Plastic Blocks
On Tuesday of last week, this was the view into the roll off we’ve got collecting your plastics. This was the product of under 1 weeks worth of your contributions. We certainly create a lot of plastic waste. Now we have got a productive way to use it.
When we fill the roll off, we have the city environmental services folks truck it out to Tanks Green Stuff. There they weigh it and are storing what we deliver until there’s enough to bale it and send it over to ByFusion for blocking. Last week, we sent them a ton (literally) of plastic waste. That’ll create roughly 100 blocks.
By Friday afternoon the roll off was nearly full again. If we average 1x per week, we will be very close to meeting the 20 ton goal of the pilot. Here’s the current update on how the project is progressing. This count began on August 1st and my observation is that it’s picking up steam by the day. Note that we’re already over the 500 participants in the program we were shooting for. I’m certain we can double that so reaching the 20 tons is achievable.
Also last week, Heidi Kujawa from ByFusion paid us a visit. We toured a plastic manufacturing facility and will be following up with them on becoming a partner. In addition, Heidi and I talked about other options that exist in our market – companies that produce thousands of pounds of plastic waste just in the normal course of their daily operation. We’ll be following up on enlisting them into this program as well.
For now, it’s all a consumer-driven program. The corporate partners are coming. If you’ve got a business, I guarantee you that you are producing large amounts of plastic waste every day. If you work in an office environment the same thing is true. Just look at your break area, or shipping and receiving. With very little effort that waste can be tossed into a plastic bag and brought over to the Ward 6 office. We welcome new partners every day.
If you would like to sign up, use this link. It will take you less than a minute. The goal is to demonstrate to the city that the community wants this program and that we need to find a way to make it happen. When that comes about it will be because of your support and encouragement. And by signing up you can get updates on how the project is progressing.
https://www.byfusion.com/pilot-program/
More Reuse
I have shared with you the beautiful countertops being produced with the crushed bottles by local entrepreneur Anita Goodrich – Bottle Rocket. When I started the bottle crushing in the Ward 6 garage the uses were a bit more mundane. Mixing with concrete (the slabs you walk across coming into our office are made with crushed glass in the mortar mix) and sandbags. It finally began raining so those sandbags aren’t so mundane right about now.
I had hoped we would buy a commercial scale crusher and do all the crushing ourselves. When COVID hit we lost some of our Department of Corrections labor to operate the machine, so we’ve contracted out the crushing. Most of the crushed glass is being sold to companies such as Dow Corning. They need the very fine silica sand that comes from your crushed wine bottle. But we get 10% of what is produced, plus some financial benefit based on tonnage. It’s that 10% that you may be benefitting from by filling monsoon sandbags.
This is the 7th straight year we’ve been giving away sandbags. It’s the 3rd year during which crushed glass is a portion of what you may have access to. The east parking lot at Hi Corbett Field is once again the pick-up site. There are free self-serve sandbags. You need to bring your own shovel to fill them, and please try to limit yourself to 10 bags per car. There’s easy access 24/7.
School is back in Session
The truck that hit this Palo Verde was towed. I don’t know about the driver. This happened right outside of Catalina High School. In fact, that’s the fence to their parking area you see on the right side of the photo.
The message – school is back in session. Get your head out of whatever else you’re doing while behind the wheel. Use of mobile phones is a level one infraction in the city of Tucson and drinking while driving is illegal everywhere. With all the ads we see about both texting while driving and DUI it’s still all too common. Please be a part of the solution and not a part of the problem. We’re all just glad there weren’t a line of kids standing in the bus loading zone waiting to be picked up when this happened.
Afghanistan One Year Later
We are within the 2-week window of the evacuation from Kabul we all witnessed last year. I say a ‘two-week window’ because in the last couple of weeks during August 2021 over 100,000 Afghans were flown out of danger. The sad reality though is that thousands of their family members, former U.S. contractors and people who supported our efforts were left behind. This is no celebratory time for any of them.
Last week Matthieu Aikins of the NY Times Magazine had a good article about what’s happening in Afghanistan. It’s more than an on the ground report. He has comments from inside the Biden administration. This one in particular is exactly what I’ve been experiencing since starting to work on resettlement:
Apart from its counterterrorism efforts, the White House, focused on the challenges from Russia and China, has pursued a strategy described to me by a U.S. official as “making sure Afghanistan stays off the front page.” In this, the Biden administration has been helped by a marked lack of interest from Congress in the country since the withdrawal, an apathy as bipartisan as support for the war in Ukraine, which has replaced Afghanistan as the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.
