Page 10 - the NOISE August 2014

City CounCil CanDiDate Jim mCCarthy seeks to restore BalanCe, anD Preserve the CharaCter of flagstaff
weigh the property rights against the com- munity rights and the rights of the surround- ing property owners,” he said. “You need a balance between competing demands. If you just say, ‘well that’s his land and he can do what he wants with it, end of discussion,’ well that’s simple and straightforward, but that’s not justice. And it’s not right, and it’s not good for the community,” he said. “Zon- ing takes into account the context of a given proposal.” Mr. McCarthy further noted that during his time on the Planning & Zoning Commission, he helped bring consensus. “I voted with the majority of the commission 97% of the time,” he said, having gone back through the minutes to arrive at that number.
Part of what it means to contextualize a proposal is to also consider the impact on lo- cal, universally shared resources, like water. “I have some pretty strong feelings about wa- ter,” said Mr. McCarthy. “Does it make sense to put in a new golf course? It doesn’t if you take into account our water situation,” he said. And it doesn’t matter if it’s watered with reclaimed water or potable water. That’s why I voted ‘no’ on the Little America Golf Course project,” he said.
Mr. McCarthy was also instrumental in pre- venting the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort from using the City of Flagstaff’s drinking water to make snow. During a crowded water commis- sion meeting in 2010, they were tasked with the question of whether to sell Flagstaff’s re- claimed wastewater to the resort, or its drink- ing water. Though Mr. McCarthy was a nonvot- ing member of the Water Commission at that time, he was able to influence the conversa- tion by asking tough questions. In a close vote, the Water Commission voted in favor of selling the city’s drinking water. Then the vote went to the City Council, and they voted against it.
“If it weren’t for me, I would say the vote would have gone the other way at council,” he said. “The water commission voted by a one-vote margin in favor, and the council voted by a one-vote margin to not allow it.” Mr. McCarthy thought back to that time and remembered something Utilities Director Brad Hill said. “He said, ‘water, is water, is wa- ter.’ At some point, we will have to treat our sewage to a much higher quality level than we do now,” said Mr. McCarthy. “We should be recharging our aquifers with water that is good enough quality that we’re not contam- inating it,” he said.
In the meantime, Mr. McCarthy said there are better ways of using reclaimed wastewa- ter other than watering grass, and mentioned how some of the newer buildings on NAU’s campus use reclaimed wastewater to flush toilets. “Here you have a legitimate need and it’s being addressed with reclaimed wastewa- ter. Are new golf courses a need or a want? I would contend that they are a want,” he said.
Mr. McCarthy said that he just wants “com- mon sense things to happen,” he said. “I’m not going to take an extreme position either way. I don’t have any great big agenda. I want to restore balance, maintain the character of the city, and help bring about decisions that are not based on extreme ideologies of any fla- vor,” he said.
Mr. McCarthy wanted to remind Indepen- dent voters that they need to specifically request a ballot to vote in the August 26 Pri- mary Election, even if they are on the perma- nent mail ballot list. McCforFlag.org
| Kyle Boggs is knee-deep in Council questions. kyle@undertheconcrete.
story by
kyle Boggs
photo by
greg hales
During the last Flagstaff City Council election, Jim McCarthy came in fourth, squeezing him out of one of three open
seats. Mr. McCarthy has saddled up his can- didacy again for 2014, hoping to ensure balance on the council and to maintain and enhance the character of Flagstaff. Mr. McCa- rthy was raised in Tucson.
He has always considered himself some- one who was interested in government. Even in grade school, he took civics courses more seriously than a lot of the other students. He became an Eagle Scout, and is proud of his community- and nation-focused merit badges. Educated as a mechanical engineer at University of Arizona, he moved to Phoe- nix and earned a master’s degree in land use planning from Arizona State University.
