Word is that the Tucson City Council will be discussing establishing a code of conduct for Mayor and Council.

Gila Courier would like to help out in this important effort.  We offer some suggestions.  Just a few general guidelines:

• If you choose to drink at social events while on city business, do so in moderation.
• Don’t offer to do to city employees what you have been doing to the taxpayers around here for past several years.
• Don’t spend $230,000,000 on downtown and have nothing to show for it.
• Don’t use city money to give graffiti lessons to kids.
• Don’t allow medians to become so full of weeds that people start calling them “weedians”.
• Don’t allow potholes to become bigger and more numerous than the city swimming pools you close.
• Don’t actively chase jobs from the region such as Rosemont Mine and F-35 training base.  Particularly during periods of high unemployment.  Particularly when you say that jobs is your top concern.
• Don’t rush through $80,000,000 in bonds in a bad bond market just because the state is about to take away your ability to borrow money and then talk about transparency.
• Don’t spend $200M for more public transportation when the public transportation you already have requires $40M in city subsidies.
• Don’t demand resignation of a council member for being boorish.  People might then think that the rest of you should resign for being such bad stewards of people’s hard earned tax dollars.
• Don’t blame the state because you didn’t prioritize road maintenence and your streets draw comparisons to the surface of the Moon.
• Don’t leave it to the business community that you have disregarded to pay for Independence Day fireworks and city swimming pools in the summer.
• Don’t allow your spouses to get caught with political signs of their opponents.
• Don’t spend $800,000 on a $50,000 video short…especially if you have no place to show it.
• Don’t make deals that say if you can’t complete an unspecified deal within two years, you’ll give the person $2,000,000.
• As part of settlements of bad deals such as the above, don’t give the other party parking spaces that you don’t own.
• When you do make stupid deals, don’t forget to file them with the County Recorder so a third aggrieved party can also make a claim against you ten years later making a bad situation worse.
• When you demand that elected officials support education, don’t act all surprised that all the kids that show up at the university might need a place to live.
• Don’t have national candidate searches for jobs that you really want to fill from the inside.
• Don’t give free rent to one restaurant, free electricity to another restaurant, $1 rent to other businesses, and then make it difficult on any other small business trying to get started.

I’m sure the attorneys will have to pretty these up a bit but there are a few modest suggestions for your brainstorming session tomorrow.