Update on the Rottweiler (see entry "Good cop.").

I called Pima Animal Care Center last week to ask if they had received a Rottweiler from the police.  I've been told previously that when the police find stray house pets, they turn them in to PACC.  They said that none had been turned in that night or the next day by the police or anyone else.  The good news is that apparently, the dog did not end up at PACC.  Perhaps someone took on his case and tried to find his owner.  That's all I have and I wish the dog luck.

Petition-signing opportunities for Repeal the Main Gate Overlay at the 4th Ave. Street Fair!

(If you like what you read here, please post it on your wall complete with the link that leads to our blog so your friends can see it and remember to sign the petition at the fair.)

Hello, everyone, I just wanted to remind you and encourage you to let the citizens of Tucson know that petitioners for “Repeal the Main Gate Overlay” will be at the 4th Avenue Street Fair this weekend. I want to give you some insight into what it is all about. Yesterday, I was able to attend a petitioner training session, so you might see me at the fair as well because I will be there.

First of all, I am impressed with the stance the neighborhood has taken. It is not about whether or not the students get more housing, it is more about what kind of building will they be housed in and how detrimental that building could be to the surrounding neighborhood. The neighborhood wants the students to get the housing they need. They just want citizens to have a chance to vote on it, since it will be a fourteen-story building that encroaches on historical homes, makes the residents unhappy, requires a zone change that flies in the face of Tucson's culture, and is basically being dictated by someone in Chicago who does not understand Tucson.

One of the things that I noticed about the neighborhood's proposed plan (which was turned down) was that it looked a lot like the developer's plan--just with some very important changes. It spared historical buildings, it was not fourteen stories high but was still several stories, the building would staggers up in height as it gets closer to existing buildings, and it would not put a permanent shadow on some people's houses like the City of Tucson's version does. Residents do not necessarily want to stop the building, they just want it to be available for a vote and for it to be built according the the proper and zoning laws and with respect to the community.

The plan as it exists currently does not comply with the Department of the Interior's standards for development in a historic preservation zone.  It overrides national, state, and local historic preservation standards, and is even missing many standards.  To view the details, visit http://westuniversityneighborhood.org, scroll to the bottom, and click on the WUNA final document. Below are some illustrations of each plan so you can see for yourself what I just mentioned.

I decided to add the next section of material from the neighborhood association to this post for your edification. Please read it and if it matters to you, come down to the fair, have some fun, and sign the petition.

Talking Points for Repeal the Main Gate Overlay

ARE YOU A CITY of TUCSON REGISTERED VOTER? Do you know your Ward number?

DO YOU CARE ABOUT PRESERVING HISTORIC NEIGHBORHOODS IN TUCSON?

Mayor & council passed an overlay/rezoning in West University that affects all historic neighborhoods in the city. It does not comply with Department of the Interior standards for development in an historic preservation zone. It overrides national, state and local historic preservation standards. This overlay zoning allows for fourteen buildings up to fourteen stories high (159' or 50' higher than the Marriott). It imperils more than a dozen historic structures by creating incentives for demolition of historic properties, replacing them with buildings up to 84 feet high. COT has created high hurdles for historic demolition for a regular citizen but made it doable for a developer. Mayor and council’s overlay (rezoning) has given a developer the green light to build a fourteen-story high-rise near the corner of Park Avenue and Speedway Boulevard. There have been no major impact studies completed for this rezoning. Who will pay for the infrastructure costs? The public?

One developer paid for a minor traffic study and has funded the urban overlay design and the lawyer who wrote it. Speedway is already rated as a “failing” street and there have been no sewer or water studies. The City of Tucson, developers, and the West University NA were in discussion for the past eight months AND the plan was just developed in the last three months after mayor and council voted in the Plan Amendment at the December meeting.  Heights and historic properties were included after the Call to the Audience was over and the recommendation went to M&C.

We do not want to stop development. We do want the public to have an opportunity to vote on it and to have proper impact studies done prior to starting. We ask mayor and council to consider the West University alternative area plan which allows for heights (up to ten stories) near Park Ave. and change of use and preservation for historic properties. We do want the city to develop a winning plan with proper studies and relativity to neighboring areas.

