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September 18, 2003

Host: Michael Grant
Topics:
· West Nile virus in Maricopa County;
· Phoenix in the year 2012;
· Arizona State University East campus
In-Studio Guests:
Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch, Director of the Maricopa County Department of Public Health,
Al Brown, Director of the County's Environmental Services Department,
Rick Weddle, CEO of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council,
Dr. Jonathan Fink, Vice President for Research and Economic Affairs at Arizona State University

 

>> Michael: Tonight on "Horizon," the West Nile virus, carried by mosquitoes which lay eggs in standing water has made its way into Maricopa County. We'll talk to County health officials about that. Where will Phoenix be in the year 2012? That's a question tackled at a recent Urban Land Institute conference. And Arizona State University's east campus is growing, and new buildings are being constructed to meet the needs of students.

>>> Good evening, I'm Michael Grant. One week ago today, a dead sparrow was dropped off at a Maricopa County office by a Chandler resident. Yesterday, it was determined that the bird was infected with the West Nile virus, the first confirmed presence of the virus in Maricopa County. The virus has now been found in 10 of the state's 15 counties, although only one human has been infected, that in Graham County. Here now to tell us more about the virus's entrance into the County is Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch, Director of the Maricopa County Department of Public Health, and Al Brown, Director of the County's Environmental Services Department. Gentlemen, welcome back. Al, why did the person bring in the bird for testing?

>> Al Brown: We've been encouraging our residents to bring in any dead birds that they find for at least a couple of years now, because we've been expecting this. This really isn't a surprise. It's fortunate that the first detection of West Nile virus was at the end of the summer instead of earlier in the summer, because now the mosquitoes are on decline. We're grateful that our citizens have been on the ball in bringing in these birds. We've had 400 submittals this year.

>> Michael: Any precautions you have to take if you find a bird and you want to take it in to the county?

>> Al: We recommend that people handle dead birds with gloves and place them in a plastic bag. Also, they should be put on blue eyes rather than wet ice and delivered to one of our regional offices. We encourage them to call in to our complaint line, which is 506-6616, within Arizona area code 602 to screen the birds so we can make sure that they are bringing in the kind of bird that we would like to see. For example, we do not want any pigeons. Pigeons unfortunately are not affected by West Nile virus.

>> Michael: Dr. Weisbuch, should we be alarmed?

>> Dr. Weisbuch: I don't think we have to be alarmed, but as Al said, we've been preparing for this for at least two years, and in fact finding an infected bird is really an opportunity for all of us to begin to remember what it is we're supposed to be doing in order to protect ourselves against this virus, against the mosquitoes who bite us in that case.

>> Michael: Is it rare for West Nile to be fatal?

>> Dr. Wiesbuch: It is -- "rare" is a hard term. The number of fatalities is reasonably low compared to the number of people who are infected with the virus. Most people who are hit with a mosquito or have a mosquito bite from an infected mosquito show no symptoms at all. They develop an immunity and they don't know that they had an exposure to the virus.

>> Michael: It sounds like valley fever.

>> Dr. Weisbech: It is in a sense. About 20% of the people who are stung might come down with some level of illness. Fever, nausea, vomiting, kind of like a summer flu.

>> Michael: Okay.

>> Dr. Weisbech: A smaller percentage, maybe a third or about a third of that group, the group that gets sick, will have sufficient symptoms to take them to a doctor and possibly be admitted to the hospital. But it's only an extraordinarily small number of that group of people, around 1%, who actually, in fact, will have a fatal illness, and we've found over the last several years that most of those people are elderly folks, folks with immunological problems and so on. So we don't expect to find very many people with fatal illness in this community.

>> Michael: To a certain extent, it sounds like the same high-risk groups as we associate with, for example, the flu in the winter time.

>> Dr. Weisbech: Absolutely.

>> Michael: Okay. Al, what about the spread of West Nile? We mentioned mosquitoes. What can the public -- let's ask this first. What is the County doing to try to stop the spread of West Nile?

