No matter the municipality City Hall activists like to fancy themselves as guardians of veracity.
Elected officials aren’t giving it to you straight. Something untoward is going on. But for us the world will end.
Their intelligence varies but the refrains are largely the same when it comes to development matters, pensions, imaginative projects and other matters of civic life.
Notwithstanding the merits he espouses the upper end of the Activist Mensa Meter is dedicated Scottsdale preservationist Howard Myers. His messaging troika is basically this: Development is bad. Tourism is good. And keep expanding the spectacular McDowell Sonoran Preserve, albeit at all costs. 
One may disagree with Myers but he has not seemed a dishonest sort over the years. Yet, his blatant falsehood recently about a proposed plan to relocate a beloved bar and restaurant called Greasewood Flat, separate but in tandem with a related residential plan, challenges that notion.
Myers started by doing his best John Kerry flip-flop impersonation. He actually suggested the new, proposed Greasewood Flat location on land owned by the bar’s owners near the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, before he now appears to be against. This, coming from the person who constantly scolds Scottsdale leadership about the import of tourism and Scottsdale’s western heritage place within it.
But it was Myers’ email blast to the North Scottsdale community claiming the project’s residential elements would be “high-density” that became his biggest flirtation with credulity. We guess that’s what one home to the acre is called in north Scottsdale. And for Myers’ to mislead the community about “1,100” housing units when the actual number is less than half that amount is trespassing on the truth, to put it kindly.
Myers owes a retraction and an apology to those he communicated with in the first place as these plans are quite important ones for the city worthy of all debate but not fact defiance.
There is no doubt Myers cares about the city and has made an important difference for it in many ways. He can begin anew by casting aside his inner Pinocchio.