WaterWired

AWWA Letter to Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO)

Thanks again to G. Tracy Mehan III, executive director for government affairs at the American Water Works Association, who sent me three previous letters letter he sent to assorted government officials, including President Joe Biden (as President-Elect) and EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan. You can find all three letters here.  

This letter is from AWWA CEO David LaFrance to Sen. Michael Bennet of AWWA's home state of Colorado and the incoming chair of the very important Senate Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Climate, Forestry, and Natural Resources. A PDF is below as is the entire letter pasted below that

Download AWWA Letter Senator Bennet 3-24-21

24 March 2021

Honorable Michael Bennet
261 Russell Senate Building
Washington, DC 20510

Subject: Chairmanship of Senate Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Climate, Forestry, and Natural Resources

Dear Senator Bennet:

Congratulations on your appointment as chair of the Senate Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Climate, Forestry, and Natural Resources. As the CEO of the Denver-based American Water Works Association (AWWA), I view your subcommittee as being absolutely critical to advancing the Nation’s efforts in solving our long-standing water and climate issues. Our 4,500 utility members and 50,000 individual members collectively provide drinking water to more than 80 percent of the American public.

The critical importance of your subcommittee cannot be overstated. Before his passing, William Ruckelshaus, the first Administrator of EPA, stated that in 1970 some 85 percent of our water quality impairments came from point sources, while 15 percent came from nonpoint sources. By the year 2010, 40 years later, the figures were reversed, with 85 percent of water impairments coming from nonpoint sources and 15 percent from point sources.1 Nonpoint runoff, particularly nutrients, has manifested itself in the growth of harmful algal blooms and the proliferation of hypoxic zones in our lakes and estuaries. Consequently, we experience greatly increased costs in providing safe, potable drinking water. Source water protection, measures to help protect and improve waters sources used for drinking water, was emphasized in the 2018 Farm Bill for the first time.

We also face the dire necessity of addressing global climate change and urgent needs to sequester carbon, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop alternative energy sources.

Given that agriculture accounts for the bulk of privately-owned land in the continental United States, your subcommittee stands squarely in the nexus of these issues and the ability to address them is within your jurisdiction.

Your efforts to advance conservation in the 2018 Farm Bill were much appreciated, and we continue to support your approach of working with agricultural interests in a voluntary, cooperative manner. We, too, believe that farmers, ranchers and woodland owners have a key role in addressing the issues described above. In Colorado, we have been fortunate to have worked cooperatively with both the Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Two recent examples: Denver Water worked cross jurisdictionally with the Forest Service and NRCS to restore both Federal and private lands burned by wildfires and, most recently, NRCS designated a key future water supply watershed for Denver as a National Water Quality Initiative area which will receive extra funding and emphasis to protect source water.

We are particularly excited to know that your subcommittee will soon begin developing the conservation and forestry titles of what will be the 2023 Farm Bill. During development of the 2018 Farm, Bill, AWWA advocated emphasizing source water protection to help protect the nation’s drinking water using established voluntary conservation methods. AWWA also has a keen interest in simplifying and expanding the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, as many of our members are active partners in projects around the country.

AWWA is willing to provide any input you feel would be helpful. If you wish to discuss this further, I can be reached at 303-910-4618 or at dlafrance@awwa.org. Alternatively, your staff can contact Tracy Mehan, executive director of AWWA Government Affairs, in Washington, D.C., at 202-326-6125 or at tmehan@awwa.org.

Again, congratulations on becoming the chair of the Senate Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Climate, Forestry, and Natural Resources. We look forward to working with you.

Sincerely,

David LaFrance
CEO, American Water Works Association

cc: Honorable Michael Bennet
Cesar E. Chavez Memorial Building
1244 Speer Boulevard
Denver, CO 80204

Enjoy!

“In the West, when you touch water, you touch everything.” – Rep. Wayne N. Aspinall (D-CO), 1896-1983

V.B. Price Column: Interior Secretary Deb Haaland

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland

by V.B. Price

I share with many New Mexicans a feeling of immense pride in the appointment and confirmation of our Congresswoman Deb Haaland from Laguna Pueblo to be America’s 54^th Secretary of the Interior. She joins former New Mexico Congressman Manuel Luján, Jr., who served as Interior Secretary from 1989 to 1993, in holding that most powerful and influential office that affects the well-being and quality of life of people across the United States and particularly in the water-starved American West.