>> Al: We're really on top of this. We've had our fogging trucks and vector control officers in the area around where the dead bird was found out for the past night, and actually, we did find a source of mosquitoes in that area, and they've been treated and eliminated. We also have prioritized this area of the greater Phoenix area which is in Chandler around Ray and McQueen roads is our highest priority, and that's what we'll do every time there is another positive sample find. We will go out there and do more sampling, more testing, mosquito control and treatment, and encourage people to call in complaints about mosquitoes to that complaint line so that we can target these areas and quickly eliminate breeding.

>> Michael: Now, can the public do some things?

>> Al: Really, the first defense is what people can do, because they say there is an old expression that you feed 'em, you're going to feed 'em. You bite 'em, you're going to get bit by the mosquitoes if they are in your backyard. That's all there is to it. You breed 'em, you feed 'em. It's in backyard watering troughs, planters, bird baths and any kind of toy that might have gathered rain water or sprinkler water. People are very often shocked and surprised when we do an inspection of their property, with their permission, of course, and point out the breeding going on in their backyard. They never realized they were doing this.

>> Michael: So kick that thing over if it's standing water. Can you drop in bleach or, you know, let's say it's a -- it's something you can't kick over, it's standing water, but can you drop in some chemicals to help out?

>> Al: Michael, we recommend the use of mineral oil or just vegetable oil, even would be good. Get vegetable oil and shake it up with dish detergent and spray it over the water, that will kill the larvae in there. If people have a larger body of water, like a fountain or a decorative pool or a large horse trough where they are not going to be draining it, they can get free gambusia mosquito fish from us, and they can call that phone number I gave earlier, and we'll be glad to bring some out for them.

>> Michael: You know what strikes me as peculiar, Dr. Weisbuch, this was not a particularly good monsoon season, in terms of rainfall production, but the mosquitoes have been all over the place. What the heck is going on?

>>Dr. Weisbech: As someone once said if you are going to eliminate mosquitoes, you've got to think like one. I don't think like one very well, but we have people who work for Al who are outstanding mosquito killers. They go out with their fogging and with the larvicides and with the fish. Usually in a monsoon environment, that's when you get the lot of standing water. I think that's one reason why this year we haven't seen this particular problem earlier. We were expecting, actually, to see at least some mosquitoes with the West Nile virus earlier in the summer than we did.

>> Michael: So it did help.

>> Dr. Weisbech: I think it probably did help.

>>Michael: Al, wouldn't you say that's true?

>> Al: Definitely.

>> Dr. Wisbech: As Al has said, the fact that we're finding the first occurrence of this virus in this community at this time, means that we've been very, very fortunate, because as the temperature gets cooler and as the mosquito incubation time gets longer in the colder weather, the fewer of them that are available to sting people and get people infected. All that means is that we'll see this problem next year. But we've done what the County can do. We're very much on top of this. What we need to have -- the message we need to get people to know now is to remember what they have to do to prevent the backyard mosquitoes, the precaution that we've taken. Al talked about them.

>> Al: People should go out and put deet on themselves which is an insect repellant, like "Off" basically. If they are going to be outside and there is mosquitos around, protect yourself. Wear long-sleeved clothing, avoid being outside during nighttime hours, if possible, especially if you know there is mosquitoes in your neighborhood.

>> Michael: Okay, all right. And incidentally, we will throw up some links and those kinds of things on our web site to the County if people want more information. Al Brown, thank you very much for joining us.

>> Al: Thank you.

>> Michael: Dr. Weisbuch, I'm glad you made it.

>> Dr. Weisbech: It's always a pleasure. I was trying to find my way around this campus. It's getting bigger every year.

>> Michael: It gets tougher and tougher.

>>> Michael: Where will the Valley be in nine years? Will it be prospering or floundering? That was the topic of conversation last week at the conference put on by the Urban Land Institute's Arizona chapter. We will talk to two of the speakers about the conference, but first, Mike Sauceda gives us some of the highlights.

