KJZZ's Sun Up is a weekday morning podcast giving you the Arizona news you need to start your day. It is the biggest stories of the day from KJZZ News.
Transcript
ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s Sun Up is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, Nonprofit for Arizona.bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.
PHIL LATZMAN: This is KJZZ’s Sun Up, your daily news update from here in Phoenix on our state and region. I’m Phil Latzman. Good day to you. We bring you this podcast as a daily digest of Arizona news as reported by our KJZZ news team.
It is August the 3rd, the first Monday of August. It has been so hot, 12th straight day of extreme heat warning here in our Valley area in Phoenix, and that continues to tomorrow, so please be careful outside. And here is the news.
The federal government released a new plan for managing the Colorado River. As Alex Hager reports, the preview of the plan released on Friday sets a 10-year framework for sharing the shrinking water supply.
ALEX HAGER: After long, failed negotiations, the new plan would force policymakers to come back to the table every two years and adjust the rules. Some water experts say that could make it hard to create long-lasting changes to water use that are needed in response to drought and climate change. Elizabeth Koebele researches the river at the University of Nevada, Reno. She says this plan represents a missed opportunity to make bigger changes.
ELIZABETH KOEBELE: I’m not very confident that there’s a lot in here that would get us beyond the sort of challenges we’ve seen over the last couple years and this pattern of managing crisis to crisis that the basin has really been in lately.
ALEX HAGER: Koebele says the 10-year plan adds some predictability to river management, and negotiators could use it as an opportunity to agree in ways they couldn’t before. Alex Hager, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
PHIL LATZMAN: Maricopa County’s in the middle of one of its worst West Nile virus outbreaks in years, with five deaths recorded so far in 2026. Health officials are urging residents to use mosquito repellent and to avoid standing water. Melissa Kretschmer is an epizooologist with the state health department. She says monsoon rain puddles have brought many infected birds and mosquitoes together, amplifying the spread.
MELISSA KRETSCHMER: The birds get infected, and the mosquitoes feed off the birds, and thus get the virus in them, and the mosquito then transmits that virus to a person when they bite them.
PHIL LATZMAN: The CDC has reported 113 cases of West Nile this year, and 61 were in Arizona.
Well, measles continues to spread here in the state, and kids are heading back to school. Most classrooms across the state have immunization rates below the level recommended to prevent an outbreak. Katherine Davis-Young reports on that.
KATHERINE DAVIS-YOUNG: Arizona has had 342 measles cases since last year. That’s the highest tally the state has seen in more than three decades. The majority of those cases have been among unvaccinated kids.
Medical experts say measles is so contagious, about 95% of the population needs to be vaccinated to stop its spread. Only a quarter of Arizona’s kindergarten classrooms hit that target last year. And in Greenlee, Mohave, La Paz, and Yavapai counties, there were no schools reporting 95% immunity.
WILL HUMBLE: That’s just a perfect environment for bigger outbreaks in the future.
KATHERINE DAVIS-YOUNG: Will Humble directs the Arizona Public Health Association. He says measles is likely to be active in Arizona until vaccination rates rise higher. Katherine Davis-Young, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
PHIL LATZMAN: A Virginia company plans to bid on 4,000 acres of state trust land to build a utility-scale solar farm outside of Buckeye. Taylor Griffith has details.
TAYLOR GRIFFITH: Apex Clean Energy applied for a 30-year commercial lease on the parcel of land in 2023, according to documents submitted with the Arizona State Land Department. It goes up for auction in two weeks with the minimum bid starting at over $43 million. Apex says the Grand Verde Solar project would provide enough energy to power over 100,000 homes. More than $700 million in improvements are proposed alongside the solar array, including new access roads, underground and overhead transmission, a substation, and battery energy storage systems. Taylor Griffith, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
PHIL LATZMAN: As scorching temperatures grip the West, new research finds those intense heat waves have a strong connection to wildfires. From the Mountain West News Bureau, Murphy Woodhouse reports.
MURPHY WOODHOUSE: It may sound obvious that hotter weather fuels wildfires, but some of the details of the relationships between heat waves and wildfires are eye-popping.
DMITRI KALASHNIKOV: Heat waves are actually associated with close to half of all the wildfire burned area in the Western US over the past 25 years.
MURPHY WOODHOUSE: That’s Dmitri Kalashnikov, lead author on a paper recently published in the journal Science Advances. There are significant regional variations in the findings, as seen in the grass and shrublands of the Idaho-Oregon-Nevada tri-state area.
DMITRI KALASHNIKOV: Two-thirds of the burned area in those areas is actually heat wave-related.
MURPHY WOODHOUSE: Because human-caused climate change is making heat waves more frequent and intense, Kalashnikov says aggressive action to reduce the burning of fossil fuels is the most important policy response. For the Mountain West News Bureau, I’m Murphy Woodhouse.
PHIL LATZMAN: A new case management system is being implemented around the state to reduce recidivism rates in county jails and connect former inmates with behavioral services. Lilly Roseburrough has more.
