Vice Mayor Paul Cunningham

Wednesday, a mob that was incited by President Trump stormed the United States Capitol in an effort to block the ratification of a legally constituted election. We’ve had a Presidential election during the Civil War, one during the Spanish Flu epidemic and one during World War II, but this was the first time anyone has threatened our free and fair elections, the foundation of American democracy. 

Ramón Gonzáles passed away last week. You may have read a little bit about him given the number of tributes that have gone out. R

Southern Arizona hosts the world’s largest optical telescope and 10% of all the world’s largest telescopes. The Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution and NASA, along with US universities and foreign institutions, invest tens of millions of dollars annually in the operation and upgrade of the Southern Arizona observatories.

One of our great Ward 2 faith leaders, Rev. Owen Chandler, will be resigning his post at Saguaro Christian Church at the beginning of next year.

The reason for his leaving the post fit in with what I know about his sense of duty. He’s a US Army reservist and has deployed in the past. He is now being asked to switch from the reserve component to the active component.

My office has gotten a lot of feedback about the plans for zoo expansion and how it will affect the south pond at Reid Park, the smaller of the two ponds. My staff and I have been working with both Reid Park Zoo and the Parks and Recreation Department on an informative, comprehensive response to your questions. I thought I’d share our office’s response as part of this newsletter: 

After the two in custody deaths of Carlos Ingram Lopez and Damian Alvarado, TPD opened up a process called a “Sentinel Event Review Board” which took a month to examine what went wrong in those cases. The analysis included everything from how our 911 center is staffed to how certain types of equipment are deployed to the attitudes and training of our officers.

There’s been a lot of national talk about mail-in ballots, but what gets lost in our local discussion is how long we’ve been doing mail-in ballots here in Arizona. Back in the 90’s the requirements were loosened for what were then called absentee ballots. Since then, Arizonans have been voting by mail in large numbers, usually close to 75% of the total vote. The fact that so many voters were voting by mail was among the reasons that Tucson decided to move to an all-mail system for city elections, leaving only a few polling places to staff for so few election day voters.