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November 17, 2003

Host: Michael Grant
Topics:
·Prison reform bill;
·Hunger in Arizona;
·Special report on Arizona's drought.
In-Studio Guests:
· State Representative Bill Konopnicki (Rep.) of Safford;
· State Senator Bill Brotherton, (Dem.) of Phoenix;
· Ginny Hildebrand of the Arizona Food Bank;
· State Senator Thayer Verschoors, co-Chair of the Joint Legislative Committee

>> Michael Grant: Tonight on "Horizon," legislature considers a plan for private prisons. Is it certain to be vetoed? Hunger is invisible but pervasive around the state. Despite recent rains, the drought lingers. A special report tonight. Good evening, I'm Michael Grant. Prison reform one of the primary issues facing legislators during this special session. Last week house Republican lawmakers proposed a solution in House Bill 2019.

>>Russell K. Pearce: Some of you probably have heard we have a budget crisis. We're going into this next year about a billion dollars short so we have serious issues and one is prison crowding. So the first focus was to figure out how to resolve this problem without a general fund impact. We think we have some resolutions to do that that we think are very positive for the public, for our communities and for the budget, which obviously moms and dads who work for a living pay for. Anyway, we've come one a solution that I think will resolve this problem while focusing on again no general fund dollars expended but yet the ability to resolve the problem we have before us today, and that is a bed crisis.

>> Michael Grant: Giving us an update on the issue, State Representative Bill Knopnicki and State Senator Bill Brotherton. Good to see both of you again. Representative Konopnicki, the bill passed the house today, correct?

>>Bill Konopnicki: Yes, it did.

>>Michael Grant: This is a mixture of a temporary and permanent solution that totals to 3,000 beds, correct?

>>Bill Konopnicki: That's correct.

>> Michael Grant: Give us the breakout on temporary versus permanent.

>>Bill Konopnicki: Permanent beds about 1,400, the other beds are 1,600, and that gives us the round number of the 3,000 to be able to do something with our overcrowding.

>> Michael Grant: Now, both sides of that equation, both the temporary and the permanent solution, targeted at private prisons only?

>>Bill Konopnicki: That's the way they're set up now, by state statute though, if the Director can do it cheaper, then she has the -- D.O.C. can do it cheaper, then they have the option of being able to do it themselves rather than taking it out.

>>Michael Grant: The State Corrections Director said she can do it cheaper. What do you say to that?

>>Bill Konopnicki: Well, I have great confidence in her. I think she's a wonderful asset to the state. I would Want to see numbers. But the big thing we do with private beds right now is it doesn't require upfront capital on the part of the state which we just don't have right now.

>> Michael Grant: Senator Brotherton, the Governor obviously indicated her opposition to the plan. The state corrections director has indicated her opposition to the plan. What's your opposition to the plan?

>>Bill Brotherton: Well, I think it's similar. Actually, I came on here just a few weeks ago to talk about the special session and the department of corrections, and the idea was in the special session to deal with it from the standpoint of the short-term overcrowding problem that we have now and not really get into locking us into a situation of private -- additional private prison contracts. Putting that off to the regular session. Because of the controversy surrounding private prisons and use of them, the governor and myself included feel that's something better to be looked at during the regular session when there's more time to look all the issues involved and what we're really looking at right now is getting the overcrowding problem down and giving us some breathing space.

>> Michael Grant: We've been looking at it for a long time and obviously there's a lot of private prison facilities not only in this state but scattered throughout country. What more is there to examine on the issue in the regular session?

>>Bill Brotherton: Well, I think that, again, with the special session, the governor's bill proposed using some private prison space, also using some jail space and so there were some provisional beds being set up that would have helped us with that overcrowding problem. I think that there is a great deal of controversy on how much really is saved by private prisons. You'll hear out of one report that it's 12%. The Department of Justice report says maybe 1 to 2%. And neither one of those figures being all that large. Some other issues with regard to the way these things are contracted. You have to give them an occupancy rate of 85%. Typically these private prisons tend to cherry pick. If they don't want somebody, they can send them back. So the state end up having the most difficult to manage and expensive prisoners.

>> Michael Grant: Administrative nightmare for not all that great a savings?