Here’s a link to his full article. What is strikingly clear from what he writes, and from the reports from people stuck in Afghanistan is that people there don’t have even the luxury of giving up. Taliban are actively hunting down people who supported our efforts. I’ve shared emails that describe what’s happening.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/magazine/taliban-afghanistan.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20220814&instance_id=69302&nl=the-morning®i_id=78821242&segment_id=101373&te=1&user_id=9d47d870f7f81124e31c4b4a99e9fea2
Hanna Tiede from KOLD came by last week and interviewed one of the guys who made it out. He’s a former Afghan helicopter pilot who flew missions ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with American soldiers for 20 years. Now he’s here and his family is left behind in Afghanistan. He has told me that he doesn’t feel like he’s either a husband or a father any longer because he cannot take care of his family. He has said he’d go back and sacrifice himself if there was any way to get there. Even that would likely not keep his family out of danger. Here’s Hanna’s story.
https://www.kold.com/2022/08/16/feet-american-soil-heart-afghanistan-some-struggle-make-us-their-home-one-year-after-taliban-takeover/
Over the course of the past year, I’ve said the resettlement process is broken. Our congressional delegation – with one single exception in Representative Grijalva’s office – doesn't know how to navigate the system beyond ‘following protocols.’ We didn’t do that during the 2-week evacuation because we recognized people would die if we did the bureaucratic thing. People are dying because we’re now back to doing the bureaucratic thing. Here’s one example I was involved with last week. Zohra is trying to get her Special Immigrant Visa processed. She’s in Afghanistan, trying to work through our system with poor internet access, and difficult language barriers. And yet, she’s really trying. I’ve tried as well and cannot get a single person from State, Homeland Security, or congress to even respond to emails. Zohra is essentially on her own trying to evade Taliban.
Here’s the real-life struggle thousands of Zohra’s are facing. I’ve pulled excerpts of instructions our State Department has emailed to Zohra. These are the general guidelines for applying for SIV status. Remember – people who don’t know a thing about our system and who speak very rough-around-the-edges English are trying to follow these instructions. They’re also stuck in homes under threat from Taliban, bad internet, and well...read the instructions keeping their circumstances in mind. It defines bureaucracy.
So, Zohra did all of this – last October. This past week she received a notice saying she forgot her employee number. Seriously. That is the level of impersonality and lack of understanding the process has devolved into. Note the first line in this email we received from her – in her own words:
Greeting and respect to you I hope you both are fine. I am at home and tired as Taleban push us to stay at home and they are always saying woman place is either at home or in grave.
She goes on asking for help – 10 months after submitting the application that is being held up because of an employee number.
Anyway, as you are in the picture I applied for SIV on October,23 ,2021 ,finally yesterday I have received this email from Afghan SIV Application and sent case#. They also asked me to send them documents that they mentioned although I have already sent them except employee badge.
Would you please read it and guide me I need your guidance especially about employee badge that I do not have ( please write a statement, reasonably then send me).
I need your advice so I am waiting till that time.
Looking forward to hearing back from you.
May God keep you safe and sound.
Regards,
Zohra
So, what is it that she (and thousands of others) has had to submit in order to get out of harms way? Here is the actual instruction sent to this group of people who are literally moving from location to location trying to avoid Taliban. I’ve extracted it exactly from the instructions we send to the applicants. They’re trying to save their lives – lives in danger because of their association with the U.S. operations in their home country. I pulled this from what Zohra has had to submit.
1. Verification of Employment in Afghanistan
A) If you were employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government: You must submit a letter from your employer’s Human Resources (HR) department confirming that you were employed by, or on behalf of, the U.S. government in Afghanistan between October 7, 2001, and December 31, 2023, for at least one year. The letter must contain all the information below: Your full name Your date of birth Information on the U.S. government contract or subcontract held by your employer, if applicable. This should include project name, contract number, the period of performance of the contract, and the name of the prime contractor. If available, a copy of the contract between your employer and the U.S. government or a copy of the subcontract between your employer and the company that maintains a contract with the U.S. government should be provided. Your job title You job location The date you started working for the employer (DD-MM-YYYY) The date you stopped working for the employer (DD-MM-YYYY) The reason for separation (if you are no longer employed) The name of the author completing the letter, his or her signature, and his or her contact information including corporate email (or alternate email if he no longer works with the organization) and current phone number. A thorough description of your work duties and the location where you performed those duties. If applicable, this should include an explanation of how your position required you to: o Serve as an interpreter or translator for personnel of the Department of State or the United States Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, particularly if it included duties that required traveling away from the embassy with such personnel; o Serve as an interpreter or translator for U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, particularly if this work required traveling off-base. Note: If the U.S. government directly employed you, you may submit a copy of your employment contract for consideration.