“Repeal the Main Gate Overlay”:  As you may have heard, the folks from West University are in the middle of trying to repeal the rezoning of the Main Gate District. Previously most of this the area was height-limited to forty feet. The current zoning now allows buildings of up to 159 feet. While not all of the buildings will be that tall, eventually we will see at least one fourteen-story building a half-block away from existing historic owner-occupied residential. Several others are proposed for the area along Park Ave. where Posner’s Art Store is currently, and also along Tyndall Ave. from Speedway on south.

Why are we going to all this effort and expense to fight the rezoning? We have three basic objections to the rezoning as it was passed by Mayor and Council.

Number one is the process: This project was fast-tracked to meet the time frame of an out-of-town developer trying to meet a construction schedule that has his building open for business in the fall of 2013. Unfortunately the rezoning isn’t just for this one project. It encompasses a twelve-block area from Park Ave. west to Euclid Ave. Much of what was rezoned won’t be built for years. What’s troubling about this is that zoning hearings are one of the few places neighborhoods can voice concerns and guide projects. Sure, we’ve been able to speak out now, but nobody knows what will get built in the future—and once a project does go forward, there will not be any public discussion. Let’s put a number on “fast-tracked”:  From a City Council study session in June 2011 to a rezoning on February 28, 2012. The actual rezoning process was much shorter, initiated by Mayor and Council in mid-December 2011, finalized February 28, 2012.

Objection two:  Scale and context. What that means is, “How does what gets built work with what is already there?” Buildings have to relate to their surroundings. Remembering that this is a rezoning intended to support the Modern Streetcar project, so it’s important to create community in a larger context, not destroy it to replace it with another.

The final objection is that large portions of the area rezoned are in a City of Tucson Historic Protection Zone, or HPZ. There are five HPZs in the city of Tucson: Armory Park, El Presidio, Barrio Viejo, Fort Lowell, and West University. An HPZ is a cohesive area with large numbers of historic structures. It’s an area that we as a city have identified as being worth preserving, and because of this we have adopted protections that encourage the preservation of the buildings in an HPZ. The Main Gate District creates an economic incentive for demolition of historic properties within the HPZ by allowing a historic building that is demolished to be replaced by a building of significantly higher density and therefore higher economic value to the property owner. Why pit the interests of historic preservation and development against each other? Why not craft an ordinance that encourages adaptive re-use and encourages a collaborative process between developers and preservationists?

Find me on Facebook!

Hey blog readers, I'm just reminding you with some shameless self-promotion: If you like what you read here, please log into Facebook and search for me there under "Carl Fiske Exist Kind Tucson" (those are search terms, not my URL).  Thanks!

If you keep reading the blog for long enough, you'll get to see me look like this again :)  (I plant to cut my hair short again and grow it long all over again in approximately two-year cycles.  It's fun and provides me with a variety of looks that help me connect to a wider range of people.)

Good cop.

Tonight, we spent the evening helping another Access Tucson producer and preparing some more of our flyers for distribution, so we were out around town for a few hours.  While we were out, I saw a stray dog loose in the street at a major intersection.  He wasn't paying any attention to the traffic and just managing to avoid it.  He was black and tan in color, so he really blended in with the nighttime street lit by sodium-vapor lights.  He was moving quickly and none of the traffic was stopping for him, unlike Chewy, the last dog I rescued.  He made his way to a parking lot on the corner, so I followed him there to see if he had a tag so I could call his owner.  He turned out to be a large male Rottweiler.  By then, he seemed a little tired and maybe thirsty.  A lot of people in the parking lot were concerned for him and one person even gave me some bread to give to him.  I couldn't really get near him, though, since he was pretty skittish.  Another man and I were able keep him in between us so that he wouldn't escape, but the man was probably about twenty years older than I, so I was doing most of the fast footwork.

I saw the dog sniff around and snap up a couple of food items from the ground (I didn't see what they were), and eventually he took up the bread I tossed to him.  Someone had called 911, so we waited for the police to arrive.  I ended up calling the police as well to get them to come more quickly, since it was hard to keep the dog in place.  An officer arrived shortly after my call and he turned out to be tall, lean, and strong, but I think he was still at risk because the dog could have gotten him with his teeth (he was a Rottweiler, after all).  The dog tried to run away once the officer appeared on the scene, so I had to block him again.  He seemed to have more energy this time and was moving with a greater sense of urgency.  I had to think twice about trying to block him, but I decided that he was more afraid than dangerous.  The officer and I kept him between us and the officer tried to lasso him with some kind of short leash.

