A very happy New Year to all in the Greater Vail area. 2017 was quite a year, and we look forward to and wish all good things to you and yours in 2018.
Hopefully, by the time you are reading this, you have heard that during its December 19th meeting, the Pima County Board of Supervisors reconsidered an action taken during the previous week’s meeting to reject the modifications requested by District 4 to the county staff’s road repair plan, and reversed itself and ultimately approved our District 4 changes. A supervisor from the formerly prevailing majority offered an opportunity for District 4’s modification requests to be reconsidered and our arguments that our requests were justified won the day.
This small victory for all of District 4 is evidence that our community’s feedback and involvement works. As you know, my district office staff, Lucretia Free, Sergio Arellano, and Beth Borozan, worked tirelessly to organize and conduct four different town hall meetings (we called “Just Fix the Roads”) throughout District 4 in Vail, Corona de Tucson, Green Valley, and in the Tanque Verde Valley.
Greater Vail community help, input, and assistance was generously provided by the South East Regional Council’s Transportation Working Group’s members: Co-Chairs Kreg Lulloff and Dick Katz and members Brad Anderson, Ed Buster, Anne Gibson, Bill Hart, Jay Janicek and Mike Robinette.
Organizations throughout our District contributed outstanding effort, ensuring that all voices throughout our community were heard and noted. They included the Green Valley Council, the South East Regional Council, and the Tanque Verde Valley Association. These terrific groups were remarkable in eliciting and compiling residents’ ideas, thoughts, and concerns. This was truly a community and District 4 wide collaboration.
As I have consistently stated throughout this process, the amount of money made available to us to direct towards fixing our roads is a mere drop in the bucket. And just as consistently and repeatedly, I have said that the number one issue facing District 4 and all of Pima County is fixing our roads. It is painfully and abundantly obvious that District 4 residents, and indeed residents throughout Pima County, agree. My office receives numerous pleas each week from taxpayers to fix our roads. Our own RTA Road Repair Plan (AKA “Just Fix the Roads”) is attracting significant support as well. The win on December 19th allows some folks in District 4 who have lived on failed roads for decades to be afforded some relief. Obviously, this effort does not, and has not gone far enough, nor pervasively enough. We need to fix all of our roads.
Let me be clear – our District 4 request, winning supervisors’ approval, does not in any way, matter, shape, or form take monies from any other Supervisor’s district and redirect it to ours. Our requests were merely to be allowed to re-allocate our own monies for our own District 4 roads to other areas within our own District 4. That was our modest request and that was what the Board of Supervisors voted on and approved.
As we gratefully thank all of the citizen volunteers who gave so graciously and selflessly towards this effort, let us remember that we have far to go and much to do in order to solve our $800 million-dollar road repair problem. If you agree with our direction, I urge you to let the other four Supervisors know by contacting them directly at 520-724-8126, and via email: Chair Bronson at district3@pima.gov, Supervisor Miller at district1@pima.gov, Supervisor Valadez at district2@pima.gov, and Supervisor Elias at district5@pima.gov.
I want to take this opportunity again to sincerely thank all those who gave so much to this citizen-driven process and to state again that I will not give up the fight to “Just Fix the Roads.”
