A Message from Steve K...08/14/2023

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Date: 08/14/2023

Topics in This Issue:

Trafficking

Over the weekend my bride and I went to see Sound of Freedom. It’s a movie based on a true story of young kids being sex and labor trafficked. I highly recommend that you see it – and below I’ll give you a way to do that for free.

The only criticism I have of the film is that if you didn’t know any better you might come away thinking sex trafficking was only taking place in Honduras, Columbia and that our kids are safe.

Children in Tucson are being sex trafficked. Period/full stop.

I’ve written in the newsletter previously about our work out of the ward 6 office with Dominique Roe-Sepowitz from the ASU school of public health. Ann from our office has flown to Hawaii multiple times with Dominique establishing sex trafficking forums and other educational outreach with both their political leadership and non-profits. This is a link to an article in which Jessica Munoz is cited. She’s Ann’s Hawaii point of contact: https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-we-need-a-global-coalition-to-fight-child-trafficking?fbclid=PAAabveW9c9glGVV5UtPB1LN2zK2PkuwS2NYd7v2KH92KsYcNrVOeN4WqfTy0_aem_AY9mfAf-Jkp6xGWIy9Y6Q0Lel0qSWGq956E_IJPyKMsqEm6Cf_XcdrejFBofGXrNXJg

We’ve held trafficking forums here in Tucson as well. We need to do more, and we will.

The trafficking unit out of TPD until recently had been pretty much dismantled by the failure of a single person who had been in charge to follow up on leads provided by agencies throughout the state. This office has met several times with TPD leadership, and we will take credit for compelling a change in the trafficking structure within TPD. It appears we now have an engaged detective unit that will be responsive to agency input. What we still lack though is an effective public awareness of how this industry operates, and how they prey on the most vulnerable among us.

Your young son or daughter is likely not going to be swept into a passing van and whisked off to Columbia. That’s not how it works here. But your young son or daughter might be ‘meeting’ people on social media who are simply not who they purport to be. They may be being groomed by a ‘friend’ with gifts and compliments. Young kids who are couch-surfing due to a troubled home situation may be bartering sex for the ability to sleep on someone’s couch. That’s trafficking. We love the gem show. Every time it comes to town, so do traffickers. This industry is more lucrative than the drug trade. You can sell a pill once. You can sell a person multiple times every night for years.

Ok, back to the movie. If you go to https://www.angel.com/freedom you’ll see a tab on the right hand side of the screen. It’s where people can and have bought tickets forward so others who may not have the means can go see the film. It’s also being shown at multiple theaters around the city right now. And we’re working on some educational forums that will be must-see for parents throughout our community.

School just resumed. Traffickers start with kids at the age of 5. Please be aware of how your kids are interacting on social media. Predators prey. They don’t bring a highly developed conscience to the transaction.

Corbett Building

On a happier note, another exciting renovation/preservation project is about to open later this month. The Corbett Building and the adjacent property is going to be an amazing community gathering space, complete with both indoor and outdoor activity areas, food, entertainment and fun.. 

I’ve toured the project a few times during construction. If you eat, drink, enjoy other people having a good time, want to learn pickleball, or any combination of that list you should mark your calendar now for Tuesday, August 29^th for the hard opening of the new Corbett. It’s located at 340 N. 6^th Avenue, just north of the U.P. railroad tracks and up the street from Exo Coffee.

One added touch to the art you’ll see indoors at Corbett is this nod to our friend Donovan Durband. As you stroll through the property keep an eye out for this touching memorial to him – forever a downtown advocate.

Host a Foreign Exchange Student

Education, Travel & Culture (ETC) is on the lookout for host families. The ETC folks will be bringing in high school students who will need a place to stay for the next 5 to 10 months. My in-laws often hosted youth and each time they were enriched by the experience.

Host families are expected to provide 3 meals per day, transportation to and from school and a bedroom/study area. ETC students are allowed to share a bedroom with another teen of the same gender and roughly the same age.

