Arizona ignores its water problems
Did you get a flyer telling you to conserve water?
Home building fees have been lowered. Subdivisions offer 100-year water guarantees. So don’t tell me water matters.
Some people are just trying to scare us. Ever read of the water company entering into conversations of a shortage?
Benson wants to build a 28,000-home subdivision. Vail a 500-home subdivision. An organization wants to pay people to come here.
Other states are making sure they get what’s needed in hard times, but ours, nah, we have plenty of water.
Have counties or the state made laws specifying new homes need separate clean water systems so dirty water could be used to water plants? Have counties or the state specified new homes built to harvest rain water?
This state is only interested in new businesses and more people, not water. Please don’t tell me about water problems because the way the state and counties are acting we don’t have a problem.
Jose Salgado
Northeast side
Kelly Townsend: Arizonan, hypocrite
House Bill 2569 increases my running list of voter suppression bills in Arizona to 23. Republicans are complaining that Mark Zuckerberg gave counties money to fund their election administration.
Election administration is not partisan. It provides drop boxes, drive-thru voting, clean polling places, equipment, etc.
State Rep. Kelly Townsend, a Republican from Mesa, argues that “if we wouldn’t be OK with international contributions to our elections, why should we be OK if it’s a millionaire or a billionaire?”
This argument is surprising and not genuine since Townsend attended the 2020 annual conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council, known by its acronym ALEC.
ALEC is a secretive political influence conduit that crafts model bills on behalf of sponsoring corporations and millionaires and billionaires and passes these model bills along to state legislators who are members.
This amounts to corporations, millionaires and billionaires, writing the laws that we live under. How can she argue that she is not OK with big-money influence when she attends a meeting that is facilitating big-money influence?
Robert White
Foothills
Don’t throw stones at Trump’s legacy
The writer this morning says we dodged a bullet when we elected Joe Biden, a “gifted and inspired” leader who will end the “extravagant damage” of the prior administration.
I can only suppose he means the lowest unemployment of Black Americans, Hispanics and women, creation of opportunity zones to draw investment into economically depressed areas, energy independence, no new wars, the destruction of ISIS, 7 million new jobs, canceled Iran nuclear deal, peace in the Middle East, criminal justice reform, moving the the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, constructing the border wall, the lowest gas prices in a decade, the appointment of 260 federal judges, the killing of terrorist leaders, 7 million people off food stamps to name a few things accomplished.
You may not agree with all of them, but they were accomplishments in spite of all the efforts to remove Trump from the day he was inaugurated. Trump had his faults; who among us does not?
Curt Anderson
Oro Valley
Social distancing — a poem
I hugged someone today.
It was spontaneous and hard and tight and long, and life-giving and necessary.
It broke the rules and was so right.
I hugged someone today.
My first non-spousal contact in over a year.
It was joyful and wonderful and enthusiastic, and in a word … fantastic.
I hugged someone today.
My eyes teared, my lips smiled, my heart burst, and the earth tilted ever so slightly toward normal.
I hugged someone today.
And I felt my humanity return.
Judy Troyer
Northwest side
Republicans might want to join reality
It seems as if there is, tragically, a cognitive dissonance between many Republicans and our reality. How many Republican politicians have said something like: “I am not a scientist, but I know that there is no Global Warming.”
Hmm, so, no dangerous droughts, hurricanes, winter storms?
How many Republicans have voiced severe doubts about the outcome of the 2020 election despite virtually all legal courts (including the Supreme Court) identifying such claims as fraudulent, i.e., as lies?
How many Republicans have questioned the reality of the current pandemic and are opposed to getting vaccinated? I know, I know, the Earth is flat, it was created 6,000 years ago, there is no evolution, and homosexuality is nothing but perversions that must be “healed” medically.
Well, I am happy to engage with political opponents if we can talk rationally and in a mutually respectful manner. When the other side seems to be mentally deranged, however, no communication is possible, and we must simply move on to help society at large.
