The Show for July 8, 2026: Betting on wildfires, remembering Vern Swaback and more

Firefighters are battling blazes across the state after a record dry winter and a hot spring. As some have rushed to protect their homes, others are betting on how destructive the fires will be. Plus, remembering an architectural legend in Arizona.

Transcript

UNDERWRITER: Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, non-profit for Arizona. bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

LAUREN GILGER: Hi, I’m Lauren Gilger, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, people are betting on wildfires, which is sparking concerns about arson. And getting to the bottom of a mailbox mystery in Northern Arizona. But first this morning, let’s take a trip back in time to 2016, when then-Arizona Governor Doug Ducey made a controversial move. He expanded Arizona’s Supreme Court from five justices to seven and then appointed two Republicans to fill the new seats. Democrats at the time blasted the move as an attempt to stack the court with conservatives, but then-Arizona Senate President Andy Biggs supported it.

ANDY BIGGS: As we continue to grow in the population in this state, and we continue to see an influx of litigation, this is appropriate to get ahead of the curve. Arizona is one of the states with the fewest number of justices on the state Supreme Court. There are some much higher than us, and this moving to seven would be an appropriate number at this time, and I support this and ask everyone to vote yes.

LAUREN GILGER: Fast forward to today, and Congressman turned Republican gubernatorial candidate Andy Biggs is working to stop Democrats from adding new justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. But he says it’s not the same situation. Stacey Barchenger covers state politics for The Arizona Republic, and has the story, and joins us now to tell us more. Good morning, Stacey.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Stacey.

STACEY BARCHENGER: Hey, good morning, Lauren.

LAUREN GILGER: So, Biggs has introduced a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment here to cap the number of justices. This is to do with the U.S. Supreme Court, right?

STACEY BARCHENGER: Yeah, that’s right. He wants to keep it at nine, which is the current the current makeup of the court. He says that this is because some Democrats, and high-profile ones at that, including Kamala Harris, have talked about adding justices to sort of water down the current conservative majority.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, as you’re reporting, though, Biggs was involved in making ... Doug Ducey’s move happen a decade ago, expanding the court, right?

STACEY BARCHENGER: Yeah, that’s right. So, I had just noticed his proposed constitutional amendment and got to wondering where he was at a decade ago when Governor Ducey proposed a similar plan here in Arizona. And then went back and found the same clip that that y’all just played of him, you know, being in favor of that expansion.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So, you talked to him about this. He says it’s it’s not the same thing, not the same situation? What did he have to say?

STACEY BARCHENGER: Yeah, I mean, he denied that his motivation was political, you know, that this was court packing to to build a conservative majority in Arizona. He talked about businesses that were frustrated because they have a lot of cases before the court, and they wanted it to be more efficient.

The the problem here is the expansion in Arizona was opposed by the chief justice at the time, who said it wasn’t necessary, that efficiencies were — would be better accomplished by changing other parts of the court system. And a lot of the the argument about efficiency was later proven to not be true. In later years, the court didn’t put out more opinions, and other justices have come out and said that that didn’t that wasn’t actually realized by the expansion.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. Ducey at the time had argued that the expansion of the court, and as we heard Biggs argue there, you know, would help with this growing caseload, as the population got bigger in the state. It’s not only that that it didn’t come to fruition, it almost has done the opposite, right?

STACEY BARCHENGER: Well, yeah. ... I went back and looked at our reporting in the years the years just after the expansion. And, you know, there was no evidence that they had significantly increased opinions they were putting out. There was some sort of ebb and flow, but certainly raised a lot of questions about whether the stated mission of expansion were actually accomplished.

LAUREN GILGER: So, Stacey, what does Biggs have to say about why he wants this constitutional amendment now? Like, why does he not want the U.S. Supreme Court to be expanded?

STACEY BARCHENGER: It’s really it’s really based on, you know, the Democrats that he says are motivated by political reasons, you know, that they they just want to water down the conservative majority that is on on the court. He said he prefers the sort of typical ebb and flow, which is, you know, the president gets to appoint one of the nine, or or three of the nine justices, and that should be sort of the normal way of the ideological tilt of the court.

LAUREN GILGER: So, Gov. Katie Hobbs was also involved a decade ago, right, in 2016? She was a leading Senate Democrat at the time and opposed this move to expand the state Supreme Court. What’s she have to say about this now?

STACEY BARCHENGER: Yeah, you know, she was — this is kind of funny, because she and Biggs overlapped for I think four years in the Senate. And she was one of the vocal opponents as the Senate Democratic leader at the time, called this Gov. Ducey’s court-packing plan. So, I had a chance to ask her briefly about it before my story published, and she said she thought it sounded a little bit hypocritical that Biggs had was now supporting a fixed number of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.

