Last week I opened with a few comments about the destruction that we witnessed at the nation’s capital. A couple of you took exception to my calling out the people who tore the place up. Many more agreed that everybody who was involved should be punished according to the law.
The events were indeed significant. And they have resulted in a tremendous financial cost all across the country. This is a part of an FBI memo that went out to local law enforcement agencies. You’ll get vertigo from the acronyms.
 In Tucson we are implementing security measures. Our police department leadership is monitoring appropriate social media sites and is in constant contact with agencies at all levels throughout the nation. We at Ward 6 appreciate their attentiveness to this and we regret the waste of resources caused by some unhinged conspiracy theorists who are thankfully being rounded up and criminally charged.
Vaccine Update
Each week I’ve been opening with this graphic to show who’s in line for the vaccine. On Friday of last week, the County Health folks began on the Phase 1B people. For various reasons, this will not go quickly, but there now are ways you can at least register for the vaccine if you’re in one of the prioritized groups.
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 One site I’ve been tracking is the Bloomberg COVID19 Tracker. Last week Arizona had given out about 139,000 doses at a rate of 1.91 per 100 people. That was behind the nationwide rate of 2.4 doses per 100. This week nationally we’re up to 4.4 doses given per 100 people. Here’s Arizona’s total. The state is still lagging the national effort, but with the new vaccination sites that are opening up, that should change in the coming couple of weeks.
The originally stated goal was to have given out 20 million doses by the end of calendar year 2020. We’re at just over 14 million as we near the end of January. But there is progress, and for that I’m grateful to all those who are working hard to get the vaccine out.
There are several vaccination sites in the Tucson area that are now up and running for select people. For example, law enforcement will generally use the TCC while educators will use the UA. You can use this link to get registered at the various testing locations:
Banner is scheduling based on their vaccine supply. Once they run out, their registration form disappears until they’ve got more. So if you’re in a group slated for Banner, keep that in mind. For the other sites you go to the “Make Your Appointment” tab in the link and fill out a short survey. You’ll get a confirmation email with another link that you need to use in order to actually schedule the appointment. When you get that, you’ll click on MyChart and get yourself scheduled.
I filled out the survey on Friday and received the confirmation the next day. Others emailed me that they also tried and have had varying sorts of experiences. And others got their times booked for the vaccine. This is all happening while the health care folks are also trying to manage the extreme COVID impact on our hospitals and other health care providers. So please be patient, and most importantly continue following the CDC guidelines we’ve been living under since March. You’ll see in the data below that we are far from through this, even with the vaccine rollout beginning.
I pulled this from the state website. It’s the county by county comparison on vaccine distribution. Pima County’s vaccination rate per 100,000 is near the top among all counties in Arizona.
In the Release I sent out on Friday to help you get a jump start on registering, I included a phone number for you to call if you were having trouble. The County has since changed that number, so use this one if the online system isn’t getting you where you need to go – 222.0119.
New COVID Variant Strains
Before I start to review the current COVID numbers and impacts, it’s important to keep in mind that there are growing concerns that the new strains may be factors in the worldwide – and national – spike in cases. The new U.K. variant is now in at least 14 states. The report I saw over the weekend projected that it will be a ‘dominant’ concern in the U.S. by March. And in a Reuters article, Mike Ryan, the head of the World Health Organization’s emergency division said the second year of COVID may be worse than the first. He based that on how the virus is now spreading, coupled with the unknowns tied to the new strains that are evolving.
The reason that’s important to know is that it may mean activities we thought were mildly dangerous before may now fall into a more serious category. In a NY Times article I saw last week, they mentioned air travel in particular (think UA students flying back to Tucson).
This graphic shows the current worldwide spike:
The mutations scientists are seeing have made it so the virus can replicate itself and transmit more efficiently. You’ve probably seen the estimates of it being up to 70% more infectious. The same article quoted several scientists who said it’ll take years for the virus to mutate to the point where current vaccines are not effective, so that’s some good news. But the fact that it’s much more easily transmitted is the cause for concern.