>> Reporter: The Valley of the Sun is a place of contradictions. Its weather, lifestyle and economic growth have been magnets to new arrivals. When you look at how we stack up to other areas, metro Phoenix falls short on several yardsticks. How to improve the Valley's performance in a multitude of areas was tackled by an Urban Land Institute conference titled "Reality Check Metro Phoenix in 2012, Vibrant Region or also ran." That was help last week in Phoenix. Grady Gammage, a land use lawyer and author of a book about Phoenix was one of seven speakers. One of his topics, has Phoenix evolved since the '90s. Gammage prefaced his comments with a little bit of history, talking about breaking points in Phoenix history, including the most recent.

>> Grady Gammage: The break point has to do with the decade of the '90s, and the rise in anxiety about whether the formula of population growth was sufficient, was good enough to sort of get us through all issues and problems. And the first event that I want you to remember from that era is actually a 1988 event. That's Jonathan Laing's article in Barron's. Those of you who were here remember how pissed off we were when that article came out. It was really annoying. It was captioned "Phoenix Descending, Is Boom Town USA Going Bust."

>> Reporter: Lang's article proved to be prophetic, predicting the real estate bust of the early '90s. But Gammage says the Valley quickly rebounded and had incredible growth in that decade. He says that growth was led by the desire for housing.

>> Grady Gammage: Because we have finally figured out the answer to the question, what brings people to Phoenix, is it jobs or is it house, it's housing. It's housing. They come here because they can afford a house, and after they come here with a house, they may find a job, or they may have a job coincident with about the time they decide to move here, but our growth is typically led by housing. Housing is a good proxy for other things. As those houses grow, shopping centers grow, big box stores get built, and all of those things were happening in the '90s at the same time. Our boom in housing led to the famous sea of red roofs.

>> Grady: This house is our curse but it's also our blessing. It is the strength. It is the thing that makes it possible. This is the house that cost $100,000 at the beginning of the '90s and cost between $115,000 and $140,000 by the end of the '90s. This is where Phoenix competes and wins. We compete and win in getting people to move here because we can deliver a product like this that the market wants and that people want. [ APPLAUSE ]

>> Reporter: Governor Janet Napolitano was a keynote speaker. She said the continued success on the Valley is dependent on education.

>> Governor napolitano: This is what we're about, and this is the vision, and so you can do the day to day and whatever, and I can talk about gasoline pipelines if you want, but what we're really about is what is the -- it's not the physical infrastructure so much, what's the human infrastructure we need to build the State we want to hand off to the next generation? And it starts and ends with education.

>> Michael: Here now to tell us about the conference is Rick Weddle, CEO of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council and Dr. Jonathan Fink, Vice President for Research and Economic Affairs at Arizona State University. Hello to both of you. Let me go to the last question first, Jonathan. Where will we be in 2012 in terms of growth, economy, jobs, those kinds of things?

>> Jonathan Fink: A lot depends on how the investments that we're making now play out. If we're going to have a more diverse economy and be more of a magnet than just the place that has cheap housing that Grady was talking about, we have to have other alternatives. The investments in TGen and the other attempts to expand the nature of the high tech economy here are the things that we at least at the university are going to be looking at.

>> Michael: You can marshal a pretty strong case that we've been doing some of the right things in the past two or three years, Civic Plaza expansion, TGen, the research facilities at the universities. Various other public infrastructure projects. Are we on the right track to 2012?

>> Rick Weddle: I think that's right, Michael. I think we have started to make the right investments and to take the right steps. What's fundamentally important is that we need to see those investments, not as final payments, but rather as installments on the future. It's not about just doing the right things for a couple of years, but rather doing the right things from here on out, to change fundamentally the qualitative aspects of our economic profile.

>> Michael: There are many people, and I think understandably so, who get a little uncomfortable with central planning, you know, the USSR, didn't do a particularly well with it. That's an extreme example, but are we -- are we kidding ourselves with this central planning thing? Or do we just continue to be buffeted, guided and directed by what we've been buffeted, guided and directed for a number of years and that's market forces?

>> Rick: I think the market will determine how we end up. We will in fact end up bigger. The question is how much better we'll end up. I'd like to think of it more as a central focus or a driving focus around qualitative aspects. There is plenty of room for the market to work and work well around the kinds of investments that Jonathan has mentioned, those -- it's not central planning. It's just a central focus, I think. That's a shift in thinking from trying to be the least expensive or could I say cheapest place, to being one of the better places.

