Is Mesa Being a Bully in The Fiesta Mall District?

We tell our children the being a Bully is a bad thing and that it should be reported. Schools are expelling kids they call Bullies and police are being called in other instances, as was the case with West Mesa's Senator Jerry Lewis's kids growing up.

Yet it appears that it is OK for government and it's different agencies to be Bullies. Case in point, the City of Mesa for years has been Bulling WM Grace Development Co. to do something with the property they own at Southern and Alma School in Mesa Arizona which at one time was the Fiesta Village Shopping Center.

As the area went into economic decline and with the over building of retail space in the area so did the property. The area can no longer support the amount of retail space that is available, yet the city of Mesa and Dennis Kavanaugh seem to think that it can.

In the City of Mesa's and Dennnis Kavanaugh's attempt to Bully the property owner, they are have filed additional complaints and now are using Adam Rolnick the owner of Oasis Insurance to once again attempt to Bully the property owner into submission. (Oasis Insurance make a lot of money off of insuring illegal immigrants car's and providing other services to illegal immigrants.)

What Dennis Kavanaugh and the City of Mesa fail to realize is that it is not governments role to dictate to the property owner what they can and can't do with their property no matter how much they disagree with how the property is being used. The City of Mesa has no constitutional authority to force a property owner to spend millions of dollars in revitalizing a property. The government does a good job of providing unfunded mandates.

The City of Mesa's role should be to provide a sound bases where economic development can prosper. If the City of Mesa is going to provide incentives to one developer, they should provide them to all property developers. The City of Mesa and Dennis Kavanaugh forget that it was the incentives to Marti Dorito, Kimco and River View which hastened the demise of the Fiesta Mall area. As the opponents to the incentives pointed out during that debate, the retailers in the Fiesta Mall area would move to River View and what did they do? They moved.

So if the City of Mesa and Mr. Kavanaugh want something done with the area give the Grace Company a reason to redevelop the area. Don't Bully them. With all the Bulling that they have done to date, has just cause Grace Company to dig in their heels.