Haaland and Luján, Jr. have many sterling qualities in common, not in policy and politics, but in style and affability. Both represented Albuquerque’s 1st Congressional District. Both had a bipartisan temperament while being highly partisan, a quality that endeared them to many and helped make them effective congressional players. Both were master practitioners of the art of constituent service, blessed with personal political skills.

Even though I disagreed with Republican Luján, Jr. on almost every issue, I considered him a friend. So now to have an environmental conservationist and climate change warrior such as Deb Haaland, a person with whom I agree about so many crucial issues in the West, as Interior Secretary fills me with a sense of relief and a sense of optimism.

Haaland’s influence on energy generation, Native American rights and water planning in the West is potentially tremendous. The Colorado Compact, which delivers Colorado river water to 40 million Westerners in seven states, will be renegotiated during her tenure and completed in 2026. The fate of urban growth and agricultural sustainability will depend on how equitable the new Compact turns out to be. And hovering over the process will be water hedge fund managers and investors looking to privatize as much water in the West as they can.

As an example of the power of the Secretary of Interior over Western water issues, consider arch libertarian and oil and gas champion Gale Norton, secretary from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush, and her historic action to cut off a vast amount of Colorado River water — nearly 650,000 acre feet (or over 75 percent of what the whole state of New Mexico gets a year) — to Southern California’s cities of Los Angeles and San Diego and to farmers in the Imperial Valley.

The story is complicated, but it boils down to this: blue state California was using water that belonged to red state Arizona under the Colorado Compact. California had to give up using that water when the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, was completed. The Department of Interior was willing to wean California off Arizona’s water over a 15-year period if Southern California cities could work a deal with Imperial Valley farmers to buy more water. If they couldn’t, the water would be turned off all at once in two years on January 1, 2003. And they couldn’t.

As the New York Times reported, “Three of the eight pumps that tap into the glistening reservoir of Colorado River water (at Lake Havasu)…are sitting idle, by order of the federal government. With the pumps switched off since 8 a.m New Year’s Day, less water is churning down the 242-mile aqueduct toward coastal Southern California, where 17 million people rely on snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains for washing dishes, flushing toilets and watering lawns.” It was Interior Secretary Gail Norton who turned off the spigots in a historic move that had been threatened, in one way or another, for nearly 40 years.

Deb Haaland will have that kind of potential power. Her actions could determine not only how much Colorado River water New Mexico and other western states get in a protracted and worsening drought but also the momentum of growth in Denver, southern Utah, and other burgeoning cities and states in the West.

The Department of Interior manages one-fifth of the land in the country, along with 476 dams, 348 reservoirs, 410 national parks and monuments and 544 wildlife refuges. It oversees water storage and distribution, along with hydroelectric power, through the Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau of Land Management controls permits for oil and gas drilling and is in charge of all federal lands not controlled by the U.S. Forest Service. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is the federal government’s principal point of contact with 574 sovereign Native American tribes, which includes two disastrous centuries of negotiating and breaking treaties. Interior also has the Environmental Protection Agency under its administrative umbrella. Only the Departments of Energy and Defense have even marginally comparable influence in New Mexico and the West.

Haaland will have the opportunity to do an immense amount of good for western states and their people, protecting tourist economies around national parks and monuments and supporting the creation of alternative energy industries, among many other initiatives. She might even be able to make significant inroads fixing the intractable problem of cleaning up groundwater pollution on federal lands, which has become not only a health risk but economic poison all over the West.

The Department of Interior will also have much to say about how successful President Biden is in dealing with what he considers to be four major domestic challenges — COVID-19, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change. It will be a leader in what is being called a clean energy revolution to wean the country from fossil fuels and their pollution by 2035.

It will take all of Deb Haaland’s interpersonal skills, political savvy and devotion to sound environmental planning to squeeze the most out of the massive bureaucracy at Interior. And she’ll have to clean out the nest of Trumpian holdovers that have infiltrated the establishment there over the last four years.

