Recent Posts
Sahuarita’s city council elected a new mayor this week, choosing a newer council member to replace 12-year councilmember Lynne Skelton. Skelton has been on the council since 1999, and she’ll continue to serve as a council member after her reelection to another four-year term this year. The new town mayor, Duane Blumberg, was elected to Sahuarita’s Town Council two years ago.
The South Tucson City Council is scheduled to elect one of its seven members as mayor June 20. The current mayor is Jennifer Eckstrom, who was reelected to the council this year. She’s been a South Tucson councilmember for 16 years and served as mayor for 6 of those years.
In the city of Tucson, where voters elect a mayor directly, Bob Walkup is not seeking reelection, so someone new will take the seat late this year.
Mayors of the local jurisdictions usually have duties beyond their town limits. They make decisions about regional issues while serving on the Pima Association of Governments and Regional Transportation Authority boards.
Sahuarita
South-Tucson
Tucson,
June 17th 2011 at 10:43 —
c (0) —
K—
f
g
k
State Senators Al Melvin and Frank Antenori said during an interview today there's no rift between Legislative Republicans and the party's top elected official, Gov. Jan Brewer.
The question came up during an interview about the party's failure to extend unemployment benefits this week during a special legislative session. Brewer asked them to make the change, but they ended the two-day session without passing an extension. This followed a regular session in which she vetoed some of the party's high-profile bills.
Why, then, aren't the Legislature and the governor on the same page? Any rift, the senators said, is between Republican legislators and the governor's staff, not her personally.
Watch the full interview about the special session tonight on Arizona Illustrated, KUAT channel 6, or online.
June 16th 2011 at 15:18 —
c (0) —
K—
f
g
k
Arizona benefits from the Fiesta Bowl and related sports and community events to the tune of $250 million a year, and that increases to $400 million in the years the state hosts the college football championship game, a university economist said.
Dennis Hoffman, professor in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, said his team will complete its report on this year's Fiesta Bowl and Bowl Championship Series game within a week and turn it over to bowl officials. It is expected to show an impact in the same range as four years ago, which was $400 million, Hoffman said in an interview for Arizona Week.
This spring, the Fiesta Bowl board of directors fired executive director John Junker after an audit report showed misspending on entertainment, including in one case at a Phoenix strip club, attempts at political influence and a $30,000 birthday party Junker threw for himself.
The bowl this week hired University of Arizona President Robert Shelton as executive director, saying he is the right person to bring back credibility, respectability and accountability to the bowl.
Will the scandal hurt the economic power of the Fiesta Bowl? Hoffman was asked.
"Bad PR is bad PR, and it certainly leaves an imprint at some level," he said. "How to measure that is certainly challenging."
Hoffman said that with Shelton coming on board, the Fiesta Bowl ought to regain stature as it cleans up its books and reestablishes fiscal responsibility.
June 16th 2011 at 14:34 —
c (0) —
K—
f
g
k
Maricopa County elections officials have verified as valid more than enough signatures on petitions to trigger a recall election for Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, the Arizona Capitol Times reports.
Elections officials said more than 8,239 signatures collected by Citizens for a Better Arizona have been validated; the group needed 7,756 valid signatures to trigger the recall. Another 3,500 or so signatures must be checked.
The recall election against Pearce, a most willing lightning rod and protagonist for conservative Republicans leading the state Legislature, could occur as early as this November.
His district is in a heavily Republican part of Mesa.
June 15th 2011 at 15:38 —
c (0) —
K—
f
g
k
By DIANA SOKOLOVA, Arizona Week intern
Robert Shelton will get a slight increase in total compensation when he leaves the presidency of the University of Arizona to become executive director of the Fiesta Bowl.
Shelton now earns $470,000 in base salary, a $50,000 housing bonus and another $94,600 in benefits, according to the Arizona Republic. At the Fiesta Bowl, he will be paid $455,000 in base salary, plus benefits that will bring his total compensation to $620,000, the Fiesta Bowl says.
Fired Fiesta Bowl executive director John Junker made $673,88 in fiscal 2010. He was fired after being accused of excessive spending and questionable spending for political influence.
The bowl’s economic impact in Arizona is more than $230 million a year, according to a report in the Arizona Republic. During the bowl’s 41-year history, the Fiesta Bowl and its surrounding events have generated more than $3 billion in economic impact in the state, the Fiesta Bowl estimated.
The Fiesta Bowl organization oversees two annual college football bowl games, the Fiesta Bowl and the Insight Bowl, and 40 other events. It also is part of the collegiate Bowl Championship Series network, hosting the national collegiate football championship every four years.
The Fiesta Bowl reports that in its 41-year history, more than 3 million out-of-state visitors have traveled to Arizona for it and surrounding events. The Fiesta Bowl has hosted a record seven national championship games.
The BCS national championship game drew 78,603 to University of Phoenix Stadium in January, the biggest crowd in the stadium's history, the Fiesta Bowl reported.
June 15th 2011 at 12:15 —
c (0) —
K—
f
g
k
By DIANA SOKOLOVA, Arizona Week intern
Wildfires are ravaging Arizona’s wilderness, chasing thousands from their homes, closing popular high-country cool spots and draining money from already hard-pressed governmental agencies.
A carelessly tended campfire, a tossed cigarette butt or a lightning strike are blamed. But the cause is much bigger and the responsibility of many.
Arizona Week on Friday will explore the forest management, environmental and political decisions behind the state’s vulnerability to large-scale, virtually unstoppable fires.
A human-caused wildfire burning for 15 days in eastern Arizona’s high country and now moving into New Mexico is likely to become the largest fire in state history. The Wallow Fire, named for the Bear Wallow Wilderness in which it started in the White Mountains, already has burned 452,000 acres in eastern Arizona’s high country, destroying 29 homes and other structures.
The Horseshoe 2 Fire in southeastern Arizona has been burning for more than five weeks, consuming 148,000 acres and has damaged or destroyed nine homes and 14 outbuildings.
Several other fires also are burning in the state. No human life has been lost.
These and other wildfires seem unrelenting, but should they be?
“Trying to exclude fire in naturally fire-prone places only stirs up an ecological insurgency,” fire management expert Stephen J. Pyne wrote in an op-ed piece for Sunday’s Arizona Republic. Pyne is a professor at the School of Life Sciences at the Arizona State University.
National Geographic magazine backgrounds the country’s wildfire situation on its Website, reporting that more than 100,000 fires burn 4 million to 5 million acres on average in the United States every year.
Although wildfires are catastrophic and expensive to humans, they play an essential role in nature and are considered to be necessary.
In his Arizona Republic article, Pyne discussed several approaches to prevent wildfires. Letting fires burn freely in the backcountry, “is cheap, safe and ecologically benign.” Another method is setting so called prescribed fires. It can help prevent wildfires and do the required ecological work of removing undergrowth, brush, and clean forests from litter. Large-scale landscaping along with building roads can change the behavior of fires.
Each of these approaches is doomed to failure if used on its own, Pyne said. What is needed, he said, is a mixture of strategies, adjusted to particular places, from both ecological and political rationales.
June 13th 2011 at 15:23 —
c (0) —
K—
f
g
k