B) If you were employed by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), or a successor mission: You must submit a letter from your employer confirming that you were employed by ISAF, or a successor mission, between October 7, 2001 and December 31, 2023, for at least one year. If you were directly hired by ISAF, or a successor mission, this letter must be from ISAF Headquarters HR, or the successor mission HR, regardless of where you were stationed in Afghanistan. If you were hired by an ISAF member nation, or a successor mission member nation, this letter must come from the department or agency that hired you. Note: Private contractors and subcontractors with ISAF or a successor mission or member nations other than the United States do NOT qualify. The letter must contain all the information below: Your full name Your date of birth An English language copy (or English translation) of the contract between you and your employer. If you were hired on a personal services agreement (PSA) or a personal services contract (PSC), you must submit an English language copy of the agreement or contract Your job title Your job location The date you started working for ISAF, or a successor mission (DD-MM-YYYY) The date you stopped working for ISAF, or a successor mission (DD-MM-YYYY) The reason for separation if you are no longer employed The name of the HR representative completing the HR letter, his or her signature, and his or her contact information including corporate email (or alternate email if no longer with the organization) and current phone number A description of your work duties. If applicable, this should include how your position required you to: o Serve as an interpreter or translator for U.S. military personnel while traveling off- base with U.S. military personnel stationed at ISAF or a successor mission, or o Perform activities for U.S. military personnel stationed at ISAF, or a successor mission.
2. Letter of Recommendation
A) If you were employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government: You must submit a letter from a direct, senior supervisor who knew you personally. If your supervisor has left Afghanistan or is no longer employed by the employer, the author may also be the person currently occupying that position or a more senior person. In all cases, the author must be connected with the qualifying employment. The supervisory period should overlap with the period of employment noted in your employment letter. The letter should be dated and signed by your supervisor. It must contain all of the information below: Your full name Your date of birth Your badge number (if available) Your job title Your job location Confirmation that the recommender was/is your supervisor, or is a more senior person The date the author of the letter began supervising you (DD-MM-YYYY) The date the author of the letter stopped supervising you (DD-MM-YYYY) The supervisor’s name, title, corporate or U.S. government/military email address and personal email address and current phone number Justification for recommending you for COM approval, i.e., that you provided faithful and valuable service to the U.S. government The supervisor’s description of your work duties. This statement should be personalized to the specific duties you performed, including a description of where you performed those duties. If applicable, your supervisor should also address how your position required you to: o Serve as an interpreter or translator for personnel of the Department of State or the United States Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, particularly if those duties required traveling away from the embassy with such personnel; o Serve as an interpreter or translator for U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, particularly if those duties required traveling off-base. You should try to obtain the above recommendation from a U.S. citizen supervisor who knows you personally, but if that is not possible, you should try to provide a letter of recommendation signed by your non-U.S. citizen supervisor and co-signed by the U.S. citizen who is responsible for the contract. Any U.S. citizen who co-signs should indicate that, based on his or her relationship with your contract or subcontract supervisor, he or she is confident that the information provided is correct. The recommendation must contain the work and personal email address and phone number of any cosigner so he or she may be contacted if additional information is needed.
B) If you were employed by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), or a successor mission: You must submit a letter from your immediate supervisor, the person currently occupying that position, or a more senior person. Preferably, the letter should come from a member of the U.S. military who personally supervised you. The letter should be dated and signed. It must contain all the information below: Your full name. Your date of birth. Your badge number (if available). Your job title. Your job location. The date the author of the letter began supervising you (DD-MM-YYYY). The date the author of the letter stopped supervising you (DD-MM-YYYY). The recommender’s name, title, rank, U.S. government/military email address (if applicable), personal email address and phone number. Justification for recommending you for COM approval, i.e., that you provided faithful and valuable service to the U.S. government. The supervisor’s description of your work duties, including, if applicable, how your position required you to: o Serve as an interpreter or translator for U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan while traveling off-base; or o Perform activities for U.S. military personnel stationed at ISAF, or a successor mission.
