ESPN rates the food at Arizona's sports stadiums. Result: Not very appetizing
The sports network has a major story and a full interactive map of the country’s sports stadiums and their food inspections reports.
The Arizona entries are Chase Field, US Airways Center, the Jobing.com Arena, and the University of Phoenix Stadium.
All have the distinction of having had between a quarter and a half of the different food concessions at each venue “cited for at least one ‘critical’ or ‘major’ health violation.”
[ESPN] submitted its findings to Dr. Robert Buchanan, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Food Safety and Security Systems. His background includes 10 years overseeing food safety research at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which sets the guidelines by which most U.S. health departments conduct inspections.
[He said:] “Certainly, if you have a high rate of facilities within a stadium coming up with critical deficiencies, that to me strikes of systemic errors in either management of the stadium or in the infrastructure of the stadium, and both of them need to be corrected.”
For the record, what do “systemic errors” cause?
One of the most worrisome violations to health inspectors is food not being cooked, reheated or held at safe temperatures, because that’s when dangerous bacteria – such as E. coli, salmonella, and staphylococcus aureus – can grow and, if consumed, can trigger nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting.
The full story here
11:50 AM
When it comes to wasting taxpayer dollars on sports teams . . .
… Arizona is the winner.
That’s the verdict of a fact-laden analysis and history of the phenomenon by the business of sports expert Evan Weiner on the site NewJerseyNewsroom.com.
After a lengthy history of the practice, Wiener writes:
You can go virtually to every state in the union, including Alaska and Hawaii and find public dollars invested in sports. But who are the dumbest politicians in the country when it comes to sports spending? That is an easy question to answer.
Arizona.
Had the Phoenix city council been smart, which they were not, they would have approved a multi-purpose arena back in the late 1980s that would have accommodated the NBA’s Phoenix Suns and an NHL team. Instead lawmakers approved a $90 million expenditure that was designed to appease Suns owner Jerry Colangelo.
The arena was built in such a way that the building was only good for basketball and not hockey or Arena Football or indoor soccer and that severely limited the potential revenues that could be generated in the place.
Making sure they further satisfied Colangelo, the terms of the lease between the city and the NBA team required that the franchise pay the bulk of lease payments in years 36-40 of the 40-year lease agreement.
The real rent is supposed to kick in around 2028 but given the lifespan of facilities (the Miami Arena was viable for about 11 years, the Charlotte Coliseum for about 13), it is doubtful that the team will even be playing in the arena in 2028 or 2029.
He then does a case studies on all the other Valley sports facilities.
It’s not a pretty tale.
7:25 AM
Arizona men are fat, deluded and mentally disturbed. But you knew that already!
Just noticed this study from the Center for Disease Control about the health of Arizonans
According to the CDC, 73 percent of men in Arizona are overweight or obese, and compared to the U.S. average, 12 percent more men in Arizona have high cholesterol. Almost half of Arizona men skip regular exercise and three out of four don‟t eat enough fruits and vegetables.
More than one in five men in Arizona report that their activities are limited because of physical, mental, or emotional problems, and men in Arizona rank worse than the national average in stroke, overweight and obesity, high blood pressure, heavy drinking, and getting the recommended levels of exercise.
Now, that’s not even the hedline.
The hedline is this, according to a survey from the center:
Eighty-six percent of Arizona‟s men say their general health is good, very good or excellent, according to the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Survey
7:37 AM
PHXations—Friday, June 18, 2010
The AP is reporting that White House staffers will meet with Governor Brewer in Arizona on June 28th
The White House set a June 28 date for staffers to meet with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on her turf and provide more detail on sending National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.
When Brewer met with Obama at the White House two weeks ago, promises were made for the follow-up meeting. The White House announced Friday it was keeping its promised date. Obama is not planning to attend.
CBS News confirms that the federal government will challenge SB 1070:
It was unclear yesterday whether Clinton’s comments were simply a prediction or mistake or whether instead she was getting ahead of a planned announcement by the administration.
Now a senior administration official tells CBS News that the federal government will indeed formally challenge the law when Justice Department lawyers are finished building the case. The official said Justice is still working on building the case.
