THE CITY OF TUCSON IS PROTECTING PROPERTY OWNERS WHETHER THEY WANT IT OR NOT

I saw a news item from KOLD-TV about the Tucson City Council being urged to modify its development code to prohibit front-yard swimming pools.  Why?  Because construction of the required safety wall around a front-yard pool would allegedly cause the property to no longer qualify for the historic property tax break.  
Why should anyone but the owner of the subject property care about that?  Well apparently, if a large enough number of properties in a historically designated district no longer qualify, the district could lose the historic designation, which would mean that none of the properties in the district would qualify for the tax break.
I have not done the research to see if any of the above is true.  But even assuming that it is true, I find these comments by a city council member, as quoted in the new item, to be illuminating, and not in a good way:

“We can’t allow something in the front yard that’s going to delist the property,” said Steve Kozachik, the city council member for Ward 6.
Kozachik wants to move Tuesday’s hearings out of a closed-door session to make them public. He said that is the only way each side can present their case.
Property owners would have to prove the zoning regulations would do them financial harm, which he said they would have a hard time doing.
“If the property owners want to stand up in front of the zoning examiner or the Mayor and council during a public hearing, and say ‘I’m going to sue you,’ fine and dandy, let’s hear it,” he said.
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​​In other words, what you get to do on your property is subject to the better judgment of the city.  Those comments are on a par with the comment I recently posted from the mayor of New York, who thinks that the government knows better than you do how your money should be spent.