LAUREN GILGER: And Biggs, of course, bristled at that. These two could very well end up facing each other in, you know, the governor’s election this fall.

STACEY BARCHENGER: Yeah, absolutely. And I know that this story is one example of how much that race might end up with all of us looking back to votes where they diverged, you know, when they were both in the Senate.

LAUREN GILGER: Biggs has also supported a plan, Stacey, to to split up federal courts, right? This is aimed at the 9th Circuit?

STACEY BARCHENGER: Yeah, and he in in our interview, he talked quite a bit about that. This is a longstanding, kind of conservative issue, especially targeting the 9th Circuit, which includes Arizona. It’s kind of viewed as the most liberal of the circuits. His argument is it’s just geographically very diverse, it’s very big, and so it should be — I guess, the states would be better served if you broke it up into a couple of different circuits.

LAUREN GILGER: And that would have massive implications, right, in terms of the the appeals court decisions we often see come down on major cases in in the state.

STACEY BARCHENGER: Yeah, it really could. I don’t know how real that plan to split it up is, and, you know, he brought this up as we were talking about court reform, but it doesn’t seem that it would it would influence the number of justices on the Supreme Court.

LAUREN GILGER: So, lastly here for you, Stacey, how likely is this resolution that Biggs has introduced in Congress to pass?

STACEY BARCHENGER: Oh, totally slim. Not likely whatsoever. It just is very, very hard to get a constitutional amendment across the finish line. You know, it has to pass by a two-thirds vote in Congress and then also be ratified by 38 states. So, that is just such a long shot.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, we’ll leave it there for now. Stacey Barchenger covers state politics for The Arizona Republic. Stacey, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

STACEY BARCHENGER: Of course, thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Surprise residents who were angry about the federal government turning a local warehouse into an immigration detention center can take a sigh of relief this week. That’s because the feds have agreed to hold off on their conversion of the warehouse until it completes an environmental review. The agreement comes months after Arizona Attorney General Chris Mayes sued the government over the proposed warehouse. And it’s just the latest news in the ongoing debate over the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to convert massive warehouses like this into ICE detention centers across the country. Michael Wriston broke the story for Project Salt Box, and he’s on the line now to tell us more. Good morning, Michael.

MICHAEL WRISTON: Hey, good morning. Happy to be here.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming on. So, this is kind of the latest move in this ongoing court battle between the Arizona AG and DHS over this Surprise warehouse, which sparked so much outrage when people found out what was supposed to happen there. Now, they’ve asked the judge to pause the case?

MICHAEL WRISTON: They have, yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us about about what they’re asking there, where where the case stands now.

MICHAEL WRISTON: Yeah, so recently, within the last couple of weeks, the Department of Homeland Security has announced that they are planning to actually offload a number of these warehouses—seven of them. Unfortunately, Surprise is not one of the ones that they’re looking to offload. But, with that renewed attention to the warehouse initiative and and sort of the step back on DHS’s part, in Surprise, the Attorney General and the Department of Homeland Security have reached an agreement that they would essentially pause the case, and that the, you know, ICE and their inspectors would have to go through and do a a rigorous National Environmental Policy Act review, and and generate what is called a Record of Environmental Consideration, that goes above and beyond what they did a couple of months ago. And the idea there is they need to they need to do a better job determining if there are any environmental impacts, not just to the people that live in Surprise, but to any potential people that would be housed inside that warehouse.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. So, back up a minute and remind us what the Attorney General of Arizona argued when she sued DHS over this in April. Her argument, a lot of it had to do with this lack of an environmental review, right?

MICHAEL WRISTON: Right, yeah. So, the concern that came out of the the initial filing that that she filed months ago was that when ICE bought the warehouse, they did not do a thorough enough job investigating the environmental impacts, the policies and procedures that the federal government passed as law, that dictate how they would purchase the property and then use the property down the line. In the filings that DHS subsequently submitted, the documents that they released, it shows that, you know, they really, you know, I hesitate to use the word pencil-whipped, but they did rush through a lot of the environmental considerations. Some of them were completed in as little as, you know, a couple of hours on the day that the property was bought, or within close proximity to the the filing of the lawsuit. So, it looks like that process was rushed and, in some cases, skipped. One of the glaring omissions was the warehouse sits across the street from a chemical storage site, and none of that shows up in the in the Record of Environmental Consideration that ICE initially did.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, so talk a little bit more for us, Michael, about what this kind of environmental review might entail. Like, you’re getting at it’s more than, you know, pollution and water concerns.