So the good news is that because we haven’t had a huge percentage of the population infected, the virus is still relatively naïve to the need to mutate to avoid the built in defenses. The bad news is that for whatever reason, it has mutated and it’s much easier to catch. All places where you’re gathering with others are places the virus can do its damage. Please don’t assume this is behind us just because some of our high priority neighbors have been given a vaccination. We have more than double the number of people hospitalized for COVID than we did 2 months ago.
Income Tax Assistance
With the financial impact COVID is having on many households, for many people the upcoming income tax season takes on greater importance than it might have in the past. Our partners at the United Way are geared up to help with tax preparation. You can do this with them online, in person, or by using the United Way online tax support system. All of the options are free for households earning up to $66,000 annually.
With each of those options you’re going to need some documentation. It’s the usual information; picture I.D., social security numbers, income verification – that sort of stuff. The normal advice we hear is that the earlier you file, the sooner you’ll get your refund. And so far we have not heard the April 15th deadline is being extended again this year. Now’s not too early to connect with United Way. You can go to their website to get more information – www.unitedwaytucson.org.
City Budget
We’re just beginning talks about the fiscal year 22 city budget. We’ve passed the half-way mark in FY’21, so this is pretty normal timing for starting to get into the weeds about revenues and expenditures. There are lots of moving parts again, and of course due to the on-going COVID impacts on the budget, there are lots of uncertainties.
One item that we’re going to have to make some decisions on again this time around is funding for police. The town of Queen Creek is a bedroom community up in the Phoenix area. Their pay for a 3-4 year police officer is about $19K higher than what we’re paying our cops. And they’re one of several agencies that are now in the process of lateral hires. The impact of attrition due to our pay schedule has been significant. And this graphic shows what will happen over the next few years if our present situation continues at its current pace. The graph is a part of the study session material we’ll all be seeing next time we meet.
We’ll be talking about recruitment and retention of our cops during the upcoming study session. It’s one line item in our budget. We invest a lot of money in training, so whatever decisions we make about police compensation needs to have that reality as a part of our thinking.
Pay is not the only part of employee retention. There are other ways we either show our support, or not. We’ll also be talking about budgeting for pay increases related to other city workers. It’s no surprise that recruiting for police work is difficult – not only in Tucson, but nationwide. So when we are fortunate enough to fill an academy, having a pay scale sufficient to retain the men and women we’re training is a key part of our budgeting discussion. More to come on this as the budget conversation evolves. Public safety is a core Charter responsibility, so it’s not an insignificant piece of what this Mayor and Council are responsible for addressing.
Budget Outreach
A part of this year’s budget conversation is the piece that’ll take place with you. We will be conducting community outreach meetings in order to gain an understanding of what your budget priorities are. If that outreach is to be meaningful, it’s important that we get a broad response. Please take part when you have the opportunity.
We did some of this last year. People were asked to show how they’d allocate dollars into our budget. We’ll be using a similar tool this time around. We’ll be starting with virtual town halls, and hopefully before we vote on the final budget, we’ll be in a position to be doing that outreach in person. The coronavirus will dictate that. The very general timeline includes gathering input on certain subject matters – transit and mobility, public safety, parks, housing and community development, etc – followed by the town halls where the budget allocation models will be introduced into the process. We’re bound of course by the requirement to have a budget finalized before the end of June, so this will move right along.
I’ll be sure to include in these newsletters opportunities for you to take part in this participatory budgeting process. With limited dollars and significant community needs, hearing from as many of you as we can is the key to whether the tool provides meaningful outcomes.
Transportation and Mobility Department Services
I get regular updates from our transportation folks on how they’re doing with tracking calls for service. It’s good information that allows them to keep an eye on what types of calls they’re getting, and how they’re doing in terms of taking care of work requests. I thought many of you would find it interesting to see some of the response time data.
