A Message from Steve K...06/20/2023

We’ve met and spoken with Erin Durband several times. She’s got a lot of support during this difficult time. At Erin’s request this event is intended to be a celebration where people have a good time remembering who Donovan was and what he stood for. There’ll be 8-10 speakers, a slide show of Donovan during various stages of his life, some of his favorite music being played by Sophia Rankin live and some special touches that you’ll need to be present in order to appreciate. 

I’m sure that we'll see many of you on Saturday. 

We’re confirmed for the hybrid presentation on rodents and how to control them. We’ve got Dawn Gouge coming down from Phoenix to join with Paula Rivadeneira from PACC to share in the presentation. Paula will bring some show and tell along with her expertise on various approaches to controlling for rats. Dawn is a Medical Entomology professor and a public health specialist with the UA. Between the two of them you’ll leave with more understanding of why the rodents are in midtown, where they might end up if left unchecked, and ways we can work together to mitigate their presence.  

This will be a more effective presentation for you if you can join in person here at the ward 6 office. But for those who cannot make it, here’s a zoom link: 

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81977177649d=RW16NXVTbzAxeEtyZ3dvVERwb1dGQT09 

Meeting ID: 819 7717 7649 

Passcode: W@rd6 

During my conversation with Dawn, I described what people are seeing. She’s not so sure we’re dealing with roof rats, but instead thinks they might be pack rats. Evidently, they climb trees too. Wonderful news. Here’s one making the point: 

My bride and I took part in International Refugee Day last Saturday over at Pima College’s downtown campus. It was great to see the hundreds of people from all over the world sharing a few hours of cultural cross-pollinating. That happened in the form of food, music, dress, crafts and language. There were lots of smiles, each hiding the reality that everybody who was there is in Tucson as a refugee from extremely difficult circumstances in their home country. And most continue to live with the trauma of family members stuck ‘back home.’ Thank you for your donations in their support. 

With respect to the homeless we’re partnering with a group of student nurses from the UA through the end of this week.  We’re helping them gather hygiene products that they’ll bag up and distribute to some of our unhoused residents. This flyer has a list of the kinds of things they’re collecting. We were at first going to have their collection box in the front entryway until June 20th. The support for their project has been excellent so we’ll keep the donation box up front for the balance of this week. Then the nurse group will collect what you’ve donated, put it into ‘hygiene bags’ and under the supervision of our homeless protocol team go into encampments and distribute the items. You’ll see that much of what they’re collecting is what we’re already getting from you, so for the rest of this week we’ll focus the hygiene products on the nursing student program. 

Of course we continue our weekly collection of items for the people who arrive at the Casa Alitas welcome center. With the heat now on us it’s important that we get the things we’re used to in our daily lives in the desert – sunscreen, lotions, soaps, and other hygiene products. And the need for new underclothes, baseball caps, shoelaces, belts, sneakers sizes 9-13 – all of that is needed as Alitas continues receiving over 500 new arrivals every day. 

I’ll get to the plastic reuse program below, but first a quick update on our glass reuse program. There are about 20 drop off locations scattered around town. The 22’ bin we have at the ward 6 office is emptied at least weekly, and sometimes more often. The glass is crushed by our contractor Strategic Materials. They pay us per ton, and we get a portion of the ‘silica sand’ that’s produced. The majority of the sand is left for SM to sell into the secondary market. That was the main point of starting this when I first suggested it. Companies such as Dow Corning use the material in their production process. 

Another use is cutting it with mortar to make cement. You’ve likely seen the near-tragic bridge collapse that happened last week in Philadelphia. Friend of W6 Ryland sent this link to an interesting story about the Philly city officials integrating a concrete product made partially from crushed glass into the rehab of the bridge. Since the Tucson program began, I’ve been advocating that we do more productive things with our crushed bottles than simply filling sandbags. Philadelphia is a city showing some pretty significantly important ways it can be put to use. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ULb9NAQRt8

Ok, onto plastic. Last week The Guardian ran a story on the international effort to ban the production of plastic. Thanks to Don for sharing the article. The short message is that plastic production has increased by a factor of 30 since the time Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate was counseled “the future is in plastic.” The advice was prophetic, and we’re living with the ramifications today. 

