Phoenix Hires Homeless To Urinate In City
Posted Wednesday, April 14, 2010 by Staff
(Phoenix, AZ) Lester Mankin sits calmly in the lobby of City Hall. The lobby bustles with everyday activity, yet all eyes are on Lester. As the seamier side of Lester’s building inspector job became public knowledge, Lester has been thrust under the microscope of city auditors and a dozen citizen watch dog groups. As Lester uses his city provided cell phone to place a call, conversations come to a halt in the lobby. Everyone waits - is it a real estate developer calling to confirm a meeting or permits, or is it one of those “other” calls?
In 2006, Phoenix surpassed Philadelphia to become the 5th largest city in the country with a population of 3,793,000. This is a 37% increase since 1997, which happens to be the year Lester Mankin joined the Phoenix city government. From 1997 to 2006, Lester rose through the ranks and watched the city spring up around him. By 2004, Lester was overseeing all building inspectors in Phoenix and wielding massive influence on how the city developed. With that influence, came the ability to join with his fellow native Phoenicians to form the Phoenix Six group and change the rules.
Once Phoenix passed Philadelphia for the coveted number 5 spot, Mankin and his cohorts in the Phoenix Six went to work influencing the city council. Buried deep in the fine print, new building codes and fees passed into law unnoticed. “We had finally reached the big time,” Lester reminisced with a big toothy grin. “But in the nation’s press we were not getting the congratulations we deserved. Everyone wanted to talk about how we were not a real city, how we were just urban sprawl here in the Valley of the Sun. And to be honest, it pissed me off and everyone else who built this city. My city.”
Unable to move development projects taking place all over the valley into a dense cluster downtown, Lester Mankin and the Phoenix Six did the next best thing. They brought the smells of the big city to Phoenix. As each new building went up, a nondescript $50 fee was paid by each builder. That fee then ended up in the hands of the Phoenix Six and that’s when they placed those infamous phone calls.
The night before Mankin signed each building’s occupancy certificate, local teenagers would arrive at his office to collect $50 in cash and the address of their target. The teens would then find two homeless gentlemen and provide them with the funds to purchase a bottle of Maddog 20/20 or Thunderbird of their choosing. In return, the newly inebriated home-impaired duo would dutifully filter the wine with their aging kidneys and bring the smells of the big city to each building.
“It’s all legal. The city attorney has been over the laws 10 times now,” Mankin told us while shaking his head. “Hell, we even submitted it to a public referendum in 2008 to make it part of the state constitution. When Arizonians voted to pass Proposition 100 to amend the Arizona constitution to prohibit state and local governments from enacting new real estate taxes and fees, they voted also for the $50 ‘urbanization’ fee. No one ever reads those propositions. You just split it up into smaller blocks and spread it around the fine print.”
Between calls we asked Lester Mankin how the Phoenix Six arrived at the $50 price tag. “It’s true that there is cheaper ways to give a new building the big city urine smell. You could collect trucker bombs and pee torpedoes from the side of the road and dump them around the exterior of the building. However it just doesn’t leave the same impression as hand crafted public urination by a professional. You might get a similar odor with a jug of pee, but it won’t be the same as you get in a real city. The devil is in the details. When the fragrance of urine hits your nose and begins that wonderful dance with your senses, you instinctively look around for visual signs. The stains and streaks of a thin stream in the elevators, the delicate path of the flow stained and highlighted on the concrete foundation. The pooling and run off marks in every corner of the parking garages. If you want to give people the big city experience, you need fresh urine and that costs money. Honestly it is pretty amazing that for $50 we are able to facilitate this kind urbanization. We pay the teenagers to hire the homeless that buy the wine that leaves a delectable odor on the buildings for our out of town visitors to savor. It’s a classic win, win, win situation. All I am doing is making my dream a reality and enforcing the laws the taxpayers passed in 2006 and 2008.”