At this point, keeping the dog between us started to resemble a soccer game and became even more difficult.  I had to repeatedly dart one way and then the other--like a cutting horse in a rodeo, actually.  The dog seemed to gravitate towards the officer, who was calling to him and trying to be friendly.  Being friendly didn't work, though, and he had to start issuing commands (like "sit", "down", and "stay").  The dog was able to sit and stay, fortunately, and the officer put the leash on him.  It looked like it was going smoothly until the dog really got wild and started pulling on the leash and wildly trying to escape.  He had no intention of giving up and I was afraid for the officer's safety.  The officer looked like he was getting either a taser or a gun ready, so I was pretty worried for the dog's safety, too.  Thankfully, the officer kept it controlled enough and tried to calm the dog as well as he could while still issuing commands.  The leash seemed to be some kind of choking device that didn't release when the dog pulled on it.  He cut off his own air supply and fell to the ground--not a pretty sight.  The officer maintained his cool and as soon as the dog was in kind of a twilight state, he risked putting his hand right near the dog's mouth in order to release the collar and restore the dog's normal breathing.

After all of that, the dog was calm and even friendly, and the officer was able to calmly bring him into his cruiser.  I was impressed by both the officer's sense of restraint and his bravery in risking injury to get the job done.  I told him as much, that he was brave, and that I was glad he was able to round up the dog without injury to either of them.  He said that it was better than the dog getting hit by a car.

I hated to see the dog captured in this way because he's likely to end up at Pima Animal Care Center.  Nonetheless, I'm glad that he was contained so that he couldn't get hurt or killed, or cause injury to a motorist.  He was so determined to run around on six-lane Broadway that he would most likely have gotten killed.  I'd like to give a hearty thumbs-up to the police officer for being brave enough to risk injury for the sake of the safety of the dog and others.  It was important for him to show the restraint that he did, too.  Another dog rescue well done!  Here's hoping that his ultimate fate is a good one.  I'll be alerting my dog rescue network to try to influence this.

Flyer distribution tonight.

Tonight we'll be distributing our flyers about Repeal the Main Gate Overlay to the residents of the West University Neighborhood.  I still need to post a copy of the full flyer on the blog, but in the meantime, here's a small part of our supply that will be unloaded tonight.

Helping to attract citizens to the Main Gate Overlay cause.

I've drafted a flyer to distribute around the West University neighborhood this weekend as a way to help organize people in support of Repeal the Main Gate Overlay.  I'll post a digital version here once it's finished and I plan to get the hard copies tomorrow, Saturday.  Stand by ...

The Influence of a Third Party on Individual Citizens

The entry I just posted discussed an expansion upon one of the issues addressed in my most recent episode of Exist Kind.  Here, I'd like to in turn tell you a little more about the show itself.

My guests were Beryl Baker, Kent Solberg, and John Kromko.  As I said before, Beryl had seen some of my work under the Exist Kind umbrella and was impressed such that she asked for my help with her campaign for office.  She ran for City Council on the Green Party ticket last year.  She presented a lot of very common-sense ideas and promised that if she got very few votes, then that must mean that few citizens care about the issues that she cares about.  Well, she took an unprecedented 34% of the vote--that's over one third--so a lot of citizens proved that they did share her concerns.  She gave Beth and me a lot of credit for doing so well, so we promised to get together again in the future to get some more political ideas and messages out there.  I invited her, Kent, and John to a panel discussion on Saturday, the 10th in Studio A.

Kent Solberg also ran for political office at one time as a member of the Green Party.  In 2007, he ran for the Arizona House of Representatives and though he did not take office, he has continued to stay politically active.  John Kromko was a Democrat in the state legislature from 1976 to 1990, where he took an aggressive, progressive role in his representation of his constituents.  One of his major accomplishments was getting the state to adopt Medicaid in 1982, which doubtlessly has saved lives.

