Arizona Daily Star from Tucson, Arizona • Page 1

ESI mm donors iyf door foods Left wondering about offspring Accent, Page ID High-energy eats for hikers Food More, Page 1 I It Mint 11 1992 The Arizona Daily Star I Vol.151 No. 302 Final Edition, Tucson, Wednesday, October 28, 1992 35 U.S.50 In Mexico 52 Pages Air rescue unit hours to be cut yfffai tale Tucson copter could share Phoenix duty Racing bison's owner awarded $475,000 Phoenix-based helicopter unit to trim next year's budget. He said first-year savings would be up to $600,000. "There's not enough money to do everything that the DPS has been doing with its budget," Ayars said. "I've cut the Department of Public Safety as thin as I can cut it." Ayars did not include funding for the Phoenix unit in his budget request for the 1992-93 fiscal year.

But he said he might wind up asking the Legislature to fund it, depending on the results of an in-house study. The proposals were blasted yesterday by paramedics, law-enforcement officials and others who packed a legislative hearing room to say there is no commercial substitute for the DPS helicopter units. Several challenged Ayars' claim that the hours must be cut in Tucson and Phoenix, saying other paramedics could take the place of those retiring. "If central air rescue goes away, some people in Arizona are going to die because of that," said Kevin Woods, a DPS paramedic for the Phoenix unit Woods said the central unit covers 56,000 square miles in 10 counties and aids more than 75 law-enforcement agencies. The Tucson unit covers Southern Arizona, while the northern portions of the state are divided between units in Flagstaff and Kingman.

DPS helicopter units provide three services: search and rescue, law enforcement and medical transport. Private alr-evac See COPTER, Page 18A By Joe Salkowski The Arizona Dally Star He was, quite simply, king of the racing buffaloes. His publicity posters called him "Harvey Wallbanger, World's Fastest Buffalo," and none who faced the beast in his 11-year-old, racing prime would dare dispute that claim. With owner T.C. Thorstenson saddled on his back, Harvey amassed a 79-14 record in 1 10-yard sprints against an increasingly embarrassed team of horses specially trained to race him.

He was a snorting, slobbering tour de force that threatened to revolutionize the racing industry or at least cover it with drool for a while. Indeed, none among the crowd that watched Harvey saunter down South Park Avenue in the 1991 Fiesta de los Vaqueros Rodeo Parade could have known they were seeing the last of a living legend. Harvey died just two weeks later in Tucson, poisoned by a batch of oleander that See BUFFALO, Page 18A By Mary K. Relnhart The Arizona Dally Star PHOENIX Tucson's air rescue unit will no longer be a 24-hour operation and could face the additional burden of responding to calls in central Arizona, Department of Public Safety officials said yesterday. DPS Director Rick Ayars said retirements in Tucson and Phoenix are forcing both air rescue units to cut back to 16-hour shifts, effective next month.

The helicopter teams would be on call during the other eight hours. Ayars also is proposing elimination of the Completion of CAP reportedly in doubt without new bonds By Enrlc Volante The Arizona Dally Star Tucson Water won't be able to switch the northwest metropolitan area to Central Arizona Project water next year unless the City Council and voters approve a major bond issue this spring, officials said yesterday. Tucson Water, which is proposing a $141 million bond issue, would lack financing to build transmission mains to serve CAP water to 12,000 to 18,000 homes and businesses in the northwest metropolitan area, they said. "We would be unable to complete the final stages of our CAP implementation, and that's necessary to make sure the city has an assured water supply in the future," said Tucson Water Director Michael Tubbs. Tucson, which now relies solely on ground water, plans to start serving the CAP'S Colorado River water the first week of November.

The water is to go this year to the Parks, public safety and the environment appear likely to make next spring's bond ballot. Page IB. east, northeast and southeast parts of the metropolitan area, as well as the areas around Tucson International Airport and around the city's new water treatment plant west of the Tucson Mountains. The rest of the metropolitan area is to convert to CAP water in 1993. But water officials confirmed yesterday that the full plan hinges on a bond election being considered by the City Council About $44 million of the proposed $141 million in water-revenue bonds would be for CAP-related work, said Robert Brice, a Tucson Water assistant director.

That CAP work also includes about $13.5 million for projects to store CAP water underground in the See CAP, Page2A kA it 4 -iV 'j 'is jr-t' j. Consumers help economy grow by 2.7 WASHINGTON (AP) Consumer spending powered the economy to a stronger-than-expected 2.7 percent growth rate in the July-September quarter, the government said yesterday in the last major economic report before Election Day. The seasonally and inflation-adjusted growth in the gross domestic product, while far less ro-: bust than past recovery periods, shocked private economists, who were predicting only a 1.5 percent advance, the same as in the second quarter. Previous reports for the period had shown indus-; trial production stagnating and the number of Jobs falling. "I think they cooked the books.

The numbers don't add up at all," said economist Michael K. Evans, a Washington-based consultant who is a Republican. "This sounds like the dirty tricks department." However, the Commerce Department's top economist, Undersecretary J. Antonio Villamil, said the bulk of the third-quarter growth came from consumer spending, an area for which the department has hard data, rather than from areas I such as trade, Inventories and construction, which are partially estimated. "This is based on solid evidence, not on our 'assumptions.

We go by the book and we call it like we see it," Villamil said. 1 Even economists who stopped short of questioning the integrity of the statistics said they may simply represent a continuation of the stop-and-go pattern that has characterized the economy since the start of the recession in July 1990. "This cannot be taken as a sign that the econ- omy is all of a sudden snapping out of the doldrums," said Bruce Steinberg of Merrill Lynch in New York. Although the administration touted consumer spending for building up the economy, another report issued yesterday said American consumers' confidence In the economy declined in October for the fourth consecutive month to the lowest level in eight months. That report came from The Conference Board, a private business organization in New York.

