In the Town of Oro Valley there is a slogan that reads “Oro Valley –It’s Our Nature” that should read, “Oro Valley – It’s Our Nature to Recall”.

A group of Oro Valley citizens opposed to the Town Council’s decision to purchase the Hilton El Conquistador Country Club, Golf and Tennis facilities for the purpose of creating a community center, have begun the process of ordering a recall to remove Town Mayor Satish Hiremath and three Council members.

The organization, Oro Valley Citizens for Open Government, filed for petition numbers to recall the mayor and three council members who voted to buy El Conquistador Country Club and Golf Course. The council approved buying the club, Tucson’s largest golf and tennis facility with 45 holes of premier golf and 31 hard-surface tennis courts, collectively. Additionally, the property includes approximately 18 acres of developable land along Oracle Road among the approximately 300 acres.

The Council approved the purchase 4:3 back in December for $1 million. ($.08 PSF for the land value). But, their road to recall was in approving a half-cent sales tax increase that is to begin next Sunday, March 1, to cover costs of improving the property.

You might recall back in October 2011, a former council member decided to recall Joe Hornat and Mary Snider shortly after being elected, because they voted to double Oro Valley’s utility sale tax from 2 to 4 percent and bring it on par with other communities. That recall did not go to vote.

The latest recall effort was this past October 2014. That one was to recall Councilman Mike Zinkin in Oro Valley. But, it did not go to a vote either, and so no one recalls exactly what that one was for. How quickly we forget our recalls.

Between October 2011 and October 2014 is the longest period of time I can ever remember since living here that there has not been any recall efforts in Oro Valley. But the brief recess is now ended.

Oro Valley Citizens for Open Government (OVCOG) will begin collecting signatures the first week of March to recall the mayor and three Council members. This time with resolve, because the previous referendum failed due to a technicality, and was then upheld in a court of appeals. So they are optimistic the number of signatures needed to order a recall are attainable this time.

Ryan Hartung, who is heading up the recall effort said in a written statement, “The Oro Valley Town Council voted 4-3 at their February 18^th meeting to not suspend the sales tax increase which was approved for the purchase of this property, even though the purchase is not yet finalized. If enough signatures are collected, a special election would take place in November 2015, when Oro Valley residents will have the opportunity to remove Mayor Satish Hiremath and Council members Lou Waters, Joe Hornat, and Mary Snider.” But won’t change the half cent sales tax.

One can only hope that both sides have met to discuss their differences and only then decided this to be the best course of action. But alas no, that isn’t part of our nature in Oro Valley to discuss and listen – Out Nature is to Recall.

During the Rio Nuevo Board’s regular scheduled meeting February 24^th, the Board unanimously agreed to sell the Rialto Theatre to the Rialto Foundation. Even with a bank commissioned appraised value of $1,075,000, the Rialto Foundation offered to purchase the Rialto Theatre from the Rio Nuevo District for $1,300,000 and pledged to put another $300,000 into theatre renovations. The Board accepted the Foundation’s offer and instructed the Board’s attorneys to draft the necessary documents, with the hope to close in 60 days or less.

Board Member Cody Ritchie congratulated members of the Rialto Foundation and Rialto management for the success they have enjoyed with the theatre; now ranked among the top 40 concert venues in the country. Secretary Mark Irvin and Member Jannie Cox echoed Mr. Ritchie’s sentiments.

In other action, the Board approved the $75,000 investment to help launch the January 8 Memorial to be constructed in downtown Tucson; agreed to the language presented by its attorneys to fund the $1,100,000 allocated to the Mission Garden as part of the settlement with the City of Tucson and instructed its counsel to finalize a joint procurement agreement with the City to fund the $750,000 streetscape project.

Due to a death in the Norville family, the Board also granted Nor-Generation’s request for a 30 day extension of the due diligence periods under its agreement to purchase the Arena Site from the District.

