with all this is that he's managed to keep his business, which is an institution and part of the character of this city, through all this mess. There was talk of tearing it down at one point, and then some ridiculous nonsense about keeping it but building a high rise over it. Monti managed to hang in there.
And so when he centers his campaign around reviving Mill with vibrant local businesses, I don't doubt for a second that he means it or that he knows what the hell he's talking about.
At any rate, I don't know much about any of these three candidates. But at first blush, they all look like pretty good options. Maybe I'm wrong and I'll find out horrible things about them. But so far I like the way this is going.