Crude oil prices peaked over $70 a barrel for the first time on Monday. Gas prices could be soaring past $3 a gallon by this weekend, and $4 or $5 by January. The devastation wrought on the people of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina has also destroyed a large part of the nation’s oil refining [...]

A couple of years ago I flew former Portland Transportation Commissioner Charlie Hales to Tucson to talk to folks about the economic benefits of the Modern Streetcar and Light Rail. He talked a little about how Portland developers thought differently from those from other places.
“Most developers get up in the morning,” Charlie said, “and think, [...]

I’ve served for the last seven months on the Citizens’ Advisory Committee of the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), a body of 35 people from across the region, representing many different interests & backgrounds. All of us are dedicated to creating a regional transportation plan which can fix current problems, set a tone for the future, [...]

Most reasonable leaders from John McCain to Raul Grijalva now agree that global warming is a major threat to our environment and economy, and we need to act yesterday to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases at every level to avoid disaster. But President Bush announced this week at the G-8 summit that reducing greenhouse gases [...]

An excellent Star front-page article today tells us the story of Dorothy Gooding, a 92-year-old whose driver’s license was revoked. “When they took my wheels, they cut off my legs,” Gooding said. “I felt trapped.”
By 2010, almost one-third of our residents will be seniors, and almost one-half of them will be unable to drive. In [...]

In the same week that Fred is dealing with the major issues facing our city by declaring an “Elephant Crisis”, the Star informs us that we have no choice but to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to drink sewage water direct from our taps in the very near future.
Fred is already on record approving [...]

As a public artist, I get around the country quite a bit to see how other fast-growing communities are dealing with their growth and planning for the future. It is frustrating and disappointing to return home to my beloved Tucson and find most of our leaders — political and business — with their heads in [...]

In the 1960s, dark forces of money & power converged on our historic Downtown–a 150-year-old neighborhood of homes and small businesses–and bulldozed the homes of thousands of people who had lived there for generations. What did we get there in return? TCC and La Placita, which have limped along for decades, weighed down by the [...]

We love the Ward 6 Weekly; a propaganda email from Fred to his constituents, funded by taxpayers, where we can try to understand what Fred really means behind the happy-friendly-vague words he types. This week’s edition has a few good examples of Fred-speak that I’ll proceed to deconstruct for your reading pleasure.
Fred is [...]