The incoming students will all speak English, they’ll range from 14 to 18 years of age, they’ll provide their own spending money and health insurance, and their goal is to integrate into your family. Cross-pollinating cultures is the main goal of the program. And one member of the host family can earn the Presidential Volunteer Service Award – a nice addition to college and job applications.

If you’d like more information on this program, please contact Gianne Francisco soon. The slots will fill up. Gianne advises me that the students will represent 13 different countries. Talk about it with your family. I’ve met some students from the far east and from Denmark – all brought more to the experience than what effort it cost to host them. Gianne can be reached at gfrancisco@edutrav.org or call 626.483.2417.

Tucson Plastic Program

When you make a program available to the public 24/7 it invites a wide kind of community involvement. Last week we had a couple of examples of the kind of involvement we’d prefer would find other ways to spend their time.

Do you know this guy? If so, please let us at the ward 6 office know how to find him. At about 11:30pm last Wednesday night he tossed an accelerant into the plastics bin and started a pretty significant fire.

Here’s the 911 call, and the TFD response. You can see that the call came in at 11:33pm. By 11:42pm the fire was ‘under control.’ Great work by our Tucson Fire crew. I’ve provided the video evidence of the guy to Tucson Police.

This is a screen shot of the fire right after the jerk set it. You can see the pile of debris that he had pulled out of the bin looking for a bottle to use as his torch/fuse. In the video we see him filling one of the bottles with some liquid. He then walks around to the south side of the bin, the flames erupt and he’s outta there.

The bin was replaced by noon on Thursday. Thanks to our Environmental Services team for jumping on this so quickly and keeping the donation flow moving.

Sadly, though a part of that donation flow was somebody tossing in an oil can that clearly was nearly full. We tell people that they don’t need to put cottage cheese containers through the dishwasher – the ByFusion process will clean those small bits of contaminants. But really? A nearly full container of motor oil? Whoever tossed it in certainly had to notice it wasn’t empty.

The result was contaminating about 900 pounds of the otherwise usable load of plastics, and the need to do major cleanup work at the drop site to avoid runoff of the oil into the soil. 

Periodically we have to shut down Household Hazardous Waste and neighborhood recycle centers because people start fires and leave what are simply inappropriate materials in the bins. We got both last Wednesday/Thursday. This note to the hundreds of you who do it right – Thank You. We won’t let a few ruin the hard work and community involvement of the many.

Addressing plastic pollution is an international issue. According to the U.N. over ¾ of plastic waste comes from municipal solid waste streams. Where does it end up? Far too often in the oceans and other bodies of water. It degrades the environment and by killing marine life of all forms it also degrades the biodiversity found in the ocean. Marine and coastal wildlife either get tangled up in the stuff, or mistake it for food and ingest it, with the predictably fatal outcome.

This is a photo of a group of volunteers who are cleaning plastic from a river. I think you’ll be surprised to learn that these folks are cleaning the Tisza River in Hungary. They’re taking part in an annual competition in which groups spend 10 days collecting as much plastic waste as they can from Hungarian waterways and end up comparing notes at the end to see who gathered the most.

The groups gather the same sorts of things we find in our own waterways; muddy plastic bottles, waterlogged chunks of other plastic packaging material – you know. You’re bringing it to us at the ward office. They pile into canoes and do their dredging by hand. Since they started doing this back in 2013 the Hungarian Plastic Cup competition has gathered more than 330 tons of waste from their rivers. 

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that internationally there are roughly 430 million metric tons of plastic produced each year. With no changes in our use of single-use plastics that figure is projected to triple by 2060. Most of the plastics we produce are single use, or very short-lived products. A U.N. forum held in Paris last May concluded by saying we can see an 80% reduction in plastic pollution by 2040 if we “rethink and redesign products, reusing, recycling, reorienting and diversifying markets and addressing the demand for durable plastics.” I agree that if we did all of that we’d see a reduction. I don’t expect it to happen.

Our ByFusion program is intended to touch one of those points – reusing the plastic that would otherwise become a pollutant. We appreciate the strong support you’ve given the program.

