Amid a cluster of dusty World War II-era buildings on a closed Air Force base, Chuck Backus brought to life what until recently was called ASU East.

Now Backus sees the East Valley campus losing its identity and being turned into a pawn in a showdown over legislative plans to cleave as much as $150 million in Arizona State University funding. And he is not happy.

Backus retired in 2004 as the campus’s founding provost after devoting 12 years of his life to forming and nurturing what is now called ASU Polytechnic.

The former engineer is not given to 30-second sound bites. Picture a cattle rancher lean and tall in the saddle with a seasoned face that betrays little of what he really thinks and you’ve pictured
Backus, indeed, owns and runs a cattle ranch in the foothills of the Superstition Wilderness.

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The task ahead for Arizona lawmakers has gotten easier, though some will surely see it as complicating deliberations.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that President-elect Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package includes $80 billion for an “education stabilization fund.”

The money is to be used by states to avoid cut backs in teachers and classroom programs.

Until the package becomes law, Arizona legislators can’t know for sure how it will affect their efforts to balance the budget.

So in that sense it could complicate state budget deliberations–if legislative leaders let it.

Or they can go with the flow, take the money and avoid dreary and repetitious debate over the efficacy of kindergarten programs and whether to eliminate them.

Going with the flow recognizes Obama’s popularity and election mandate to pump life into the nation’s economy.  It is only a matter of a few weeks before a package with substantial funding for education becomes law.

The overarching opportunity is to keep as many teachers working and children in school in Arizona at federal expense as possible.  Whether all-day kindergarten works or not is secondary.

It’s that easy.

(Disclosure:  The columnist’s wife is a teacher in the Mesa School District.)

It must be a bummer being Mesa’s economic development director in the time of cholera.
That was essentially my opening line when I sat down a few days ago with the city’s economic development director, William Jabjiniak. My outlook and line of questioning was unquestionably gloomy.
And why not?
My 401(k) is in the dumps. I had just returned from a Christmas trip to Ohio where I had braved ice storms and a windchill of 40 degree below zero.
I had returned to a home that has likely lost more than 25 percent of its value and to state that is in the bull’s-eye of a national recession and to a city that, according to an Arizona State University study, is more dependent on construction jobs than its neighboring cities.
Just try to find a construction job.
Now, I wasn’t entirely negative.
Maybe the end of the good times is an opportunity to get more respect for diverse economic development efforts in a city that for years feasted off of a one-course meal of residential growth, I offered.
Jabjiniak didn’t take the bait.
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