Real Estate Daily News Buzz is designed to give news snippets to readers that our (yet to be award winning) editors thought you could use to start your day. They come from various business perspectives, real estate, government, the Fed, local news, and the stock markets to save you time. Here you will find the headlines and what the news buzz for the day will be.

Wednesday, the Dow Jones industrial average ended up 15.38 points, or 0.1%, to 18,224.57. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index slipped 1.62 points, or 0.1%, to 2,113.86. The NASDAQ shed 1 point, or 0.02%, to 4,967.14. The three indexes are all up for the year.

Benchmark U.S. crude rose $1.71 to close at $50.99 a barrel in New York. Brent crude, a benchmark for international oils used by many U.S. refineries, rose $2.97 to close at $61.63 in London. Wholesale gasoline rose 9.9 cents to close at $1.719 a gallon. Heating oil rose 7.5 cents to close at $2.104 a gallon. Natural gas fell 0.8 cents to close at $2.894 per 1,000 cubic feet.

The Dow Jones industrial average managed another record high close, but just barely, even as other market indexes edged lower. Traders were watching another day of testimony from Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and monitoring earnings news from several big U.S. companies. Bond prices rose slightly. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 1.96 per cent.

NORTHERN TRUST BRINGING $95M REGIONAL OPERATIONS, 1,000 JOBS TO TEMPE
Chicago-based international bank Northern Trust, is building a $95 million, 450,000-square-foot three-building regional operations center in Tempe. The Tempe City Council is getting ready to consider a package deal from Northern Trust that brings 1,000 jobs paying an average of $82,000 to the city’s Discovery Business Campus at Elliot Road and Loop 101. A formal announcement is scheduled for Friday morning.

US NEW HOME SALES FALL SLIGHTLY IN JANUARY
WASHINGTON (AP) — Sales of new U.S. homes were basically flat in January, evidence that recent job gains and relatively low mortgage rates have yet to spur the real estate market. The Commerce Department said Wednesday that new home sales slipped 0.2% last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 481,000. This marks a slight decrease from sales of 482,000 homes in December, but represents a solid 5.3% gain from a year ago when harsh winter weather caused home-buying to stall. Despite the increasingly favorable economy, home sales have been sluggish at the start of the year. Still, many analysts expect that the housing market will gather momentum with the start of the spring buying season.

RIO CAN, SIMON TO HELP SAKS PARENT CASH IN ON $7.4 B REAL ESTATE PORTFOLIO
Hudson’s Bay Co., parent of Lord & Taylor and Saks Inc., is partnering with Canada-based REIT RioCan and U.S.-based REIT Simon to cash in on its considerable real estate holdings. The Toronto-based retailer expects the two landlords to help mold its U.S. and Canadian store portfolios into two separate REITs that will eventually go public, executive chairman Richard Baker said in a press release. Toronto-based Hudson’s Bay (HBC) will contribute 42 owned or ground-leased stores totaling 5.4 million-square-feet and valued at $1.7 billion to a new joint venture with Simon, which will focus on U.S. properties and potential new acquisitions outside the U.S. and Canada. Simon will contribute up to $278.5 million to make improvements to the stores, including possibly retenanting and redeveloping the spaces. HBC will own 80% of the new venture, with Simon owning the remainder. The new venture will lease back its properties under triple-net operating leases to HBC. The Simon/HBC portfolio includes the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship stores in Beverly Hills, Calif., and on Fifth Avenue, in New York City, and Lord & Taylor stores in Westchester and Manhasset, N.Y. The portfolios could turn into separate REITs that would go public in the future, said Hudson’s Bay executive chairman, Richard Baker.

