The Show for July 14, 2026: Mexico suing ICE, APS rate case and more

ICE officers shot and killed a Mexican national in Texas last week. Now Mexico’s government is threatening legal action. Plus, APS is asking for its third rate increase in four years.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit health care system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit 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, Mexico’s government wants criminal charges in the deaths of Mexican nationals in the U.S. immigration system. And an electronic music producer has a new collaborator: animals.

LAUREN GILGER: Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest public electricity provider, is asking the Arizona Corporation Commission for its third rate increase in four years. This one would raise rates 14%, adding up to about $240 more per year for customers, and many of them are not happy about it.

PROTESTERS: No rate hikes! No rate hikes! No rate hikes! No rate hikes! No rate hikes!

LAUREN GILGER: That is what it sounded like at a press conference outside of the Arizona Corporation Commission in May. The elected Corporation Commissioners get to decide whether and how much APS gets to raise rates. Hearings finally wrapped last week. They were supposed to end in June but went over schedule because of the amount of expert testimonies.

There’s a lot at stake for the company and for consumers, and the Residential Utility Consumer Office, or RUCO, is the state agency that represents ratepayers — that’s all of us who get our power from APS — at the Corporation Commission. They are officially opposing the rate increase request, and here to tell us why is RUCO Director Cynthia Zwick. Good morning, Cynthia.

CYNTHIA ZWICK: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so your office is against APS’ request for this 14% rate increase. Tell us why.

CYNTHIA ZWICK: Well, we think it’s excessive. And actually, during the course of the hearing, it’s gone up to 15.3%, which we think is even higher and too much. But we think that there are elements of the case that are just excessive. The return on investment that they’re asking for increases rates. They’re also seeking a formula rate, which we oppose.

LAUREN GILGER: We’ll talk about that formula rate in a moment. But tell us more about that return on investment. How much would it be for APS?

CYNTHIA ZWICK: So, for APS, they’re seeking a 10.7% interest, which is a return on the equity, which is essentially what shareholders will earn in return if the investments take place.

LAUREN GILGER: So, this is happening, Cynthia, in the midst of this cost-of-living crisis here and across the country. Tell us who will be most impacted by a rate increase like this.

CYNTHIA ZWICK: Well, we think it’s a fairly broad group of customers that are going to be impacted. We’re hearing from low-income families, we’re hearing from middle-income families, we’re hearing from residential customers in general that this rate increase is simply too high. It’s not keeping up with the cost of living, it’s not keeping up with wage increases. And so, it’s a very broad group of customers that are really very concerned about this.

LAUREN GILGER: And it seems like APS is not the only company that you get a bill from every month that’s raising their prices, right? Like this is happening kind of across the board.

CYNTHIA ZWICK: It is. Every gas company, every water and wastewater company along with each large electric utility is coming in for rate increases at the same time.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, and this all adds up. OK, there’s another big aspect of this case that you just mentioned there. APS is asking for a change in the way that it gets to raise rates, right? Like they want to be able to adjust rates each year instead of going every couple of years for these big rate cases. Do you think that this would be beneficial for consumers?

CYNTHIA ZWICK: Absolutely not. What we are hearing is the benefit of this is gradualism— that people can sort of plan for increases on an annual basis. What we know is that in other states where there are formula rates, customers pay more and they pay a lot every year, usually, on an ongoing basis.

And so, we’re concerned that here as well, people will be paying more on an annual basis, but not just for APS. They’re likely going to be — depending on where they live — they could be paying more to APS or their electric company, their gas company, their water and their wastewater. So, they could have four increases in the scope of one year.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow, OK. So, APS says that they have to ask for this rate increase because of a lot of things: inflation, the cost of equipment that they’re using for the utilities goes up, as, you know, costs of everything are going up, and just the ballooning cost of electricity today, right, like we’re seeing temperatures rise here in the Valley, that amount of power that they have to provide more people here is going up, and the influx of data centers, which we’ll talk about more in a moment.

But do you think they have a fair argument here, that costs are going up for them, too?

CYNTHIA ZWICK: I think costs are going up for them, but they’re not going up to the extent that they need a 14% or 15% rate increase, which is really ultimately what is their ask.

LAUREN GILGER: I want to talk about data centers, Cynthia. They’re so controversial right now, and we’ve seen so many built here in the Valley in particular and around the state so quickly. They use a lot of energy, right? And people are upset about them on a lot of fronts. APS is asking for a separate increase essentially for large load customers, as they’re called, like this.

And the idea is to kind of make sure that they pay for any new plants, any new transmission lines that is needed to serve a data center, and there certainly could be that coming. Are you concerned that data centers, though, are driving up costs for customers right now?

