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December 10, 2004

Host: Michael Grant
Topics:
· The Journalists Roundtable
In-Studio Guests:
· Doug MacEachern, "The Arizona Republic;"
· Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services;
· Bart Graves, KFYI radio


>> Michael Grant:
It's Friday December 10, 2004. In the headlines this week, new details emerged about the death of Pat Tillman and the U.S. Army says it's going to take another look at what happened. The Arizona water banking authority has agreed to sell excess Colorado River water to Nevada for over $330 million. And the federal judge gives permission for Governor Janet Napolitano to proclaim the "Protect Arizona Now" initiative. That's next on "Horizon." Good evening, I'm Michael Grant. This is the Journalists Roundtable. Joining me to about these and other stories are Doug MacEachern of "The Arizona Republic," Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services and Bart Graves of KFYI radio. An investigation by the "Washington Post" revealed the real story of how Pat Tillman was killed in action while serving in Afghanistan. The United States army says it will now revisit that matter. Doug, what did we learn this week about the events surrounding Pat's death?

>> Doug MacEachern:
I think the real important lesson is what we learned about how the military uses -- or approaches issues like this. It's not a new story. Unfortunately it's not a very good one, either. The big story coming out of the Tillman tragedy, I think, is the fact that the military has a knee jerk reaction, that is to obfuscate and hide and pretend what happened didn't happen and to continue in the face of enormous evidence to pretend it didn't happen.

>> Michael Grant:
And you wonder you were making the point before we went on the air, but you wonder how in the world they thought that story would hold up.

>> Doug MacEachern:
It never ceases to amaze me. Again, this is not the first time it's happened. We saw it with the Jessica lynch incident. We saw it in a number of cases. In some cases there will be some PR flak when -- way back beyond the front lines making up ridiculous story about what occurred, but it didn't occur. And when the truth of the incident finally comes out, months sometimes before the military will acknowledge it, yeah that's what happened.

>> Howie Fischer:
Part of this plugs into the national story we saw this week with the soldiers questioning Donald Rumsfeld where we found out from reading the "Washington Post" stories that part of the reason the two halves of the unit didn't know they were firing at each other were their radios weren't working. This goes directly into what the folks are saying in Iraq. We have non-armored vehicles.

>> Michael Grant:
Or that reporter for that newspaper is saying. We're not quite sure.

>> Howie Fischer:
Well, interestingly enough the question while acknowledging the question may have been planted, it's a legitimate question.

>> Doug MacEachern:
I don't know, Howie, if the parallel is all that direct. In terms of what happened, and really the "Washington Post" did an extraordinary job in getting to the details of exactly what happened, but one squad of the group went in one direction into a very steep canyon, and the fact was their radios weren't able to get through to the people that were on the other side of the canyon.

>> Michael Grant:
What seemed to be actually the breakdown more from the deployment aspect was someone removed from the scene overrode the local command and said, let's split up the squad.

>> Doug MacEachern:
Tragedy in war is almost to be expected. It's terrible to have to say that, but that's the way it is. I mean, you've got guys with enormously powerful ordnance at work here, and you can -- and the American army in particular has got a capacity to let loose with a lot of firepower in an instant. So tragedy is going to happen. But in this case, stop me again, but you've heard the story before, somebody that was not on the scene overruled the judgment of somebody that was on the scene, and that I think --

>> Howard Fischer:
Let's come back to where you started, which is somebody believed this will never come out. I don't -- I've been on this side of journalism, I have been in public relation, and one of the things you always tell a client in PR is own up to it now, you'll make it a one-day story, versus something else. The old saying, if Nixon said after water gate, I'm responsible, never mind, he would have served out his term. Yet they somehow thought, watching all this great publicity, Pat Tillman on the cover of time and "Newsweek" and things like that, that somehow this will never come out. It always comes out.

>> Michael Grant:
Well, in fact, Bart, that was Senator John McCain's point. You had a hero story in Pat Tillman intuitively. You didn't have to enhance or change what actually happened.

>> Bart Graves:
Yeah. Like Doug says, this is a pattern we've seen in a number of different cases, Jessica lynch the most recent. I can recall the Navy a few years back when there was an explosion onboard one of their ships, they tried to blame this poor 21-year-old kid who was a sailor who was disgruntled h disciplinary problems, tried to put the own us on him, in fact it wasn't his fault. I think the parents sued the federal government. McCain is worried this kind of spin continues to put -- be put on by the Pentagon, and he'd like to know why and he's launched an investigation.