GOP LAWMAKERS ACCUSE YELLEN OF PLAYING POLITICS
WASHINGTON – Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen came under fire Wednesday from House Republicans, who challenged the central bank’s lack of accountability during her second day of testimony to Congress. After she gave her semiannual economic report, GOP lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee grilled Yellen with a basket of complaints. They questioned her opposition to GOP legislation that would expand the ability of Congress to audit the Fed’s operations. They accused her of being unduly influenced by Democrats. Rep. Sean Duffy, a Republican from Wisconsin, criticized Yellen for giving a major speech on income inequality in the midst of last fall’s congressional campaigns — just as Democrats were trying to make a major issue of income inequality. Rep. Scott Garrett, a Republican from New Jersey, said a review of her meeting calendars painted a “pretty damning picture that the Fed is immersed and guided by partisan politics.” Yellen, who was nominated by President Barack Obama, rejected those suggestions and staunchly defended the Fed’s independence. Yellen is the first Democrat to serve as Fed chairman since Paul Volcker left in 1987, said that she does not discuss interest rate policies in her weekly meetings with Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew. Rather, their meetings often focus on issues the two will be facing at various international gatherings.

TJ MAXX, MARSHALLS TO FOLLOW WALMART’S LEAD IN PAY RAISES
NEW YORK (AP) — The owner of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods stores became the latest retailer to boost pay for its U.S. workers, putting pressure on other chains to do the same. TJX Cos. said Wednesday that it will increase pay for its U.S. workers to at least $9 an hour starting in June. The announcement came a week after Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it would increase starting wages for its U.S. employees to at least $9 per hour by April and by at least $10 by February 2016. Home furnishings retailer IKEA and Gap clothing chain also have raised pay recently.

TOO BIG TO MANAGE? HSBC’S CHIEFS GRILLED OVER TAX SCANDAL
LONDON (AP) — First there was money laundering. Then foreign-exchange rigging. Now tax evasion. HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, has endured a string of scandals and paid billions in penalties to regulators around the world. But recent revelations that its Swiss private bank helped the wealthy evade taxes are raising new questions about whether big banks like HSBC have become too vast to manage — and who should be accountable when things go wrong.

STRONG RELIABILITY SCORES SHOULD HELP BUICK BRAND’S REBIRTH
DETROIT (AP) — Buick, the brand that once was the pace car for the drive to the senior center, has made a comeback by appealing to buyers not yet ready for retirement. U.S. sales rose 11 per cent in 2014. In China, Buick’s biggest market, sales gained almost 14%. This week, strong showings in two influential quality surveys are bringing good publicity to a nameplate that was inches from the grave when its parent company, General Motors, was in bankruptcy six years ago.

OVERFISHING DRIVING SLAVERY ON THAILAND’S SEAFOOD BOATS
SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand (AP) — Urine pools under a bed where an emaciated Burmese man lies wearing only a T-shirt and a diaper. As he struggles to sit up and steady himself, he tears at his thick, dark hair in agitation. He cannot walk and doesn’t remember his family or even his own name. He speaks mostly gibberish in broken Indonesian — a language he learned while working in the country as a slave aboard a Thai fishing boat. Near death from a lack of proper food, he was rescued from a tiny island in Indonesia two months ago. He is just one of countless hidden casualties from the fishing industry in Thailand, the world’s third-largest seafood exporter.

MET LIFE WILL PAY GOV’T $123.5 MILLION IN MORTGAGE SETTLEMENT
NEW YORK (AP) — MetLife’s home lending unit will pay $123.5 million to end an investigation into allegations it gave government-backed mortgages to people who didn’t meet federal requirements. The Justice Department said Wednesday that MetLife knew the business was issuing hundreds of loans that didn’t meet federal requirements, which means they were not eligible for insurance by the Federal Housing Authority. But MetLife granted the mortgages anyway, and the agency says the FHA and taxpayers were stuck with the bill when defaults followed.

AMERICAN EXPRESS RAISES INTEREST RATES ON SOME CREDIT CARDS
NEW YORK (AP) — American Express increased interest rates on some of its credit card accounts by an average of 2.5 percentage points in recent weeks, a spokeswoman for the company said Wednesday. Spokeswoman Elizabeth Crosta declined to say how many of its roughly 42 million cards would be affected. But she said Wednesday that it was a “small percentage” of its customers. American Express had been charging a lower interest rate, as much as 3.25 percentage points, on its credit cards compared with rates its competitors charge for customers with similar credit scores, Crosta said. The rate increase was authorized after an analysis showed the difference.