MICHAEL WRISTON: Right. So, the environmental consideration would take into effect, or take into consideration, any impact to human habitations stemming from a change in use. So, right now, the warehouse is an industrial shell. It’s plumbed and outfitted to basically service freight, storage. It has just a few a few toilets, not a lot of sinks. So, obviously, there’s the water consideration. What would it take to convert this warehouse into something that could with that could hold 1,500 or more human beings? So, obviously, there’s water, that’s a concern there. But then they would also have to look at, you know, air conditioning, what would the impact be if they had to better ventilate this, are there ground chemicals, are there, you know, impacts on native species, impacts on waterways and tributaries to other water sources, proximity to chemicals or or things that could infiltrate the soil, the water, the food supplies, etc.? So, it it is a wide-ranging, very broad scope survey of all things environmental, and that’s just part of it. The other part, of course, is the procedural act—how did ICE go about purchasing it, and are they following federal guidelines for doing this conversion, or are they sidestepping them?

LAUREN GILGER: Right. Let me let me back up for a moment to, Michael, and just talk a little bit about what kind of reaction this got from many, many residents in Surprise when folks found out the plans for this giant warehouse, that it was planned to hold many, many migrants at some point. What did folks have to say? And, and this was not rare, we should say. This happened in many places around the country where where ICE purchased these warehouses.

MICHAEL WRISTON: Right, I would I would classify it in Surprise and in other places as full-throated, bipartisan outrage. I mean, you know, on on the left side of the political spectrum, you had people that are very clearly and evidently upset about the human rights implications of housing human beings in a in a warehouse, or in a facility that wasn’t built to purpose for detention. And then on the right, you had people that were very upset about the financial implications, mispenditure of, you know, government funding that inevitably ended up being useless or or not necessarily seen through to its purpose. So, bipartisan outrage. You’ve seen deep coalitions of people across the both aisles showing up to fight this. And, yeah, Surprise was a great example because you had you had high schoolers, you know, you had people that were very early, you know, very early in their lives coming forward and dedicating themselves to the cause of opposition. And that has continued on. I mean, even now, as they’re taking a step back, it hasn’t diminished that that spirit of oversight that we’ve seen in folks that are in that community. They are keeping their eye open that that this environmental review is done adequately, that no corners are cut, and I don’t see the pressure being let off. I think that that folks on the ground are going to see it all the way through to the end.

LAUREN GILGER: Last minute here for you, Michael. Project Salt Box has been tracking 11 of warehouses like this around the country that DHS bought up, planned to make into immigration detention facilities. As you mentioned, some of those are not going to go forward at this point. It sounds like many have been delayed or abandoned. Can you kind of summarize the overall picture right now in terms of DHS’s plans to to turn these warehouses into immigration holding or detention detention facilities?

MICHAEL WRISTON: So, of the 11 that they bought for $1.07 billion, seven are are targeted for offload. They’re going to sell those or transition those to other federal departments for use. Of the remaining four, which are Surprise, Arizona, Williamsport, Maryland, and two in Texas, in El Paso and San Antonio, one of those, El Paso, is going to be converted into ICE office and training space. It will not be used for migrant detention or large-scale detention. There are no announced plans for San Antonio at this time. Williamsport is under a preliminary injunction facing a very similar NEPA requirement as Surprise. And Surprise, obviously, is now settled with the AG that they are going to do that same NEPA review. So, despite owning 11 properties outright, they’ve only really got plans for one.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. All right. Michael Wriston with Project Salt Box, joining us to talk about the latest on this Surprise warehouse. Michael, thank you very much for coming back on the show. I appreciate it.

MICHAEL WRISTON: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, the architectural world lost an icon earlier this week. Vern Swaback was Frank Lloyd Wright’s youngest apprentice. We revisit a conversation with him from 2017.

But first, last month on The Show, we told you about new rules from the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services outlining work requirements for Americans on Medicaid. Those rules come out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but CMS’s proposal went farther than some states had expected. They generally require non-pregnant adults between the ages of 19 and 64 to work at least 80 hours per month, and they will start on New Year’s Day. That potentially means more work for our next guest. Katherine Adams is Executive Vice President at Pipeline Connects, which helps people find the right job opportunities. Adams says if the Arizona workforce system were a shopping mall, her non-profit is the directory at the front door. And when my co-host Mark Brodie spoke with her earlier, he asked what impact the new Medicaid work requirements might have on what she does.

KATHERINE ADAMS: We have thought about this a lot. And I think when people are hearing about these new work requirements, they often assume the challenge is that most people don’t want to work. But that is not what we are seeing.