One group who is on board with the program is the Lions Club. They’re hosting their 100-year celebration at the Savoy Opera House in Trail Dust Town on Thursday, September 21^st. During the event they’ll be giving an award to the Tucson plastics effort. I’m looking forward to the event for a few reasons.

Reid Park Zoo Exhibit Naming 

Transit Comprehensive Operational Analysis (COA) 

Blue Lights at Intersections 

Housing Affordability 

Staff has said that we have the ‘tools in place’ to allow clusters of any of those homes to be built. They’re right. And each of those processes eats into the affordability of the end product. One of the problems we need to address is we over-define and over-regulate where a particular housing product can go based on the criteria you see in those definitions. I’ve suggested homogenizing them, so we aren’t being so restrictive.

One of the staff options we asked to advance is to initiate a code amendment related to the shelter care use in order to address existing zoning barriers. That could include reviewing where we allow ‘shelter’ units, differentiating between congregate shelters and non-congregate shelters, looking at the number of residents allowed and site issues such as minimum lot sizes, setbacks and that sort of thing. It’s a nice start, but I suggested going further. A few examples that I proposed include these:

• Right now, our codes call a tiny house with a sleeping loft a 1-bedroom unit. That means we require more parking than if it was considered a studio. That designation should be an easy change for us – it's a studio.
• Right now, if we have more than 2 units on a site, we designate the development as commercial. That kicks in commercial building codes which are more appropriate for a real business than for say 5 tiny houses sitting on a single lot. We should remove that commercial designation when we’re talking about a small tiny home village. It’s residential.
• Right now, if a project has shared parking, we call it a condo. That adds liabilities to the general contractor, which is resulting in few, if any projects being built that don’t have individual parking assigned by the unit. A community parking arrangement is still residential – our codes can reflect realistic parking requirements and eliminate the condo designation.
• The impact fees we charge for tiny homes is a significant cost item for builders. We should be able to look at what the actual ‘impacts’ of say a 120 square foot tiny house that has no plumbing and price that accordingly.
• We don’t require EV charging stations, greywater hook-ups and solar readiness for remodels of ADU’s. We shouldn’t require that for tiny home villages either.

What I suggested at the end of my comments during the study session was to consider beginning the process of tackling all of this by initiating an overlay. It’d be better to simply do a text amendment (amend the existing codes) that captures all of what we’re trying to achieve. Something such as an amendment saying “in all areas designated R2, R3, industrial, or mobile home zoning allow for small home development (to be defined) up to some # of units, address required parking, setbacks, open space and other requirements, allow for shared amenities such as shared laundry, kitchen, restroom facilities (so we’re addressing the ‘shelter’ restriction,)” - my intent in doing it this way is to put into code some by-right housing options where we’re already allowing multi-family development, but where our existing codes define the village clusters out of the conversation without rezoning processes.

The pilot project is nice. The problems we’re facing are much larger than what working through that project process will identify. I’ve just listed some of what we already know. My hope is that we take what we know and act on it in a comprehensive way and make changes that will have a meaningful impact on the housing affordability crisis we’re facing.

Memory Screening

I’m dealing with the challenges of finding care for my brother whose Aphasia has now progressed to the point where in-home care may soon no longer be an option. I know I’m not alone. Dementia is a real thing that families throughout the community are struggling to deal with. One way to be more prepared for what’s to come is to pro-actively take part in memory screening. It’s safe, easy and can give you some baseline insights into how your memory might be slowly changing over time.

The free memory screenings being offered by Dementia Capable Southern Arizona through our friends at PCOA (Pima Council on Aging, in case you forgot) are not diagnostic. They can help you decide whether you might be wise to get further evaluations from a clinician. The screenings can be done in person or even over the phone. Tracking changes over time is one way of perhaps alerting yourself and your family to a developing condition so you can have the important conversations now that may not be possible at later stages of the disease.

To get more information on the screenings you can call the PCOA helpline at 520.790.7262, or look on their website at https://www.pcoa.org/dementiareferral.

Sincerely,

Steve Kozachik
Council Member, Ward 6
ward6@tucsonaz.gov

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