This is the chart I saw last week that summarized the transportation folks’ December work. You can see they’re involved with quite a variety of roadway activities. Not surprisingly, the number 1 call for service they receive is for potholes. And they should be proud of the response time for repairing them. In December alone, they closed out 151 pothole calls in an average of just over 5 days from the time they received the first call. This is just for W6, so consider that volume, but multiplied by 6 to get it citywide.
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Each of those categories has activity in all 6 city Wards, with the exception of e-scooters. They're nearly exclusively a W6 problem, and I appreciate how rapidly DTM responds to calls. Unfortunately, that transaction still requires one of you to notice a problem and take your time to call it in. But at least they’re being addressed. It’s clear the rest of the mayor and council are not going to show deference to W6 residents and eliminate the program.
I’m sharing this information because we often forget the wide variety of infrastructure maintenance responsibilities city workers take care of. I notice a streetlight burned out and call it in. It’s one of hundreds of calls for service our staff receive. We at the Ward 6 office are grateful for the good work they do.
UA Reopening
During his first briefing ahead of the UA reopening last week, UA President Robbins said only 3,200 non-resident students would be living off campus. That’s unlikely. He also said, “what were we supposed to do, tell them not to come?” To his question, my answer is that they very much should have advised all students traveling back from out of state that the UA has no intention of going to large in-person classes until March at the very soonest. While that’s not a certainty, based on the current COVID numbers it is very much likely. The message should have been, “please stay home until we let you know we’re about to open to larger classes.”
As to the suggestion that there’ll only be 3,200 non-resident students living off campus, this frame I clipped from a video that was sent to me last week indicates that is a flawed expectation. This is The Hut over on 4th Ave. You don’t need it to be digital quality to get the sense of what was going on inside. We had similar reports from other bars around the student housing, downtown and on the Avenue. And I toured Main Gate on Friday evening – Gentle Ben’s was packed. So were the bars across University Blvd. Nobody in UA administration should pretend to be surprised.
The UA was highlighted in an article that ran in Inside Higher Ed last week. They issued the results of a peer-reviewed study that looked at whether colleges that opened for in-person classes last fall became super spreaders for the surrounding community. Each week in their briefing, the Robbins/Carmona team speaks about how infections in the classroom are not an issue. And they show low positive test results from the students testing for in-person coursework. What’s missing is the impact the return has outside the campus boundaries.
The study included this map. It shows where community hot spots were created after the return of students for the fall semester. UA is one of those noted.
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 The study affirmed that it was the surrounding community that in many cases suffered from students returning to the area. This graphic from the study shows the impact the UA had on the wider community:
The blue line in the graph shows what’s going on with regard to infections in the wider community even as the case counts (red line) seem to have leveled off on campus. This is the reason I continue to believe the responsible thing for the UA to have done was to tell students to stay home until they were advised the UA was ready for larger in-person classes. The testing results they continue to show on the UA Covid dashboard each week that suggest a low infection rate on campus miss the entire point. The Inside Higher Ed study makes that pretty clear.
COVID Fatality Memorial
The Presidential Inauguration will take place on January 20th. You may have seen something about that in the news recently. The Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) is hosting a memorial the evening prior to that event to honor the lives lost due to COVID. It’s something you can participate in through a variety of ways – your creativity can guide that.
In D.C., the plan is to surround the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with lighting. It’ll be the first time that has ever been done for the purpose of recognizing American lives lost. When we planted flags at Himmel Park for the Week of Mourning, there were 622 COVID deaths in Pima County. Now there are well more than double that number. Nationwide we’ve lost nearly 400,000. That’d be a lot of lighting around the Reflective Pool. So cities and towns across the country are joining in.
The PIC is suggesting lighting buildings, ringing church bells, or finding other ways to commemorate the lives lost. The event in D.C. will take place at 3:30pm Tucson time on Tuesday the 19th. This past year has certainly been challenging. As we turn a new page, this will be an opportunity for a showing of national unity, the day before the new administration is sworn into office.