As we’ve seen — with the appointment of conservative Secretaries like President Reagan’s James Watt, President Bush’s Gail Norton and President Trump’s Ryan Zinke — the damage inflicted on the environment by the Department of Interior is all about policy and expectations, about setting a course and a destination, about fundamental values and dispositions, about knowing how to get along with people to avoid unnecessary and destructive friction.

Deb Haaland is a legitimate Green New Deal advocate with unbending environmental and social justice values. But she is not an all-or-nothing, dismissive, hate-driven partisan zealot, like those politicians who call her a “radical.” She is willing to listen meaningfully and respectfully to those who oppose her, and, if possible, make accommodations. But her record tells us that she’ll never roll over either. If there’s anyone we can trust to do the right thing in the next four years, it’s her.
 

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

Originally published on 21 March 2021
(Photo by Shane Balkowitsch)

Enjoy!

Leave a comment on this blog or here at V.P. Price's site. 

"We must shift our thinking away from short-term gain toward long-term investment and sustainability, and always have the next generations in mind with every decision we make." - Deb Haaland

AWWA Letter to President-Elect Joe Biden

Thanks to G. Tracy Mehan III, executive director for government affairs at the American Water Works Association, who sent me this letter AWWA just sent to President-Elect Joe Biden. 

Download AWWA letter to President-Elect Biden

I like the letter's organization - brief introduction to AWWA, then a number of issues, their descriptions, and then requests. I'll give the intro and then the first issue - recovery from the pandemic. The others issues are water infrastructure, workforce, protecting our sources of drinking water, and research. I'll then cut to the end, which discusses new regulations.

Here goes!

November 13, 2020

The Honorable Joe Biden 
President-Elect, United States of America
1120 20th St. NW
Washington, DC 20036

Attn: Dr. Cecilia Martinez, CEQ Review Team 
Patrice Simms, EPA Review Team

Dear President-Elect Biden,

The American Water Works Association (AWWA) congratulates you on winning the 2020 election. You will take office during a critical moment in U.S. history, and we are confident your commitment to research and science will serve you well.

AWWA’s 50,000 members are water professionals who represent the full spectrum of water utilities—small and large, rural and urban, municipal and investor-owned. We are an international, non-profit, scientific and educational society dedicated to protecting public health.

Our members provide safe drinking water through source water protection, treatment and distribution, and they safeguard the environment by cleaning wastewater and managing stormwater before returning it to our waterways. They also create the technology and equipment that keeps water flowing. The infrastructure our members maintain is the foundation on which our country’s communities are built. That infrastructure -- and our members -- need your help.

To help you and your team hit the ground running, we have developed a set of recommendations that will provide investments and attention needed to help address challenges the country faces in drinking water issues.

Recovery from the Pandemic
AWWA’s research found that revenue shortfalls at U.S. drinking water utilities may reduce economic activity by $32.7 billion and cost 75,000 to 90,000 private-sector jobs. Drinking water utilities will see revenues from customer payments drop by nearly $14 billion. This is the result of the elimination of water shutoffs for non-payment, increased late payments due to high unemployment, reductions in non-residential water demands, and the addition of fewer new customers due to economic stagnation.

We appreciate the interest by some in Congress to send more relief funding to state and local governments—they need help, but public utilities do too. Last spring’s CARES Act did provide funding relief to state and local governments, the act also carried a provision prohibiting the use of those funds to offset lost local utility revenues. Many utilities, particularly those serving small to medium-sized communities, are at risk resulting from diminished operating revenues. Not only do these lost revenues mean local communities are less able to renew, repair, and sustain aging infrastructure and treatment facilities, but some are feeling the effects in their ongoing operating finances, which may result in the loss of operators that are needed to ensure the utility is in regulatory compliance.

We know it is critical to continue to provide water service to our communities during a pandemic. Consequently, water utilities themselves, or state or local governments across the country have instituted moratoria on disconnecting water service for non-payment during the COVID-19 crisis. However, we urge that if there is to be a mandatory moratorium on disconnecting water service, that such a moratorium be limited to the duration of the current coronavirus public health emergency plus a reasonable amount of time after the formal declaration expires. Some past legislative proposals would have imposed a moratorium on shutoffs indefinitely, for any public health emergency. In addition, they imposed a moratorium if any part of a local government accepted relief funds, even if none went to the water utility. It would be harmful for water utilities to be subject to such mandates if they have not received any benefits. 