3. Updated Form DS-157, Petition for Special Immigrant Classification for Afghan SIV Applicants Beginning July 20, 2022, you must submit the Form DS-157 Petition for Special Immigrant Classification for Afghan SIV Applicants together with your COM approval application. The form is available online at https://eforms.state.gov/Forms/ds157.pdf. You must complete the entire form, leave no fields blank, and sign the form. It is important that you follow the instructions to the DS-157 at the end of the form. If you have previously submitted a signed DS-157 with your application, there is no need to submit a new one. See travel.state.gov/afghan for more information on the updated Form DS-157 petition.
4. Evidence of Afghan Nationality You must submit a scanned photocopy of your tazkera with an English translation. Alternatively, the biographic data page of your Afghan passport is acceptable evidence of Afghan nationality, or a photocopy of your National Identity Card front and back.
5. Employee Badge(s) If available, submit a scanned copy of any identification badges you have held during any periods of employment by or on behalf of the U.S. government, or by ISAF or a successor mission.
If you didn’t read all of that, I understand. If you’re trying to save your life, and that of your family, you did. And more often than not, much of what is being required is impossible to provide. These are refugees – asylum seekers who are hiding to save their lives. Getting together documents such as this is literally an impossible task. Zohra did – except for an employee number. So, 10 months later she gets her “Dear Zohra” letter sending her back to square 1. She was an employee of the IRC – our main contractor for refugee resettlement. I haven’t been able to get them, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service or our state department to even acknowledge receipt of her application.
One year after the evacuation of American personnel, thousands of Zohra’s are left at the mercy of Taliban. That’s what congress and the administration is trying to keep off the front page.
This – another email I received last week from a desperate refugee left behind. This one was ‘lucky’ enough to make it to Pakistan. And yet you’ll see that’s hardly a safe haven for Afghan people. I have changed the name contained in the email for their protection, but the rest is verbatim:
I apologise for late reply as I explain problems that we’re faced with them in here one of them is phone connection our phones are blocked because we don’t have visa and we are able to connect with internet sometimes by using Wi-Fi .
For your further information I should say me and my brother Ahmad living in Islamabad Pakistan.
The main reason I come to Pakistan was that the taliban searched our house several times in hopes of catching me the Taliban demanded that my father turn me over for a forced marriage to one of their senior commanders It was a serious marriage demand and they issued threats to kill him if he did not immediately comply. These events forced me and my younger brother to leave my family and my country.
Pakistan security situations is not good for Afghans because taliban have good connection and agents here please help us we can not stay in here this is my kind request.
With regards.
This is a part of an email exchange I had with one of the refugee resettlement agencies. It really doesn’t matter which one because they’re all being ignored by congress and state when they make inquiries into the status of Special Immigration Visa applicants:
Our understanding is the current backlog for initial review of SIV applications is 6-9 months. Once the process is underway, it takes another several months for Chief of Mission (COM) approval. After that, if approved, applicants must leave the country to continue the interview process since US Embassy no longer has a presence in Afghanistan (and the next phase requires in person interview). Depending on which country people travel to, there is an additional wait for appointments at a US Embassy. If all goes well from there, there is an additional wait for medical, security, US agency assurance, travel planning, etc.
Not a single person will survive that process. There should be no ‘celebrating’ our exit until we make a serious effort to reunite the families broken apart and in danger in the wake of the 2021 evacuation. The public doesn’t know these stories. That’s how the folks in power want it to remain. If anyone up that bureaucratic food chain were to see this, I’d be happy to hear from them – IF the message was a willingness to work with me and my office and bypass this mess to save a few lives.
After 9 months of trying, we were able to get the judges wife and 2-year-old daughter out of Turkey. One of our D.C. policy people called that ‘a miracle.’ That’s a sad testimony on our process.