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COVID at Other Colleges
With the UA back in session, let’s take a short tour of other campuses to see how they’re handling the COVID/student issue. First up – Stanford canceled plans to bring students back for the winter quarter. They had 43 students test positive early in the month and immediately advised freshmen and sophomores that only students with special circumstances and Resident Assistants could move back into their on-campus dorms. Some had already begun moving in when they were sent back home. Correctly, their campus administration cited the strain area hospitals are experiencing in having made the decision.
As a comparison, this came from last week’s UA COVID dashboard
The University of Pittsburgh asked all 34,000 of its students to delay their return to campus until at least the last week of January. That’s for students who live both in and out of state. Their COVID-19 Medical Response Office told them they’d give at least 2 weeks notice before advising students to travel to campus. UA President Robbins asked rhetorically ‘what were we supposed to do, tell them not to come?’ That’s exactly what others have done.
Similarly, Kansas State is going all online for at least the first 2 weeks of the semester. And Washburn University, located in Manhattan, Kansas has advised all of their students that they’ll be online until further notice. Richard Myers, Kansas State U President told the AP ‘as we anticipate a surge in positive cases as people return to our campuses, this action will help us keep safety protocols in place.’
At U Florida, their administration caused some rather heated response from faculty when they included on a campus app a way for students to report instructors who were not doing the in-person teaching that was prescribed for some classes. I saw instances where faculty called it a ‘snitch line,’ ‘McCarthyism,’ a ‘crime stoppers approach,’ and ‘demoralizing.’
The Rutgers U President has tested positive for COVID. He’s now quarantined. He believes he contracted the virus while away from campus. While his symptoms are right now mild, a professor at Harrisburg U has died of COVID-19.
Charles Shearrow was a Manufacturing Professor who had his students produce over 2,300 COVID face shields for first responders. That’s him on the far right. His son, in the middle, helped produce the shields. Mr. Shearrow was 61 years old when he passed away.
COVID Risk in Arizona
Over the weekend the state of Arizona passed 11,000 COVID deaths. In Pima County, we’re nearing 100,000 cases and 1,500 deaths. The trajectory is up, and our Risk Assessment by the Harvard Global Health Institute is severe. Here’s their Risk Assessment map. I suppose we could all move to North Dakota and ride this out. But they’re still in Orange (shelter in place) and it’s awfully cold there, so if we converged on them, we’d just kick that state into the Red category too. Might as well stay in Arizona and do what the CDC tells us to do. Not inviting over 20,000 young people to fly back into the city would have been a nice touch.
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In Pima County the infection rate has climbed in the 85705 zip code. That’s the Grant/Stone/Miracle Mile area. I’m watching to see when the UA student impact is felt in the 85719. Based on the bar-hopping activity I witnessed, it won’t be long. For now though the hot spots are still the south, southwest and now the ‘05 is thriving.
The State Department of Education is recommending all-virtual right now for teaching protocols in Pima County.
 The 9 tracking metrics for reopening are still not looking good. These are the standards the UA faculty group is looking to for a safe re-entry plan. They’ve asked for all-virtual until all 9 of these are in either the yellow or green for 2 consecutive weeks. We’re not close.
The State of Arizona is still leading the country in terms of percent cases p/100,000. The Covid Tracking Project puts out this map – Arizona is 112 people p/100,000. Nobody else is close to us.
 Here’s our statewide map. The infection numbers are why Harvard has the whole state in the high risk category.
And I haven’t touched on the Rt value recently. It’s the infection rate. If the value was 1, that would mean the sick person wasn’t infecting anybody else. Anything over 1.0 means they are. In Arizona, every infected person is infecting more than one other person. That’s also true in Pima County, and in the UA zip code:
Each week I get emails from Tucson residents who are living out of the area and want to know if it’s a safe environment. I share the newsletter with them. The data speaks for itself. And it’s pretty consistently bad everywhere, so hopping on a plane to come back to Tucson right now isn’t probably a great idea if escaping COVID is the goal.
For the NY Times data sets, use this link:
The State Department of Health site is at this link: www.azdhs.gov.
Sincerely,
Steve Kozachik
Council Member, Ward 6
ward6@tucsonaz.gov
City of Tucson Resources
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