Providing financial assistance to people who are struggling to pay their water utility bills is needed now more than ever. In many states, water utilities are actually prevented from providing this assistance. Giving utilities a path forward to assist customers who are on low or fixed incomes and struggling with unemployment at this time would help us keep the water flowing at a time when it is needed the most.

Request: As you work with Congress on the next COVID-19 relief package, we urge you to make sure it includes the following:

1. Funding to help low-income customers pay their water bills during the current pandemic emergency;

2. Funding to help those local water utilities that have suffered significant revenue losses due to the pandemic, so that they can continue to operate and provide safe water services; and

3. A definitive limitation to any mandated moratorium on disconnection of water service for non-payment, if such as moratorium is included in a legislative package.

And now, the finish:

New Regulations
Federal drinking water standard setting is a scientific, risk-based and data-driven process that discerns what substances are to be regulated, and at what levels. This takes a significant amount of time, which can be at odds with perceived risk. This is where the research efforts mentioned above can accelerate and improve regulatory processes.

We caution against setting a precedent of by-passing these established processes via legislative action. The nation tested that approach with the 1986 Amendments to the SDWA with untoward results. Those amendments required that EPA to set 25 new regulations every three years. Bob Perciasepe, former assistant administrator for water, said in congressional before the House Subcommittee on Health and Environment in 1996. “The current requirement to regulate 25 new contaminants every three years needs to be replaced with a scientifically defensible, risk-based approach. The current regulatory treadmill dilutes limited resources on lower-priority contaminants, and as a consequence, may hinder more rapid progress on high priority contaminants.”

That said, we are eager to follow the data on substances of concern wherever it may go in the investigative process so that we may know how to best protect public health. We will then prepare our members to comply with any new regulations. AWWA offers the expertise and field experience of its diverse membership to help you and your team address these multiple water issues. We have a government affairs office in Washington, D.C., that you can contact for immediate assistance. Our Executive Director for Government Affairs is Tracy Mehan, who can be contacted at 703 850-9401 or tmehan@awwa.org.

Sincerely,

Melissa Elliott

President
American Water Works Association

Read the whole letter.

I like that motto: "Dedicated to the World's Most Important Resource"

Enjoy!

"Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up in unforgivable." - Joe Biden

John A. Cherry Editorial: 'The Groundwater Project - Democratizing Groundwater Knowledge'

Dr. John A. Cherry, the only hydrogeologist (apologies to Gedeon Dagan - thank you, Gretchen Miller) to win the Stockholm Water Prize (2020) wrote this editorial in the current issue of Groundwater 58(5) September-October 2020. It's important enough for me to publish here. I admire John as a scientist but I admire him even more for what he has undertaken.

Download Gwat.13029

Read on:

We are in a global water crisis right now and groundwater is at the core of it because 99% of the Earth's liquid freshwater is groundwater, and groundwater is the buffer of the world water system. Nearly 50% of the world population depends on groundwater for domestic use and many more on its irrigation benefits. An inevitable increase on this dependence is coming as the population swells. Groundwater is used locally but transferred around the world in food and products. There are unprecedented rates of change to the water cycle and much is out of balance. Unfortunately, this elusive and invisible groundwater resource is commonly misunderstood, mismanaged, and abused. A key limiting factor is that the immense advances in groundwater science of the past 50 years are not being put to work in solving today's problems. The science is not being converted into widely recognized benefits to humanity and the environment. Why? Scientific knowledge is not sufficiently democratized.