>> Michael Grant:
Going to the story that Howie touched on just a couple minutes ago, there's a Tempe company that's saying to the military, you know, if you need more armor on that gear we have the capacity to do that.

>> Bart Graves:
This goes to the Rumsfeld -- big story of the week where the soldiers in Kuwait were tossing questions at Rumsfeld, we don't have the equipment to do our job and we're about to go into Iraq and we're worried. Rumsfeld kind of gave a misleading we're doing everything we can, but this Tempe company, which by the way, has former congressman Matt Salmon representing them, working for them, saying, we're ready. We're only being asked to ship half of what we have.

>> Michael Grant:
What our capacity is. Howie, it was a week full of military stories. Governor Napolitano back in Washington talking to the base realignment and closure commission. Do I have the acronym for BRAC right?

>> Howard Fischer:
She was talking to an undersecretary of defense. He is the staffer who is going to report to the base realignment commission that's going to be appointed next year. This is particularly important to have him understand the issue, because the way the system is set up, this commission will come back and make recommendations and say, these bases should be closed, and they're looking at closing perhaps one out of every four bases. That goes to Congress. If Congress can only reject it entirely and Congress doesn't act, that becomes the law of the land. They can't monkey with it. It's the commission that's going to be making the decision. The governor said she wanted to, A., find out what they're doing but B. make sure they understood in Washington what we've done here. For example, this past year they passed some bills that had to do with development and air bases. They said you can't have a natural gas storage facility within 9 miles of Luke. They passed another bill that talked about buying up development rights for about $5 million a year that the state is going to put up. What she said needs to be done, though, is that we haven't done much about the helicopter training sites we have here because we have the Western Arizona -- you know, training site for all of the military and they train the Apache long bow folks here. You already have urban encroachment around Papago Park.

>> Michael Grant:
That's one of the facilities at Papago?

>> Howard Fischer:
There's one near the old Williams army air base on written house road that's the next step for development. There is also one in Pinal Airpark north of Marana and that's a big growth area for Tucson. In fact, you have the Wolfswinkles going to be putting in a development at a helicopter-training site.

>> Michael Grant:
How do we protect those in the governor's opinion?

>> Howard Fischer:
The governor said we need some restrictions, whether it's buying up development rights, whether it's restricting development. I talked to one of the joint use people at the National Guard. He said we need a one-mile zone around these helicopter-landing sites where there is no residential development.

>> Doug MacEachern:
I think the history of BRAC has been local and state officials -- officials when they are appealing to BRAC finds themselves beating their heads against the wall because they will make decisions regardless of what people said but apparently it sounded like there was resonance there, that they were appreciative of the fact that the governor had these list of proposals.

>> Michael Grant:
Arizona water banking authority on Thursday agreed to sell excess water to Nevada in the coming years, in exchange Arizona is going to get there are 330 million. Howie, what are the details of the agreement and do we have any water at all left in the canal?

>> Howard Fischer:
I think it's all been allocated, although my goldfish is saying, please, just half a quart for me. This actually goes back a number of years. Arizona is entitled to 2.8 million acre-feet of water every year out of the Colorado River. Now, to put in that perspective, it's like 325,000 gallons an acre-foot. An acre-foot will take care of one to two families a year depending on consumption. It's a fair amount of water. We haven't been able to use all the water, partly because many of the cities have their own supply, farmers have their own supply and the C.A.P. is expensive. The fear was if we let it go down the river, California uses it, California will say Arizona can't use it, why don't you give us their allocation. So we started banking calm years ago. We ran out of money. It's creating an underground aquifer to store it.

>> Michael Grant:
And you have to some facilities at the ground level to let it get down to the aquifer.

>> Howard Fischer:
What this deal does is Nevada is going to give us $230 million over a 10-year period starting in 2009 to pay for water banking. We are going to bank like 1.25 million acre-feet for them over the next 30 years. Then they're going to be able to start withdrawing at the rate of 40,000 acre-feet a year on average, and maybe up or down on certain years, for Las Vegas. They need that now because they have a tiny Colorado River allocation and with the river running low, they're worried Vegas will stop growing. So this gets them over the hump for the next 30 years while they develop additional water supplies up in Lincoln county.

>> Michael Grant:
And the element here really is that when they need it they will go ahead and take it out of our allocation in the river and we'll pull out water that we banked in 2005.

>> Howard Fischer:
Sure. It's hard not to think of it as a big water ponzi scheme.

