Thank God we have money for 'landform graphics'

Laurie Roberts is a columnist for The Arizona Republic.

Finally, an end to this madness of cut cut cut everything in sight in Arizona.

I can understanding kicking hundreds of thousands of people out of AHCCCS. They’ll still getmedical treatment, after all. The fact that we just won’t have any federal money to help us pay for it is a small detail.

I can understand cutting every last dime that goes to help little children. The sort of children who need the help are often the children of poor people and we’re going to show them, aren’t we? The fact that it’s mere babies who will suffer is beside the point.

But by God, don’t ask us to put prettified freeways on hold.

A story in this morning’s Republic announced plans to create “landform graphics” along I-17 in a stretch of north Phoenix. “Landform graphics” is a fancy way of saying the state’s going to lay down different colors of rocks to make pictures in the dirt on the side of the freeways.

Cost: $5.4 million.

“The rock landscaping is less expensive to maintain,” Arizona Department of Transportation spokesman Doug Nintzel told reporter Betty Reid. "We also see it as a quality-of life issue, not to mention that it can enhance nearby property values.”

I couldn’t reach Nintzel to ask him my burning question (Really, Doug? Really?). Instead, I got his colleague Tim Tait, who pointed out that rocks are cheaper to maintain in the long run than vegetation. And besides, the money isn’t state money but from Maricopa County’s half-cent sales tax for freeways. And besides, some of it comes from the feds and must be used for “enhancement of highway corridors.”

“MAG (the Maricopa Association of Governments) has set a standard for landscaping and it’s not just gravel,” Tait told me. “It’s a regional decision of how to spend regional funds. And we follow their instructions.”

“If we didn’t landscape and just left it as rock and dirt,” he added, “we would hear about it.”

So, to recap. Colored rock pictures along a freeway in north Phoenix is a quality-of-life issue.

The question is: the quality of whose life? Certainly not one of the people on AHCCCS in desperate need of an organ transplant – the ones who won't be getting them because we don’t have $1.5 million.