Knowledge democratization means full accessibility to it around the globe. Accessibility to knowledge has been limited by a number of impediments. First is the peer‐review journal publication process. Although successful as the gatekeeper for scientific advancement, it is a tragic restriction presenting only fragments of incremental insights. By design, journals communicate short, ongoing, often inconclusive, and site/time‐specific research findings that do not filter and synthesize the exploding literature into the essence of scientific advances needed for education and into actionable knowledge useful to policy makers and resource managers. Second is the flawed judging of science. Journal citation statistics are the main criteria for career advancement in universities and strongly influence who receives research funding, resulting in funding of established ideas, not new ones. Pressure to publish has caused the fragmented groundwater literature to become immense, making synthesis incredibly challenging. The third limitation is financial. Research is conducted using primarily public resources through university and government salaries supporting the researchers, journal editors, and reviewers, yet to finance the journal, the journal's copyright restricts access to only those who are willing to pay. The unintended consequence is that science created using public money for the public good is severely restricted in serving its constituency, the public. The fourth limitation is lack of incentives for conversion of the journal outputs into synthesized knowledge for understanding beyond the narrow expertise of its origins. Time spent on writing a book or article of long‐term benefit to the broader scientific community, users of science (policy makers, managers), and benefactors of science (the public) does not get administrative support and can restrict career advancement. The fifth limitation, a corollary from the previous ones resulting from the ignorance of groundwater benefits to humans and ecology, is lack of funding for field testing of many of the new concepts, models, and technologies to assess advantages to serve societal needs.

As a giant step toward overcoming these impediments to democratization of groundwater knowledge, The Groundwater Project(GW‐Project) has been initiated, which is an online platform for groundwater knowledge. At its core is a comprehensive and living e‐book series, free to all, in many languages, to represent quality syntheses from elementary to advanced levels for our state‐of‐knowledge on all aspects of groundwater science and engineering, with regular updating as the knowledge grows and evolves. It is written and edited by expert scientists and practitioners with many decades of experience volunteering their time to realize a noble shared vision: knowledge should be free, and free knowledge should be the best knowledge synthesized in a unifying framework.

Motivated by the textbook Groundwater(Freeze and Cherry 1979), and with more than 300 participants from 14 countries on 6 continents, the GW‐Project is ushering in a new era for understanding groundwater and its vital role in the freshwater cycle. The team is answering humanity's call to service, to transcend college campuses, national boundaries, language barriers, and socioeconomical ladders, enabled by the Internet. To help facing our global water crisis, we invite you to join our community as we embark on our journey. Check https://gw‐project.org for more information.

The author appreciates the contributions of Ying Fan, Allan Freeze, Ineke Kalwij, Doug Mackay, Stephen Moran, Everton de Oliveira, Beth Parker, Eileen Poeter, Warren Wood, and Yan Zheng to this vision, in alphabetical order.

Read my blog post on the project. Consider a donation: click here.

Enjoy!

“Those who can, do; those who understand, teach.” - Aristotle

Sharon B. Megdal's Reflections: 'Relevance Today of Comments on Arizona’s Future from 1987'

Sharon B. Megdal, a friend, colleague and one of the smartest ones in the room, runs the Arizona Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona. She has started a series of Reflections that I have found fascinating. Today's is: Reflections: Relevance Today of Comments on Arizona’s Future from 1987.

Here she is with Gov. Bruce Babbitt - 1987 and 2020 (click on the graphic to enlarge it):

Here goes:

I have lived in Arizona for close to 42 years. When I moved to Arizona from New Jersey, where I grew up and was educated, I had no idea I would become a water professional. I studied economics as an undergraduate at Rutgers University and as a graduate student at Princeton University. My fields of specialization were Public Sector Economics (the economics of government tax and expenditure policy), Econometrics (using statistical methods and models to characterize economic behavior), and International Economics. Note the absence of anything sounding like water, agricultural, or environmental economics.

Some interesting twists and turns in my professional career led me, since the early 1990s, to focus almost exclusively on water. The most pivotal event occurred in September 1985, when Governor Bruce Babbitt appointed me to fill a vacancy on the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), the body responsible for regulating privately owned utilities. I was therefore especially pleased to publicly thank Mr. Babbitt at the WRRC’s June 2020 annual conference for profoundly influencing my career. 

Recently, when scanning some publications from the 1980s, I came across a document I had totally forgotten: the proceedings of the October 27-28, 1987 Arizona Futures Symposium. My speaking assignment at the symposium was to react to Robert Theobald’s comments, entitled “A Framework for Thinking About Transportation Issues.” I was asked to focus on economic issues and Arizona’s future carrying capacity. Robert Theobald (June 11, 1929 – November 27, 1999) was a distinguished consulting economist and futurist author. In October 1987, I had the experience of ACC service and my economics training to draw upon. I was a self-employed consultant and part-time Visiting Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University, teaching economics for NAU’s MBA program. 

