MesaZona > Table of Contents : Here's The Menu. Enjoy

Friday, February 16, 2018

This Month's Sponsored Guest: Farnsworth Family-Business Branches Out

12,000 homes built by the family real-estate firms and now they go into healthcare for dementia ....they sponsor themselves for the expanded empire NO VIEWS for this "tricky business"

NO VIEWS: Mayor John Giles Joins Mesa Morning Live

What's that story with the torn Achilles heel and the bruised right eye???? Giles is plugging an inter-faith banquet for "The Golden Rule" Huh?

Swarms of Quakes > New Records! | Quake "jolt" wakes residents 50 ...

Published on Feb 16, 2018

February 16, 2018: Recent and ongoing quake swarms are producing earthquakes at a record pace. | LA area quake felt by many.

A Travel Site Selects Mesa: Who's Getting "Artsy" Driving Travel Bookings?

From the City of Mesa Newsroom yesterday 15 Feb 2018 @ 4:54 PM

Mesa named one of the most artistic cities in the U.S.

Mesa has been named by Expedia, Inc. as one of the most artistic cities in the United States. The travel company includes Mesa in the large city category, with a population between 350,000 and 1 million, as having a thriving arts community.
"Mesa has a vibrant arts culture that is growing with new artists' lofts, an emerging music scene and the beginnings of an innovation district that blends creativity, coworking, business and education," Mayor John Giles said. "We are proud to be recognized as one of the most artistic cities in the country."

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BLOGGER COMMENTS

> The rules in Expedia's survey clearly state that they've chosen cities with populations under 1 million in the city center - downtown Mesa in reality has way less than 10,000

> The opening on the travel site Expedia's Viewfinder website is this quote from Democratic President Lyndon Johnson between known for his War on Poverty and The Great Society

“Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves and to others the inner vision which guides us as a nation.” –Lyndon Johnson

Why do you love to travel?

> Named as an "artistic city" by a travel-booking site?

Sure why not when information from the city's Open Data Portal shows that visitor-counts to city-owned/managed institutions have decreased over time:

Number of Visitors to Downtown Mesa City Attractions

See the actual data on this dashboard > http://open.mesaaz.gov/dashboards/19812/placemaking/

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Mesa, with a population of 484,587, was recognized for its easy access to the arts. Expedia cited the Mesa Arts Center as a "veritable one stop shop of creativity" with performing and studio art classes; Broadway shows and concerts; WordPlay Cafe offering an open mic for poetry, storytelling and music; and exhibits at the free, five-gallery Mesa Contemporary Arts museum.
The City was also recognized for the i.d.e.a. Museum for promoting children's exploration of creativity and learning and the Mesa Community College Performing Arts Center for offering music, dance, theater and a new art gallery to showcase student art. Expedia also said downtown Mesa is "well worth exploring, with its over 200 sculptures and art hub."Mesa was honored by Expedia as one of the most artistic large cities along with Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, Honolulu, Charlotte, St. Louis and Baltimore. Mesa was the only Arizona city recognized as one of the most artistic towns in the U.S.

Original source for more news from Mesa Now
For more information, visit www.viewfinder.expedia.com/features/americas-artistic-towns/.

Public Information and Communications
Contact: Steve Wright
Tel. 480-644-2069
steven.wright@mesaaz.gov

Reality-Check For A Spoon-Fed Reporter: The Tallest Building In Downtown Mesa

Hey!
Pardon me, dear readers, but more often than not, this is the sensation your MesaZona blogger feels when he sees and reads published stories in mainstream media that are so far off-the-mark on the simple and straightforward basics of accurate journalism.
Case in Point: an article from back in July of last year that's a total Ra-Ra for a way-out-of-scale way-out-of-proportion way "above-the-market" for "up-scale urban" housing and questionable real estate speculation here in the New Urban Downtown.
Talking about what? Another over-sized "Pie-In-The-Sky" dream to plop down atop a less-than-one-acre parking lot a luxury 15-story hotel tower in a 2-story historic district and 75 above-market apartments adjacent to a charter school with 700 students to benefit the business interests of Mega-Millionaire State Senator Bob Worsley, a close crony in the cohorts of the mayor.

Gotta wonder when someone whose job it is to report "the news" can take the words, directly quoted without fact-checking from Director of Downtown Transformer Jeff McVay (shown in an image to the right) and to reproduce them without even looking around at the streetscape, or for that matter admitting that she got the cross-streets incorrect where Worsley's monster oversized Pie-In-The-Sky Dreams" could come true if this kind of hood-winking gets promoted more - without questioning - in corporate mainstream media.
Most of the reporters who are newbies, recent graduates of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism @ ASU have any easy way to get stuff published when so much of they write is "spoon-fed" news that the City of Mesa - or the Mayor's Cohorts - tell them what to write . . Uncle Walter is probably rolling around in his grave if he knew what kind of journalism these corporate slackers are practicing

With such glaring obvious mistakes any reasonable person might and could doubt what passes as news.

