Ex-Gov. Doug Ducey's border wall crumbles and falls … on your wallet

In the end, former Gov. Doug Ducey was that guy who invites you and all your friends to dinner at the priciest restaurant in town, orders champagne, caviar, surf and turf and the most decadent dessert on the menu … then walks out before the check arrives.

We sort of knew this about him already.

After eight years, we’re stuck with a terrible education funding crisis.

We’re stuck with a wildly expensive – if solvable at all – water crisis.

We’re stuck with picking up the tab for all the wealthy pals to whom Ducey and the Republican-controlled Legislature handed out tax break after tax break after tax break.

Ducey's border wall left a bad taste

And then, like a cherry on top of that chocolate mousse priced higher than your minivan, there is Ducey’s disastrous shipping-container border wall.

Bored at the end of his term and looking to score points with Republicans nationwide, Ducey spent roughly $100 million to purchase several thousand shipping containers, transport them to southern Arizona and stack them up at spots near Yuma and on federal property in Cochise County.

I don’t have to tell you how much better that $100 million of taxpayer money could have been better spent. Let alone the cost of taking the wall apart, for which some estimates suggest could be as much as $75 million.

A merry band of very brave, very determined protesters eventually stalled the installation in eastern Arizona, and a lawsuit filed by the federal government ended it.But, under an agreement between the feds and the state, Arizona has agreed to “remove all previously installed shipping containers and associated equipment, materials, vehicles, and other objects from the United States’ properties on National Forest System lands within the Coronado National Forest” as well as all “United States’ properties in the U.S. Border Patrol Yuma Sector, including from lands over which the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation holds an easement on the Cocopah Indian Tribe’s West Reservation.”

He wanted to be Moe. He's stuck being Curly

Before the agreement was reached, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement from Washington that the container wall “is not an effective barrier, it poses safety hazards to both the public and those working in the area and has significantly damaged public land.”

It wasn’t the land Ducey was worried about, however. It was his reputation.

For the better part of eight years the former governor hoped that ridiculous stunts like the container wall would bring him the kind of media attention received by Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’s Greg Abbott. But among these three stooges of Republican politics, Ducey remained Curly to their Moe and Larry.

And now we’re left to pick up the tab.

On New Year’s Day social media was filled with photographs of an enormous rainbow over metro Phoenix. Newly sworn-in Gov. Katie Hobbs even tweeted about it.

I hope she found the pot of gold. She’s gonna need it.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

For more opinions content, please subscribe.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Doug Ducey's border wall crumbled and fell on your wallet