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This weekend Real Estate Deposition Corp. is going to try to auction off more than 450 homes across metro Phoenix for the lenders that took them back.

These foreclosure auctions, which started in the Valley last December, are becoming regular events on the weekend as foreclosure rates climb.

And  opening bids are dropping. A few homes on the auction menu for this weekend have starting bids as low as $1,000.

One of the properties featured in this weekend's sale is a condo in downtown Phoenix's Orpheum Lofts. The condo is valued at $299,900, but the opening bid is only $79,000.

Anyone interested in that foreclosure property can check it out on their way to the auction at downtown Phoenix's Convention  Center.

On Wednesday, I stumbled upon the biggest surprise of this year's election season and here's a hint:

It has nothing to do with anyone named Clinton or Obama.

Contrary to what most people around here may be thinking, there's going to be an election this fall. In Scottsdale. And to my total and complete surprise, it's shaping up to be a decent race.

This year's matchup features the incumbent mayor and veteran campaigner, Mary Manross, against the City Council's resident accountant, Jim Lane. I crashed the North Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce breakfast on Wednesday to hear them debate.

My first surprise: That John Washington is still in the race. He's running as a write-in even as he acknowledges that he doesn't even want the job. (“I'd rather be getting my hands greasy under an old car or flying in a plane if I could afford the gas,” he told me.)

My second: That Lane was actually good. Not once did he drone on about “process” or generally accepted accounting principles. Instead, he took aim at Manross with specific and detailed criticisms. (Among his shots: “We've had a mayor who did negotiations for a regional transportation sales tax where Scottsdalians lose 77 cents out of every tax dollar we contribute, and over 20 years that's estimated at a billion dollars.”)

My third: Manross. She's usually at her best on the stump, yet she didn't fire back at Lane, absent a lame observation that he, too, was responsible for the multi-million-dollar debacle that was the Toll Brothers condemnation case. Instead, she talked about the importance of vision and took credit, as pols always do, for every good thing that's happened on her watch.

(After the debate, she did defend Scottsdale's small cut of the countywide transportation sales tax, pointing out that Scottsdale voters supported the plan and use the freeways built as a result of it. “Yes we're a donor city. We contribute the most per capita because we are a successful community and because of that, almost invariably we always will be a donor community.”)

It's anybody guess who will win the coming election. For the first time in city history, it's being held in September, the same time as the Republican and Democrat primaries. Though the race is non-partisan, the timing doesn't bode well for Manross, a Democrat in a heavily Republican city. Then again, you don't get elected to serve for 16 years without having a few fans.

We'll see how it goes. Meanwhile, Lane and Manross should explain a few things. Among them:

-- The Toll condemnation disaster. Maybe they can explain how the city's shrewd negotiating tactics left us paying nearly $100 million for preserve land we could have bought for a third of that.

Both Manross and Lane voted to put the case in the hands of jury. They won't talk about what went on in pre-trial negotiations, saying it's all legal stuff and thus confidential.

But the trial's over, folks. They should have to explain how they managed to fumble away tens of millions of dollars – money that could have been used to buy land elsewhere in the preserve.

-- The curious case of the Hualapai water treatment lease that's also likely to cost us a bundle.

Scottsdale needed a few acres of state land next to its Water Campus to meet new federal drinking water standards. So the city leased the land, started building the treatment plant, then was outbid when the state put the land up for auction.

An outfit named Hualapai LLC outbid the city by $200,000, paying $6.2 million for the property. Then the company sent our leaders a bill for $1 million – the rent for use of the land for a year. Rent the city agreed to pay, according to the 10-year lease signed by Manross.

Once presented with the rent bill, city attorneys pronounced the lease invalid. It seems that while Manross signed it, other charters officers didn't and the City Council never approved the deal.

The upshot: we'll wind up paying up to $13 million for the land and who knows how much more because of that crazy lease.

Manross told me after the debate that she explain how she came to sign a lease that hadn't been approved, given that the whole thing's now in court. “It was just signed along with 5,000 other papers a month I get, probably at midnight after a council meeting. I may have signed that. In fact, I did sign it. But my point is I can't talk about it.”

Well, somebody should.

(Column published in Scottsdale Republic, June 5, 2008.)

In the last months of her brief life, it was as if Trenay Duchane didn't exist.

She and her sister Treshae were no longer allowed to go to school. They were never seen outside the one-bedroom apartment they shared with their father, stepmother and baby sister. Child Protective Services had long since lost track of the family and those who suspected that something was wrong kept quiet.

No one put the pieces together until it was too late. Now Trenay is gone and I'm told Treshae will never be the same.

Torture can do that to a little girl.

The case drew headlines in November, when police say 12-year-old Trenay was ordered into scalding water then beaten to death and left for days in that tiny apartment with her traumatized little sister. By the time police were called, Trenay's body was decomposing and 9-year-old Treshae was cowering in the bathtub, covered in bruises, burns and assorted other injuries, both fresh and festering.