Most people who can work already do, or they’re actively trying to improve their situation through education or training. And so, the challenge is often not that the system is complicated, but imagine being told you need to complete 80 hours of work a month, training, education or work, or community service to keep coverage. Nobody tells you where to start. That’s the problem that Pipeline Connects can really help to solve.

MARK BRODIE: Do you anticipate that once these cuts go into effect, you’re going to have a lot more people coming to you looking for that kind of help?

Claudia Johnstone
Katherine Adams

KATHERINE ADAMS: Absolutely. I think why this is important now is the new requirement is going to add another layer of complexity. Again, it’s not the concern of whether people are willing to participate. I think the concern is whether people know where to go, how to get connected, how to document their participation.

For many, especially adults, that are returning to education or training after years away, trying to navigate a system can be very overwhelming. So, one of the biggest barriers that we’re seeing is the misconceptions that just opportunity doesn’t exist in general. But in many cases, the opportunity is there. It’s just hidden in plain sight. What’s missing is really awareness.

So, community colleges in Arizona, workforce programs, apprenticeship opportunities, adult education providers, employers actively looking for talent, these all exist. But if people don’t know how to find that opportunity that’s best suited for them, they might as well not exist. So, often we say, you know, that a hidden opportunity is the same as no opportunity at all.

MARK BRODIE: Are you prepared to handle a potential influx of people who need to to find work and need to find work that they can document to keep their coverage?

KATHERINE ADAMS: Absolutely. So, we I just want to take an example for example's sake. So, taking a single mom that lives in Yuma. She may be working part time, receiving Medicaid, and looking for a better-paying career. She doesn’t necessarily know whether she could get or needs a certificate, she should enroll in a college program, pursue healthcare training or connect with a workforce center. These are all big questions.

So, instead of spending weeks trying to navigate multiple agencies, websites, Pipeline Connects can help her connect to programs and opportunities that make sense for her goals. So, making a pathway visible based on where she’s at.

MARK BRODIE: So, in terms of the documentation, how easy or difficult is it for somebody who is on Medicaid to get that documentation and get it in a timely manner, in the format they need it, so they can get it to where they need to get it to keep their coverage?

KATHERINE ADAMS: Yeah. So, as we know, there’s multiple ways you can document that. I want to talk about, for an adult education student, this is really especially important. So, someone may be earning a GED, completing an English as a second-language program, earning a certified nursing assistant credential, or completing workforce readiness training, or maybe even finishing a healthcare certificate through adult education. All of these accomplishments matter, and they represent real progress towards employment and economic mobility.

But too often, these achievements are trapped inside separate systems or paper records. So, part of what we’re doing is working to make these credentials visible, so learners can move more easily and connect to jobs, education opportunities, and workforce programs.

So, when we think about these new requirements through Medicaid, the visibility matters. If someone’s participating in training, earning credentials or attending school, or preparing for employment, those achievements need to be easier to recognize and easier to build on.

MARK BRODIE: How easy or difficult is it to sort of increase the visibility of those things?

KATHERINE ADAMS: So, most people think of a career as a resume and a job application. We think of it as a journey. We are currently working to provide visible credentials, which is essentially an employment record, which is visibly on a profile that helps people ensure that all these steps along the journey can be recognized, and not only through that individual, but also by employers, colleges and workforce partners.

MARK BRODIE: Is it safe to say that you already work with Medicaid enrollees in Arizona?

KATHERINE ADAMS: Absolutely.

MARK BRODIE: And what has their and your experience been in terms of, you know, making sure, because you referenced, you know, most people who are on Medicaid and are able to work are already working. Like, I guess, what what are you hearing from them in terms of what these new requirements might mean for them?

KATHERINE ADAMS: I think the biggest opportunity that we’re hearing about collectively, and we do work with different sectors, so we work with healthcare sector and we work with other sectors, but obviously everyone is affected by Medicaid.

But really at the end of the day, what we’re seeing is whether people can see a path forward, and can we help them to have those opportunities that they seek more visible, accessible, and in a space where it’s easier to navigate, so everyone has a fair chance to continue to move forward.

MARK BRODIE: So, what are you going to be watching for specifically once these new requirements take effect to see what kind of impact they’re having, both on the people with whom you’re working, but also with Pipeline Connects?

KATHERINE ADAMS: Yeah, I think that, you know, we have a lot of data that we are able to take a look at within the system of Pipeline Connects, and it’s telling us a lot. I mean, we’re actually seeing where people are interested. So, where does interest exist?

