Corporate, Military Training, General Aviation + 2 Flight Training Schools To Benefit from $10M Grant

Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport Receives $9 Million FAA Grant

Source: Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport Authority (PMGAA) 
August 25, 2016

Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport announced Aug. 25, one of the largest Federal grants it has received since transitioning from a fighter pilot training base to a bustling regional airport.  The Federal Aviation Administration has awarded a $9,126,000 grant to replace over one million square feet of concrete originally built in 1941. 
The concrete, referred to as the North Apron Area, will be replaced in five phases and includes areas used by corporate, military, general aviation and the two flight training schools that operate out of Gateway Airport.  The year-long project is being scheduled in phases in order to not disrupt daily operations at the busy airport.

 

Mesa, Ariz., Mayor John Giles, chairman of the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport Authority added, “This is a significant project that will create 105 jobs and enhance the airport’s ability to serve corporate customers, military training exercises, and other general aviation users.”
The $10,000,000 project includes a local grant match by the Arizona Department of Transportation and the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport Authority. 
Construction is anticipated to begin on Sept. 20, following a groundbreaking ceremony, and will take a year to complete. 
After a competitive bidding process, Dibble Engineering was awarded the contract to oversee the project.  
The $10,000,000 project includes a local grant match by the Arizona Department of Transportation and the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport Authority.  Construction is anticipated to begin on Sept. 20, following a groundbreaking ceremony, and will take a year to complete.  After a competitive bidding process, Dibble Engineering was awarded the contract to oversee the project.    

 

Take This Test: YOU rate Mesa

We are constantly bombarded, be-dazzled and honestly bamboozled by all the hype and hoopla from the City of Mesa Office for Economic Development, interviews on Mesa Morning Live and by press releases produced by the City of Mesa Newsroom - after all it is their job to cast a positive image in the game of public relations . . .for example, Mayor John Giles bragging that according to Forbes "Mesa is the best city in the Southwest to live in" while not daring to bring up the shortcomings of that survey, repeating time-and-time again that "Everything is great", or anyone else on the taxpayer-dime grabbing any snatch of what passes for news.
Well, how do the real people rate where we live and work?

Greatest Hits: The Strong Towns Strength Test
Find it  here and publish your comments and results on that site.
It goes like this

Here are ten simple questions we call the Strong Towns Strength Test. A Strong Town should be able to answer “yes” to each of these questions.

1. Take a photo of your main street at midday. Does the picture show more people than cars?
2. If there were a revolution in your town, would people instinctively know where to gather to participate?
3. Imagine your favorite street in town didn’t exist. Could it be built today if the construction had to follow your local rules?
4. Is an owner of a single family home able to get permission to add a small rental unit onto their property without any real hassle?
5. If your largest employer left town, are you confident the city would survive?
6. Is it safe for children to walk or bike to school and many of their other activities without adult supervision?
7. Are there neighborhoods where three generations of a family could reasonably find a place to live, all within walking distance of each other?
8. If you wanted to eat only locally-produced food for a month, could you?
9. Before building or accepting new infrastructure, does the local government clearly identify how future generations will afford to maintain it?
10. Does the city government spend no more than 10% of its locally-generated revenue on debt service?

My hometown of Brainerd scores a 1 or a 2, but only because the biggest employer (the school district) can’t leave town and there are a couple of neighborhoods where multiple generations could technically live within walking distance of each other. We're getting closer on local food, and many the rest are doable with some modest change in thinking. 
How does your town stack up? 

Juanga: El Divo de Juarez - Esta Noche Voy a Verla

A Tribute

Juan Gabriel Rancheras

Another Tribute!

A Radical (Re)Thinking | Poverty: The Biggest Problem In The World

Rethinking Poverty

August 19, 2016

• Poverty the biggest problem in the world
• More money needed to help poor
• Direct transfers more efficient than subsidies

Anti-poverty programs often fail because of an inadequate understanding of poverty by policymakers. So argues Abhijit Banerjee, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has worked in dozens of countries to better study the economics of poverty. In a recent podcast interview, Banerjee talked about this main theme in his book, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.

Professor Banerjee also shared his views on policies to help the poor in a panel discussion on sustainable economic development in low-income developing countries , during the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings in April 2016.

