Thursday, October 14, 2021
Wednesday, October 13, 2021
WASHINGTON – Arizona projects got $110 million last year and will get another $159 million in the fiscal year that started this month, or more than 9% of all funding nationally under the Great American Outdoors Act for those two years.
The money, dedicated largely to national parks but also to federal lands and tribal schools, has been welcomed by tourism and environmental groups, who said it is long overdue.
“The National Park Service has been underfunded over the years,” said Kevin Dahl, senior program manager for Arizona in the National Parks Conservation Association’s Southwest region.
“These are our jewels, and with visitation and with normal wear and tear, there’s a lot of buildings, a lot of roads, trails, etc. and those all need regular maintenance,” he said. “When you don’t maintain them over time, the backlog of maintenance becomes pretty high.”
For national parks, the backlog of deferred maintenance totaled $11.9 billion in 2018, according to data from the National Park Service. More than $507.4 million of that was for projects in Arizona, with $313.8 million needed in the Grand Canyon National Park alone.
Joe Galli, senior adviser in public policy at the Greater Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce, said the funding is critical to not just the park, but the region.
“It’s very good for improving facilities and maintenance, and enhancing the visitors’ experience, those things are critical to the lifeblood of visitation in Arizona which is a critical component of our economy,” he said.
Tuesday, October 12, 2021
‘Unstoppable’ Kari Lake? Former news anchor has Trump’s endorsement and is packing them in a year before the 2022 election On a warm Saturday evening, several hundred people milled around the Old West-style trappings of Frontier Town in Cave Creek, waiting for Kari Lake to take the stage.
The rally was held to “Back the Blue,” and the crowd shared the pro-law enforcement sentiment. But more than anything, they were there to back Lake in her bid to become Arizona’s next governor.
It was a stunning show of support for a candidate for governor — for anything, really — at a time when few voters are even paying attention to an election that is 13 months away.
Lake has spent the past several months barnstorming the state, packing people in for her campaign events. In Cave Creek on Oct. 2, it was several hundred. A couple weeks earlier, more than 50 people crowded into SoZo Coffeehouse in Chandler on a Tuesday morning. The crowd would be considered large for just about any candidate, but one volunteer said it was the smaller Lake events he’d seen recently.
“I’ve never seen hundreds of people go to an event over a year out,” said Tyler Montague, a longtime Republican operative from the East Valley.
Few, if any, political operatives in Arizona have ever seen anything like Lake. When she left Fox 10 after 27 years as a news anchor in March, she recorded a video declaring that she walked away because she had to read news she didn’t believe was truthful and no longer felt proud to be a member of the media. Three months later, she launched her campaign for governor. Since then, she’s become a phenomenon: shooting into the lead in the crowded gubernatorial primary, confounding her opponents and surging to the front of the field with a populist conservative message and 27 years’ worth of name ID from her career in television.
Monday, October 11, 2021
TEMPE – It all started over a bowl of “medicinal menudo,” a term political cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz coined as part of a running joke.
Several years ago, during a convention at Harvard University, social scientist Gilberto Lopez took Alcaraz to a spot that served the Mexican beef tripe soup. Thankful for the meal – and the dish’s reputed abilities to alleviate hangovers – Alcaraz told Lopez, “I owe you my life.”
The menudo forged a bond between Lopez and Alcaraz, who has consulted on popular TV shows and films and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 and 2021. During the pandemic, Lopez invited Alcaraz to collaborate on a Hispanic-focused education campaign about COVID-19 prevention and vaccinations.
Lopez, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s School of Transborder Studies, launched the COVID Latino project with the goal of using art and social media to disseminate information – and counter misinformation – about COVID-19 throughout the Southwest.
The effort brings together experts from Arizona and California’s Central Valley, home to many Hispanic farmworkers, and provides culturally relevant campaigns by way of the internet and social media.
The project so far has included animated public service announcements in Spanish and neighborhood murals to better connect with the hard-hit Latino population.
Lopez said the project stemmed from his frustration over the type of information being circulated in rural, Hispanic communities – “very technical, very jargony information.” Through the collaboration with artists, Lopez said, the resulting pieces are easier to share online and will help make the topic more digestible.
“Humans are storytellers,” Lopez said, “and we’re telling stories in a way people understand.”
Friday, October 8, 2021
WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans on Thursday objected to a move by the Justice Department to investigate violent threats made against local school board members and teachers, arguing that the federal agency is “policing the speech of citizens and concerned parents.”
“Violence and true threats of violence should have no place in our civic discourse, but parents should absolutely be involved in public debates over what and how our public schools teach their children, even if those discussions get heated,” according to a letter led by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week directed the FBI to meet with local governments and law enforcement officials to probe increasingly frequent clashes at school board meetings over mask mandates and discussions of race in public schools. His action followed a Sept. 29 plea for help from the National School Boards Association to President Joe Biden, in which school meetings in Georgia, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Virginia, Wisconsin, Tennessee and Nevada were cited.
“As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” the association said.
“As the threats grow and news of extremist hate organizations showing up at school board meetings is being reported, this is a critical time for a proactive approach to deal with this difficult issue,” the letter added.
But the GOP senators said that it was “entirely inappropriate” for the association to ask for a review of whether crimes are being committed under various statutes, including the PATRIOT Act, which is aimed at deterring terrorism.
“We urge you to make very clear to the American public that the Department of Justice will not interfere with the rights of parents to come before school boards and speak with educators about their concerns, whether regarding coronavirus-related measures, the teaching of critical race theory in schools, sexually explicit books in schools, or any other topic,” they wrote.