We can see what careers people are exploring. We can see what pathways are starting to illuminate as being very viable or prioritized by our partners here, our community, and employer partners. And we can see where and industries are really attracting attention and looking for talent, and starting to identify where awareness gaps exist. So, if there’s a strong demand from employers for healthcare workers, but relatively low awareness amongst learners or people seeking those opportunities, there’s a red flag.

So, that’s the kind of data and insight that really helps us, that we can provide back to education providers or workforce organizations, and even policymakers to help us collectively make better decisions for Arizona. Especially with these new requirements, it’s just important to kind of understand the landscape at a better collective view.

MARK BRODIE: Katherine Adams is executive vice president at Pipeline Connects.

LAUREN GILGER: The Pipeline Fire burning near Sedona that’s had surrounding communities on alert this week has reached 27,000 acres. More than 1,200 fire crews now saying it’s 51% contained. And that’s just one place that’s burning around the state, on top of several other large fires burning across the Southwest that are sparking evacuations and destruction, and have resulted in the deaths of three firefighters. But as people are evacuated from wildfires this summer, rushing to protect their family and homes, others are heading to betting sites like Polymarket to put down money on the fires—how big they’ll grow, how long they could last, how much might be destroyed. Our next guest reports the practice has wildfire survivors calling it "morally reprehensible," and experts worrying about arson. Kylie Mohr wrote about it for High Country News, and she’s on the line now to tell us more. Good morning, Kylie.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Kylie.

KYLIE MOHR: Good morning. Thanks so much for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Thank you for coming on. So, tell us first just like what exactly are people betting on here? What do the questions look like?

KYLIE MOHR: Right, so the questions, as you said, it could be anything from a fire reaching a certain number of acreage by a certain day. It could be a fire being extinguished by a certain day. The way that prediction markets work is that there are these contracts that people can buy and sell based on the outcome of future events, and they’re usually framed as a specific question. So, you can get as granular as you want to with anything from fire behavior, fire growth, fire spread, things like that.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And they do tend to get pretty granular. This is part, of course, of the whole kind of world of prediction markets that’s so exploding right now. You can literally bet on anything, right?

KYLIE MOHR: Yes, you can bet on which team will win the World Cup, who will attend Taylor Swift’s wedding — the sky is the limit.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, yeah. And we should say these these market hosts make money, basically, on each bet, right? And they’re making probably a lot of money right now.

KYLIE MOHR: Yes.

LAUREN GILGER: Who creates the questions that folks are betting on here?

KYLIE MOHR: Yeah, so I can say at least for Polymarket, which is one of the two largest prediction markets, the Polymarket markets team — so employees of the company — are the ones creating questions, and they are seeing what is trending on social media, where there’s a lot of interest, where there’s a lot of eyeballs, and then creating those bets accordingly.

LAUREN GILGER: So, you kind of analyzed this in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire in Southern California, where more than 16,000 structures were burned, 31 people died. People were betting on all of that?

KYLIE MOHR: Yes, they were. Yeah. So people spent about $1.2 million betting on both the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire, which burned in January 2025 in the greater Los Angeles area.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And so, there’s obviously kind of an ethical question here. And you spoke with some survivors of those wildfires about this. What did they have to say?

KYLIE MOHR: Yeah, so they were flabbergasted, was one of the words that they used. For both of them that made it into the story, it was the first time that they had even heard that this happened. They thought it was crass, heartless, morally reprehensible to gamble on their fate, the fate of their communities, the fate of other people.

I think anytime these big fires not just burn a lot of structures but cause fatalities, that really ups the ante on these bets, and in general kind of increases the repulsion that I think people hear and feel when they learn about this happening.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And as you outline there, a lot of money involved. But there was another big concern here that came up in your reporting on this, and that’s arson.

KYLIE MOHR: Right. So, you know, if you go onto these prediction markets, you can find bets on other natural disasters, too— hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, etc. But wildfires are different because we have the ability to set them. We have the ability to control them in some ways.

And so, ethicists and just the general public are worried that if you want to win a bet, maybe you’d start a fire in order to do so. Obviously, there’s no examples that we know of of that happening yet. But as wildfires continue burning communities every summer and as prediction markets become more widespread, there is definitely a concern that this is going to create a perverse incentive for people.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. You spoke with one expert that said something that really struck me, said something along the lines of even just betting on something like this really diminishes the value of human life.

KYLIE MOHR: Right, I thought that that was a really well-spoken way to describe it. We’re talking about people’s lives, people’s well-being — not even just the people who live and work in these communities, but also the firefighters who are risking their lives to try to control these fires and to keep us safe.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And there’s also a new platform specifically for betting on wildfires in California. But they’re framing this, your you’re reporting, as a public good.

