I don’t like to get political in this newsletter, but this issue affects all of us, regardless of your political leaning.

Dark money –undisclosed money that is funneled in support or against candidates and elected officials in Arizona– is a corrupting influence. Not only do you not get to see who is trying to influence your vote, but dark money is also used to pressure politicians from the governor level all the way down to school board –even obscure water district boards.

And that is the connection to real estate and the economy.

Imagine that a water company wants to use its money muscle to influence a local water district board –the board members of which seldom spend more than $200 to get elected. That company could over-whelm and control that board with a couple thousand dollars!

If you hope that policies will be made on the basis of the merits of laws, rather than who can pressure whom with dark money, then you will want to understand more about the effort to repeal SB1516, “The Dark Money Act.”

Go to StopCorruptionNowAZ.com to learn more.

If you favor an open market, for real estate or almost anything, then you don’t want policy decisions made based on this kind of pressure.

Here’s a video to explain more.

From the City regarding its compost facility operator:

The City of Phoenix has issued its Compost Facility Operator RFP!

This RFP will select a qualified contractor to operate the city’s future 110,000-ton compost facility, which is scheduled to open in late 2016.  The successful proposer will operate and maintain the compost facility and sell the products generated at the facility.  

The RFP is posted at this link.  The pre-proposal meeting will be held at 2:30 p.m. on March 11, 2016 at the city’s 27th Avenue Transfer Station in Phoenix.

All questions about this RFP must be directed to the robyn.skramstad@phoenix.gov.

I’m a big fan of composting. I like the idea that I’m keeping the nutrients from my yard in my yard, or that I’m adding to the health of my yard by composting much of the food that I buy.

In Phoenix, you need to think more about heat and moisture than in other parts of the country.

Of course, the big news about getting a compost facility operator is that it could lead to more composting services for those of you who don’t have the time, room or inclination to do your own composting.

This issue does not necessarily impact home sales or purchases. You don’t for instance, need to have a compost pile inspection from a licensed compost pile inspector. But, if you have a compost pile and you are selling a home, you’ll want to make it look attractive.

I such a nerd about this stuff, that I made a video about composting about 8 years ago. Well, not so much that I’d want to be a compost facility operator.

So, while you are waiting for the next season of Game of Thrones to come on here’s something you can watch. In the video, I cover three different types of compost systems that I’ve used and the results that I’ve had.

As for the movie, I’d like to thank all of the people who made this production possible: the director, the key grip, assistant key grip, the stage hands and union lighting guys…

WPA Building Rendering

Some of you have been following along as we have worked to save the WPA building at the state fairgrounds.

Seems the fairground board is bent on tearing down another historic building in Phoenix. They believe that they will make more money for the fair by renting tent space on the land where the building used to be.

We believe, and have shown, that this is not true. We already have parties who are interested to rent all or part of the renovated building. But the fair board is not willing to wait that long.

I understand their frustration. The Arizona Legislature has been sweeping money from their ticket sales for years to “balance” the budget. This has left the fair with nothing for renovation, let alone long-term planning.

Current WPA Buildling

In 2014, when the fair board was about to tear the building down, some of us found a way to halt the demolition. The fair board gave us a year. In that time, we have come up with tens of thousands of dollars in commitments to repair the building.

But now we are told that the time is running out. The fair board plans to demolish in April, unless we raise $100,000 to at least repair the roof. However, they have resisted our efforts to get architects in to the building to assess what it would take to repair the roof.

We need your support to save this piece of Arizona heritage. Please contribute whatever you can to the Arizona Preservation Foundation for the WPA building.

Some on the Fair Board are fearful that a bunch of historic preservationists will come along and alter the grounds such that they will never be able to host a fair again. I think I can speak for folks in the preservation community when I say that this is not the case. Our state fair, which is unique in so many ways, has the room for preservation while maintaining our annual state fair –our heritage.

There is common ground here, as large as the Veteran’s Colosseum.

So, do I have your attention?

I saw a movie recently (“Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?“), which featured our own Kimber Lanning, Local First Arizona’s founder and director since its inception. We got to talking about why it’s important to consider moving to a credit union as your bank of choice.For years, I had been thinking about the prospect of closing my national bank account and opening an account at a local credit union.

Well, it is finally time and I need your help. Allow me to explain.

To start, and for the sake of this series, let’s just say that I bank with “CitWellsiBank of America.”

Like most banks, my bank charges these fees unless I carry a certain balance; difficult for a small business to do. I suspect credit unions have fees of their own. However, that money has to go somewhere, but I’d rather have it go to a local credit union and keep the money in the local economy. Did you know that when you spend your money locally, four times that amount stays in local circulation, than if you spend it on a national chain or, in this case, a bank?