Meanwhile, the Labor Department said American workers' wages, salaries and benefits rose 3.5 percent in the year that ended Sept. 30, the smallest increase in five years. Later this week, the Commerce Department will publish figures on personal income, durable goods orders and new home sales in September. But yesterday's report, -which dealt with the economy as a whole, amounted to the last economic See ECONOMY, Page 5A Quayle to speak at rally during brief Tucson stop Vice President Dan Quayle will speak this afternoon at a downtown political campaign rally. The speech about 5:15 p.m.

at the Ramada Inn, 475 N. Granada Ave. is open only to those with tickets, Roy Coffee, executive director of the Bush-Quayle campaign in Arizona, said yesterday. Tickets are free, but are limited. More than 100 of between 400 and 500 tickets had been given away by late yesterday, Coffee said.

For information about tickets, call either 325-2956 or 325-3079 numbers for Republican campaign headquarters of Rep. Jim Kolbe and Sen. John McCain, respectively. This is the vice president's second trip to Tucson this campaign. The first was in March when he spoke with business people, stopped by a bowling alley, and attended a dinner for the Bush-Quayle re-election campaign at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort.

Quayle has business and family ties to Arizona and has made several trips to the state over the past year. After his brief stop here he will fly to Phoenix tonight for another political function. Quayle will arrive at and depart from the Tucson Air National Guard base next to Tucson International Airport. Jim Davis, The Arizona Daily Star 'Sky Island' designation is urged Aspens parade their fall finery In the by a private group to create the Sky Island Mount Lemmon Ski Valley. The Santa Cat- National Biodiversity Conservation Area, alina Mountains are Included in a proposal Story, Page IB.

1 WEATHER Fed report on lending bias finds wide racial differences Economic numbers encourage Bush; Clinton focuses on Southern support Chance of rain. Today is expected to be cloudy, with northwest winds of 10 to 20 mph. The probability of rain is 10 percent. Look for a high in the lower 80s and an overnight low in the mid-50s. Yesterday's high was 86, the low 58.

Details on Page 15A. INDEX 1-ID Money MB 7-MD Obituaries 7D ID Public records 28 1H7A Sports 1-tt 7D Tncsoi today ID TV SD WASHINGTON (AP) Mortgage applications from blacks and His-panics are still rejected roughly twice as often as applications from whites and Asians, the Federal Reserve said yesterday in its second annual report on lending discrimination. Because of rising delinquency rates linked to the recession, lenders in 1991 denied a greater percentage of mortgage applications for all racial and ethnic groups than in 1990, the Federal Reserve said. But difference in rejection rates across groups appeared roughly the same, it said. In 1991, lenders rejected 37.6 percent of the applications for conventional mortgages from blacks, 26.6 percent from Hispanics, 15 percent from Asian-Americans and 17.3 percent from non-Hispanic whites.

A year earlier, the rejection rates were 33.6 percent for blacks, 21.4 percent for Hispanics, 12.8 percent for Asians and 14.2 percent for non-Hispanic whites. The agency said that some but not all of the discrepancy can be explained by income differences among the groups. However, disparities still were present when the applications were grouped by income. For instance, among high-income applicants, the rejection rates were 9.7 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 13.6 percent for Asians, 19.8 percent for Hispanics and 23.2 percent for blacks. Among low-income people, the rejection rate was 31.5 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 20.2 percent for Asians, 37.1 percent for Hispanics and 48.2 percent for blacks.

The 1991 survey covered 7.89 mil-See BORROWERS, Page 5A The Associated Press President Bush seized on news of stronger-than-expected economic growth yesterday as a welcome tonic for his ailing campaign. Bill Clinton sped through the South, telling supporters who seemed ready to begin celebrating, "One more week." The third man in the race, independent candidate Ross Perot, stayed out of sight after two days of appearances in which he accused the Republicans of plotting "dirty tricks" against him and his family. "It's crazy," Bush said of Perot's allegation that Republicans were planning to disrupt his daughter's wedding. "A little bizarre," the president said of Perot's spending tens of millions of dollars on campaign ads. Clinton, leading in all the polls, was glad to take the high road, denouncing "all this name-calling and stuff." Not that he was above all name-calling.

In Augusta, and then again in Tampa, he gave his dramatic version of political appointees' at the State Department going through his records and then his mother's late at night, then declared, to cheers and laughter "I bet it's the only time those three political hacks have worked till 10 o'clock at night the whole time Bush Crossword DearAbby. has been president" As the campaign moved into its final days, all the vice presidential candidates were out campaigning as well. The final flurry of television ads continued, too, with Clinton and Bush adding new positive spots to their rotations. Bush's was two minutes of Bush directly appealing for votes and indirectly bringing up the trust and character issues. "The person you choose to lead America must have certain qualities," Bush says.

"Decisiveness. Honesty. Integrity. Consistency." Clinton countered with a 30-second ad designed to keep voters focused on economics, promoting his own economic recovery plan. In an appeal for Perot supporters, the ad touts Clinton's endorsement by Perot economic adviser John White.

Perot's running mate, former Vietnam prisoner of war James Stockdale, said in an interview with The Idaho Statesman in Boise that anti-war demonstrations by young Americans such as Clinton hurt the war effort, costing thousands of American lives and prolonging the captivity of POWs. Dan Quayle joined a Bloomington, 111., crowd in See RACE, Page6A i iiiiir 'ill! 50136' 00001.