As I reviewed the transcript of my commentary, I found portions pertinent to our situation today and our quest to address wicked water problems. To acknowledge the 35th anniversary of my appointment to the ACC, I would like to reflect upon observations from that time, specifically my 1987 symposium commentary. Perhaps you will find my comments relevant to some of our current-day water policy challenges and efforts to identify pathways to solutions and conclude, as I did, that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

In late 1987, we were in the transition from the industrial era to the communications era, just a few years after the break-up of AT&T, the monopoly that provided most of the country with telephone service. These were uncertain times for the telecommunications industry. Judge Harold Greene, who presided over the breakup, wielded a lot of power. I asked the question: “Can we rely on the Judge, the state and federal regulatory bodies, the companies involved, and the market to coordinate so that the communications network develops in an appropriate fashion? There are some who are quite pessimistic about the answer to this question. The infrastructure we will have in place to handle our transportation and communications needs will depend on many parties and many actions, and is not likely to be ‘optimal’.”

I pointed out that communications and transportation systems can be substitutes, something we are so keenly aware of now that COVID-19 has upended our work, educational, and personal lives. Then, teleconferencing and facsimile transmission were two examples of how the communications network could be used instead of the transportation network. Who would have imagined that we’d have the virtual meeting platforms we now have?!

When looking toward the future, I asked: “What will make things change so that a farsighted public policy replaces the crisis management spirit that pervades so much of government’s – and the private sector’s – operations? We are talking about things that require a long lead time. Shorter run problems require more immediate attention and resources. How can a community that cannot determine its carrying capacity in the short run (or does so only by default) ever find the resources to devote to longer term problem solving?” I noted the need to “formulate the questions now and educate the public – including decision makers – on the questions and also on the future implications of current decisions. Too often we search for answers when the questions have not even been properly articulated.”

Drawing upon the fiscal federalism framework that has shaped my thinking about a multitude of public policy matters, I spoke about jurisdictional responsibility. “What level of government should have the responsibility of dealing with these issues? We live in a federal system of states, counties, cities, school districts, improvement districts, etc. Arizona is made up of many different regions, each with its own character and problems and, therefore, solutions. Most observers of demographic and economic trends point to the disappearance of the bell-shaped income distribution. Instead we see a bimodal distribution – lots of poor and lots of well-to-do, with little in between…How will such an income distribution affect social and physical infrastructure requirements?”

Whether transportation, water, or other governmental responsibilities, I have long been interested in the diversity of situations. I suggest to you that these 1987 observations could be made today and in the context of water: “Economic conditions vary not only within counties, but also between counties. There is already a feeling within the state of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. Fiscal constraints are going to be no less important [in the future] than they are today. In fact, they may become more severe.” I further observed that “the challenges of developing appropriate policy for the future will necessitate cooperation among many levels of government and between the private and public sectors. I think this is a reality that must be recognized.”

I ended my remarks with some statements that I again suggest have relevance to today’s water policy dialogues. “What can be done so that we have a chance of choosing a policy vector that leads us to a desirable future? We must recognize that we are borrowing from future generations so that we may have today. We are borrowing for things we should not be [borrowing for] and not borrowing for things (such as building of infrastructure) that we should be. There are no easy solutions. We have difficulty solving today’s problems. Management is rewarded on quarterly profits. Elected public officials are judged on what they did while in office, not on the basis of what they might have done for the very long run.”

I am going to end this essay as I ended my commentary. I have been consistent in my call for education at all levels and in acknowledging that both the private and public sectors have important roles to play in resolving our thorny public policy challenges. “I am convinced that more resources have to go into public education on issues related to our future. There needs to be a continual effort to formulate questions and discuss issues and potential solutions…The commitment of resources will have to come from the government and the private sector, as both have a stake in our future.”

We both came to Arizona from the Northeast: she from New Jersey, me from New York.

In 1987 I was long gone from the UofA and Tucson; I was there from August 1970 to June 1976. I still have fond memories of Tucson (although the metro area is about 3X larger than in 1970 and it is hotter in the summer as well. 

Enjoy!

“You know you’re an Arizona native when you hug a cactus only once in your lifetime.” - Nancy Dedera