Credit unions, by design, are investors in their local economy (I think you could make the case that we wouldn’t have the same damage to our economy if we were all using credit unions that weren’t too big to fail. The big banks prior to the recession were doing big credit default swaps, bundling loans (great 2-minute video clip explanation from William Hurt film, “Too Big to Fail” at the link), and selling off collateralized debt obligations.

So when I was talking to Kimber at the movie, I got to thinking about the things were holding me back and I realized that they are probably the same things that hold back other people:

Time. This is probably the biggest impediment to making the switch. My suspicion is that it’s going to take a lot of time to research credit unions, narrow it down to one, set up all of my business accounts, personal accounts, savings accounts so that it’s an exact replication of what I currently have and like. Not to mention learning new things like how to navigate their online offerings, their apps (if they have them) and how to move money around between banks the process.

Uncertainty. Will the credit union have a similar setup on its website interface? How easy will it be to get cash from a credit union with, presumably, fewer locations and ATMs. Where will I get cash if I need it? The big banks tell us we have to go to an ATM or a branch to get money, but we’re smart consumers; we know we can just visit the local supermarket and get cash back and there’s no ATM fees this way. Am I to expect the same level of trust/uncertainty when considering a relationship with a local credit unions?

Security. We’ve been duped into believing that big, national banks are the only ones who take security seriously. How often are local credit unions information compromised? We know it happens to the big banks. What measures do local credit unions take and how do they compare to the national banks?

Over the course of the next two months, I’ll be doing a series on my personal experience in setting up and moving from my big national bank to a local credit union. The first one, which you’re reading now, is defining The Problem: time, uncertainty, and security.

I’m going to do it for everyone, putting these posts up. And I’d love to have your comments as we do it. Tell me what you’ve experienced. Please help me get started by answering these questions:

1) Have you ever considered moving to a credit union?

2) What has kept you from seriously considering a credit union? What’s been holding you back? Why did you decide against a credit union?

3) What credit union do you recommend (or not recommend) and why?

I look forward to our journey together. (Read Part 2, “Credit Unions: Funnel it Down”.)

jp

The 4^th annual Grand Avenue Festival is this Saturday, October 20^th
and community involvement is a huge component!

The focus for this year’s celebration is the vibrant culture, art, history and adaptive re-use of the Lower Grand Avenue Arts and Small Business District and adjoining neighborhoods.

Opportunities abound!

Coffee, Cookies & Crafts

Hanging Gardens & Woven Fences & Trashy Sculptures

Grand Trashy Hat Promenade

Bands on Grand Performances (free)

Food

Free tours of the Historic Commercial Building and Adaptive Reuse, begin at 8 am and continue hourly until 11 am, courtesy of the Phoenix Revitalization Corporation (PRC), followed by Free screenings of “The Greenest Building,” shown at the conclusion of the tour.

Check out the Festival on Facebook

Official Festival Flyer [download, print, share!]

With widespread attention and growing support for a trolley on the Grand Avenue Rail Project to boot and a Final Report from Greening America’s Capitals, Grand Avenue is poised to bust open in a big way this year…but we need community support…your support to make it happen!

Recent developments along Lower Grand Avenue reveal an emerging, grassroots effort to revitalize the area. In 1998, a federally funded Weed and Seed project, which aimed to reduce violent crime by “weeding” out offenders and “seeding” community services, kick-started a partnership between city, federal, and state agencies, as well as the local faith community, residents, businesses, and nonprofits. This partnership has led to a 40 percent reduction in violent crime over the last 10 years. Artists have colonized the street, taking advantage of inexpensive vacant and underused warehouse and shop spaces.” ~ Greening America’s Capitals

(Greening America’s Capitals selected Phoenix in 2011 as one of five nationwide cities.)

“[Phoenix] asked for assistance to improve the Lower Grand Avenue streetscape, making it more environmentally, pedestrian-, and bicycle-friendly while also maintaining the neighborhood’s artistic character. The EPA design team will explore options that use green infrastructure techniques suitable for arid climates to capture and treat stormwater runoff. Design options might also include improvements to pedestrian crossings, transit shelters, bicycle paths, and trolleys.”

The Grand Avenue Festival is sponsored in part by the Grand Avenue Merchants’ Assoc.; Phoenix Revitalization Corp.; Oasis on Grand; Glass Lab Metal Lab; Abromovitz Grand Avenue Partners, LLC; Arizona Pedal Cabs; Phoenix New Times; Dunlap & Magee Property Management.

Source: CAP Board

About seven years ago my friend Roger Clark (no relation) at the Grand Canyon Trust (the folks who are cleaning up or working to retire coal-fired power plants in the Southwest) suggested that we should consider covering the Central Arizona Project with solar panels.

If you don’t know (and you really, really should), the Central Arizona Project delivers about 1.5 million acre-feet of water to central and southern Arizona from the Colorado River on the AZ/CA border. One acre-foot is about 325,000 gallons of water, so about 488 billion gallons. You use, on average, about 60 gallons of water per person per day, just to live here. Basically, if we did not have this canal, we could not have nearly the population in Arizona that we have now.

Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado all take water from the Colorado River system. Very, very little runs down through Mexico to the Gulf of Baja, and what does run there is full of fertilizer and chemicals. But that is another story.

Regardless, we need to save as much water as we can. The canal loses about 4.4 percent of its water to evaporation. That equals about 66,000 acre-feet of water, or about 21 billion gallons of water. That’s a lot of water slides, people.

This canal is not covered because, as the CAP Board website tells us, the cost of installation would have quadrupled from what it was at about $3.6 billion to about $14.4 billion. So, they say it is cost prohibitive to cover the canal.

That is where Roger Clark believed that we could kill two birds with one stone. We could cut down on that evaporation while generating electricity. Why do we want to generate electricity here? Well, because in order to pump the water to Phoenix, we use about 400 megawatts of coal-fired power from a plant here in Arizona. What if we could pump that water primarily with solar power? That would be a huge drop in the amount of CO2s that we produce, as a state. Even if we can’t reliably pump the water all the time (like, when there are clouds), we could still sell the green energy elsewhere.

So, Roger, et. al were told that they were crazy and that it was all pie in the sky. I was told the same when I talked about it as a legislator and when I worked in the energy field. Since then, I’ve only dared to hope that one day I could help make this happen —way off in the future.

But the future can be now. This is where the “I Told You So” Department gets to do its work. Please see this article from India where they covered about 1 kilometer of a similar canal with solar panels and generated about 1 megawatt of electricity. The local electricity corporation did it with a contract with Sun Edison.

So, here are four reasons why this is great news:

1) Our canal is 336 miles long, or about 541 kilometers. If you assume 1 megawatt per kilometer, and take out about 25% of the total length to assume that they can’t put panels everywhere along cities, etc., you can have a power station on our canal that generates about 400 megawatts.

2) Unlike other massive projects that take up vast amounts of land in the desert, and which could possibly disturb sensitive habitat, this land is already accounted for.

3) You may not eliminate the entire 4.4 percent evaporation. But you would probably save half of that, at least. That is over 10 billion acre feet of water! Personally, I think we should commit to send some of that to the Gulf of Baja so that they can rebuild that massive Baja Delta and maybe, I dunno, rebuild and stabilize their local economy!

4) If we generate excess power that is “green power”, we get to sell it at a premium to the power hungry folks in California –the Whole Foods of power consumption. That means money coming in to Arizona, instead of going out.

So, as you probably know, I totally geek out on big infrastructure projects like this. I love them because they are also crucial for us to find more sustainable ways to live in the desert.

I hope that Paul Newman, Sandra Kennedy and Marcia Busching make it in to the Corporation Commission so they can work on this. It would also help if we got Heather Macre on the Central Arizona Water Conservation District Board.

From the “In Case You Had Not Already Heard” department….

This news is a few days old, but I wanted to touch on it because this says a lot about all of the work y’all have been doing to emphasize supporting local.

The Arizona Capitol Times spoke with Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton about it:

 

Not only is the city following a policy that provides for prudent and efficient investment, but provides additional funds for consumer and small-business loans in the local economy.”

Another reason for the city’s investment is to hopefully get a higher rate of return on some of Phoenix’s other investments. This move isn’t a totally unique one as several cities around the country have been implementing plans like this to manage their money in the fallout from the financial crisis.

It sounds like a novel idea and it stimulates and benefits the local economy, so why aren’t their reports of a high number of states and cities implementing such a plan? Says the Capitol Times…

Investing money in local banks isn’t easy. State law requires that the city’s bank deposits be insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to prevent it from losing taxpayer money if the bank fails. The maximum federal insurance on low-risk investments that the city might utilize, such as a certificate of deposit, is $250,000. That could require the city to work with many banks if it hopes to invest anywhere near $50 million locally.

For these reasons, Phoenix mostly invests in U.S. government securities.

Jeff Dewitt, the City of Phoenix Finance Director said the city probably can’t invest more in local banks likely could not invest more in local banks given FDIC insurance limits. The East Valley Tribune also reported that Phoenix has a team of in-house investment managers who oversee its deposits and ensure that city funds are protected while earning the highest yield possible. Dewitt said the city is inviting local banks to submit applications with their investment pitches. He said proposals must be completely FDIC-insured or collateralized and offer a higher rate of return than U.S. Treasury notes.

As Local First so wonderfully reminds us,

The flow of these dollars will recirculate throughout the local economy, creating jobs and securing a strong economic future for our community. If you are a locally-owned and operated bank or credit union: Phoenix’s Finance Department will be accepting applications from local banks that have an interest in providing CDs and other FDIC-insured products to the city.  Local banks can contact the city’s Finance Department at 602-262-7166 for more information or to submit an application.”