KYLIE MOHR: Right, so this was really fascinating. I found this platform kind of early on in my reporting. It’s called Wyldfyre, but spelling with two Ys instead of two Is. And it purports to be the first California wildfire-specific prediction market. It encourages people to trade on what fire does next.

It’s worth noting that it’s currently using play money, so real money is not being exchanged yet, although they say that it’s coming soon. And you can bet on fire behavior in any county or any city in the state on this platform. And you mentioned they’re framing it as a public good.

And that’s one of the interesting pieces about prediction markets is they position themselves as harnessing the wisdom of crowds to come up with some sort of prediction or analysis that maybe experts might miss, is their reasoning.

LAUREN GILGER: Does the Forest Service use information like that?

KYLIE MOHR: No, absolutely not. Cal Fire and the Forest Service both told me they don’t use prediction market data, they don’t plan to. They have their own complex, data-driven models to predict fire behavior, and they don’t want to be associated with a system that ties financial gain to wildfire outcomes.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, last 30 seconds for you, Kylie. There are efforts also to rein in prediction markets, right? And sometimes from specifically betting on things like this.

KYLIE MOHR: Right, so there are There’s a kind of a growing tide at a state level to rein in prediction markets. Arizona has actually been leading the charge on that with the platform Kalshi. But so far, those attempts are really focused on topics like terrorism, assassination and war. And so far, wildfire has not made that list.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. More to watch. Kylie Mohr wrote about this for High Country News. Kylie, thank you for your reporting, thanks for coming on the Show.

KYLIE MOHR: Thank you, so much.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger. Some residents of a community northeast of Flagstaff have had quite a bit of drama with their mail over the last couple of years. People living in Doney Park were moved into group mailboxes several years ago—some had had mailboxes on their properties—but then in 2024, a vehicle crashed into the community mailboxes, damaging them. That left residents needing to drive into Flagstaff to get their mail at the post office. And the process of getting their mailboxes put back up has been a bit of a saga. Sam McLaughlin is a staff reporter for the Arizona Daily Sun and has been following this. He spoke with my co-host, Mark Brodie, who asked about the timeline and if it’s right that some of the residents used to have individual mailboxes, then they were all moved into group ones, and then there was no mailbox at all.

SAM MCLAUGHLIN: That’s roughly it. A lot of residents in the area had their own mailboxes when they first moved in, although there were some who even from the start were using what the Postal Service calls cluster box units, or CBUs. Those are the mailboxes that kind of look like little sets of lockers, you know, with an individual box for each residence, all grouped together in one unit.

And then a few years ago, the Postal Service announced that everyone in this particular neighborhood of Doney Park would need to start using the CBU. It was located relatively close to them, you know, a short drive down the road to pick up your mail and back. So, from the folks I talked to, that wasn’t much of a major inconvenience.

The problem came when the CBU for this particular neighborhood got hit by a truck. And it was November 2024, the Postal Service came, picked it up, took it away and told the residents, "For the moment, you’re going to have to drive into the main post office in Flagstaff to pick up your mail." And that’s about a 10-mile drive each way.

MARK BRODIE: OK. And the residents pointed out some concerns about doing that, in addition to the distance, but like, it sounds like, you know, you basically, some of them anyway, had to wait in line to pick up their mail.

SAM MCLAUGHLIN: I think they all have to wait in line to pick up their mail when they’re doing it. So, when they drive into Flagstaff to go to the main post office, they’re not assigned a PO box. They have to wait for a clerk to be available, and then they can provide their name, their address, and pick up their mail that way.

So, it’s definitely more time-consuming in multiple ways than just going down to the end of the road to get your mail, and on days when the post office is particularly busy — think holidays — it can be a long wait for them to get their mail.

The other thing that some residents shared with me is that although there are a lot of retirees in the Doney Park area, and folks who might have the the flexibility in their schedule to go into Flagstaff, stand in line, wait to get their mail, there are also folks out there who are still working, and the post office is not open late. It’s not a place that has extended hours.

And so, for folks who are working and trying to juggle holding down a full-time job with still getting their mail, it can be very tricky to figure out how to make the time to get to the post office during business hours when they’re supposed to be at work.

MARK BRODIE: Did the post office say anything about why they didn’t assign these residents a PO box so they didn’t have to stand in line?

SAM MCLAUGHLIN: I don’t believe the post office or the Postal Service has responded to that particular question, no.

MARK BRODIE: OK. And in terms of getting their mailboxes back, as you report, it seems like the big issue is that nobody really knew who owned that little piece of land that the the CBU was on, and they couldn’t figure it out. Is that right?