>>Bill Konopnicki: Well, I don't think so. I think there's some opportunity there, and clearly as was mentioned earlier, the Governor's plan was going to call for some of those too in the short term. We've got 31,000 folks incarcerated, growing at an alarming rate, by '07 budget should be in the neighborhood of 40,000. To add 1,400 permanent beds seems to be a prudent way to solve a short-term problem and putness a position to use those as a long-term solution as well.

>> Michael Grant: Now, let me move to another issue, the bill would also impose a thousand-dollar surcharge on a DUI offense. There's some controversy about whether or not that's going to raise sufficient dollars, or intended dollars. Do you think it will or not?

>>Bill Konopnicki: Well, the original intent of that, Michael, was to literally stem the number of DUIs in the State of Arizona, 1 in 5 fatalities is DUI related. With the number of folks we have incarcerated, roughly 3,000 that stay for 120 days, 9,000 on annualized basis and the unintended consequence was to have some revenue generated from that. It will not be enough to solve all the prison problems. It will be some money coming in that I hope we can use for a number of alternatives as we move forward.

>> Michael Grant: One of the other revenue sources, I understand, for this plan out of a corrections fund, I think I saw a figure somewhere in the 7, 8 million range?

>>Bill Konopnicki: Yes, the Governor's plan called for 9 million out of the correction fund. We're using almost all of that, 8.9 million.

>> Michael Grant: Senator Brotherton, any problem with the thousand dollar DUI surcharge.

>>Bill Brotherton: Well, I'm a victim of a DUI driver. I was hit once head on by one and injured, my son and I, and so it's a terrible problem, and there are some issues, I think, perhaps legal, with the clean elections folks because they get that surcharge, and as far as I know the bill still exempts it, but I don't see any problem with looking at alternatives. Bill and I have talked before about alternatives but that's one of the issues that I have too, with private prisons, I think to some degree the more we rely on private prisons, the more we create a lobbying entity that is going to be somewhat resistant to alternatives to incarceration, because these are folks who, as we know, they earn a living off of incarcerating folks.

>> Michael Grant: We learned just last week in Scottsdale with Rural/Metro that sometimes privatization can last for a long time, and other times it comes to an end, or private -- are private prisons a shaky foundation upon which to set this particular governmental function?

>>Bill Konopnicki: I don't think so. I think private prisons have been around for a while. We do have provisions in there we can take them over and operate them if we're not happy with the results. I think in the State of Arizona we want to have a mix. I would think that clearly the use of public beds ought to be the mainstay of what we do shall but a mix of private beds just makes good sense. We don't have to put up capital to build them. Gives us an opportunity to maybe move quicker in term of building facilities since we don't have to control it. Just some things that are helpful.

>> Michael Grant: Senator Brotherton, is the Governor going to veto this bill?

>>Bill Brotherton: I would think in its current form, I haven't spoken to her directly on it, but in its current form, I don't think this is going into law.

>> Michael: All right. and the special session will continue until Christmas. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us.

>>Michael Grant: Hunger is a misunderstood malady nearly affecting 14% of Arizona's population. It is rarely visible so we might think it's not much of a problem. Unfortunately that is not the case. In fact, it is getting worse. Producer Larry Lemmons takes us to St. Mary's food bank where volunteers are working to help feed the hungry.

>> Reporter: St. Mary's food bank is basically a food clearing house.

>>Sandy Schimmel: So what we do is we go to grocery stores, we go to food brokers, food manufacturers, food warehouses, growers and ask for food to be donated and if we can't get the kind of products we need, then we buy it. So all the food comes into one location? Our warehouse. It's sorted and stored wherever it needs to go, and then agencies that need food to feed their clients can come here and take whatever they need.

>> Reporter: St. Mary's serves everything from big feeding halls like the Salvation Army to things like hospice care and missions.

>>Sandy Schimmel: So we kind of try to provide food to all agencies that provide food for people in need.

>> Reporter: It was, in fact, the first food bank of its kind. It was founded in 1967 by John van Hengel (sp).

>>Sandy Schimmel: He was working at as a volunteer a charity dining hall, he met a family a woman and her ten children and she was feeding her kids from the back of the grocery store, dumpster diving, and he looked at them, their' clean and the kids look well fed, he was kind of surprised, and he said, what's back there? She said, there's all kinds of stuff. You can get milk and bread and cheese and eggs and all the groceries are in the dumpster. So he called a grocery store and said, what do you do with food that's going out of code? What do you do with yesterday's bread? We throw it away. He thought, what if I come and get and it bring it back to the dining hall?

