Pima Community College
Re: the April 8 article “Community colleges face ‘reckoning’.”
I’ve attended PCC for six years. I study with really talented, hard-working students that have to devote too many hours at a fast food joint to pay their rent and gas, even with financial aid. These students struggle to make ends meet and stay in school. They have to miss learning opportunities due to work. And worst of all, the school demands precise completion schedules or they lose their aid, and receive constant pressure to follow an exact path, or else. Finding intelligent life in administration is almost futile. PCC eagerly drives these students away to ignore their talent and make a career in fast food. I’ve also seen the school make awful decisions on staff, and as a learning source vital to us seniors keeping our melons active, forget it, you have to be able to flash memorize like an 18-year-old, and we can’t, but we do learn. So much for the “community” part.
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Thad Appelman
Northwest side
Hybrid over EV
Every product or service a person buys has a carbon footprint. Want to know your footprint? Add up how much money you spend in a year. The person that spends $80,000 per year will have roughly double the footprint of someone that spends $40,000. Which brings us to electric cars. They cost a lot more than gasoline cars because they are a lot heavier and have a much higher carbon footprint at purchase. It takes tens of thousands of miles of driving, depending on several factors, before the electric car has a lower carbon footprint when compared to an equivalent gasoline car. And if the source of electricity is coal, then it may never have a smaller footprint. And this is why I am so disappointed when I see electric cars on the streets. Do the buyers really own them for 10 years? Hybrids are much more friendly to the environment.
Randy Park
SaddleBrooke
Teachers on food stamps
Re: the April 8 article “Community colleges face ‘reckoning’.”
Jon Marcus does not address a key factor leading to community college decline; namely, the national practice of hiring contingent, part-time faculty. At Pima Community College, where I work, adjunct faculty pay is approximately $25/hour, and the great majority of faculty receive no benefits like health care, retirement, etc. Nationally, this is standard practice.
These faculty directly serve our students and often do so while working multiple other jobs and/or performing additional caretaking roles at home.
I am disheartened that no legislation exists to earmark a higher portion of the community college budget for teachers. What is education without teachers? If your teacher is on food stamps and Medicaid, it can be hard for her to provide the kind of support community college students need, many of whom are underprivileged to begin with.
Let’s stop the downward spiral of community colleges by advocating for legislation that transforms the budgets of community colleges. Let’s stop telling teachers they are worthless and pay them for the critical work they do.
Dr. Sarah Jansen
Midtown
Wash, rinse, repeat
I hope that our so-called “Legislature” will soon get tired of the pass, veto, repeat game they are playing and actually begin to legislate, i.e. pass bills that deal with the many crises our state is facing.
Bruce Hilpert
North side
Vote NO on Prop 412
The TEP franchise agreement increases costs to our community with no binding performance or tangible benefits. It does not address the legally declared Climate Emergency Crises and needs more work. Although other lower total cost alternatives are available, TEP plans to continue to generate harmful emissions with coal/natural gas, use billions of gallons/year of precious and expensive aquifer water, for another decade and then generate 34% of electricity with natural gas. Per EPA, methane released when natural gas is mined traps 25 times more heat in the atmosphere, increasing temperatures that reduce local rainfall while increasing electricity usage, TEP revenues. After approval, Council members have held/are holding meetings to review unanswered questions and have identified several significant options that provide assured benefit to our community. The current agreement is active for two more years, why the rush to enable TEP to continue to increase, instead of requiring them to decrease, community damages and costs?
Terry Finefrock,
CPIM TEP Ratepayer
Foothills
Prop 412 is premature
Tucson Electric Power wants voters to quickly, quietly approve a 25-year agreement for electricity distribution in Tucson. Their campaign signs for the May 16 election promise “clean reliable energy.”
We wish it were so, but after 25 years, the facts are TEP continues to source 90% of its energy from climate-changing fossil fuels, a third from coal. Their claim that using natural gas (methane) is clean contradicts what scientists say: “methane is a global warming amplifier.” Even the United Nations finds cutting methane is the strongest lever to slow climate change over the next 25 years.
While TEP is promising to deliver 100% renewable power for City of Tucson operations, many other cities are far ahead in delivering truly clean, more reliable, less expensive energy to their residents.
The climate crisis is here and getting worse. With community in mind, we can make a much better agreement.
Robert Cook
Midtown
Free mass transit in Tucson
Regarding free rides on Tucson’s mass transit system. My question is: why do all taxpayers owe everyone a free ride? The great majority of people in this vast country either own cars which they use for transportation or utilize mass transit which they pay to use.
I can see the need for subsidies for low-income or destitute citizens, but to provide free transportation for everyone smacks of the welfare society that we are becoming.
William Johnson
Northwest side
Bad dream
Observing the great progress Republicans have made in stripping women of their reproductive rights, I have to ask: When was the separation of church and state removed from the First Amendment of the Constitution? How can a judge in one state rule that mifepristone cannot be used by anyone in any state, when SCOTUS left abortion decisions up to individual states? What medical school did Judge Kacsmaryk attend that gives him more medical knowledge than the physicians advising the FDA? Where is it written that anyone must be forced to have an abortion if it is available? Mifepristone has been proven safe for decades. Women who choose to carry a pregnancy to term are welcome to do so. But forcing large numbers of people to follow religious doctrine and faulty scientific logic turns the Constitution on its head. Please, someone, wake me up and tell me this has all been a bad dream.
Pamela Parker, MD
Obstetrician/Gynecologist
South Tucson
Blind justice?
It seems we hear about conservative judges and liberal judges. We hear about Republican judges and Democrat judges. Judges are supposed to interpret the law without favor or prejudice. To have liberal Democrat judges and conservative Republican judges defeats the principles of a “justice” system. Justice is supposed to be blind to partisan manipulation. Without an objective and unbiased judicial system, we don’t have a democracy.
Richard Bechtold
West side
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