Source of Income Discrimination
Last week, Perla Shaheen from KGUN9 ran a piece on our upcoming income source discrimination item. I’m hoping staff will return to M&C with a draft proposal in September. Every single day we get calls and emails from people who are on the verge of eviction, oftentimes because landlords simply don’t want to work with fixed income tenants. Or more to the point, landlords can jack up rents in this market to a level where fixed income tenants can no longer afford to live there. Here’s Perla’s story:
https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/city-to-protect-low-income-residents-from-landlord-discrimination
This is an example of an email we received last week from a resident who’s affected by the increased rents. I’m withholding his name, but we’ve got several people working on finding him a place to stay:
The new owners also have a real problem with anyone who gets any kind of rent assistance from anywhere. They seem to think that it’s all “Section 8” and anyone on any program is a deadbeat. I’d been concerned that they would raise my rent by $50. That would have really stretched what little Social Security Disability that I get. Imagine how stunned I was when I found out that they were going to raise my rent by $340 a month. In a unit that hasn’t been updated since before I moved in.
I did talk to the Manager or Supervisor, I’m not sure what her title or name is. I wanted to know if there was any way to drop the rent since I’d been such a good, solid tenant for 2 years. I was told, “We don’t care what kind of tenant you are.”
I’ve been hunting for another place and they are all the same as here. They’ve raised their rents outrageously. They won’t even allow you to submit an application unless your monthly “salary” is 2 to 3 times what they are charging in rent.
So, I can’t stay here, unless I win the lottery in the next 2 weeks. I can’t move anywhere else because I can’t even qualify to put in an application. What am I supposed to do?
To be clear, the income source discrimination ordinance will not prevent landlords from raising rents to the level that people cannot afford the new costs. We cannot prevent that because the state has in place a law that preempts local rent control ordinances. California allows local rent controls. That’s the reason Arizona is getting all of the California investors buying up property and jacking up rents. What the income source ordinance will do is prevent landlords from refusing to extend leases simply based on the source of a person’s income.
One guy who’s in the local apartment management business left me a voice message recently. Instead of saying he had concerns with the direction we’re headed with this ordinance and that he’d like to explore options, his message was just a bunch of personal insults, followed by an invitation for me to return his call if I wanted to be educated. That kind of call doesn’t get returned. If, however you’re in the rental business and have constructive ideas we can talk about, the goal being to keep people housed I’ll be happy to engage. What we cannot do is to simply sit by and not explore any tool that we can put into our tool kit in an effort to keep people housed. For investors the housing market is ‘hot.’ From the perspective of leaders in the local shelter operator space, it’s “tragic.”
Proposition 411 – Residential Road Repair
We get calls from time to time asking if a particular residential street is going to be repaired using Prop 411 funds. Every residential street in the city will be touched by those funds. The program will last for 10 years. What we cannot say right now is when a particular street will be restored.
Prop 411 is the 10-year ½ cent sales tax levy that is earmarked for both road repair and road safety elements. The road repair portion is 80% of what we’re collecting. The estimate is that we’ll collect just under $600M over the next 10 years for road repair.
Right now, our transportation folks are doing an analysis of residential streets, getting ready to identify the first years’ candidates for repair. Once the analysis of road condition is done, they’ll sit with the various utilities (TEP, SW Gas, Century Link, etc.) and see when they’re planning on doing utility upgrades. The timing of the road repair will be coordinated with the utility work.
Not all neighborhoods will receive the same road treatment. Why? Because they warrant varying kinds of treatments depending on the condition, they’re in. Some will require a full reconstruction – from the base up. Some will only need top coating to preserve what was recently repaved. Analyzing what a given area needs along with the utility considerations is also a part of the analysis transportation is doing. All of those considerations might end up with you seeing some streets that aren’t in the worst condition getting taken care of before some that are rotted to the bone. Keep the faith – they'll all get done during 411.
Assuring all of the funds we collect are used as we promised in Prop 411 is going to be the work of a bond oversight commission. That’ll be made up of residents. We’ve already got one in place looking at how earlier tax money is being used (Prop 101, for example.) We’ll decide on the make-up of the new commission later this fall when transportation staff brings a proposed Year 1 game plan for the 411 projects they’re right now analyzing. And while all of that work is being done the tax money is accumulating. We can’t spend what we don’t have.
Proposition 411 improvements are scheduled to begin in 2023. For more information on the Prop 411 program visit: https://www.tucsonaz.gov/Prop411
Street Art
Related to street improvements is this fun project coming to the Armory Park/downtown area. With the support of Rio Nuevo, TEP and PSOMAS Engineering, the city is sponsoring a mural art project. The final product will be unveiled on October 22nd. But coming this week will be 2 opportunities for you to get a sneak peek at the design that’s evolving. Local Tucson artist Yu Yu Shiratori will be presenting what’s in the works both at the Children’s Museum, and then in Armory Park. The ultimate canvas for the art will be the segment of 6th Avenue that sits between the park and the museum. This flyer has the dates/times for the events this week. It’d be great to see you there.