SAM MCLAUGHLIN: That seemed to be the problem initially. So — I’m trying to recall the timeline of how this all happened in my head, so I was talking to the residents, I reached out to the Postal Service. The Postal Service spokesperson came back and said, "The parcel where the foundation slab for the CBUs is located is on private property, and we are waiting for permission from the property owner to be able to replace that concrete slab and put up new mailboxes."

So, when I heard that, I thought, "Well, who owns this?" And I immediately started looking at county property records. So, I went online, and I looked, and as far as I could tell, that little area was not part of any of the surrounding parcels. So, I drove out there myself, I talked to some of the neighbors, folks who own property or rent property that’s adjacent to that parcel, and everyone that I was able to speak to said, "I don’t own that, and I don’t know of anyone who does."

It’s right next to a Forest Service parcel, so I reached out to our local Forest Service office, that’s the Flagstaff Ranger District of the Coconino National Forest. They did some checking, they got back to me and said, "No, the boundary of our parcel is exactly where it shows up on the map." And there are physical markers on the ground that I observed that confirm that as well.

So, no one seemed to know just who owned this particular piece of land, and it’s not a large or impressive piece of land. It is really just a gravel pullout on the side of the road, but it seems like somehow it had been overlooked or maybe had just slipped through the cracks in all the years of development out there in Doney Park. This seemed like it just got forgotten, I guess.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so it turns out that it is not privately owned at all, it’s county land. How did the county maybe not realize it? And apparently, nobody else realized it, either.

SAM MCLAUGHLIN: As far as I can tell, like I just said, it it seemed to have slipped through the cracks. Yeah, the county eventually, after I contacted them and after residents had contacted them, did some additional work. They sent out surveyors to check, and they came back with a determination that that little gravel pullout was part of the county right of way. So, it’s not private property, it’s not federal property, it’s owned by the county.

MARK BRODIE: So, does this mean now that the USPS can go ahead and put a new set of mailboxes for these residents?

SAM MCLAUGHLIN: One would think. One would think now that it’s known who owns it, and it is the county, and the county has said that they’re happy to cooperate with USPS and get them the right approvals to put down a new concrete slab and put up new mailboxes.

At the last time I checked with USPS, their spokesperson said that they were still waiting on some sort of approval or permitting completion from the county. Once that’s done, they should be able to pour a new concrete slab that will be larger than the old one, and they should be able to install a new set of mailboxes. When that will happen, though, we still don’t know.

MARK BRODIE: How are residents handling this? I mean, it sounded like, you know, some of them are taking it in in stride, but it definitely felt like there is a sense of frustration with how long this has taken and sort of the path that it has taken.

SAM MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, I think there is definitely frustration. I spoke to Delia Moder and Cassie Davidson, who both live out in that area, and they told me that they were frustrated by the delay and also just frustrated by the lack of communication from the Postal Service.

They felt that they hadn’t been getting clear information about the cause of the delay or when things might be resolved, and they did feel frustrated by that. They felt like, "We’re in a rural area, we’re being ignored." And obviously, this isn’t the most pressing issue in the world, but it is something that’s impactful for folks who live out there, and they would like to see it addressed and addressed in a more timely fashion, ideally.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Sam McLaughlin, a reporter with the Arizona Daily Sun. Sam, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

Vernon Swaback was an apprentice to the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright and was deeply influenced by the great architect’s visionary principles. He studied under Wright from 1957 until 1978 at Taliesin West, Wright’s Scottsdale home, studio and school.

Swaback went on to become a celebrated architect in his own right as the founder and managing partner of Swaback Partners. Over nearly five decades, he grew Swaback from a one-man practice to a nationally recognized firm.

Swaback passed away earlier this week at the age of 87. Back in 2017, I had the opportunity to sit down with him and talk to him about his experience working under Wright. Here is that conversation:

SWABACK: My first exposure to Frank Lloyd Wright was seeing the homes that he had designed in Oak Park, Illinois, which was not too far from where I lived, and I was I think 8 years old at the time.

And if we can accept that his architecture was not just different in style but absolutely different in its whole spiritual sense of things, it could, therefore, move somebody to want to design their life around it.

It wasn’t like, “I like colonial, you like Spanish.” I mean, there was nothing to that. It was really an expression of something perhaps as deep as nature itself. I didn’t have the words, and I’m not sure having the words makes it any more meaningful because it just speaks to the whole human sense of need and desire and celebration.

