Vice Mayor Paul Cunningham

Envision Tucson Sustainable Festival provides a popular annual event that brings together individuals, organizations, and companies in our community who are working to help us not just envision but also create a resilient future for Tucson and Southern Arizona.
 

Tucson lost one of its finest citizens this week. Roger Tamietti, former Tucson Fire Department captain, union leader and friend to many of us passed away on Wednesday morning after cancer surgery.

I came into this job with a lot of swagger, but I was quickly overwhelmed. I met Roger on my third day. He was the friendliest guy of any of the people I had met in that first week, and the only one that made me feel like I was up to the job. He had a way of making everyone around him comfortable. It was his gift, and not one that you will find many people have.

Tucson Electric Power is developing plans for a new transmission line to help serve growing energy needs. The project would help Davis-Monthan Air Force Base satisfy its energy resiliency requirements and improve electric reliability for customers in Tucson.

TEP must determine a route for the Irvington-East Loop 138 Kilovolt Transmission Line, which will connect the Irvington Substation to the East Loop Substation. The line also must interconnect with the planned Port and Patriot substations. TEP has identified potential routes within a revised, expanded study area.

In 2015, with the help of $180,000 in support from Friends of Saguaro National Park, Saguaro National Park replaced the 55-year old interpretive exhibits in the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center with new, bilingual exhibits to help visitors understand the story of Saguaro National Park and appreciate the connection between people and place. Unlike the (newer) Red Hills Visitor Center in the Tucson Mountain District, the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center has no outdoor interpretive space- where rangers can provide interpretive talks to visitors and school groups.

To assist residents with property protection from potential heavy rain due to Tropical Storm Lorena, the City of Tucson Transportation Department will reopen its sandbag distribution site on Friday, September 20, 2019, at 2 p.m. in the east parking lot of Hi Corbett Field, 700 S. Randolph Way, at Reid Park. At this location, sand and sandbags will be provided. Residents should bring their own shovel and be prepared to fill their own sandbags.

The Arizona Daily Star ran a feature this weekend on families that are in Section 8 housing that are facing losing their homes as landlords turn away from wanting tenants that use the program.

There are a number of reasons why this is happening, and they run the gamut from the way the program has been administered at the federal level to the lack of affordable housing stock despite the amount of new development we’ve had in recent years.