>> Doug MacEachern:
I think it's interesting to note that one of the things about Arizona water policy that most -- conservationists found most appealing was this water banking recharging issue that was putting so much C.A.P. water back into the ground, presumably for a long time. One of the least appealing things about what's occurring now I would think is the fact that they have such well-developed plans for extracting it.

>> Howard Fischer:
That's part of the issue. The other interesting thing of this deal is, Nevada is now our new best friend.

>> Michael Grant:
The politics of this thing?

>> Howard Fischer:
The current law says if there's a shortage on the Colorado River, Arizona is the first to lose allocation before anyone else has to cut back. So we are now officially aligned with Nevada, which sent a letter saying, when you want to try to change the federal law, we're there with you. Now, what does this mean? Hard to say. We've got 10 electoral votes, they've got maybe 6, and California's got 55. It can't hurt. I don't know that it actually is going to mean a lot if you go in front of Congress and say, oh, look, Arizona and Nevada want to change the law, which now benefits California.

>> Doug MacEachern:
It feels better to have friends.

>> Michael Grant:
That's right. But the math still isn't working real well. We still only have about -- even together we only have a third, fourth of their clout.

>> Howard Fischer:
And next, Utah.

>> Michael Grant:
Bart, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne wants to seize control of the school system in Colorado City, speaking of things Colorado.

>> Bart Graves:
I think he'll have an easier time getting that through the legislature than Janet Napolitano will be getting the legislature the new conservative legislature to buy the fact we knee a parameter around helicopter bases to prevent development. Specifically he's using the Colorado City school district up there in the far, far, far northwest part of the state as an example because they basically -- the teachers' paychecks have bounced there because it's grossly mismanaged and baud of this very weird offshoot, I use the word cult, but segment of the discarded more must not religion that's been investigated up there that runs that town, that city. They essentially have just kind of been on their own for years and years and years and now it's a total mess.

>> Howard Fischer:
It's a funny situation whereby virtue of controlling the votes and the land and the tax, the fundamental church of the latter day Saints controls the district. They don't send their kids to the public schools. So they spend money on other things, like they have an airplane. You know that school districts all need an airplane. Their argument is we have to fly down to the county seat at Kingman to be able to go to meetings. So there is no authority now for the state to basically say, this school district, which should theoretically be a subdivision of the state, is not being run properly and seized.

>> Michael Grant:
Talking about students that failed the AIMS test and what to do.

>> Howie Fischer: This is a problem developing. We have been talking about AIMS almost as long as we have been doing this show, the idea of high stakes test to graduate. Originally it was supposed to be 2002. Now the juniors have to pass reading, writing and math to get a diploma. Odds are 1 out of every 10 kids is not going to do that. What Tom Horne got the board of education to do is to say even after you graduate, got your 12 years in, you can keep taking the AIMS test, you may be able to go back as a fifth year senior and keep taking the test until you pass it. This doesn't sit well with most of the school administrators. First of all, they say there is no money for the kind of tutoring necessary. They have come up with an alternate plan, to have a two-tiered diploma, one would be an AIMS diploma, and the other would be a general diploma. You would have to have taken AIMS every time it offered, you would have to have 90% or better attendance, you would have to have taken all the remediation offered by the district, and then if you could not pass, you would still be eligible for a general diploma.

>> Michael Grant:
The board of education going to debate that?

>> Howard Fischer:
I think the board liked Tom Horne's plan but the reality is we will be sitting in the spring of 06 ant the chance that 5 to 10% of students who completed all their coursework is not going to get a diploma. The legislature is not going to let that happen.

>> Michael Grant:
Yet another new development this week regarding Proposition 200. U.S. District Court judge David bury allowed Governor Janet Napolitano to proclaim the "Protect Arizona Now" initiative law. Bart u what did judge bury make the ruling?

>> Bart Graves:
To hear the governor's explanation for this, remember this back on Monday, she had her brief weekly news conference before she took off for Washington, at a school, she was reading the books she's giving out to first graders, and we asked her, why sit so important to get the judge to give you authority to proclaim it law? She says, well to just get it done. Quote-unquote. I always thought there was another reason for that. I think -- proclaiming it is a little different from putting it into effect. 200 is still not in effect. But by proclaiming it the governor like all the other measures on the ballot in November that passed can say, Proposition 200 is in effect from the standpoint that the Attorney General can now take it to the Department of Justice and have it checked over for voting rights violations and check its constitutionality.

>> Howard Fischer:
What's really important about that is the Department of Justice, which has to determine any changes to state law adversely affect minority voting, is the department of justice comes back in 60 days and says we don't have a problem with citizenship proof, that undermines the case of the case down in Tucson. One of their charges is minority voting rights have been impacted.