>> Reporter: Eventually that initial idea grew into an operation involving a large warehouse and 10 trucks.

>>Sandy Schimmel: They usually make about 13 to 17 stops each and what they do is they're going to the grocery stores and picking up food that would otherwise be thrown away. They're going to a brokerage house or manufacturers or they're picking up produce and bringing it back here and it gets sorted and put away. It needs to go in the cooler, it might go in the freezer, might go up on the shelves. That's what they're doing every day, five days a week, 10 trucks are going out picking up up food.

>> Reporter: Some are from the Arizona gleaning project.

>>Norm Gold: We operate three semi tractors, six refrigerated trailers and our role is to gather donated food, mostly produce, from growers, from packers, distribution warehouses and from food banks and we distribute it to the food banks throughout the state from Nogales to Flagstaff to Yuma. So we've distributed 57 million pounds last year, mostly produce. We rely heavily on food banks like Nogales and Yuma. That's where the growing season starts now and we get a lot of produce out of those seasons.

>> Reporter: The Maricopa County Sheriff's Department also let's the project have three trucks and drivers every day to help distribute food around the state. St. Mary's also relies on the time of volunteers.

>>Sandy Schimmel: The volunteers from Microsoft are sorting food that's donated. It can come in from a food drive or it might have come in from a manufacturer, might be dented cans off the grocery shelf that's perfectly usable and what they're doing is sorting food into different categories, and then when the food is done being sorted, it goes, gets packed up and then it gets packed into emergency food boxes. So all the food that comes in gets used in one method or another.

>>Melissa Libhart: With the holidays coming up and understanding that the time of need, especially around hungry -- hunger and feeding families and whatnot, we decided to contact them proactively and they said, we'd love to have you come volunteer and we've even signed up to come back next spring. So we would like to make it a semi annual event that we can participate in.

>> Reporter: All this community effort, of course, is intended to alleviate a significant and growing problem in Arizona, hunger.

>>Sandy Schimmel: Unfortunately, about 13.9% of people that live in Arizona are living in poverty, and most people who live in poverty don't have enough money for food, and what we find is with a lot of families that are hungry or in need of food, the family has at least one person who is working, but they go home and they pay their rent and they pay their light bill and they pay their utilities, transportation, healthcare, dress their kids, send them off to school, and food is the last thing on that list, and so what happens is people either don't have enough food or enough of the right kinds of food. People take turns eating so maybe it's this person's turn to eat in the family this day and not this day. And if you look at the schools we work with, where we have 22 schools, which is all we can serve right now, where we have at least 95% of the kids qualifying for free breakfasts and/or free lunch programs, there is a serious program in our community. In Phoenix alone, just Phoenix, not Tempe, Chandler, Mesa, there are 200,000 people living in poverty right now. You could fill up Bank One Ballpark four times with people that are hungry just in Phoenix.

>> Reporter: 80% of St. Mary's funding comes from about 40,000 household in the Valley. It's that kind of community support and effort that helps the organization stay viable in the face of escalating demand on the food bank.

>>Sandy Schimmel: The demand on the food bank increases every year. This year alone we've increased the amount of food we're distributing by 38%. That's an enormous amount of food to distribute, and what we've seen is a lot of other food banks are turning agencies away saying we can't help anyone else. We're done. And we've taken on 70 more agencies just in the last eight months. These are agencies that may have been able to provide food for their clients before, and now they no longer can, and they're looking for that resource and St. Mary's food bank provides that food for free. So that's what we're here for. Just 20 million pounds 10 years ago, 30 million pounds now. Something is wrong in our community that there's a constant growing need for food.

>> Michael Grant: Here to help us understand the extent of the hunger problem, the Executive Director of the Association of Arizona Food Banks, Ginny Hildebrand. Also joining us, the Co-chair of the Joint Legislative Committee on Hunger, State Senator Thayer Verschoor. Thank you very much for being here. Ginny, I was very surprised by this. Services to homeless people make up approximately 1% of all services given by food banks in the state.

>>Ginny Hildebrand: That's right.

>> Michael Grant: I was very surprised.

>>Ginny Hildebrand: Most people are. It's not something that, you know, is general knowledge. I think that this information is somewhat fraught with our perception because we may see people standing on the street corner asking for assistance. That's a visible piece. What isn't visible are all the people behind that one person, you know, that are working poor, seniors, children that are not able to eat on a regular basis at their home.