And then in the fall of 1956, the Mayor (Richard J.) Daley of Chicago proclaimed Frank Lloyd Wright Day, and there was a great celebration and an unveiling of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High building. And I went to that, and that just sort of clinched it all. I knew then that I just had to somehow find this man.

So I wrote a letter to Taliesin in Wisconsin, and I always remember clearly that about an hour after I wrote the letter, I called. I said, “I’m very concerned that my letter will get lost.” There was an urgency about it.

And we went to Taliesin in Wisconsin. I sat between my mother and my father, and Frank Lloyd Wright looked at me and said, “Why do you want to leave the university?” I have no idea where this answer came from, but I said, “Because they’re beginning to teach preconceived ideas.”

He looked at my mother, and then my father, and he said, “Where does he get it? From you or from you?” I knew from that moment on my life had been changed.

GILGER: So what was he like as a mentor, as a teacher?

SWABACK: I can’t think of him without thinking of him as being terribly humorous. He was a joyful man. He was always exploring, you know? I mean, nothing had any meaning to him other than what he could do with it.

And you would almost have to be there to see this. He would hold up a brick and say, “A brick is just a brick, but, oh, what you can do with it.” And then if you look at things like the Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, and other buildings, he turned the brick into a piece of magic.

GILGER: Yeah. So that’s kind of what he was like. What I wonder, also, is what did you learn? How did your aesthetic change? How did your theories behind what you wanted to do with the rest of your life change during that experience?

SWABACK: Well, long before I was at Taliesin, I was interested in design, and I remember the feeling of designing various building shapes and so forth. And I would think, “But I don’t see that this has any meaning.” I mean, it might be circular, it might be triangular or square, fancy or plain. But I I couldn’t feel that it had meaning.

And it was this search for meaning that was central to everything that radiated from him. And so, all of a sudden, there became a reason for doing something one way or another, and a very significant reason.

GILGER: So obviously this experience working under Frank Lloyd Wright, you said it changed your life and has obviously affected what you do now. How would you like that sort of theory and what it is that he taught you carried forward?

SWABACK: Well, I’d like to swing kind of a wide range to answer that because it’s not surprising that most of the people who can hire an architect tend to be rather well off and able to do things that more easily can slip into grandeur than into meaning. And so, in 2011, I formed a nonprofit called Two Worlds Community Foundation, and that gave me the sort of the corridor in which to crusade, write books and whatever about things that no one had commissioned but that I believe to be essential to life.

But there is something that goes beyond what any one client can commission, and perhaps the strongest umbrella word for that is community. And community is sort of the sum total of what all things add up to becoming, and if they add up in an artful way, then they’re worthy of the word community.

And I feel so strongly about it that the opposite of community is war. Peace is not the opposite of war because peace is just some sort of notion that nobody’s being bothered. Community may be as hard won as war, but it just has such a very different outcome.

And these words perhaps have less meaning to most people than they do to me because if you heard Frank Lloyd Wright talking about them, it was almost something injected into your bloodstream. I mean, the words were just a guide to induce a feeling. Feelings last longer than the memory of words. And there wasn’t anything about him that was inconsistent with this obvious dedication.

GILGER: You’ve said that you believe that Frank Lloyd Wright would become more relevant, more famous in the future rather than in his own time. Why do you think that is?

SWABACK: What I experienced at Frank Lloyd Wright’s side was a true community. We talk now about farm-to-fork initiatives, neighborhood gardens and so forth. That was normal for us. That’s all. That’s the only kind of food we had.

We talk about Uber, shared vehicles. That’s all that we did. We had a certain amount of vehicles, and we shared them.

We talk about the whole notion of being green. He’s now being called not only our greatest architect ever, but he’s being called our first green, our first sustainable architect.

So these things that were happening produced what you almost would consider to be a society independent of the exchange of money. Taliesin West is a World Treasure site that was built from the ground up without any employees. People who lived there, people who studied there, people who enjoyed the culture built that place.

Think of how that could change the future prospects for people who may indeed live 30 years longer than their bank account would provide. Retirement ought to become a thing of the past. We have continuing care retirement communities where people are cut off from the life of whatever would inspire them to continue to assert themselves, continue to learn.

What if, instead of that, those people could still be part of a community in which young people could learn from the elders, and elders could gain a sense of vitality and promise from the young people?

That has to be in our future. If that isn’t in our future, we probably don’t have a future. And the place to look for that as a prototype was the life lived at Taliesin West with Frank Lloyd Wright.

GILGER: Vern Swaback, thanks so much.

SWABACK: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: That was Vern Swaback speaking with me in 2017 after the publication of his book, “Designing for the Life of Community at a Time of Great Change.”

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban and our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram at @kjzztheshow.