Steve Kozachik: Thanks for all the help along the way

I will be retiring from the Tucson city council after April 1st. Having invested the past 14+ years developing relationships it’s important to use this space to offer a huge thank you to the many people, my staff, wife and I have had the pleasure of working alongside. We’ve shared a lot, and those memories are indelible.

Stephen Covey wrote a book titled Live Life in Crescendo. In the book Covey challenges us to continue to grow, contribute, learn and where you can, to influence. The metaphor he uses is music – how one note builds on another, leaving us anticipating the next note. Covey’s directive to us is to live life anticipating that what’s to come builds on what we’ve already experienced, and that our best days lie ahead. My move over to Pima County administration is made with a crescendo mentality; building on what have been our shared experiences, and knowing there’s more to learn, grow in, offer and contribute.

So where have we been together? In the past 14 years Tucson and our region have seen some significant changes. Those include working through the 2010 recession and in partnership with Rio Nuevo, the Downtown Tucson Partnership and Pima County we’ve seen an amazing resurgence in our downtown core. Credit to the private sector risk takers who had both the trust and vision to invest in our community.

Through the Ward 6 office we’ve taken on a variety of causes. Residents from throughout the community have been our partners. You’ve participated in complex rezoning discussions as we put into place the Sunshine Mile overlay. It can serve as a template for defining how we see businesses co-exist with adjacent neighborhoods when planning future transit-oriented development. You’ve participated in our donation drives related to Afghan arrivals, migrants who cross our southern border from all over the world and unhoused members of our community. Your generosity over the past years has continually amazed me. We worked together to preserve the Benedictine monastery. The ‘we’ includes the developer, his design team and concerned community members. As a testament to the success of that effort it’s worth noting the new Benedictine Apartments are 100% leased. And the monastery is preserved in perpetuity. And the complexity of those negotiations served us well when working through other major development projects close to the UA campus. Getting multiple voices and perspectives into the same room to share their viewpoints yields a better outcome. You’ve participated in kicking off the plastic reuse program that will place Tucson as the first city in the world to take on the problem of non-recyclable plastic waste at scale and turn it into a productive asset. Since we began the program you’ve provided roughly 240 tons of plastic. Take a bow.

Together we’ve worked on reasonable gun-control measures. Yes, there are such things; “reasonable” gun-control measures. We’ve worked to give voice to the victims of sex trafficking in our community, and to educate parents and youth about how they can become a victim. We’ve partnered with our friends at the Reid Park Zoo and Tucson Wildlife Center on animal conservation and rehabilitation efforts. And on a similar note, we’ve participated together in shutting down the Tucson Greyhound Park. The animal abuse that took place there is finally a thing of the past. And on a very local scale this office has partnered with numerous neighborhood groups on planning, designing and installing traffic calming measures that will also enhance our climate adaptation work. Chicanes with landscaping slow traffic on our collector streets while providing beauty along our roadways.

There have been some disappointments and outcomes on policy issues I’d rather have seen go another way. But living a life in crescendo is forward looking. The mayor and city council have challenges on the immediate horizon. The potential for migrant street releases will necessarily impact resources. The city budget is facing a significant deficit next fiscal year due to the effects of the state flat tax. The recent snowpack in the Sierras will provide a temporary respite from challenges we have relative to the future of the Colorado River and the allocations we receive from it. But our reality is we need to find new ways to conserve water — and to assure it’s clean. The clean-up of PFAS contamination is another issue the mayor and city council must stay engaged with. Decisions will have to be made with respect to the city’s role in RTA Next, and how the city and TEP work together on the Midtown Reliability Project. The micro-grid initiative I introduced is a nice step, but we will need a healthy utility providing power. Achieving that in a way that respects local ordinances put in place to preserve the aesthetics of our community, and in a way that continues to address the need to invest in renewable energy sources is going to be an important needle that needs to be threaded. Those are some big issues — and the list is not at all exhaustive.

So I’ve got the flaps down and I’m taxiing on the runway headed over to work for county administration. The work I’ve discussed with them related to the Knott Development called Mosaic Quarter can be a regionally transformative project. What I will bring to that table builds on the work I, along with my staff have done with community members over the course of my time on the city council. Those relationships don’t end. I look forward to seeing you out and about, as a citizen continuing to look for ways to plug in and help make the region just a little bit better as a result of the effort.