Whodathunkit? GOP hiding facts about immigration law
It’s typical of Brewer and her Republican friends who consistently have failed to crack down on the violent and criminal acts that accompany illegal immigration. Their patchwork policies do nothing to solve the real problem that Arizonans experience every day.
They failed to point out that the new law will do nothing to stop the coyotes, human traffickers and dangerous drug and arms dealers who cross our border every day.
They don’t mention that the new law is an unfunded mandate and gives police no resources or money to implement the new law. Brewer and Republicans took police officers off the streets when they massively cut public-safety funding this year.
Read the whole thing at Arizona Capitol Times
While Arizona’s politicians have spent time persecuting gays and Mexicans and letting the state’s finances go into the toilet, more industrious folks in town have been working to put us on the map in an important national ranking, the Republic reports:
Arizona now ranks fourth for mortgage fraud nationally. It’s the first time the state has cracked the top five for the problem, according to data released this week from the Mortgage Asset Research Institute.
Florida, New York and California (in that order) rank ahead of Arizona in 2009 mortgage-fraud cases. The most prevalent type of home-loan fraud is application misrepresentation, which includes borrowers lying about income. Overall, U.S. mortgage fraud climbed 7 percent last year.
Officials on the state and federal level are (finally) going after mortgage fraud, the paper says in a related story:
A federal and state law-enforcement task force has accelerated arrests and prosecutions of Arizona residents accused of participating in mortgage-fraud schemes involving kickbacks, inflated property appraisals, phony buyers and other tactics.
There have been 51 Arizona indictments and 13 convictions since the task force was assembled March 1, all of them involving allegations of fraud against lenders, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
2:23 PM
The Rokerij is named one of the best bars in America by Esquire
Says the mag in the new issue, with its slightly unorthodox use of the comma intact:
Step through the large wood door and down the stone steps. It’s calm and cool down here, like being in a cellar. There is a glowing fireplace, bottles of wine stacked up on the walls, a long, polished wood bar that stretches the width of the room. The bartenders are well dressed, they ask just enough questions, not too many.
Esquire’s also odd in that you can’t find the snippet online. On its web site it mentions two places in southern Arizona: The Hotel Congress and, rather fancifully, some place in Arivaca, which is close to the Mexican border in south west part of the state.
Last year, if we remember correctly, the only Arizona bar listed in the magazine proper was the Buffet in Tucson.
5:22 PM
How did Arizona fare in US News' grad-school rankings?
As we know, the state fared mighty poorly in the undergraduate arena when U.S. News unveiled its undergraduate college rankings last August.
It’s slightly better news on the graduate level, but this is tempered by the fact that the reporting on the rankings locally were wrong or incomplete.
Not a good example to set for the kids!
Anyway, the Thunderbird business school retained its place as the best international business school—for the fifteenth year in a row.
The ASU Carey Business School came in 27th on the MBA list, and UofA’s Eller 55th.
But neither the Republic nor the PBJ noticed that both ASU and UofA’s law schools made the top fifty as well—38th and 42nd, respectively. I did some other selectively checking and also found:
In English both came in in the 50s; in history, ASU was 71st and UofA 42nd.
They came in 30th and 45th in fine arts, respectively, and 25th and 36th in public affairs. They tied for 39th in economics.
Now, given that there are fifty states, Arizona did not fare embarrassingly. Having two schools in the top fifty, in most cases, in those categories is a decent showing.
The papers should have noticed that.
That said, the state’s ranking in the undergraduate sphere — detailed here —remain shocking and a big problem for the state’s national image.
7:57 AM
Why are Phoenicians so fat?
The new issue of Phoenix magazine says we’re “one of the fattest cities in the nation,” in a story that isn’t online. It’s a feature article with a lot of information about weight problems and how to overcome them, but the basis for its thesis is limited to a year-old Men’s Fitness survey.
There’s still a lot of grim info:
One in four Phoenicians is uninsured, according to the U.S. Census. Even for the insured, many policies have seemingly backward approaches toward obesity prevention. Insurance policies usually cover treatments for heart attacks, strokes or diabetes that may have been caused by obesity, but pockets clamp shut when paying for preventive servies such as nutritional counseling and education.