>> Michael Grant: Is the problem getting worse? And if so, why?

>>Ginny Hildebrand: Well, it's really a challenge. Over 700,000 people in our state live below the poverty level. That's a huge number. It's close to 14% of our population. And we know that that group of folks is struggling sometime during the year and is going to need emergency food. Last year 475,000 people were served with emergency food in our state through our food bank network, and that's a pretty big number.

>> Michael Grant: Senator Verschoor, the state does make a general fund contribution, does it not, to the food bank network?

>>Thayer Verschoor: That's correct, Michael. This piece you just watched, a lot of people would look at and that think this is a huge government program, but the truth of the matter is most of what you saw there is donations and help from private individuals and private corporations and from the religious, the faith-based community and other organizations. The state only has a general fund -- gives to the food banks of about $1.8 million. That's mostly used to help them with the trucks, some of their operating costs, the trucks that you saw there to help with the gleaning program, other equipment and some help with the volunteers. So that's the great thing about this food bank program. You know, America -- Americans, sometimes we forget we are the most charitable nation in the world, and we are, and you can see that. The problem is that we are facing a growing population also here in Arizona. So that's why you see a lot of the increases in those numbers.

>> Michael Grant: What's on the plate of the joint legislative committee on hunger in relation to this issue?

>>Thayer Verschoor: Well, I think there's a couple of things. Of course, the biggest thing that's going to be on the plate is the budget situation. You know, it just overwhelms everything. We're facing a $900 million deficit, so this is a program that -- and all the hunger programs, all of the programs that have to do with DEs and the Department of Health Services are all going to have to be look at. And so those are some of the issues that we'll be facing, as well as how good the programs that we have out there, how well they're working and what we can maybe do better with the food stamp and WIC program.

>> Michael Grant: The penetration raid on the food stamp program is only about 74% in Arizona?

>>Ginny Hildebrand: That's right, but it's up from where it used to be bat 50%. What we're looking for is trying to get as many people who are eligible for that program on that program because it's really different to have food stamps and be able to provide for your family most of the month the food that they need or having to go to a food bank and having to ask for a three to five supply of emergency food. That's a big difference.

>> Michael Grant: Now, I take it that school lunch programs and some other types of support contribute to helping solve the problem in some measure?

>>Ginny Hildebrand: There are a number of federal nutrition assistance programs that make a huge difference for hungry people in our state. Food banks probably only provide about 15% of the amount of food that hungry people receive in our state, but there's food stamps, there's WIC, there's school meals, there's senior programs and others.

>> Michael Grant: And the state will administer or assist in qualifying on many of those programs, will it not?

>>Thayer Verschoor: Yeah, the state assists through the Department of Economic Security and through the Department of Health Services, assists a lot of those programs.

>> Michael Grant: Okay. Senator Verschoor, thank you very much for joining us. Ginny Hildebrand, our thanks to you as well. Despite the rain that fell in the Valley earlier this month, climatologists say it's going to do little for Arizona's record drought. Phoenix has recorded almost 6 inches of rain so far this year. That is below normal. Tonight in the first of a two-part series, KUAT producer Ted Robbins looks at the drought and what it means.

>> Reporter: For John Whitney, the current drought has been devastating. Three years ago it helped force him out of the ranching business.

>>Larry Dozier: The first year we took the cattle off it was tough. But now -- I still get emotional about it. But now we realize, you know, you can't just keep crying in your beer, as they say. You have to go on.

>> Reporter: For Larry Dozier, it's meant pour business. Dozier is with the central Arizona project which sells Colorado River water.

>>Larry Dozier: Salt River Project has been taking some supplemental water from us. The users down on the Gila River, like the San Carlos project and the Gila River Indian community have been taking more water from us than they normally would because their surface water supplies have been shorted. So it's expanded our customer base.

>> Reporter: The reason? Six straight years of below-average snowpack and stream run justify. -- runoff. Not justify for Arizona but the rest of the west. The orange was half to one-third less. That meant drier forests which contributed to devastating fires last summer and this. It meant retiring agricultural land such as John Whitney's circle bar ranch. And it means drawing down water supplies in fast-growing urban areas, especially and obviously during the summer. The southwest gets most of its moisture in the winter. That's when snowpack and consequence stream runoff forms. The current drought is thought to be at least partially caused by a prolonged La Nina, an ocean temperature change that helps push the normally wet winter jet stream too far north to benefit us. But what is normal? State Director of Water Resources Herb Guenther says there's no such thing.

