Monsoon season returns to Tucson
Here in Tucson, the sky does not just rain, it performs. One moment the desert is dry and still and then just like that the wind shifts. You smell creosote before the clouds even gather. Locals know that scent. It is the desert’s way of saying here it comes.
When the first raindrops hit the ground, it is like the whole city exhales. Kids run out barefoot. Dogs bark at the thunder. You might even catch someone just standing there smiling up at the sky.
Of course, the streets flood. They always do. Traffic slows, washes fill and you learn quickly which roads to avoid. But nobody really minds. This is what the desert waits for. Plants perk up overnight. Frogs croak from nowhere. Even the cacti seem to breathe a little easier.
Monsoon season is not just weather. It is a feeling a rhythm something older than the city itself. And every summer it finds its way back just like clockwork.
People are also reading… Trump administration has terminated 67 research grants at U of A — so far Border wall expanding across Arizona’s scenic grasslands Tim Steller’s column: Border Patrol raid in midtown Tucson shows need to be ready Hobbs signs law aimed at saving water by turning farms into homes A Tucson Sonoran hot dog landmark closing to move next door Huge Tucson data center to use drinking water for 2-3 years Indictment: Tucson church pastor failed to report child sex-abuse claims Tucson filmmaker flips the script on making movies in the Old Pueblo Where to see the July 4 fireworks shows in Tucson 🎆 Shop for Lego lovers to open in northwest Tucson Where to see the July 4 fireworks shows in Tucson Arizona Wildcats announce official 16-player men’s basketball roster for 2025-26 Arizona’s Koa Peat, Louisville’s Mikel Brown lead USA past France in U19 play Tucson police ID alleged gunman in deadly, chaotic crime spree Tucson to go from scorcher to soaker over the next few days
Drakovi Bloodrose
Midtown
No on Project Blue
A simple cost/benefit analysis of the proposed Project Blue data center(s?) would make it an obvious no-go. Some 75 jobs does not come close to balancing out the untold amount of water and electricity that will be consumed. For comparison, the University of Arizona employs a good 15,000 people, with minor environmental impact. At the very least, if this data center goes through, the city and the county need to demand an open process (read: no NDAs), and a tough contract with clear, binding penalties for noncompliance. The key here is binding, as in ironclad. How many corporations have created extreme environmental damage and walked away leaving we taxpayers to foot the bill? But really, there is little that can be done if and when Tucson runs out of water. As with the several proposed mining projects in southern Arizona, the water issue alone should stop this project.
And thank you, Star, and journalist Tony Davis, for staying on top of this.
Margaret Zanger
Midtown
AHCCCS cuts
Dear Arizona Daily Star, please cover some of the effects that the Big Beautiful Bill would have on access to health care and services for some of our most vulnerable. Many Tucsonans suffer from mental health, substance abuse, homelessness, and food insecurity, and cutting the services available to them would only hurt our neighbors in need and hurt the systems trying to help them.
Daniel Lee
Foothills
CBP fiscal year reports
CBP reports 5,597 criminal alien arrests beginning FY Oct. 1, 2024. FY ending Sept. 30, 2024, lists 17,048 criminal alien arrests. At the current rate, this FY will end at just 10,877. That is a significant difference. Average daily arrests: FY2024: 46.7; FY2025: 24.0. If all arrests are attributed to Trump’s second term, average daily arrests are 42.4. That is still 10% less than the FY2024 average.
The CBP website does not provide monthly totals. Implicitly, Trump’s administration is arresting fewer criminal aliens per CBP-reported statistics.
That is my “critical thinking” conclusion based CBP reported statistics.
James Abels
Midtown
Sell out
This is a hard LTE to write, as someone who served over 22 years. Who was proud of the government our Constitution created. But I am overwhelmed: We have a President selling cellphones and Teslas from the Oval Office. We have a Supreme Court granting that President firing authority over independent commissions, which Congress created to specifically exempt them from such politics. And we have a Congress manipulating data to justify an appropriations bill, which by all independent review is regarded as terrible – terrible for the costs to healthcare, assistance to the less capable, etc. When a Senator votes for the bill yet trusts the House to fix its problems — well anyone can be bought. That is the true problem: Neither our politicians nor our appointed judiciary care beyond their own well-being. I never thought that those with whom I served with would be so disrespected, never mind all Americans! But don’t be shocked. The bill passes. Everyone apparently can be bought.