[…]
Almost 75 percent of Arizona high school students do not have a physical education class, and almost 60 percent do not receive physical education at all, according to Arizona’s Youth Risk Behavior Study.
The story touches on, but doesn’t explore, racial issues:
One reason for the city’s high rate of obesity is its cultural diversity. Due to a variety of factors such as genetics, cultural norms, lifestyle and socioeconomic conditions, certain ethnic and minority groups—especially the Hispanic, African American, and American INdian populations—tend to be the msot affected. That being said, obesity is happy to claim victims of an ehtnicty and age. The tragic increase of childhoo obesity is a case in point.
7:40 PM
PHXations, Thursday, January 28
Overheard in Borders. Our cast is a man and a woman, both fiftyish:
Man: Hon?
Woman: Mmmm?
Man: They got a book here about the iPod. [O’Reilly’s The Missing Manual
Woman: Really?
Man: Let’s get it and read it and then we can decide if we’ll get one.
Woman: Okay
[ Exeunt, pursued by a bear. ]
The Democratic Diva writes about a recent talk by ASU prez Michael Crow. One passage:
He clicked on a graph of state funding of ASU per student since 1990. Back then the state contributed roughly $11K per student. Today it’s around $5K.
Sounds like it’s time to introduce a bill to put the Ten Commandments on the state capitol.
The Arizona Cardinals’ Kurt Warner holds a press conference conference tomorrow. Most papers quote his agent saying that Warner will announce “whether” he will retire; this Chicago Tribune report says he will.
Warner, 38, is expected to retire after 12 seasons, including the past five with the Cardinals. A friend who talked with Warner after the Cardinals lost to the New Orleans Saints in the playoffs said “it sounded like he was done.”
2:25 PM
Arizona: C- in education
A report by the group that publishes Education Week magazine has rated the 50 states and Washington D.C. on education. Arizona comes in 46th—and dropped three places since the last report.
According to the Republic, however, there is some good news:
The good news is that for the second year in a row, Arizona earned an A- for the quality of its learning goals, tests and accountability. It is 18th in the nation with that grade, although last year it was eighth.
OK, so the good news isn’t really good. The bad news?
The bad news is the state lags in all other categories. In the “chance for success category,” Arizona sank from 42nd in the nation to 45th, although its grade was the same, C-.
7:00 AM
Phoenix murders drop by nearly half in two years
The front page of the Republic this a.m. featured this hed:
Phoenix Shootings leave 3 dead in 1st murders of ’10
The hed is accurate, but it obscures the real news in the story, which is that police expect to report that there were 130 murders in the city last year—down from 222 in 2007.
According to crime stats here, the city’s murder rate isn’t trending up or down overall. Rather, oddly, it bounces:
216 in 1999, 247 in 2003 and 234 in 2006 …
… but 152 in 2000, 183 in 2002, and 168 in 2008.
Still, given the rise in the area’s population, the drops over the last two years are solid improvements. (For 2009, the rate per 100,000 people will have dropped by half from the prevailing rate at the turn of the last decade.)
7:00 AM
Phoenix: Not a bang-for-your-buck kinda city, according to Forbes
Both Forbes and Fortune are nuts about lists; it’s the biz-mag-porn version of those “32 ways to please your man” stories in Cosmo. The latest from Forbes is “Best Bang-for-Your-Buck Cities.”
The idea is to track issues like unemployment, home affordability, commute times, and taxes. Tucson comes in at number 62 on the list, Phoenix at 82. The top five are Omaha, Little Rock, Jackson, Des Moines, and Augusta, which shows you the sort of trade-offs involved when you’re obsessed with bucks-related bangs.
The most telling statistic is real-estate taxes. Phoenicians whine constantly about them; according to Forbes, the city ranks 24th in that category. (That is, they are the 24th lowest in the country.)
There isn’t another top-ten city in the top fifty—a potent sign that property owners here are getting a pretty easy ride, taxwise.
7:00 AM
Can Phoenix make a "Creative Class" appeal?