Excerpts:

 IMF News: Why do we know so little about the more than one billion poor people in the world?
Banerjee: Well, it is very expensive to collect data. To be honest, there are a billion poor people in the world, but how many of us would live next door to them? So, we don’t see them. They are mostly invisible except in their most extreme manifestations—you see the person who is begging in the street, or the person who has made it out of poverty and can tell his own story . . .

IMF News : You also speak a lot about poverty traps. Do you think there are circumstances in which people or groups of people do, in fact, find themselves trapped in poverty?
Banerjee: There are two answers to that question.
One is: do I believe it is true? Yes, I believe it’s true.
Do I have any very well-founded reason to believe it’s true? Much harder question. I would say the evidence on these interventions—which help people today and many years later they are still richer—suggests that there might be a trap [for the poor], because if there wasn’t one, you would think that [the people who were helped] would fall back [into poverty].
If it were the case that some people are doomed to be who they are and some people are just poor because they are unskilled or undisciplined or not hardworking enough, then you would imagine that you couldn’t get them out of poverty by doing something today, because tomorrow they will still be lazy and will go back to where they belong. I think the evidence suggests that this is not true, that many people are in a situation where, if given an opportunity, they would be in a different place.

Source: http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2016/08/19/NA081916-Rethinking-Poverty

Wake Up Mesa! How To Take Acton > Attacking Head-On Current Development Patterns

10 STEPS TO A STRONG(ER) TOWN
August 29, 2016 by Andrew Burleson

Last names oftentimes say a lot -like your MesaZona bloggers : Mello(w) . . .
We often talk about cities needing to change their current development pattern, but we usually offer gentle suggestions intended to prod towns in the right direction a little at a time.
What if we attacked this problem head-on instead?
The author of this article hits it right in the head e.g..read the details
Excerpts from this source:
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/8/26/10-steps-to-fix-a-city


1. Don't issue any new bonds until the city's current debts are fully paid off.
2. Don't accept unfunded maintenance obligations.
3. Throw out your parking ordinances. 
4. Don't permit greenfield development when existing infrastructure is highly underutilized.
5. Require buildings to front the street.
6. Dramatically simplify your zoning.
7. Dramatically simplify your traffic hierarchy.
8. Stop building stroads.
9. Set a maximum block perimeter of 2000' and enforce it.

10. Fire anyone on staff who believes the above is unworkable.

In today’s municipal world the professionals are a big part of the problem. There are plenty of good people out there who could work well within the constraints above. If the people in your city staff don’t think that’s possible, then the city needs new staff.

----

Each one of these actions marks a dramatic departure from the norm for most places. Take even one of these steps and your town is on its way to becoming stronger. Take them all and you might just have a truly strong town on your hands.

Want another way to assess your city's strength and build a better place? Take the Strong Towns Strength Test.

Army GeoSpatial Center Gets DSM-10 Digital Surface Modeling For An Entire Country from Single- Source Contract Award

U.S. Government Awards Vricon Sole-Source Contract
August 26, 2016 09:32 ET

MCLEAN, VA--(Marketwired - August 26, 2016) - Vricon was awarded a General Services Administration (GSA) contract to support the Army Geospatial Center (AGC) with 10-meter and 0.5-meter geospatial data. Vricon's mission is to build The Globe in 3D by producing photorealistic 3D products and digital elevation models with unmatched coverage and delivery timelines.
Under the contract, Vricon will provide AGC with DSM-10 -- a digital surface model (DSM) with 10-meter postings -- for an entire country. Vricon also will provide the Vricon Data Suite -- a bundle of products that includes Vricon 3D Surface Model, Vricon DSM, Vricon Point Cloud, and Vricon True Ortho -- for specific areas around the world. All Vricon Data Suite products possess a 0.5-meter resolution.

"This is a tremendous award for Vricon," said Magnus Brege, CEO of Vricon. "It validates the quality of our products and the importance of our global coverage. Moreover, the US Government recognized our pricing model as 'extremely affordable' -- we create this value through our unique automated processing techniques that help keep costs down while maintaining superior accuracy."
To learn more about Vricon, visit www.vricon.com.
About VriconVricon serves the global professional geospatial market with world-leading 3D geodata and 3D visualization solutions. Vricon is headquartered in McLean, Virginia. For further information, visit http://www.vricon.com.

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