FAA: SOUTHWEST FOR NOW CAN USE PLANES THAT MISSED INSPECTION
DALLAS (AP) — Federal officials have agreed to let Southwest Airlines Co. keep flying planes that missed an inspection of a backup rudder system if the planes are checked in the next five days. Southwest grounded 128 planes — about one-fifth of its fleet — on Tuesday after discovering the missed inspections. Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King said the groundings caused the airline to cancel about 80 flights Tuesday and 15 more by late Wednesday morning. She said crews inspected 80 of the planes overnight and will check the rest before the five-day deadline.

$100M SETTLEMENT FOR HUNDRED IN FLORIDA TOBACCO LAWSUITS
MIAMI (AP) — A $100 million settlement has been reached between three major tobacco companies and hundreds of people who sued them for smoking-related deaths and illnesses in Florida federal court. The tentative agreement announced Wednesday involves R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Philip Morris USA Inc. and Lorillard Tobacco Co. The deal resolves about 400 cases pending before a federal judge in Jacksonville, Florida, but does not affect thousands of other lawsuits pending in Florida state courts.

JUSTICES: DENTISTS UNFAIR TO LIMIT TEETH-BLEACHING PROVIDERS
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a state regulatory board made up mostly of dentists violated federal law against unfair competition when it tried to prevent lower-cost competitors in other fields from offering teeth-whitening services. By a 6-3 vote, the justices rejected arguments from the North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners that it was acting in the best interests of consumers when it pressured nondentists to get out of the lucrative trade in teeth-whitening services. Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion that the Federal Trade Commission was right to conclude that the state regulators also had a financial interest in the market for teeth-whitening.

JUSTICES APPEAR TO FAVOR MUSLIM DENIED JOB OVER HEADSCARF
WASHINGTON (AP) — Have you heard the one about the Sikh, the Hasidic Jew, the Muslim and the nun who walked into a job interview? Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito channeled his inner stand-up comic Wednesday in indicating that he and most of the court would side with a Muslim woman who showed up for a job interview with Abercrombie & Fitch wearing a black headscarf. She didn’t get hired. Samantha Elauf, the woman at the center of the case about religious discrimination in hiring, was in the courtroom Wednesday. The case turns on how an employer is supposed to know that a worker or applicant has religious beliefs that need to be accommodated.

LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST PURINA CLAIMS FOOD SICKENS, KILLS DOGS
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A dog owner has filed a lawsuit against a pet food company alleging that thousands of dogs have been sickened or died from eating a brand of dry dog food. Pet owner Frank Lucido filed the suit on Feb. 5 in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California against Nestle Purina PetCare Co., saying he fed his three dogs Beneful “kibble” style dog food, and within a short period of time, two were sick and one was dead.

MAINTENANCE WORK ON SR 77 NORTH OF TUCSON IN PINAL COUNTY
State Route 77, north of Tucson between Oracle Junction and Winkelman in Pinal County, (Mileposts 116 to 120) will have daily lane closures from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. as follows to allow Arizona Department of Transportation crews to repair the roadway.

• Southbound SR 77 will be closed Wednesday, March 4.
• Northbound SR 77 will be closed Thursday, March 5.

Traffic will be guided by a pilot car and drivers should expect minimal delays. Drivers are reminded to share the road, be cautious, and slow down while traveling through the work zone.

UTILITY WORK ON I-10 IN NORTH TUCSON SUNDAY
Motorists traveling along the Interstate 10, between Orange Grove and Ina roads (milepost 249.5) on Sunday, March 1, need to be aware that Tucson Electric Power Company will be performing utility work that will require 15-minute intermittent closures from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. to replace an aerial cable. For more information about this project, please call Paki Rico at 520-388-4233, or email prico@azdot.gov.