The News From Here

Our weekend was a little different than usual. Plus it started early, it started Thursday for us. A visit with old friends that we don’t see often enough, a party in celebration of another year with an old friend and his family, all that before Saturday. Saturday we walked the Arts & Crafts Show at Mesa Arts Center. For those who don’t know it’s one block away from “old #5.” Yes we drove there, but there was a good reason (to me anyway) that gave me another block of walking to do. After that there a was about a block of walk left in me so went the next block up town to tour a section of “Downtown” we hadn’t visited lately. It’s nice to see high occupancy but I fear that it’s short lived. The mass transit train will soon be extended a grant total of 3 miles right through that section. The street is already narrow so during construction estimated at 2-3 years may mean the demise of many of the business there. It happened when they did the landscape improvements and that only took a year. Some of those businesses have really struggled to exist through several of the city’s grandiose plans. Nice plans and nice results but the cost went way beyond the actual public funds that were spent. The cities hopes are that the train will boost the Mesa Arts Center and bring more associated business with it. It may indeed do that –eventually. There’ll have to be a change of attitude with city officials also and even with the many changes of folks in the administration we’ve witnessed there doesn’t appear to have been much actual change in attitude. Maybe a democratic process actually does represent the constituency. I guess that means that things are pretty much the way “they” want them to be.