Two local activists co-wrote an op-ed piece in the Republic on Sunday about one aspect of what Phoenix needs to do to move into the 21st century. That aspect is generally referred to as the Creative Class theory, though the authors don’t use the term.
A Canadian professor named Richard Florida in a series of books on the subject analyzes the relationship between economic development (particularly in high technology) and socioeconomic factors like education levels, social tolerance (particularly toward gays), and cultural accouterments.
The idea has been percolating around for nearly a decade and is a staple of discussions about modern city planning. (PHXated was on a panel at Phoenix Design Week recently that discussed how it related to Phoenix.)
In their essay, for example, Myra H. Millinger and Steve Betts cite this statistic:
In a Forbes survey of approximately 1,000 corporate executives, a strong and vibrant creative community was among the top-five determinants of location decisions for 74 percent of respondents. Only 24 percent ranked metro Phoenix as having that cultural vibrancy.
Even if the executives might have been overstating the issue’s importance, the fact that they felt compelled to do so is an indication of the analysis’s influence these days. The pair’s punch line, emphasized by me, is correspondingly devastating for the fifth-largest city in the country.
And remember that, in Creative Class terms, we’re not concerned about all corporate execs; we’re talking about a highly specialized (and desirable) slice of them: The ones at modern technology- and knowledge-related companies cities like Phoenix are now competing to attract. And you can bet the numbers for that slice would be much worse for Phoenix.
Anyway, most sane people will agree with what the pair say. I found two interesting things in their piece.
The first is they felt compelled to mince their words, and that’s not going to help anyone going forward. Here’s what they have to say about Arizona’s reputation:
This is of concern to every sector here competing for talent and industry. Add to this the recent unflattering images of Arizona transmitted virally across the globe, the misperceptions of who we are, and a lack of awareness of what makes us unique, and our world positioning will continue to falter.
Phoenix’s trouble is not about “misperceptions.” It’s about correct perceptions. This is the home of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a national poster boy for hostility to immigrants and arguably the most potent symbol of brutal police power in the U.S. since the Civil Rights Era. The Mormon church, one of the most powerful organizations in the state, has put itself in the forefront of the anti-gay marriage campaigns here and nationally, notably in California’s bitter Prop. 8 battle last year—right under the noses of the nation’s high-tech industries.
In other words, on a good day by most Creative Class measures, Arizona would come in right above the Deep South; those two additional issues put the state near the bottom nationally for such an appeal.
So let’s be honest. Arizona doesn’t have to overcome misperceptions; it has to overcome reality.
Now, the second interesting thing about the essay is that the writers tacitly understand these problems. In response, their idea is to stress what they call an oasis:
This effort, under the umbrella of the Metro Phoenix DNA Initiative, has identified a compelling focus and distinctive themes that define this region’s strengths as the “Opportunity Oasis”—a place where meritocracy reigns and where open-space thinking, urban pioneering and a lush desert oasis present to the world a profile that is at once distinctive and of enormous appeal.
That’s a good description of what downtown might be like in a few years; intellectually, however, the small but vibrant Creative Class Phoenix does boast now will have to reconcile an oasis like that with the tragedy and intolerance around it.
It’s not impossible; Atlanta, for example, has managed to position itself as the capital of the south and correspondingly created an oasis for enlightened whites, blacks, gays and creative people. Even so, it’s not really a Creative Class mecca nor a particular high-tech destination.
I haven’t thought this out, but I’m intrigued by a variant of this, which I call the Enclave Gambit.
Can Phoenix create a city-within-a-city—corporeally set downtown, but with symbolic residents throughout the area—that tries to live, and create, and interact amongst themselves, set apart from a lot of the hate talk, intolerance, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism and backwardness that otherwise characterizes most of the state?
Now, it’s a tough sell in Creative Class terms: “Trent Frank, John Kyl and John Shadegg hardly ever go downtown” isn’t something to base an economic development plan on.
But: One thing Phoenix doesn’t have as yet is a focused community dedicated to change—and for now, the Enclave Gambit might be the best way to form one.
p.s.: You can download the Metro Phoenix DNA Initiative here.
12:00 AM