>> Michael: Now, you talked about action plans at the conference. Is that central planning? Or were these different kinds of action plans?

>> Jonathan: I think the issue about planning is we have to look at what the competition is doing, and it's one thing if people are going to come to the Valley because they like the weather and they like the housing, but if we want to be getting the jobs that we're really competing for, we have to look at what the other regions are doing. They are investing a lot in other parts of the country. So, I think the question is not really should we do this or not. If we want to participate, we have to be making those kinds of investments.

>> Michael: Where do the action plan -- I mean, what's an action plan, who formulates it, maybe more importantly, who executes it?

>> Jonathan: I think it's a combination of business and government working in partnership. That's what we've been seeing the last few years with the various committees that have been laying out plans, doing comparisons with what's going on elsewhere in the country. I think there is some role for the university in terms of providing some new ideas, from looking around at what's worked elsewhere.

>> Michael: I don't know, I've been here a long time, and I've seen a lot of these plans gathering dust on the shelf after a lot of well-meaning people put in a lot of time on them. I don't mean to denigrate the effort. Are we getting better at this or is our shelf going to get dustier?

>> Rick: Michael, I think the best model look at is how this region, this state, banded together years ago to deal with water. Some would say maybe that was central planning. We decided that we needed to have water. I see it much more at a macro level. The kinds of things we need to do now are very similar to the way we worked together to accommodate the growth here by providing adequate water. Now we have to provide adequate talent, adequate infrastructure in terms of education, adequate infrastructure in terms of transportation. Those are both the hard and the soft sides of those infrastructure points is no different than the way we worked together centrally and around a guiding focus to accommodate the water needs.

>> Michael: The university, Jonathan, I think, is trying to make several moves generally to be more of a -- I hesitate to call it "player" more of a partner in relation to a lot of this stuff. I take it that's a -- the university seems to be firmly set on that course.

>> Jonathan: Yes, I think with Michael Crow's arrival, that has really been infused through the university and through the community, recognition that the role that the university can play is quite significant. We're trying to leverage proposition 301 funds that came on line a few years ago. The research infrastructure bill that was passed that will give us these new buildings. TGen and the other things that have been done collectively really give us a kickstart and a boost that we're trying to take advantage of.

>> Michael: Rick, Grady said people come here to buy the house, I think he had the $100,000 red tile roof on the screen at that point in time. You were saying before we went on the air, not necessarily so from the standpoint that Phoenix has a lot of competition from places that are cheaper than it now.

>> Rick: We do indeed. I mean, as we've become successful in growing and we're quite good at growing, our cost structure has gone up, as Grady mentioned in his comments, from $100,000 to $140,000 or so or more expensive than that. So the attractiveness of that cost differential on housing has moderated somewhat, and so we're not as advantageous cost location as we once were. The key now is how do we make sure we have the qualitative aspects to go along with that cost, so that we can win in both cost and quality, which really is what value is all about.

>> Michael: You said Albuquerque is our competition now? Tell me that's not so.

>> Rick: We find a lot of second-tier cities very, very aggressively competing for top notch high quality showcase projects. Albuquerque is one of those. They have good intellectual assets with the federal labs, the university system, and a very aggressive state leadership to play in that space. San Antonio is another lower-cost location but competed formidably to locate a new automobile manufacturing plant this year. So many of these second-tier communities have good cost structures relatively well organized leadership approach to providing incentives and meeting the market to achieve some of these high profile projects.

>> Michael: Does it remain, essentially, a sunbelt phenomena, or is there a northern state or a northeastern state that is doing a particularly good job?

>> Rick: New York state right now is having extraordinary success in the attraction of semiconductor manufacturing. It is not a sunbelt location issue any more. It's a talent and technology issue for high profile projects, and organizing leadership around them. I mean, competition is very dramatic across this country, because we are in a jobless recovery right now. So competition for employment generators has escalated significantly. It's not just the sunbelt. The sunbelt is growing, it will continue to grow faster than other areas, but we're seeing a good many northern nontypical competitors show up and compete formidably for these high profile projects.