Water Security
That is “Lake Powell.” Or what’s left of it. As is also the case with Lake Mead, Lake Powell is at roughly 30% of its capacity. We rely on those lakes for our Colorado River water allocation.
Last week KOLD’s Bud Foster ran a story on the water shortage we’re facing. It’s not just us. All of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, California, several tribes, and parts of Mexico are also reliant on the CAP. All of those users are sucking the river dry. Here’s Bud’s story covering the crisis.
https://www.kold.com/2022/08/18/water-shortages-mean-higher-prices-customers/
In a previous newsletter I shared that I’ve asked the Citizen’s Water Advisory Committee to look at new water conservation measures the city of Las Vegas has implemented. Those include things such as eliminating front yard lawns (non-productive turf areas,) limiting the size of back yard lawns, limiting the times of day people can water lawns or wash cars, putting golf courses on water diets, mandating that swimming pools be drained into the sewer system and not out onto the street. I’ll be asking M&C to consider the recommendations coming from CWAC later this fall.
Other cities are ahead of us on some of these conservation measures. That’s not because we’re behind the times when it comes to championing conservation. In fact, we use approximately the same amount of water per capita that we did 20 years ago. But the population has increased, and the condition of the Colorado River (our current source for water) is depleting.
Examples of what others are doing include the town of Healdsburg in Sonoma County. It’s wine country. California Governor Newsome has declared a water emergency in that area. In response they’ve placed residents on tight water use budgets and have banned all outdoor yard irrigation. People are busy buying and installing rainwater cisterns. In the East Bay, California they’ve banned watering lawns between 9am and 6pm in order to reduce evaporation. Their goal is a 10% reduction in water use. And in L.A. they’ve banned hosing down any hard surface, except to address an immediate health hazard, banned restaurants from serving water unless expressly requested, banning lawn irrigation within 48 hours after it rains, banned the use of water in a manner that allows it to flow into the street or onto sidewalks, and implementing non-watering days that grow more restrictive depending on how the water shortage develops over time.
We are in a drought and we are in a desert. We’ve got to look at policies such as some of these. The Colorado River is over-allocated – each of the states and groups I listed above as users of the river have legal entitlements to water coming from the Colorado. Those entitlements exceed the amount of water the river produces. Simple arithmetic – that doesn’t add up to a healthy outlook for the Colorado.
In Tucson, we’ve also got the PFAS contamination issue that I’ve been writing about for the past few years. That means we will be reliant on our groundwater more heavily as the Colorado River allocations are reduced. The EPA recently reduced the level of PFAS that is considered to warrant a health advisory. The new level is below our ability to even detect it. We’ve shut down 25 water wells as a result. They’re scattered throughout the region, but primarily around DM and the Tucson International Airport where the Arizona Air National Guard practices. Those groups used the firefighting foam that largely caused the contamination. The red dots on this map show how widespread the problem has now grown.
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Congress has finally included PFAS treatment dollars in some current legislation. We haven’t seen any of it yet and Tucson Water has over $50M already invested in containing the issue. To their credit the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality has helped with about $5M to build a couple of test treatment plants. That’ll be a drop in the eventual bucket of funds we’ll need. And to help with funding we’re in litigation against 3M and other product manufacturers. We’re hoping to see ‘discovery’ end soon and oral arguments start this month. The actual cases should begin early next year.
Water is my number 1 issue of importance. We have to conserve and clean what we have. We really have no other options than to take this as an existentially serious challenge.
Monkeypox in Pima County
As of last week, there were 6 confirmed Monkeypox cases in Pima County. All of the confirmed cases are men under 40 years of age. You see it on the news – it's here. But it is not spread in the same way that COVID is, so widespread and rapid transmission isn’t being predicted. But caution is being suggested.
The information issued by our partners in Pima County health gives some pretty easy to follow guidelines regarding Monkeypox. It appears as a new rash or lesions. It can be in one area or spread more generally on the body. It can be accompanied by a fever, chills and/or sweats, and lethargy. If left unaddressed it can lead to scarring and secondary bacterial infections. So, if you’ve got a new rash that you’re not sure about, have it checked.