This is a beach in Panama City – dated 2019. Today that condition is far worse, and it is matched on shorelines around the world. 

Worldwide today there’s over 430 million tons of plastic produced annually. That weighs more than the combined weight of all 8 billion of us who live on earth. The trajectory is for that number to double in the next 25 years. While I’m not at all optimistic about an international treaty being put into effect – and enforced – that makes a significant dent in plastic production, the conversation is clearly important and warranted. Everybody I speak with about our relatively little program recognizes now that they’ve begun collecting plastic at home just how pervasive the stuff is in our lives. And for all the good it brings to us in terms of packaging, use in health care settings, fenders on cars, boats, pill bottles...for all that good and convenience, it’s a petroleum product and during its production is a contributor to greenhouse gasses and climate impacts. 

The UN effort is to ban many of the unnecessary single-use products – such as packaging – and replace that with biodegradable materials. Governments can already levy extra taxes on the production of new plastic products, but the fact that that isn’t happening points out the difficulty from a political/economic sense this UN work is going to encounter. People are creatures of comfort. We can already choose to take cloth bags to the grocery store, take our own carry out containers to restaurants, or simply not buy products packaged in plastic. Sounds easy. I’m guilty – I just came back from Walgreens and literally every product I bought was packaged in plastic (the manufacturer didn’t offer an option,) and I carried them back to the office in a doubled up single use bag. It’s all going into our program, but the environmental damage was done at the front end of the packaging’s life. 

Right now there are 50 countries joining together advocating for a treaty trying to get up to an 80% reduction in plastic production by 2040. The U.S., China and Saudi Arabia are not signed on. Oil producing countries are pushing back – this link has an article about the difficulty in getting buy-in: determined  

We’re still pulling costs together comparing the two sites under consideration for ByFusion’s Tucson operation. From my perspective we’ve got to make that call this week. We continue falling further and further behind in terms of processing the material we already have. Some of it will be baled and trucked to L.A. for processing – out of necessity. Tank’s has been a great partner but we’ve outgrown his property and simply have to start chipping away at the pile and producing blocks. There are several projects we’re talking about each week during our calls so we’re going to need the blocks, and some form of revenue stream to get the program off the ground. We’ve got lots of balls being juggled in the air. 

Thanks to ward 6 partner Jim for sharing this plant stand he made using just 4 blocks. The colorization in the blocks blends perfectly with those unique plants he has going. 

We get calls from developers from all over the city pretty much weekly asking for help kicking loose a building permit from the city system. Having worked in capital projects for several years I fully understand the impacts sitting and waiting for an inspection or a permit to continue working has on a project. Time is money. 

Our planning department has been actively hiring people to come on board and help with the workflow. While that hiring has been going on they’ve also made some changes internally which should help get permits out the door. One major change is in how permit reviews will be categorized. This chart shows the 4 types of project/permit and how they’ll be prioritized:  

Notice that in each category there’s a ‘performance goal.’ Some of our ability to meet those goals is a function of the quality of, and completeness of the development package the city receives from the developer. But assuming a good submittal, you can see the various timelines now built into our response queue. Kudos to our planning staff for keeping at it and getting us to this point. 

Use this link to access the Planning and Development Services site.  

https://www.tucsonaz.gov/pdsd/apply-permit  

And as always, please feel free to give us a call here at the ward office if we can help keep your project moving along. 

Coming on Thursday, July 13th TPD is partnering with the Children’s Advocacy Center, Banner UMC and the Justice Management Institute in a resource fair for victims of domestic violence. That’s both the moms (or dads) and kids. Kids are victims whether they are physically abused or not. Every 44 minutes in this country a kid witnesses a DV event. In those moments the child is subjected to the impacts of an abusive relationship. Those impacts can cause a lifetime of emotional trauma. The resource fair is an opportunity to learn about interventions. 

The resource fair is intended to present to victims a variety of services they have available. Between the 3 primary agencies who are sponsoring the event, they’ll be able to triage through the facts of each case and help connect that person or family with the best outlet to fill the needs.  

The event will be held at the Flowing Wells library – 1730 W. Wetmore. Come and learn the rules regarding DV and take advantage of the resources that will be available. 

