April 8, 2011
Section: TUCSON/REGION
Page: A8
Tucson knows what it wants; getting it is a whole other thingRHONDA BODFIELD, ARIZONA DAILY STAR We have the road map for what Tucson wants: good jobs, good schools, good roads, good land planning, good government. Now comes the difficult part: Figuring out how to get there. Imagine Greater Tucson, a community-interest group that launched an initiative last year to steer a vision plan for the area, shared with about 400 onlookers Thursday the nine values it has identified Tucsonans share, based on feedback from thousands of people in 51 "community conversations." Among the others: We embrace the character of the region, including our small-town feel. We value the environment and appreciate the University of Arizona. We yearn for a good quality of life, including having a safe place to live that allows for affordable housing and health care. While "imagine" may seem like a fluffy, daydreaming kind of verb, it's going to take hard work to shape future realities, attendees were warned. In part, that's because Arizonans have a high attachment to their state but aren't particularly engaged, and have a low sense of connection to one another. Lattie Coor, the former Arizona State University president who now runs a nonprofit public-policy research group, said Arizona ranks 40th in the nation for voter registration, while 37 percent say they do not follow the news or discuss current events regularly. The state comes in 48th in the nation for exchanging favors among neighbors. And while Tucson indeed scores higher than the statewide average for those measurements, Coor noted some of the other sentiments expressed by Tucsonans are cause for concern. Those in the greater Tucson area are less likely than the rest of the state to say the schools are good and that political leaders do a good job. We're also less likely to believe people in the community care about one another, and we're less convinced that our city will be a nice place to live in five years. The other challenge, said Robert Grow, the co-founder of a similar planning effort in Utah from the late 1990s, is that projected growth patterns for the area, based on recent trajectories, conflict with the core values identified in the first phase of the group's efforts. Grow said since the only way to stop growth is to make Tucson a lousy place to live, the question is how to grow well. And that's where regional vision comes in: to understand the long-term consequences of choices being made now. Left unchecked, he said, the Tucson of the future will see employment dominated by big-box and strip commercial enterprises. Single-family homes running along the fringes of the urbanized area will contribute to sprawl, costing more money in roads and sewers and making congestion worse as multimodal transportation becomes impractical. Air quality and wildlife habitat will suffer, he predicted. "That is where you likely will end up unless you choose another alternative," he said. The next phase of the group's effort, starting with three public meetings in May, will be to let the public come up with alternative scenarios, which Grow called "the crash-test dummies of the future." Rhonda Walker, 46, an account executive, called the presentation exciting yet troubling. "We need to talk to our neighbors and our co-workers and our colleagues to try to get more people involved," she said, adding she didn't particularly like the way the future looked in the sample scenario. She was also concerned about the lack of connectedness to neighbors. She noted when her water pipes burst recently, a neighbor she'd never met helped her shut down the system. She made him dinner. A friendship has now been formed. Walker, who lives downtown and is active in revitalization efforts, noted that private investment is starting to ramp up downtown, which she said gives her hope Tucson is on the right track. "We just need to get each other motivated to reach these goals." Keith Kuehn, 59, a business-development executive, was so struck by Coor's description of Arizona as a place of high attachment and low engagement that he scrawled it across the top of his program. "It really jumped out at me because wearing Tucson as a badge, but not making any personal investment in the community, says there's some hypocrisy going on," he said. "The next step is how you take those value sets and alter the trends." Does he think it can happen? "Change starts with awareness," he said. "So it's possible." Contact reporter Rhonda Bodfield at [email protected] or 573-4243. |