LILLY ROSEBURROUGH: In December 2025, Yavapai County launched its partnership with the technology company Kyndryl to improve recidivism rates and case management. Now, other counties around the state are joining them to create a statewide database for inmate services. Executive Director of Behavioral Health Services at the Yavapai Sheriff’s Office, Beya Thayer, says the program is producing positive results.
BEYA THAYER: This is just such a great opportunity to support individuals in accessing services that they need. We do have a high disclosure of substance use risks and mental health needs. We have individuals who return often due to high acuity with their mental health.
LILLY ROSEBURROUGH: Thayer says before the new system, it was difficult to track what services individuals needed and connect them with the appropriate ones. Lily Roseburrough, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
PHIL LATZMAN: The Colorado River loses millions of acre-feet of water each year to evaporation. But scientists say measuring exactly how much has been a challenge. And now a new effort aims to improve those estimates using weather stations. The Mountain West News Bureau’s Kaleb Roedel has more.
KALEB ROEDEL: The Colorado River basin’s two largest reservoirs have fallen to record low levels. That’s why the Desert Research Institute is working to better measure one of the river’s biggest sources of water loss: evaporation. Chris Pearson says that starts with gathering better data.
CHRIS PEARSON: This project places our monitoring equipment in the middle of the reservoir to provide kind of a cleaner picture of air temperature, humidity, wind speed over the water, as well as the water temperature signal at the center of the water body.
KALEB ROEDEL: Pearson says combining those measurements with satellite data will improve evaporation estimates at major upper basin reservoirs. That could help water managers make better decisions at a time when the river’s under increasing pressure. For the Mountain West News Bureau, I’m Kaleb Roedel.
PHIL LATZMAN: Well, former Democratic congressman and long-time Tempe Mayor Harry Mitchell passed away at the age of 86 last week. Mitchell’s accomplishments were many, but one was very personal, as Kathy Ritchie tells us.
KATHY RITCHIE: Mitchell was well known for his political career, but after he left politics, Mitchell became a caregiver to his wife, Mary Ann, who had Alzheimer’s disease.
MARIE RAYMOND: When Harry received his wife’s diagnosis, you know, he was really looking for resources and support for himself and for his family, and he was having a really hard time finding anything locally in Tempe.
KATHY RITCHIE: Marie Raymond is a community health and human services program manager with Tempe. She says around that same time, his son, then-Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell, learned about Dementia Friendly America, a national network of communities supporting those living with dementia. Raymond says father and son wanted to bring the dementia friendly mission to Tempe, and in 2015, it became the first city in Arizona to receive that designation. She says other caregivers were touched by a well-known figure being so candid about his experience.
MARIE RAYMOND: There he was, just exposing his feelings and himself to everyone to share his experience so that it could normalize it.
KATHY RITCHIE: Dementia Friendly Tempe will host its 10th annual summit later this fall. Kathy Ritchie, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
PHIL LATZMAN: A Cold War-era submarine will soon have a new home at Steele Indian School Park. Ignacio Ventura was at this past weekend’s groundbreaking ceremony for the new monument and sent this report.
IGNACIO VENTURA: The USS Phoenix was part of a class of submarines designed to counter Soviet Union fleet. This was during what’s known as the Cold War era, which ended around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. After being decommissioned in 1998, efforts are underway to bring parts of the Navy attack submarine to Phoenix. Pete Lumianski is a retired US Navy captain and worked to bring the project to fruition.
PETE LUMIANSKI: We seem to be constantly in a state of tension with other parts of the world, and we can certainly draw lessons learned from the Cold War, which includes Vietnam, Korea, and the Gulf Wars. So that’s what we’re hoping to achieve.
IGNACIO VENTURA: Former Arizona Attorney General and Phoenix Mayor Terry Goddard helped spearhead the effort when he created the USS Phoenix Commission in 1989. Ignacio Ventura, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
PHIL LATZMAN: In sports, basketball, Mercury suffered a home loss to the Liberty Saturday. They’re back at it tonight in Chicago, but Phoenix pulled off a big trade over the weekend at the WNBA trade deadline. They get five-time All-Star guard Kelsey Plum from the LA Sparks in return for a first-round pick next year, guard Monique Akoa-Makani and a second-round pick in 2028. Plum’ll be a free agent at the end of the year. She’s been sidelined because of a lower leg injury, but was having a career year before that, averaging nearly 24 points per game.
Baseball, Diamondbacks had their four-game win streak snapped. The Guardians salvaged one with a 5-0 shutout yesterday in Cleveland. Arizona returns home tonight to host the division rival Padres, whom they lead by one game in the National League wild card standings.
And that does it for this edition of KJZZ’s Sun Up, Arizona’s morning news podcast on this Friday, excuse me, Monday — how could we forget? — August the 3rd, 2026. I’m Phil Latzman, and have a great day. We’re back at you tomorrow to do it on a Tuesday, and don’t forget, stay cool and hydrated out there.