He started AiResearch, which is now Honey- well, a Fortune 100 company that designs and manufactures emerging energy-efficient tech- nologies. His wife Kathy worked for Gore, and after it closed the Phoenix plant, she moved to the Flagstaff facility. “Of course, since we’ve been here, we’ve loved it,” he said. Since mov- ing to Flagstaff 12 years ago, Mr. McCarthy has served on the Planning & Zoning Commission as well as the Water Commission.
Mr. McCarthy is an avid hiker with over 300 days under his belt in Grand Canyon. His pas- sion for the serenity of the canyon enabled his advocacy against air-tours there, which was not only the topic of his master’s the- sis, but has culminated more recently in the form of a short film. After retiring, Mr. McCar- thy has studied the guitar, and can be found regularly volunteering behind the scenes at Flagstaff’s Pickin’ in the Pines annual music festival, and is a participant in the Flagstaff Folk Project where he shows off his newly discovered songwriting abilities.
Mr. McCarthy’s decision to run again is not one he took lightly. “It wasn’t a particularly easy decision. It’s a lot of hard work,” he said.
“You’re basically writing off a year of your life. And if you lose, it was for nothing. If you win, you still spent a year of your life running.” But this time he thought it was especially important that he run. “Some of the people running aren’t the kind of people I want to seeoncouncil,”hesaid,“soIthoughttheonly way to prevent that is run myself.”
Mr. McCarthy is worried about the balance of the council, not just in terms of political allegiances, but the over-representation of certain interests. “If the election goes in a certain way, the council could be very unbal- anced,” he said. For example, “Right now, out of 7 council people — I’m counting the May- or of course — there are 4 people, which is a majority, that have roots in the construction industry. Depending on the way the elec- tion goes, for instance, if Jeff Knorr and Mark Woodson are elected, we would have 5 out of 7 people on the council that are directly in the construction industry,” he said.
Indeed, Mayor Jerry Nabours is past pres- ident of the Northern Arizona Building As- sociation with six years on the Chamber of Commerce Board. Jeff Oravits founded Ar- izona Concrete and Masonry Construction Company. Mark Woodson does subdivision layouts, and Jeff Knorr is a builder. “I want to be clear; I have absolutely nothing whatso- ever against the building industry,”Mr. McCa- rthy said. “But I don’t think it’s healthy to have any group over-represented on council.”
Mr. McCarthy pointed to further unbalanc- es with the council as it relates to governing philosophies. Some members of council “have a philosophical bent that causes them to let philosophy get in the way of pragma- tism and common sense,” he said. “For exam- ple, when the mayor asked the City to look into outsourcing some of the landscaping, it would have cost the city $20,000 more to out- source that work, not to mention the fact that local workers would be laid off,” he said. “It’s
like, what part of this makes sense? And the mayor went ahead and voted for it anyway. He let philosophy get in the way of pragma- tism.” Pointing to another example from his 6 years on the Water Commission, Mr. McCarthy singled out one current council member who proposed the city do meter hookups for new construction for free. “Of course it’s not free,” he said. “It would have been paid for by the existing homeowners and the rest of the city.”
Another reason Mr. McCarthy is running for City Council is that he wants to “maintain and enhance the characteristics that make Flagstaff an interesting and unique place to live,” he said, and pointed to pushback from some council members when the most re- cent regional plan was adopted.
“There were efforts to delete the climate change wording, delete some of our dark skies protections, and an effort to downplay multi-model transportation.” These efforts highlight what Mr. McCarthy regards as the council downplaying the character of the city. “You have to understand the mentality that I’m running against. Everything is for business and development. Again, these are really good goals, no doubt about that,” he said, “but they have to be weighed against community character and other things that are important.”
Mr. McCarthy’s education and experience in land planning and zoning informs his per- spective, both on balance and maintaining community character. “The prevailing men- tality on the current council is that if a person owns a piece of land, they have the right to develop it in any way that they want. Well, there is some truth to that, but as we studied in my master’s program, we have this thing called zoning,” he said. “The concept there, which is really a conservative concept, is that you can do anything you want as long as it’s compatible with surrounding land uses.”
Mr. McCarthy continued. “You have to
10 • AUGUST 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us