In a June 5, 2012 letter to Mayor Greg Stanton, Phoenix’s Environmental Quality Commission (EQC) recommended the language for the Solid Waste Collection Ordinance be updated from “The City does not provide” to “The City may provide” waste and recycling services to commercial, industrial and multifamily customers.

“We believe updating this ordinance is congruent with achieving the Environmental Quality Commission’s goal to help city leaders identify environmental issues and advise the City Council on opportunities to protect Phoenix’s natural and urban environment.” ~ Kate Gallego (Chair) and Jessica Catlin (Member)

The most common complaint the EQC hears from Phoenix residents is that they have insufficient access to recycling services. The letter to Mayor Stanton goes on to say:

“Phoenix should have the flexibility to study whether the Public Works Department can meet these customers’ needs by expanding its popular recycling program.”

The EQC letter include goes on to suggest that:

• Allowing Phoenix to explore service options that might result in innovative partnerships with the private sector. This might help expand service and lower rates for solid waste and recycling services.
• An expanded recycling program may help the city simultaneously create a new revenue stream and achieve its diversion goals.
• Removing the barrier to explore this service provision is one significant but simple step Phoenix can take in its efforts to become a more sustainable city.

Why hasn’t Phoenix had a recycle presence in these areas?  

In my quest to answer that question, I found out that obstacles to having recycling bins at multi-family housing units is not the same as reasons some people cite for why it won’t work.

For example, in 2006, The Arizona Republic reported, “Valley cities say they don’t offer recycling to apartments and condos because those residents won’t take advantage of the service. They also fear that contamination (regular garbage mixed with recyclables) would be too high because of the anonymity that shared trash bins offer. They also say there is simply no demand.”

Another interesting tidbit from the article:

Terry Feinberg, president of the Arizona Multihousing Association, said recycling won’t work at apartment complexes because scavengers would rummage through containers. He also said existing dumpster corrals are difficult to enlarge to make room for separate recycling bins.

“Even on new construction, the extra space required can lead to elimination of parking spaces, which can put the property out of zoning compliance,” Feinberg said.

If the state was serious about requiring multihousing to recycle, Feinberg said, officials would offer financial incentives to the industry or allow complexes to retrofit and waive code penalties.

That was in 2006. Where are we now in handling these situations?

“I can’t speak to why Phoenix has not been in the business of recycling in the past, but here is what i do know. Residents and businesses want better service, and other cities across the country have much more robust programs, so there must be a way to meet this need. Changing the language allows our city to explore those possibilities.”

~ Jessica  Catlin, Phoenix Environmental Quality Commision

Now that’s what I’m talking about: Proactive, forward-leaning momentum. Enough talk about change. Be the change. 

—The EQC plays a leadership role on a number of environmental topics, including greener neighborhoods, renewable and solar energy projects, land use policies, air and water quality, sustainable building codes, urban heat island, recycling initiatives, climate action plan goals, the Phoenix General Plan, and other key city efforts.—

Energize Phoenix (not to be confused with the ever creative Ignite Phoenix) and Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton will unveil “Go Green Like Your Grocer“, a community energy efficiency showcase at AJ’s Fine Foods on Central Avenue and Camelback Road from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.  this Saturday, June 30.

Why should you attend the Go Green Like Your Grocer event?

Other than hearing the Mayor’s announcement that rebates are doubled, up to $3,000, for the rest of the program?

“We are thrilled to showcase AJ’s commitment to energy efficiency and officially name them an Energize Phoenix Energy Saving Superhero,” said Mayor Stanton.  “Our goal is to encourage residents within the Energize Phoenix Corridor to complete a free home energy check-up so they can save money by saving energy and contribute to a sustainable community.”

What is Energize Phoenix?

“The city of Phoenix was awarded a $25 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Energy Better Buildings Program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to launch, in partnership with Arizona State University and Arizona Public Service, “Energize Phoenix,” a project that will save energy, create jobs and transform a diverse array of neighborhoods along a 10-mile stretch of the light rail line.” ~ energizephoenix.com

In addition to being a visible support of our great Phoenix community, applauding the energy saving efforts of Mayor Stanton, Energize Phoenix, and fine examples like AJ’s, you’ll be energizing your own awareness of the cool savings to be had this  monsoon season and through the year.

“Did I mention APS will be on-site giving away a free CFL bulb to attendees, as long as supplies last? Or that in a lot of cases double rebates will pay for 100% percent of energy efficiency project costs?” ~ Ken Clark 

(If you can quote yourself, you know you’re onto something good, right? 🙂

Energize Phoenix offers cash incentives and financing to help pay for energy saving projects for homes and businesses located within the Energize Phoenix Corridor, a 10-mile stretch (PDF) along the light rail line.

Get the full skinny in the Energize Phoenix Press Release.