West University neighborhood is getting stepped on and your neighborhood is probably next.

 Please pass the link to this blog entry around Facebook or other media because Tucsonans want to be able to build their own city without outside developers or the city government displacing them without their input!

As it turned out, once the petitions were submitted to the City for review, more than half of them had to be rejected due to a small technicality.  It was only long after the City reviewed the language and format of the petition, then accepted it, that it finally told WUNA about this technicality.  What happened was that some fine print had been omitted from the documents: 1) The right of a signer to look through the text of the entire petition before signing.  2) It is illegal for a person to sign more than once.  Petitioners knew enough to say these things to signers, but they needed to be in print to be legally binding.  Now, once WUNA found out about this, they made certain to correct these problems and then continued circulating the petition.  It didn't help those signatures that were rejected, though, and they had to be thrown out.  When I was at City Hall for the review, I observed that the officials who did the reviewing and made the announcement came across as rather sympathetic to the neighborhood's situation.  They apologized and acted as though they didn't want to have to reject the effort.  Interesting ... I hear nowadays that as time passes, it is becoming increasingly difficult for petition efforts to be successful because our elected officials seem to be increasingly opposed to grassroots political efforts from their constituents.  How anti-democratic!  This particular situation in West University isn't just limited to the one geographic location, either.  Other historic neighborhoods are and should be concerned because it opens them up to possible rezoning and veritable destruction, and the people will have no autonomy over their own living space.  The good news is that I'm also hearing that City Council has been receiving a good number of disgruntled phone calls about the results of the petition effort.  So, if you are inclined, I ask you to please assist with this call effort by contacting your respective city council member.  Follow this link to see a list of council members and click on your respective council member to get their contact information. Also, to see this event in action please watch the video below.

Thanks for reading my blog and supporting grassroots democracy.  We can expect to see more action taken by WUNA in some way and I'll be sure to update the blog as I find out more and continue to help.