"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!