Thursday, July 21, 2022
Research/ City Creek Reserve
> Legislation Mesa City Council
| Meeting Name: | City Council Study Session | Agenda status: | Final |
| Meeting date/time: | 7/9/2018 4:30 PM | Minutes status: | Draft |
| Meeting location: | Council Chambers - Lower Level | ||
| Meeting Name: | City Council | Agenda status: | Final |
| Meeting date/time: | 7/9/2018 5:45 PM | Minutes status: | Draft |
| Meeting location: | Council Chambers - Upper Level | ||
__________________________________________________________________________
ORDINANCE 5-a
This proposed development has been the subject of robust discussion both in public hearings and in the local media, ranging from demolition of certain properties that have been in the district for years to a retro-fake architectural style that in no way is "Mesa-unique" . . . Note that the proposed development is getting financed by a for-profit branch of the LDS Church City Creek Reserve, Inc, applicant
Land Equity Investors LLC and Presiding Bishop of the Church of LDS, owner.
| 18-0756 | 5-a | Ordinance | ZON18-00375 (District 4) The 0 block of South Mesa Drive (east side), the 400 block of East Main Street (south side), the 0 block of South Udall (both sides) and the 0 block of South LeSueur (west side). Located at the southeast corner of Main Street and Mesa Drive (6± acres). Rezone 4± acres from T5MS and T4NF to T5MSF; and 2± acres from T4NF-HD and T4N-HD to T5MSF-HD. This request will allow for a mixed-use development. City Creek Reserve, Inc, applicant; Land Equity Investors LLC and Presiding Bishop of the Church of LDS, owner. Staff Recommendation: Approval with conditions P&Z Board Recommendation: Approval with conditions (Vote: 4-0) |
AURORA FLIGHT SERVICES: Sub-Orbital Near Space Motherships Assembled in Southeast Mesa
announced July 14 plans to assemble a fleet of suborbital spaceplanes in a new factory in a suburb of Phoenix.TV
The company said it has started work on the factory in Mesa, Arizona, where it will perform final assembly of new Delta-class spaceplanes. The facility is scheduled to be fully operational by late 2023. The first of those spaceplanes will start flying private astronauts in 2026, the company projects.
Virgin Galactic disclosed few details about the new factory, such as its size, but said it construction of it was in progress. It is located adjacent to Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, enabling completed spaceplanes to be transported by air to Spaceport America in New Mexico. The company said the factory will support “hundreds” of jobs and produce up to six spaceplanes a year.
“Our spaceship final assembly factory is key to accelerating the production of our Delta fleet, enabling a rapid increase in flight capacity that will drive our revenue growth,” said Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, in a company statement. “We’re thrilled to expand into the greater Phoenix area, which is home to outstanding aerospace talent, and we look forward to growing our team and fleet at our new facility.”
The Delta-class spaceplanes are the next generation of suborbital spacecraft that the company says will be able to fly more frequently than existing SpaceShipTwo vehicles. Virgin Galactic projects Delta class vehicles to be able to fly once a week, while the existing SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, will only be able to fly monthly. VSS Imagine, a spaceplane being built by Virgin Galactic at its Mojave, California, factory, is designed to perform two flights a month.
Virgin Galactic did not go into details about why it selected Mesa, Arizona, for the factory, but the company previously said it was considering several locations. “We’ve been in contact with multiple municipalities about locations and have received interest from at least three states,” Colglazier said in a November 2021 earnings call about plans for the Delta-class factory. “We expect interest to grow as we estimate we’ll be creating more than 1,000 new jobs. We are looking forward to the new opportunities and community relationships that our expanded footprint will bring.”
“Arizona is a growing innovation hub, geographically situated between our existing operations in Southern California and New Mexico,” Swami Iyer, president of aerospace systems at Virgin Galactic, said in a statement. “This will allow us to accelerate progress from conceptual design to production to final assembly at scale as we capitalize on the many advantages Mesa and the Greater Phoenix area offer.”
Virgin Galactic will contract with suppliers to produce major components of the Delta-class vehicles, which will then be assembled in Mesa. The company has not announced which suppliers it is working with.
The company is taking a similar approach for building new planes to replace the existing WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, VMS Eve, used for carrying SpaceShipTwo aloft. Virgin announced July 6 it selected Aurora Flight Sciences, a Boeing subsidiary, to produce major components of two aircraft, which will then be assembled at Virgin’s Mojave factory.