Monkeypox is transmitted through skin-to-skin exposure. It is infectious as soon as your symptoms begin. Most of the hospitalizations are for controlling the pain associated with the lesions. There have been no reported deaths in the U.S. from Monkeypox. When properly treated it lasts from 2-4 weeks.
There are vaccinations for Monkeypox. Pima County health has received about 900 doses and expects another 900ish by the end of August. Check with your doctor if you have symptoms. He or she can contact the PCHD folks about access to the vaccine.
The federal website describing Monkeypox in greater detail is https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/response/2022/index.html.
COVID
COVID is still a thing in Pima County. It’s good to see the downward trend in cases continuing. Now that UA students have re-arrived in town, it’ll once again be instructive to see what happens to the counts. We know from the testing I did alongside Rescue Me Wellness that the student housing towers are fertile breeding grounds for the virus. We know the current trend and will watch how things evolve.
Both UA students and the general public should stay up to date on vaccinations. What we don’t need is for new variants to find unprotected hosts and continue the pandemic. The BA.5 is the most easily transmissible variant we’ve seen. But it’s also not as deadly as Delta was, so all of this is unpredictable. The CDC says they’ll have BA.5 vaccines by the fall.
Testing is also still an important part of managing our way out of COVID. I know 3 people who in the past month had continued showing positive tests for more than 2 weeks. One of them has had continual and worsening symptoms. The other 2 had mild symptoms. Each infection hits the host differently. You can still get free self-test kits through the federal government – use this link to access the order form: free tests You’re allowed to order up to 16 free tests.
Pima County is still handing out free test kits. This week they’ll be available at these locations:
This link is from our partners at Pima County health. It gives easy to follow instructions on how to give a self test: https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?portalId=169&pageId=787398
The COVID numbers for new cases, hospitalizations and fatalities are still high. Vaccines continue to be available for free – as is also true of boosters. This link will take you to the Pima County health site showing both their mobile vaccine centers, and the standing ones: https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?portalId=169&pageId=669257
Last week, both the statewide and Pima County new case counts continued to decrease. The numbers are still far too high, but the trend is once again headed in the right direction. Here’s the updated table I’ve been keeping:
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Week of
|
Pima County
|
Arizona
|
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April 24th
|
260 new cases
|
2,350 new cases
|
|
May 1st
|
510 new cases
|
3,911 new cases
|
|
May 8th
|
776 new cases
|
5,404 new cases
|
|
May 15th
|
1,090 new cases
|
7,204 new cases
|
|
May 22nd
|
1,692 new cases
|
11,498 new cases
|
|
May 29th
|
1,985 new cases
|
13,042 new cases
|
|
June 5th
|
2,200 new cases
|
14,677 new cases
|
|
June 12th
|
2,451 new cases
|
16,334 new cases
|
|
June 19th
|
2,559 new cases
|
15,373 new cases
|
|
June 26th
|
2,263 new cases
|
16,514 new cases
|
|
July 3rd
|
2,210 new cases
|
20,198 new cases
|
|
July 10th
|
1,880 new cases
|
15,280 new cases
|
|
July 17th
|
2,251 new cases
|
18,135 new cases
|
|
July 24th
|
2,764 new cases
|
17,249 new cases
|
|
July 31st
|
2,152 new cases
|
15,034 new cases
|
|
August 7th
|
2,003 new cases
|
13,501 new cases
|
|
August 14th
|
1,899 new cases
|
12,244 new cases
|
To put those new case counts into perspective, they haven’t been this low since May. And there were 81 deaths statewide and 15 COVID-related deaths in Pima County last week. Those are the highest fatality numbers we’ve seen in months. It is not benign.
Here’s our state map dating back to the start of this in 2020.
Here’s some relatively good news. On the Harvard Risk Level map Arizona has moved from the red risk level into the orange level. It’s still a level worth paying close attention to, but the change reflects progress.
About half the counties in Arizona have moved to the orange risk level. Pima County is not one of those. In fact, our numbers only improved incrementally last week. We’re still solidly in the high-risk level for transmission. And we are sadly closing in on 4,000 deaths. Pima County was at 622 deaths when we did the vigil in Himmel Park less than 2 years ago. Nobody would have predicted where we’d be today.
BA.5 continues to be the dominant strain of COVID in the country – and in our community. It is the most highly transmissible variant we’ve seen.
Sincerely,
Steve Kozachik
Council Member, Ward 6
ward6@tucsonaz.gov
City of Tucson Resources
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