Larry is an intelligent, articulate, and insightful commentator whose views are shaped by a combination of journalism, entrepreneurship, law practice, and leadership.
✍ He is an experienced and well-known leader, having served as Chair of the LD18 Democrats, and President of the Democrats of Greater Tucson, a teacher at the UofA Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and Video Manager for Iskashitaa Refugee Network,
✍ A common-sense business leader, he operated a successful marketing consultancy for 20 years. He is skilled in fundraising, artificial intelligence, and online communications.
✍He considers multiple viewpoints before forming an opinion. His ethos is the Boy Scout Law.
✍ Larry is a lifelong writer, having worked as a seven-time award-winning journalist for the New York Daily News and as the author of 600 editorials for the Blog for Arizona.
✍He is a graduate of Amherst College and Seton Hall Law School and has also attended the University of Munich in Germany.
✍He is not all work and no play. Larry enjoys singing and playing the guitar, watching film noir, going on outings with his Portuguese Water Dog, weight training, and meeting his many friends for lattes at breakfast.
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Importantly, the bond issue will not increase taxes.
Voters should approve Prop. 463 this November, which will give Pima County the authority to sell bonds to repair many of the county’s 2,200 miles of beat-up, worn-out roads.
That is according to Brian Bickel, president of Democrats of Greater Tucson, speaking at a recent meeting of the group. “One of the biggest problems we have is that once you get off the major arterial roads and into neighborhood streets, that’s where the biggest need is. These streets are 50-60 years old and there hasn’t been any significant maintenance,” he says.
Importantly, approving the bond issue will not increase taxes, because the county will only issue a new bond when an older existing bond is paid off. “People who live on crappy roads are going to vote for it,” Bickel says. “This bond will not come close to fixing every road in Pima County, but the focus will be on residential streets.”
In an effort to restore fairness and transparency in Arizona elections, the Outlaw Dirty Money campaign has created a Posse to identify dark money political ads and report them on the ODM website, where people will be able to look them up by race or by sponsor.
“We will maintain a list of dark money sources that are already registered with the Secretary of State so people can look at a mailed piece, see who paid for it, and determine if it is a dark money group or not,” says organizer Merrill Eisenberg.
The group is working toward three goals:
Evaluate the sources of state and local political ads to decide if they are paid for with dirty money,
Provide information about the sources of state and local political ads to the voters, and
Educate voters and raise awareness about the dirty money issue.
“We need Posse members to help identify political advertising in any format and report suspected “dirty” money ads to ODM. We will research the ad and classify it as 1) not dirty money, 2) dirty money but the organization supports disclosure, or 3) dirty money intended to anonymously impact our election,” Eisenberg says.
At the recent showing of the film “Dark Money” at the Loft, the campaign set up a table and signed up 49 new posse members in one night.
There’s a long, long list of reasons why a woman wouldn’t speak out even now, and no doubt it was even more difficult in the pre-Anita Hill world of 1982.
I can’t speak for everyone who has faced sexual assault, but I can speak for myself.
1. At first, I didn’t know that what happened to me was a crime.
Southwest Key Programs operates an off-limits compound at 1601 N Oracle Road near Drachman Street, north of downtown in Tucson
9-19-18 UPDATE: Arizona moves to revoke licenses from all Southwest Key migrant-children sheltershttps://goo.gl/qVxUA9 The government contractor failed to provide proof its workers had the required background checks.
Up to 300 migrant children ages 5 to 17 are warehoused at a dangerous facility run by Southwest Key Programs in Tucson. “There seem to be some real problems here,” said state Representative Kirsten Engel, speaking at a recent meeting of the Democrats of Greater Tucson.
The Arizona Department of Health Services (DHS) made an inspection and found “numerous violations that employees have fingerprint cards, and space and privacy for kids.” DHS negotiated an agreement with Southwest Key giving DHS the power to make unannounced inspections.
“It’s a black box,” she said of the compound, which is closed to the public. “When we were at Southwest Key there was a representative from the Denver regional office of the HHS (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), but we didn’t get a lot of information from him.”
Southwest Key is a massive private contractor that is paid $485 million by the federal government to warehouse 5,200 children in 26 facilities in Arizona, California, and Texas. In Arizona, it houses 1,500 children in 13 different shelters.
The children are technically not incarcerated. “They are in a ‘mandatory temporary child shelter situation,'” Engel said. “They are in the hands of a private entity. One of the issues is that it is all being done by private contract and is not being adequately overseen by a state agency.”
