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Derouin: The top contributor to Scottsdale campaigns

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The Littlefield ticket for mayor and City Council (which includes Guy Phillips, Betty Janik and Tom Durham) has made a lot of noise about developer campaign contributions.

To hear Littlefield talk, there is a developer behind every tree and all the contributions are going to the opponents of his ticket. But, per usual, Littlefield is wrong --- deceptively wrong.

Regardless of the claims of Littlefield and his ticket, the record is very clear that the top contributors to the campaigns for all four members of the Littlefield ticket are a pair of downtown landlord-developers who run an outfit called Sunbrella Properties.

Sunbrella owns a bunch of old downtown properties and has gone to great lengths to make sure that no competing development occurs downtown because anything new would compete with their existing rental properties.

Sunbrella felt so threatened by Southbridge Two (that was projected to generate $300 million of economic activity annually) that it contributed $91,753 to fund the campaign against it.

Sure must be profitable to own old, existing, rental property downtown that produces next to nothing in property and sales taxes for Scottsdale, but, apparently, constitute a mint for the owners --- particularly if competition is kept away.

Campaign finance reports filed on July 15 for the campaigns of Littlefield, Phillips, Janik and Durham also show that Mike and Cindy Simonson, Sunbrella’s landlord-developer owners, are the top contributors to every single one of the Littlefield anti-competition ticket—to the tune of $8,600 to every candidate. This adds up to a total of $34,400.

Littlefield, Phillips, Janik and Durham are not anti-developer, they are just anti-competition and against those developers that do not contribute to their campaigns.

In the economic world, they would be known as “protectionists” who dislike competition. If their kind of developer contributes to their campaigns, everything is fine.

This is typical Littlefield (and Janik, Phillips and Durham) hokum. Fence-me-in developers are OK (as long as they contribute to the Littlefield ticket). The concept of a vibrant, diverse year-round downtown that produces more tax revenue to support lower residential property taxes is immaterial.

Palm Springs, here we come. Yesterday it was a great city; today, it is but a memory of what it once was.

Editor’s Note: Jim Derouin is a longtime Scottsdale resident, and involved in the creation of the city’s ethics code.