From The Guardian
Now we know...
Trump aimed to erode immigrant representation with census citizenship question, documents show
Documents reveal officials worked to keep secret their intention to use the data to exclude non-citizens from apportionment
Wed 20 Jul 2022 14.19 EDT
Last modified on Wed 20 Jul 2022 18.30 EDTDonald Trump’s administration tried to add a citizenship question to the decennial census as part of an effort to alter the way the US House’s 435 seats are divvied up among the 50 states, a new tranche of documents reveals.
The documents, released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday, offer the clearest evidence to date that the Trump administration’s public justification for adding the question was made up. For years, the administration said that it needed to add a citizenship question to the decennial survey because better citizenship data was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The US supreme court ultimately blocked the Trump administration from adding the question in 2019, saying the rationale “seems to have been contrived”.
“Today’s Committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the Trump Administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals,” Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who chairs the oversight committee, said in a statement. Maloney recently introduced legislation that seeks to block future political interference at the census bureau.
The decennial census has never asked a citizenship question and the US constitution says House seats shall be apportioned based on “the whole Number of free Persons”.
Excluding non-citizens from the apportionment count, and therefore diminishing their political representation, has long been a goal of hard-right immigration groups. It would have clear political impact: California, Texas and Florida all would have lost out on a congressional seat if unauthorized immigrants were excluded from apportionment, a 2020 projection by Pew found. Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio all would have been able to hold on to an additional seat.
Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross became interested in adding a citizenship question shortly after taking office in 2017.
That year, James Uthmeier, a commerce department attorney, set out to analyze the legality of adding a citizenship question to the census at the request of Earl Comstock, a political appointee serving in a top policy role at the agency. In an undated memo released Wednesday, he concluded that doing so would not be lawful. The document makes it clear there is little evidence those who drafted the constitution wanted to exclude non-citizens from apportionment.
“Their conscious choice not to except aliens from the directive to count the population suggests the Founders did not intend to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens for the ‘actual Enumeration’ used for apportionment,” Uthmeier wrote in the draft memo.
“Over 200 years of precedent, along with substantially convincing historical and textual arguments suggest that citizenship data likely cannot be used for purposes of apportioning representatives,” he added. “Without opining on the wisdom of such an action, a citizenship status question may legally be included on the decennial census so long as the collected information is not used for apportionment.”
But in subsequent drafts throughout 2017, Uthmeier and Comstock substantially changed that analysis.
They revised the memo to suggest there was much more ambiguity into whether a citizenship question could be added for apportionment purposes. By August 2017, they turned in a memo to Ross suggesting there was a legal basis for adding the question for apportionment purposes. “There are bases for legal arguments that the Founding Fathers intended for the apportionment count to be based on legal inhabitants,” the new memo said. “If the Secretary decides that the question is needed for apportionment purposes, then it must be included on the decennial.”
The memo was eventually hand-delivered to John Gore, a top official at the justice department (DoJ). Attached to the document was a handwritten note from Uthmeier nudging the justice department towards a rationale it could offer for adding the question.
“Sec Ross has reviewed concerns and thinks DoJ would have a legitimate use of data for VRA purposes. Please let me know if you’d like to discuss,” Uthmeier wrote. In a postscript, he suggested Gore review a recent supreme court case that could help him make the case for why existing processes for counting citizens were insufficient. Gore subsequently ghostwrote a DoJ letter to the commerce department requesting that a citizenship question be added.
The handwritten note is among the new evidence showing that commerce department officials tried to keep their work on adding a citizenship question quiet.
“Ultimately, everyone is in agreement with our approach to move slowly, carefully, and deliberately so as to not expose us to litigation risk. We can discuss further in person,” Uthmeier wrote in a September 2017 email. “At this point, Peter and I want to make sure that we are not yet discussing our analysis with outside parties that may take our discussions public.”
Kris Kobach, Kansas’ former secretary of state who led Trump’s failed voter fraud commission, advocated vigorously for the idea of adding a citizenship question to the census and excluding non-citizens from apportionment. “There are about 710,000 people in each congressional district. But, if half of the district is made up of illegal aliens, then there are only 355,000 citizens in the district. The value of each citizen’s vote in such a district is twice as high. That is unfair,” he wrote in a 2018 op-ed in Breitbart. Kobach and Ross discussed the addition of a citizenship question at the request of Steve Bannon in 2017.