Just one small piece of information provided by McVay that Worsley's real estate speculation, registered as MACDev LLC with the Arizona Corporate Commission just a week before a Memorandum of Understanding was agreed to by the City of Mesa, is the tallest building here in downtown Mesa: it's simply NOT true.
The tallest building here is Courtyard Towers, towering like a behemoth of 15-stories high over the 1-story and 2-story buildings in the neighborhood on N Robson Street just north of Main Street - an assisted-living facility

Yes it's that "Vision Thing" all over again presented with pretty pictures computer-generated by some scatter-brained architects in distorted perspectives and mis-positioning reverse-mirror images of imaginary and un-imaginative buildings that don't know East from West. . .to be accurate this view shows the distorted narrow back-alley behind the Drew Building seen at right.
The location of the tall imaginary building shown at center is the SEC of Main/MacDonald where the Bank of America has been located for years!
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Readers will note that reporter Jessica Boehm starts off with what got done in Phoenix - that's not, however, what makes Mesa UNIQUE or respects the historic district where Worsley wants to plop-down his Pie-In-The-Sky fantasies
Looks like a 6-7 story CAD-generated image - when the proposal is for 15 stories
Click here for more of the Spoon-fed new report

Corrections & Clarifications: A previous version of this story listed the wrong cross streets for the proposed project's location.

"One of the pioneers who helped reinvigorate downtown Phoenix nearly a decade ago with a risky condo project wants to take another risk — this time in downtown Mesa. . . "

Raising Arizona Minimum Wage: Morally Right or Morally Wrong?

Here in Arizona we have a problem in the Arizona State House with Republican legislators like Sylvia Allen
PHOENIX — Calling the voter-approved measure morally wrong, a Republican-controlled Senate panel voted Monday to ask voters to reconsider the 2016 measure which is set to hike the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020.

Who else is on that panel - the Committee on Commerce and Public Safety - in the Arizona State Senate who approved by Monday’s 5-3 party-line vote - a new challenge this week to what voters approved in the last General Election?
Sen. Bob Worsley R-Mesa
Sen. Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert
Allen told The Independent on Wednesday, that she feels that Prop 206 is far too burdensome on the small, locally-owned businesses that dominate rural Arizona. “Cost of living went up with prices. The minimum wage was never meant to support a family,” Allen said. That in a nutshell is her thinking.

Allen said the minimum wage hike has forced employers to reduce employee’s hours and raise prices, increasing the overall cost of living the wage hike was intended to address.
According to more details in this report from The White Mountain Independent her questionable argument supporting small business is way off-the-mark for any kind of workable wage to deal with the real cost-of-living for workers in small business jobs that pay the mandated minimum wage.
Huh? Facts and data below challenge her assertions:

“What I see is we are going to destroy small business in Arizona and have nothing but chain stores,” Allen said. “Large corporations are not affected as much because they are already paying higher wages.”

Tomas Robles, co-director of Living United for Change in Arizona, the organization that spearheaded Prop 206, had his own take on the issue.

“These are lies,’’ he argued. Robles cited figures which show unemployment in Arizona is at the lowest rate in a decade and that employment in the traditionally low-paying leisure and hospitality sector not only has risen since the measure was approved, but has outpaced the national average.

Going even farther into where this strange thinking of a publicly-elected official, Allen said the issue goes beyond the effect on small businesses.

“Your business is your private property,’’ she told colleagues.

“No one has the right to tell a business what they have to pay to an individual,’’ Allen continued. “They don’t know the particulars of that business. They don’t know the liability that they carry.’’

> Echoing that theme by Sylvia Allen the Snowflake legislator presented Diana Links, who said she owns a catering firm which provides lunches for charter schools.
“My family took a risk, not the voters of Arizona,’’ she said.
> Sen. Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, said the entire concept of having voters set a higher minimum wage is questionable.

“I believe I have a moral responsibility to be generous with my own money,’’ he said. “But I believe it’s completely immoral to be generous with other people’s money.’’

Supporters, however, saw the issue in terms of the broader good.

> Sen. Sean Bowie, D-Phoenix, told colleagues that the margin of victory for the measure is actually larger than most of them won their own seats. Nor was he swayed by arguments that a minimum wage hike is improper taking of money from one group and giving it to another.
> Sen. Bob Worsley, R-Mesa, went along with his GOP colleagues and voted to put the issue on the November ballot

National Debt: Myths vs. Truths

Published on Feb 8, 2018

Truth in Accounting partnered with the Fiscal Challenge to educate students on the true national debt.