Steve Blair and Jim Lamerson are the poster boys for term limits in Prescott.
Steve Blair has been on the Prescott City Council for 12 years; Jim Lamerson for 16 years. (Voters rejected Lamerson in the last election.) They both need to retire. Instead, they are running for re-election to continue their short-sighted decision-making. New voters need to know their history.
Blair and Lamerson exemplify everything that’s wrong with Prescott. Their small-town attitudes didn’t work even when Prescott was a small town with simple problems. Now it has grown in population and square miles, and water usage is at a critical threshold. Yet developments, with insufficient infrastructure, are being crammed into every open space. This is due in part to their inaction during the years they served on the City Council.
For example, if the Prescott City Council purchased the unique land within the Granite Dells—as the voters intended when they approved an initiative to extend a 1-cent tax to preserve open space—we wouldn’t be in a four-year negotiation with the developers. Instead, the City Council voted repeatedly to fund new roads and road repairs, rather than buying irreplaceable open space. This despite previously pledging to spend $40.7 million on open space at a time when land was cheap in Prescott. At the time of the Open Space Alliance’s lawsuit challenging Council’s decisions, a mere $3.6 million had been allocated for open space.
Now it will cost the City more than $40.7 million to provide the infrastructure for this deal.
In the 2010 decision, the court ignored the clear intent of the voter initiative and sided with the city based on a mere technicality, writing that the tax money “may” be used for roads. Any reasonable voter believed that the open space tax money would/should be used for buying the Granite Dells. But Council members were clearly more interested in funding road construction than acknowledging the will of the people. As an aside, most of the road work done in Prescott is done by Fann Construction, which is connected to Karen Fann, a state senator. (Her personal wealth has grown massively since elected to state office.)
An unfortunate Prescott custom has been for friends of the Mayor and City Council not to worry about getting what they want, even if it costs the residents access to open space and a future free from worry about an adequate, sustainable water supply.
Here is a column, in Jim Lamerson’s own words, opposing buying open space and a story about the lawsuit:
https://www.dcourier.com/news/2000/apr/19/open-space-initiative-isnt-good-for-prescott/
It’s worth mentioning that Blair singlehandedly put Prescott in the national spotlight when he complained about a mural on a school that featured a brown child. He said on his KYCA radio show that a child of color shouldn’t represent Prescott. He even pushed the group who painted the mural to lighten the skin of the child. Never mind that the children of the grade school themselves had decided what the mural should look like. The mural disappeared when the school was sold and knocked down for a parking lot. But the ugly memory of Blair’s casual racism remains.
Here are links about what happened:
While Blair and Lamerson are quick to claim the glory of all good things which happened in Prescott over the past 12-17 years, they never mention their failures: allowing the drug rehab businesses to proliferate and not buying open space. Blair and Lamerson never met a dense development they didn’t like. They represent a small-town Prescott that’s long gone—and they’re partially to blame.