>>Herb Guenther: We're either in flood or we're in drought, and so you know, your guess is as good as ours as to whether we are coming out of the drought or just entering in the front end of a megadrought.

>> Reporter: The historic record shows that drought itself is not unusual. It's been measured by tree rings, which indicate a tree's growth or lack of it during drought. Kurt is a scientist at the uniuniversity of Arizona's Tree Ring Laboratory.

>>Kurt Kipemueller: This 1996 ring which is narrow happened to have formed during a dry year so it's much, much narrower. Similarly, the same thing occurred in 1989 where you have this very, very dry year and also, corresponding narrow Ring. The ring is a bit wide inner 1979 because conditions were much wetter during the winter of 1979.

>> Reporter: Take a look at charts of tree rings over the last 1,000 years and you can see some droughts lasted decades.

>>Kurt Kipemueller: We have these shorter duration droughts but none the less, severe droughts in the late 1700s and late 1600s. These were both, I think, about 18 years in duration, whereas the 1580s drought was about 28 to 30 years in duration.

>> Reporter: Some scientists think we could be in a decades-long drought now. If that's true, it will mean some serious rethinking of the way we use water. Dallas Riegle is a hydrologist with the Salt River Project supplying water to the Phoenix area.

>>Dallas Reigle: I'm not sure -- I'm pretty sure that we could not survive a drought of that length, or that magnitude today with the increased population. There's no way this society could withstand the drought of that duration.

>> Reporter: This is the Salt River Project's control room where technicians monitor the flow of water to customers. For the next few years experts think the state's urban areas at least are not in serious trouble. In fact, Tucson water's Marie pairtree says since the use of Colorado River water, which is stored underground in the Avra Valley and then blended with groundwater, the city is better off than it was.

>>Marie Peartree: Because we have use of Colorado River water blended with groundwater, and we've been able to shut off about 60 wells in the central well field, just us them for emergency purposes, for instance, the water table below the Tucson community has risen in places as much as 20 feet.

>> Reporter: Of course, the Colorado River is a finite, though renewable resource. Last year customers in Arizona took the state's full 2.8 MiG -- million acre-feet off the Colorado River. An acre-foot is amount of water it would take to cover an acre of land to one foot. Lake Powell, lake Mead other and storage reservoirs along the river every down significantly. Greg is a scientists with the center for of the study of the planet earth. Explains what it would take to end the drought.

>>Greg Garfin: In a single year for our reservoirs to get back up to average levels, we would need twice as much winter precipitation as the long-term average.

>> Reporter: Or for -- at least if not twice as much, a quarter much for twice as long, right?

>>Greg Garfin: Yeah, we would need above -- significantly above average precipitation for a couple of years.

>> Reporter: But predicting exactly when a drought will end, says Garfin, is a little like predicting the end of a bear market in stocks.

>>Greg Garfin: Drought is a tricky beast. It's what's called a creeping disaster. You really only know in retrospect when the beginning and when the end point of drought have been.

>> Reporter: So the state is for the first time creating a long-term water outlook plan. A number of experts already have specific predictions on what steps might be necessary should the drought last a decade or longer.

>>Dallas Reigle: I think in order to survive that, you're looking at major societal changes.

>> Reporter: Those possible actions are the subject of our next report.

>> Michael Grant: That part 2 of the series can be seen tomorrow night. We will look at planning for possible solutions to the drought. Here's what else you can expect tomorrow night on "Horizon."

>> Reporter: These students in the Murphy School District stand to benefit from a lawsuit. Crane versus Arizona is an attempt by school districts to get more programs to help at-risk kids pass mandatory standardized tests. If successful, poor students could get additional help costing taxpayers hundreds of milions of dollars. Tuesday at 7:00 on "Horizon."

>> Michael Grant: Wednesday we'll take a look at a conference that is focusing on issues of mental health. On Thursday, we start a series about a border patrol group that gives medical attention to undocumented workers crossing the desert. And Friday, please join us for the Journalists Roundtable for a wrap-up of the week's news events. And that more on the rest of the week on "Horizon." Thanks very much for joining us on a Monday evening. I'm Michael Grant. Have a great one! Good night.

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