A Phoenix cop told me it was one of the worst cases of homicide he'd seen in his 24 years. In a state where a child is beaten to death every six days, that is saying something.

The father and stepmother, Jeffery Duchane and Reiko Troupe, await trial on charges of murder and child abuse.

Could we have done something to protect Trenay and Treshae? This newspaper went to court in search of an answer to that age-old and absolutely crucial question. The records, ordered released by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Crane McClennen, show that CPS lost track of the family a year before Trenay died and officials at the last school the girls attended failed to recognize the signs of abuse that were there, had they just opened their eyes.

CPS first encountered the girls in 2005 and again in 2006 while investigating reports that the children were being neglected when living with their mother. Caseworkers found insufficient evidence of neglect but they did offer help — furniture and rent money and bus tickets and such. By August 2006, the mother was unable to care for all five of her children and the two oldest – Trenay and Treshae – moved in with their father and stepmother.

Troupe, then 25, was also known to CPS. The agency had twice been called upon to protect her when she was a child and twice found insufficient evidence of a problem. In the summer of 2006, Troupe was again under the watchful eye of CPS, this time as an adult who had just given birth to a meth-exposed baby. Here again, CPS found no evidence of neglect but set her up with the non-profit Family Builders to get help with parenting, substance abuse and depression. Social workers reported that the girls had a good rapport with Troupe, who they called “an attentive and affectionate parent.”

Within two weeks of Trenay and Treshae showing up, however, the family broke off contact. After a month of trying to reconnect, Family Builders returned the case to CPS, noting that Troupe had met none of the goals set for her.

A CPS caseworker, finding all phone numbers disconnected, sent Troupe a certified letter: “You have till October 14, 2006, before 5 p.m. to get in touch with me. Before further actions will be made concerning your children.”

Three days later, CPS closed the case and walked away.

The girls, meanwhile, apparently continued to live in the same apartment and were enrolled in nearby Solano Elementary School for the 2006-07 school year. In November 2006, the family moved and Treshae would later say that this was when the abuse began: The beatings with a knotted electrical cord or a fist, the burnings with an iron or hot water, the bites, the broken arm that nobody bothered to see about, leaving Treshae's left arm misshapen. Treshae said her father told her that day to “stop being a baby.” She was 8 at the time.

School records indicate that the girls were frequently absent and Solano dropped Treshae from its rolls in April 2007, noting that the second-grader's status was unknown.

Jean Richards, a spokeswoman for the Osborn School District, said the state requires schools to drop a child after an absence of 10 days, though she said that someone from Solano would have gone over to the apartment to investigate.

"We would have gone out,” she said. “We have family or parent liaisons. A parent liaison would have gone out with someone else, it could have been a nurse, it could have been another teacher or the child's teacher if they were not in special ed, and made a home visit to see if somebody was physically living there.”

If they did, it's not in the school records released by the judge. Meanwhile, Trenay twice turned up that same spring with both eyes blackened, once during the same week her sister was being dropped from the rolls. Trenay explained her injuries away as a car accident and a fight with other kids. Instead of calling CPS, however, the school called relatives who confirmed the stories. Richards said they would have called CPS had they been suspicious.

The fact that they weren't, coupled with Treshae's sudden disappearance and Trenay's frequent absences, is a tragedy. A family member would later tell police that the phone calls from the school scared Troupe, who then would keep the girls home.

There is nothing in state law that requires a school to notify anyone when a child suddenly disappears.

There should be.

Attorney Jorge Franco, who has reviewed the records on behalf of Treshae and her mother, says he believes Trenay and Treshae might have been saved had the state's child abuse reporting laws covered excessive absences. “Had they been required to pick up the phone, then they would have put CPS back on the trail,” he said.

Instead, the trail vanished.

By August 2007, the family had been evicted and moved again, but the girls were never seen outside the apartment. They didn't return to Solano, and no other school requested their records. “I don't go to school,” Treshae would later tell police. “My mom teaches me at home. She said it was better.”

This from a child covered head to toe in injuries, one who told police that she and her sister were beaten every day. Until Nov. 6, 2007.

On that day, according to police, Trenay Cheire Duchane, age 12, committed a fatal mistake. She  messed up her room. Treshae told police that her sister was ordered into a tub of scalding water and heard her sister's screams as she tried to escape. She was then whipped with the knotted electrical cord, pushed against the wall and punched in the face until she passed out.

By the time Duchane got home from work that evening, his daughter was dead or dying. Four days passed before he called 911. He called because her body was beginning to smell.

Such is the sort of love and support shown to too darned many children in this state.

Police found Treshae cowering in the bathtub behind the shower curtain and Trenay, long gone in the bedroom she had shared with her sister. Next to her body were pages from a notebook, filled with a child's handwriting. Over and over, the same words were written, about 100 times

“I will listen to my mom.”

(Column published June 4, 2008.)

The debate this week over the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill will be depicted as a fight between those who believe in man-made global warming and those who don't. And to a large extent, that will be the case.