Norman Patten
Midtown
Ciscomani and Mo
Democrats will try to defeat U.S. Representative Juan Ciscomani no matter how he votes on the Cruel, Callous and Conniving Bill, but should he decide to vote no, then moderate Republicans and Independents might think — maybe — he is putting his constituents and country before his loyalty to the mythomaniac Trump. If not, he surely will lose to the Democrat who truly cares about those in CD6 who depend on Medicaid and those veterans who depend on a financially healthy U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
As an aside, I think that the Democrat who will fight to strengthen our democracy, fight for a better deal for the working class, fight for human rights, and fight to defend our Constitution is Mo Goldman.
Mitchell Anderson
Catalina
PUA! goes the classroom funding
A student in my French classroom as Tucson High Magnet School exclaimed, “that’s the first field trip I’ve been on!” After our class took a walking trip to the UA’s Center for Creative Photography. This trip cost the district nothing, because of the generosity of the CCP in not charging admission, my students in wearing their walking shoes, and their parents in signing off on it.
Arizona public schools cannot stand to lose a single cent of funding more than what they have already had withheld by local lawmakers. On Tuesday, July 1, another Presidential Unilateral Action (PUA!) suddenly and inexplicably withheld $6.8 billion from schools across America. In the time it takes this to be proven illegal in court, children will hit their milestones and keep growing, missing out daily on valuable instruction and after-school support that was cut on Tuesday.
Galen Retterath
Downtown
Defend our freedoms
President Trump opened an American concentration camp in Florida called Alligator Alcatraz. Alcatraz was a federal institution where inmates had either pled guilty or been found guilty in jury trials. There are no jury trials at this American concentration camp. Rather, we have masked secret police with the leeway to snatch anyone at any time, including naturalized citizens.
The accusation of being a terrorist does not make you a terrorist in the U.S. even when it comes from a man terrorizing people from his lofty position of privilege. In America, we have laws not concentration camps.
On display in Florida was a grotesque sight: an American president fetishizing in cruelty filled with rage and fomenting division. We now have an evil concentration camp, and it won’t be the last.
We must understand as we celebrate this July 4 that the cause of America was about more than independence, the cause became about freedom and that is what must be defended.
Teresa Jenkins
SaddleBrooke
Our better angels
What kind of society do we aspire to be? One that rewards the rich or one that cares for the less fortunate — that being a society that feeds the hungry, that provides universal health care and cares for our most vulnerable, our children.
Do we desire a nation that supports preventive health care, that supports the research to find cures for Alzheimer’s and cancer, or do we deny science and resign to suffer the scourges of disease?
Do we continue to deport innocent folks who harvest our food and build and serve our community?
Are we so inured of the suffering and starvation outside our country that we shut down USAID at the expense of millions dying from malnutrition and preventable or treatable diseases?
Have our better angels vanished? Ronald Reagan spoke of “the shining city on a hill”, the United States of America. Let us not allow the light to fade.
Jonathan Insel
Foothills
Homeless encampments
Last week, the City of Tucson reported that it spent over a million dollars to clean up homeless sites. This got me to thinking, and some readers will probably call this simplistic and naive, but here goes. I don’t know the answer to this, but possibly would it be cheaper to place a couple of Porta Potties and a dumpster at these sites. It would hopefully improve the sanitary conditions for the homeless, while also benefiting surrounding neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, there will always be homelessness until we find solutions for affordable housing, drug and alcohol addiction, along with mental health issues. These are issues that every level of government should be addressing on a coordinated level. Would the annual cost of such a program be more than the million spent? Even if the cost was the same, the human benefit would be worth it. No one chooses to be homeless.
Fred DiNoto
Northwest side
It is a choice
“There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a Nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.” (FDR, 1932)
Some parts of the Republican BBB come directly from the first view. Once again, the hope of “trickle-down economics” is being used to rationalize tax cuts, even though this hope has never been realized for past cuts. Active repudiation of the second view is embodied in the spending cuts. Trump’s BBB is not “populist”, but in these elements is a traditional GOP bill: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for business, and reduced spending on support programs.
Barbara Hall
Midtown
The economy of genocide
Regarding the destruction of Gaza, the United Nations has just published a report by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese naming more than 60 companies — including arms manufacturers and technology firms — that profit from what she calls “the economy of genocide.” Here’s an excerpt:
“While life in Gaza is being obliterated and the West Bank is under escalating assault, this report shows why Israel’s genocide continues: because it is lucrative for many.”
Notably, prominent Israeli genocide scholars Amos Goldberg, Omer Bartov, Daniel Blatman, Raz Segal and Shmuel Lederman have all concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
When institutions and corporations ignore these clear and authoritative assessments, they abandon both moral responsibility and international law. The cost is measured in human lives.
Terry Hansen
Downtown
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