The new documents significantly undercut previous testimony Ross gave to Congress about why he was adding the question. In 2018, Ross testified he added the question “solely” at the request of the Department of Justice, which was not true. The justice department declined to prosecute Ross for the false statement.
Ross also testified in 2019 that his desire to add a citizenship question to the census had nothing to do with apportionment. “This testimony is not supported by the new documents obtained by the Committee,” the House oversight committee said in a memo.
Ultimately, the failure of the commerce department to add a citizenship question blew back on Comstock, who was reportedly forced out of his role as the commerce department’s policy director in 2019. One former White House official told Politico at the time it was difficult to think of anyone who “had pissed off as many senior White House officials”.
Uthmeier is now the chief of staff to Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis.
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Let's make it happen
Techdirt Podcast Episode 326: Broadband Competition Is Just A Click Away
from the let's-make-it-happen dept
Yesterday, we released a new report from the Copia Institute, written by Karl Bode, about the state of broadband competition and the great potential of an open access fiber model: Just A Click Away: Broadband Competition In America. On today’s episode, Karl joins the podcast to dig into the details of the report and explain how a better future of US broadband is possible and attainable.
Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.
Filed Under: broadband, competition, fiber, podcast
MARICOPA COUNTY (Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler): Toxic Unhealthy Man-Made Environment
Human-Made Consequences of Climate Change Are Here & Now...Nobody's Safe. It's Urgent and Getting Worse
New report reveals how the climate crisis is supercharging extreme weather
It’s the most comprehensive look yet at how humans have already transformed the planet
"We now have the clearest picture yet of how different the world is today as a result of human-driven climate change. The most comprehensive report to date on the physical science of climate change was published today by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“Climate change is a problem that is here now. Nobody’s safe, and it’s getting worse faster,” Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme said in a press conference today. “We must treat climate change as an immediate threat.”
Extreme events — from floods to heatwaves and droughts — have gotten worse, it says in a nutshell. And scientists are even more certain than they were before that humans’ greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide and methane (which makes up a majority of “natural gas”), are to blame.
“We’ve known for decades that the world is warming, but this report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid, intensifying, and unprecedented in thousands of years,” Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC, said in an August 8th press briefing. “It is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change.”
The IPCC is considered a leading authority on climate science, and its new report has more than 230 authors from 66 countries around the world. Today’s findings are an update to a similar report in 2013, and they incorporate the body of research that’s been published in scientific journals since then.
Researchers have gotten a lot better at judging how much climate change affects individual weather events since 2013, which makes a big difference this time around. . .
“Extreme weather is occurring with more frequency across the entire planet,” Paola Andrea Arias Gómez, one of the authors of the IPCC report, said during yesterday’s press briefing. “We now can attribute that these changes are mainly driven by human activity.”
More bad news: without drastic action to curb the use of fossil fuels, things will get worse. . .
What does that mean for extreme weather?
Get ready for more “unprecedented” events — basically, things that have never happened before. The report authors outline five ways this is expected to happen in the future: extreme events will be even more extreme. They’ll be more frequent. There’s a greater chance of extreme events happening back to back or even different kinds of disasters happening at the same time. They’ll happen in places that surprise us. And the timing of these catastrophes will be unpredictable.
There are all sorts of other problems detailed in the new report, including vanishing ice, rising sea levels, and scary tipping points that could accelerate the pace of the climate crisis. There are also two more key reports expected to be published by the IPCC early next year: one that details how all of these changes to the planet will affect human life as we know it and another one that outlines potential solutions. Notably, today’s report is the only one that will be ready in time for the upcoming United Nations climate conference in November when world leaders are expected to discuss ratcheting up commitments to rein in their planet-heating pollution.
“This report is a reality check,” Valérie Masson-Delmotte, co-chair of the IPCC working group responsible for the report, said in a press release. “We now have a much clearer picture of the past, present and future climate, which is essential for understanding where we are headed, what can be done, and how we can prepare.”
Imperialst Rhetoric, Tom Horn to Defuse Tensions, Gold Tops $5,000 in Demand Frenzy, . . .Japan Bond Crash
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images Trump, Democrats Hurtle Toward Shutdown After Minnesota Killing A fatal shooting by Border Patrol agen...
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Flash News: Ukraine Intercepts Russian Kh-59 Cruise Missile Using US VAMPIRE Air Defense System Mounted on Boat. Ukrainian forces have made ...