At our July 18th study session, we are scheduled to get a full briefing on the current RTA proposal. The Technical Management Committee forwarded their recommendation to the full RTA board for review and comment. Below I’ll share what’s on the table and give some personal perspective on what we’ll be talking about in July. 

A couple of weeks ago I shared what was then the Technical Management Committee (TMC) proposal along with an alternate proposal being offered by the citizen advisory group (CAC.) The proposal we’ll be asked to comment on is largely the TMC one, but they tossed in a small nod to the CAC I’ll show you below. 

They broke the plan down into 5 project categories and added a 6th one to cover overhead. That last one has $23M for administrative expenses, $10M for small business assistance and $77M for debt service. Those are all figures to be extrapolated over the 20-year life span of the Plan. The other categories contain actual work being done. 

The full projected cost of the RTA Next plan being proposed is $2.34 billion dollars. That’s the ½ cent sales tax spread over the next 20 years. The original RTA tax was projected to cover $2.1 billion dollars in project costs. In the new proposal, they’ve included $230M for projects that were listed in the current RTA Plan. They’ve been deferred and are at the front of the line for RTA Next because they don’t have the funds to cover it all under the original RTA revenue projections. And I’m not convinced there won’t be more unfunded projects we’ll be asked to defer from the current plan. The final 2 phases of Grant Road for example will cost in excess of $50M. Those phases are still in early design and everyday costs for labor and materials continues to escalate. I’ve seen their graphs for anticipated revenue growth. They don’t have any economic downturns built in over the next 20 years. Some of us would say that’s not realistic. And they still do not have an inflation adjuster computed into any of the Next cost estimates. 

The largest project category being proposed for Next is roadway construction. That element has $1.1B tied to it. The list contains 33 named road projects. Of those the only projects that are close to midtown are modernizing the corridor on Speedway between Alvernon and Wilmot, adding bike paths and doing signal changes on Prince between Romero Road and Country Club, adding pedestrian improvements on Stone from Prince to Drachman and those same kinds of upgrades on Fort Lowell from Oracle to Alvernon. Otherwise, the named roadway projects are out in the south 12th Ave, Drexel, Valencia areas – and out in the county and the other PAG jurisdictions.  

And there continues to be no line item for any road repair built into the Next plan. 

The next largest category in the proposal is for transit. They’ve got $510M of RTA dollars (your ½ cent) programmed for weekday evening bus service, weekend bus service, neighborhood circulators, express service, special needs for elderly and disabled, and frequency and service expansion. If RTA Next fails at the ballot these services would lose their funding source. That’s a part of the decision we’ll have when we vote whether or not to go to the ballot with whatever the Plan is at that time. 

Safety projects are the 3rd category in terms of cost. They’ve got $150M programmed into things such as intersection/capacity improvements, bus pullouts, technology upgrades and railroad crossing safety elements. They’ve also stuck into this category some work out by Starr Pass and on 22nd Street from Alvernon out to Camino Seco. The nature of those last two isn’t broken down in our material. 

Next comes the one part of the CAC alternate proposal that made the cut. To refresh your memory, here’s the CAC proposal: 

I’ve highlighted the category called Active Transportation. Those are projects that fit with, and build on some of our Prop 407 greenway/connectivity work. They enhance the mobility experience for non-auto modes. The citizen group had asked for $262M in funding for those kinds of projects over the next 20 years of the RTA. The TMC proposal grants them $90M, spread over 20 years and spread among 9 jurisdictions. That’s a pretty big difference in priorities. What this shows is the TMC read the CAC material and chose to include about a third of this one category from their recommendation. 

Another area that shows a stark difference in priority is the environmental category. Compare the $87M in environmental work the CAC proposed to the $30M being proposed by the TMC. All of the environmental work being proposed by the TMC is for wildlife linkages such as the wildlife tunnels they’ve built way north on Oracle. Here’s what one of them looks like:  

There’s value in the wildlife linkages. There’s also environmental work the RTA could be doing in the area of decarbonization within their transit category that isn’t included. 

I’ll be interested in hearing from the rest of M&C on their reactions to what’s being proposed. Right now, I see a lot of space between the priorities we placed in our own Move Tucson 20-year city transportation plan, and the priorities we identified in our Complete Streets design plan and where we’d be spending your money within RTA Next.