>> Michael: Jonathan, I understand that Kevin McCarthy addressed the state's current fiscal crisis. What was the gist of that presentation in relation to where we are now and where we're going?

>>Jonathan: I think he was trying to identify what the rhetoric was about taxes versus what the reality was, and he acknowledged it was a very political issue and that we need to come to some agreement about what kind of revenue options are possible.

>> Michael: Some of the different fiscal choices and for that matter, I think, obviously, a subject under scrutiny right now is whether or not structural reforms are needed on the tax code for business opportunity?

>> Jonathan: Right, and he was trying to give his view of what some of those possibilities might be and what their implication were.

>> Michael: Let me cycle back to the last question last that I didn't ask you, Rick. Where do you think we're going to be in 2012?

>> Rick: I'm quite optimistic. I think we will be not all the way to the home stretch, but we'll be headed on that path. I am confident that investments that have been made recently will be considered installments rather than final payments and will make future investments in those areas, and that we'll continue to be a place that people want to live, not just because they can get a nice house, but because they can have a nice lifestyle afforded by a nice job and employment opportunity. I think -- I'm fairly bullish on the future, and I think we'll do a good job in that, but it's going to require a lot of work on the part of a lot of people.

>> Michael: Rick Weddle, CEO of the infamous GPEC. Thank you for being here, Dr. Jonathan Fink, thanks to you as well.

>>Arizona State University is one of the biggest universities in the country with 57,000 students on three campuses. The university is expected to continue its phenomenal growth at all three of its campuses. That means more new buildings. Yesterday ground was broken for a new student union at ASU East, located in the southeast part of the Valley at the intersection of Power and Williams Field roads in Mesa. Paul Atkinson has more on yesterday's groundbreaking.

>> Reporter: The groundbreaking of the new student union at ASU East is causing a lot of excitement. Unlike other campus buildings which are renovated former Air Force facilities, the new union is ASU East's first step towards expansion.

>> Dr. Chuck Buckhous: This will be the beginning of a new phase for construction of a building for this campus to be part of what President Crow says is the new American university.

>> Reporter: Part of the goal for ASU President Michael Crow's new American university is to prepare for an increase in enrollment from 3,000 to 20,000 students.

>> Michael Crow: The mission here at the east campus will be to build a national class polytechnic institute that has the capacity to offer complete comprehensive undergraduate education across a range of disciplines, not all of which would be related to technology.

>> Reporter: The new building replaces empty space with a food court, student organization work space and book store. The union also uses indoor and outdoor space to take advantage of the valley's climate and provide for expansion.

>> Dr. Gary McGrath: Provost Backus recognized the importance of our having a central place for students to congregate and interact with faculty and staff.

>> Reporter: ASU President Crow acknowledges this is the first new building for ASU East, but not the last.

>> Michael Crow: For those of you who have not had your radar out lately, I suggest that you build a radar for ASU East and that you turn it up a little bit because there's going to be a lot of things happening here. Our hope is that when all is said and done, that this east campus of ASU will be one of the leading centers for applied research, one of the leading undergraduate training programs anywhere in the United States.

>> Michael: To see a transcript of our show or to find out about upcoming topics, please visit our web site at www.kaet.asu.edu, click on the word "Horizon," that will lead you to transcripts, links and future show topics.

>>> Speaking of which, here is what is on "Horizon" tomorrow.

>> Reporter: A new transportation plan for Maricopa County is approved. Find out what's in it. The State Board of Education is adjusting the grading curve for schools, plus Governor Napolitano is concerned congress won't give enough money for forest protection. These topics and more on Friday's "Horizon," Journalists' Roundtable.

>> Michael: Incidentally, please stay tuned for "Horizonte" coming up next here on channel 8. It is a new program that gives you an in-depth look at important Arizona issues, but through an Hispanic lens.

>>> Thank you for joining us on this Thursday evening. I'm Michael Grant. Have a great one, good night.

 

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