Together, we touched on a number of topics that related both to Tucson politics and longer-range concerns for Americans in general.  These topics included the following:

*appropriate allocations of RTA (Regional Transportation Authority) money

*the necessity of maintaining a city's core

*the importance of grassroots citizen involvement

*threats to citizen involvement and ways minimize them (thus keeping the power with the people)

*whether it is better to build a very limited downtown streetcar system or use the money for improving the existing bus system that serves the area as far out as the suburbs

*the question of whether or not the auto industry would support the streetcar (as it does currently) if industry leaders believed that it would actually make a significant difference

*Repeal the Main Gate Overlay (initiative of the West University Neighborhood against an incomplete process of finding agreement over an upcoming development)

We also rolled in the video of my interview with John Patterson of Repeal the Main Gate Overlay.  Below is a still from the show.  I was unable to embed the video itself here, so under the picture is the link to the YouTube clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAwVCVQtd_Q)

"No Way Overlay!" (Repeal the Main Gate Overlay)

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to interview a resident of Tucson's West University neighborhood who is part of an effort to correct an incomplete process that was used to push development through.  John Patterson is part of Repeal the Main Gate Overlay and is helping to collect signatures for a petition that ends with the end of the month.  West University is a historic neighborhood of Craftsman bungalows to the west of the U of A, and an out-of-town developer succeeded in convincing the City of Tucson of the urgency of getting his out-of-place project into the neighborhood as quickly as possible.  This caused residents to be left out of the planning process and impact studies to be skipped over.  The residents may well have agreed to the high-rise development IF they'd had a chance to participate in the process.

I was connected with John and this situation through local community leader Beryl Baker.  Beryl had seen some of my work under the Exist Kind umbrella and was impressed such that she asked for my help with her campaign for office.  As you may recall from my post on October 17, 2011, she ran for City Council on the Green Party ticket.  She presented a lot of very common-sense ideas and promised that if she got very few votes, then that must mean that few citizens care about the issues that she cares about.  Well, she took an unprecedented 34% of the vote--that's over one third--so a lot of citizens proved that they did share her concerns.  She gave Beth and me a lot of credit for doing so well, so we promised to get together again in the future to get some more political ideas and messages out there.  "The future" came this month when she brought us into touch with John and a couple of other local leaders working to get things done in Tucson.  So, I'd like you to see one result of this over on my YouTube channel.  Here's the video of my "No Way Overlay" interview:

(If the above link doesn't work, follow this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv7r6ZY1Tt8)

Later that day, we broadcasted my regular programming live from Access Tucson and talked about this, as well as other current issues in Tucson.  See the next blog entry for a link to that and more details.

By the way, work like this costs us a good amount of money for raw materials and fuel used for promotional and publicity efforts.  If you would be so kind, I'd like to direct you to the front page of my website, www.existkind.com, and ask you to scroll down to the small button that says "Make a Donation".  Please consider helping us out with what we spend on printer ink, paper, fuel, video equipment repair, and the like.  Thank you very much!

Upcoming show episode: A perspective from someone other than the Democrats or Republicans.

I'm excited about the next episode of my show and how it seems to be coming together.  Over the years, I've felt that a major third political party would really benefit American politics.  In various aspects of life, I've concluded that when there are only two strongly competing sides to an issue, they tend to lock horns and end up in a stagnant stalemate, and this carries over to America's political system that is dominated by two big parties.  Adding a third or even fourth element can break up this impasse because if two parties lock and fail to make progress, the external elements will gain ground right under their noses.  This negative stalemate thus becomes too costly for those engaged because the external forces will just outperform them.

The idea of a strong third political party, such as the Green Party, has had its ups and downs over the years and people have doubted its success, including myself at times.  However, nowadays, our two-party system has become what many would consider to be dysfunctional to the point at which we would do well to give more merit to third parties and those that do not necessarily closely resemble the dominant parties.  My own thinking on this led me to invite Green Party member Beryl Baker back to the show, along with a couple of other local members.  I consider myself largely independent, as opposed to partisan, so it's my pleasure to present a variety of perspectives.  In addition to Beryl, I'll be joined by former Arizona House of Representatives candidate Kent Solberg and former state legislator John Kromko.  We'll take a look at the current state of things from a reasoned, critical point of view and review Beryl and Kent's achievements as they put themselves out there in their respective runs for office.

I'm excited for this show and I'll post more updates as it takes shape.  You can bet you'll be watching this promising show on YouTube after the fact.  Catch you later!