Ripley: Fact-checking Berman’s bluster

At the Sept. 9 Gilbert Town Council meeting, Mayor Steve Berman attacked the Tribune, calling it negative and unsupportive of the town.

This column is aimed at helping the mayor with his facts and setting the public record straight.

The attack came when the city administration asked the council to renew a contract with the Tribune’s advertising department for legal advertising.

Berman criticized the contract, saying that he personally called the Arizona Republic and could get a better rate.

While pinching taxpayers’ pennies is admirable, it seems out of character for Berman.

After all, this is the same mayor who approved a $60 million tax rebate for an auto dealer complex.

This is the same mayor who supported the $40 million Big League Dreams complex but lost his cool when a TV reporter pressed him with questions that required detailed understanding of the bidding process.

Big city mayors don’t ordinarily do town staff work and research legal advertising rates. So what is really going on here?

You can go to the town’s Web site and watch a video of the meeting or you can read on.

The Republic is “much more positive” than the Tribune, Berman complained from his mayoral chair on council.

“The Republic supports all of our activities in Gilbert,” he continued. “The Tribune supports virtually nothing. I hate to see the Tribune do our advertising because it is a negative publication.”

It wasn’t until just before the vote that Councilwoman Linda Abbott corrected the record — in part.

She noted that the Tribune is the media sponsor for the 2008 Gilbert Days festival. (Gilbert Days is in November. Don’t miss it.)

While Berman glared, Abbot also noted that the Tribune supports various Gilbert Chamber activities.

She didn’t elaborate, but she might have been referring to Tribune publisher Julie Moreno, who serves on the chamber board and makes her home in Gilbert.

Tribune marketing director Jeff Blaugrund provided me with a list of other Tribune sponsorships in Gilbert: Mercy Gilbert Medical Center Diamond Ball; Town of Gilbert Family Halloween Carnival; Big League Dreams; Gilbert Professional Cowboy Rodeo Association Xtreme Bull Riding; Gilbert Citizen’s Police Academy golf tournament, benefiting the Gilbert Police Crime Prevention Unit; and the Gilbert Leadership training program.

The mayor also failed to mention that the Tribune has a news office in Gilbert. That speaks to the Tribune’s level of commitment to Gilbert.

But there’s another level of commitment of which the mayor is evidently unaware.

A good example was Tribune sports columnist Scott Bordow’s interview with Gilbert High football player Beau Harris. The interview ran just two days after the mayor said the Tribune does not support the community.

On the very first play in Gilbert High’s game against Phoenix Desert Vista, Harris collapsed to the turf after a head-to-head collision. He lay there for 40 minutes before being airlifted to Scottsdale Osborn Healthcare where he underwent emergency craniotomy. The surgeon removed a blood clot, then reattached Harris’ skull.

We ran the story of Harris’s miraculous recovery on A1.

Harris’ mom, Sara, later thanked the community for its support in a letter to the Tribune that we published in both Varsity Xtra and our letters column.

I know it didn’t have anything to do with Mayor Berman. But a lot of good that goes on in Gilbert has nothing to do with the mayor.

I have a wonderful stack of thank-you letters from students at Islands Elementary School in Gilbert.

Last July, special education teacher Christie DeCarlo invited me to go to her school and talk with students about how to start a school newspaper.

A date was set and on Sept. 16 I pulled up a chair that was a tad small for a big guy like me in a classroom at Islands Elementary.

I wanted to chat sort of off the record; they wanted to do a press conference. I was trapped. But it went well. Their questions were good ones and based on the thank-you letters they sent me I wasn’t misquoted a single time.

“Negative” news is in the eye of the beholder, and in Berman’s eyes we have been negative.

That’s because we have done stories that question his ethics and his leadership. We’ve written about his messy breakup with his estranged wife, Michelle, and the police investigation into the matter when Berman punched a hole in their wall in an argument with her.

From Berman’s perspective, it may be all about him. But we think there’s more to the town of Gilbert, much more.