>> Michael Grant:
I wonder how much the proclamation on the governor's part, though, was to reduce a little bit of the heat that the governor's office had been taking in terms of the delay in proclaiming it prior to the suit being filed.

>> Doug MacEachern:
The governor doesn't want to be appearing doing absolutely nothing, after all after all, she does have to take a -- the position at least that this is the will of the people. But she also is lawyer enough to realize that this thing's got a lot of churning to the court to do.

>> Bart Graves:
She is politically savvy enough to know when that she took her time about -- after certifying everything else, well, we'll just put this over here or for a while. All those that supported Proposition 200 were enormously irritated.

>> Michael Grant:
Another federal judge in action on the Microsoft settlement got okayed and we now get tons of money to market Microsoft software?

>> Howard Fischer:
We can get tons of money. Here's the deal, if you buy a PC as opposed to a MAC, you need an operating system, and Linux not withstanding, odds are it comes from Microsoft. Lawsuit was filed about five years ago saying that Microsoft in selling these windows programs to Dell and the computer manufactures who then passed on the cost to us as buyers was overcharging, charging way more than necessary because they had a monopoly. It was price fixing. Microsoft denied that. Now after nearly five years of litigation they have agreed to a settlement, $104.8 million that will be paid out in the form of vouchers. These vouchers are good for $15 for every operating system, so if you bought three computers in the last three years probably you get 45 dollars, plus $9 for every application, like Microsoft word. The interesting thing is they been be used for any hardware and software. Not necessarily Microsoft. The tricky part is you have to apply for these. The return rate on this is not good, but the good deal from the perspective of at least Arizona schools is one half of any unclaimed or unredeemed vouchers, Microsoft will give those vouchers to the schools of the State of Arizona.

>> Michael Grant:
Steroids came to Phoenix in a major league kind of way this week. Doug, John McCain hot on that issue.

>> Doug MacEachern:
Well, there's a convergence of forces here. The players union was in town discussing the issue, and it blew up into a national story at the same time, and John McCain recognized that this is a good opportunity to start playing poker. He knows that there's a lot of resident among the public regarding the steroid issue. It's no surprise -- anyone that's interested in sports at all that there's going to be a run on the career home run mark perhaps late next year, and so it seems like the perfect bulked up storm coming together here.

>> Michael Grant:
Was part of this triggered by the leak of bonds' grand jury testimony?

>> Doug MacEachern:
All that came out of that. All of it came out of the fact that bond and Giambi, Jason Giambi, it became known that they testified that they had used illegal -- or steroids.

>> Howard Fischer:
What's interesting, of course, is that the sports people will tell you, well, this is something to be negotiated between the owners and the players. But where John McCain has them by the bats and the whatever is that they have an antitrust exemption under federal law which is what allows baseball to set rules who can play where. Congress withdraws that exemption from antitrust, the entire baseball system, the draft and everything goes out the window and that's what really has their attention.

>> Doug MacEachern:
You could make a fair argument that John McCain never expected would it get so far that he would actually be submitting any kind of legislation on this. I think he recognized that there was enough motion on the part of both players and owners to get this thing rolling if they just had a little more impitice and he gave it that.

>> Michael Grant:
Bart, City of Phoenix authorizing condemnation for land ASU wants for the downtown campus?

>> Bart Graves:
Yeah, about 13 acres of condemnation they want -- most of it they're taking pretty easily. The rest they may use eminent domain to acquire in the downtown area to put a lot of these ASU businesses schools there eventually.

>> Howard Fischer:
And a trolley.

>> Bart Graves:
Going to be a big dynamic place we're told.

>> Michael Grant:
Panelists, we are out of time. Thank you very much. If you would like to see a transcript of tonight's program, please visit the website. It is at www.azpbs.org. When you get there, you can click on the word "Horizon." That's going to lead you to transcripts, links and information on upcoming shows. Speaking of which, Monday "Horizon" takes a break for special programming. Tuesday we're back with an interview with Senator Jon Kyl who will talk about his recent trip to Iraq. Also on Tuesday a tour of the new ASU biodesign institute which opens that day. Wednesday an entertaining look at Valley life with republic columnist Clay Thompson who will tell us about his new book "the Valley 101 great book of life," and Thursday we'll take a look at this year's economy and a look at next year's as well. Thanks very much for joining us on this Friday evening. Hope you have a great weekend. I'm Michael Grant. Good night.

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