Albrecht Classen
Midtown
With Trump, we could be Brazil
All should be so grateful for President Biden’s focus on vaccine rollout and efforts to get as many vaccinated as soon as possible.
If you want an idea of where we’d be right now had Donald Trump been reelected, you need only look at Brazil and the dire situation going on there.
Governed by Trump’s twin, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president takes the same dismissive attitude toward the virus as did Trump. Brazil’s number of new cases and deaths have been staggering as a result.
ICUs are close to 100% capacity, and the death rate of health-care workers is the world’s highest. Thank you, President Biden, for being the leader we so desperately needed during our crisis.
Deb Klumpp
Oro Valley
Proposed AZ bill is anti-military
Arizona House Bill 2054 is dangerous for military voters. Close to 5,000 Arizonans serve in the military overseas. Service members only get a 45-day turnaround to vote, and many who try to get their ballot back in time don’t succeed and don’t get counted.
This makes it easy for military voters to get put on “inactive” voter status by accident.
Moreover, many military voters live outside of Arizona in one of the 800 U.S. military bases around the world.
If this bill passes, when a military service member changes their address to an out-of-state duty station or an overseas deployment, they would be eliminated from the Arizona voting roster unless they met strict, unrealistic guidelines.
We encourage the House to vote “no” on the bill or pass an amendment to exempt military and overseas voters. We already fight so hard to vote — don’t make it harder for us.
Jennifer Dane
West side
Biden is making America good again
I feel the writer of the letter “Biden not making America great again” has exaggerated many of the actions of the president.
For example, using the teleprompter: Perhaps Joe Biden does not need it, unlike the last president.
His aid package was designed with different people and situations in mind, thus the “pork.” People, both citizen and undocumented, have been without COVID tests.
The border wall serves no purpose but to curry favor with the former president’s supporters, and the fencing in the Capitol is due to same.
Being a teacher in a confined classroom with 25 to 30 students — with the ancient ventilation systems — puts not only the teacher but the students at risk as well, thus marking time to upgrade both school classrooms and vaccinations.
The environment is an important concern to this administration, and we do not need to destroy our country to have cheap gas and oil.
Finally, America was always great — you just couldn’t see it until Donald Trump needed a slogan!
Richard Rebl
East side
An audit? Or a way to screw things up?
Legislators hand-counting millions of ballots?! This has to be one of the most harebrained ideas our Republican Legislators have ever conceived.
I, with 50-60 volunteers, have spent many hours hand-counting thousands of ballots in every election for more than 15 years, under controlled conditions set in state law.
It was obvious over and over again that computers are far more accurate than humans. Humans don’t sort correctly, miss marks, can’t count and get distracted/tired/bored.
Once my team of two Republicans and one Democrat needed five hours to count and recount 400 ballots because we kept missing things and would be off by a few votes. Counting more than 2,000,000 ballots is mind-boggling.
It’s absolutely certain that under the uncontrolled conditions in the Legislature, the human and computer numbers will differ. Which number is right? Will the court decide, at cost to taxpayers, without changing the election results anyway?
Don’t they have anything better to do, like helping people recover from the aftermath of the pandemic?
Barbara Tellman
Downtown
Infrastructure issues all on the GOP
Da Nang, Vietnam, is now a first-class city. This happened when our tax dollars were spent on the Gulf War, War in Iraq, the never ending Afghanistan War, and a wall between us and Mexico that has done nothing more than interrupt the migration of jaguar, cougar, bear, deer and wolves plus destroy the landscape, federal parks and water flow.
What are we thinking?
Thousands of our bridges need repair. Schools need to be brought up to date. Not only maintenance is needed, but we need to join other nations in improving and moving forward with new energy sources.
All of this will create sustainable, good-paying jobs and improve the public’s well-being.
Meanwhile, GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threatens a “scorched earth” if one dime of our tax dollars goes to infrastructure. The Eisenhower GOP that had the foresight to build freeways across America is gone.
Janet Pipes
Northwest side