CYNTHIA ZWICK: We are concerned about it, and that’s one of the things that we’re looking into in this case. We have actually asked that there’s a separate rate class for those large customers that’s established, and we’re also looking at the subscription rate that the utility is proposing.

However, that was not included as part of this case. So, we’re continuing to look at what those costs might be and whether truly growth is paying for growth or whether some of those costs are being shared with residential customers.

LAUREN GILGER: And we don’t have a clear answer to that yet?

CYNTHIA ZWICK: We don’t.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. So, if you’re looking at the amount of vitriol that data centers seem to be, you know, raising in the general public right now — we’ve seen this happen in various places around the state and around the country, obviously, where people are just up in arms about the building of these data centers — do you think that they understand the issue entirely? Do you think that if these things were to be completely separate, it would solve the problem?

CYNTHIA ZWICK: I don’t think it would solve the problem at all. I think that there has been — there needs to be much more communication with the members of the communities where these data centers are going in. I think there needs to be more transparency about what the costs are. Many of the contracts that utilities create with the data centers are covered by NDAs, so there is very little transparency. So, I think there’s a lot that can be done to sort of open the doors to better explain what the situation is, who is paying for what costs, and really how all of that is playing out in the community.

LAUREN GILGER: So that the people who are mad about this might understand it better.

CYNTHIA ZWICK: Right. They still may not agree with it, but at least they’ll understand what the issues are, which I think is missing at the moment.

LAUREN GILGER: So, if you’re looking forward and we understand that data centers will be needed for various things, like, you know, everything that operates our phone, like, what do you think needs to happen in terms of the rate structure and the payment structure so that customers aren’t bearing the weight of this?

CYNTHIA ZWICK: Well, we need to make sure that if the formula rate goes through and there are annual filings, that we have time to be able to really evaluate what those costs are and ensure that those costs are not being passed along. There has to be an open and transparent process for anyone who has an interest to really understand that and to measure whether that, in fact, is occurring — whether those costs are covered by the data center cost causers.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. Very quickly, we won’t likely see a decision on this from the Corporation Commission for quite some time, end of the year is what we’re looking at, likely. What are you watching for now?

CYNTHIA ZWICK: Well, we’re just watching essentially what we’re waiting for now is there are some closing briefs that have to be filed. We’re waiting for the recommendation from the judge. And that will really set the tone. The judge will make a recommendation to the Commission, but they can ultimately make any changes to the recommendation and implement whatever modifications they feel are appropriate.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, it’s a long process. RUCO Director Cynthia Zwick joining us this morning. Cynthia, thank you very much for coming in. I appreciate it.

LAUREN GILGER: State Treasurer Kimberly Yee is calling out an attack ad against her that’s making the rounds of late, and that she says is racist and revolting.

AD VOICEOVER: Meet Kimberly Yee. She’s the empress of DEI. Yee led a national effort to govern bureaucrats pushing an extreme diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda. Kimberly Yee: too liberal for school superintendent.

LAUREN GILGER: Yee is running for superintendent of public instruction against incumbent Tom Horne in this month’s Republican primary election, and she has blamed her fellow GOP opponent for this ad, but Horne strongly denies any involvement.

But it’s not the only example of accusations of racism that are cropping up this primary election cycle.

Just last week on X, Turning Point USA COO Tyler Bowyer asked Arizona state Rep. Quang Nguyen, a Republican who is Turning Point-endorsed, "Can you speak English?" Nguyen is an immigrant who fled Vietnam at 12 years old.

In Tucson, state Senate candidate Alma Hernandez, a Democratic representative who is Jewish, had multiple campaign signs vandalized with what Jewish leaders are calling antisemitic and misogynistic slurs.

But is this vitriolic rhetoric new, or has politics always been this overt? To find out, I sat down with longtime Arizona political strategist Chuck Coughlin, president of HighGround.

CHUCK COUGHLIN: It’s changing. The nature of our communication is changed because it is a 24-hour news cycle, there’s so many different mediums in which we can listen to and be exposed to this information. That’s to begin with.

And then we have, you know, we’re in this period of time right now in our country where our social mores have devolved. And we are now at a very tipping point of overt racism being a sales tool, or overt hatred being a sales tool to divide people.

And that’s what our politics is today. It’s all about dividing us into partisan Democrats or partisan Republicans, because you run in a primary. Eighty percent of people get elected in a partisan primary, and so that’s all you got to win in a legislative contest or Congress.

You know, there’s only 20 seats, 30 seats in the country that are absolutely up for grabs on a routine basis. And so, if you win the primary, you’re in, you’re good to go.

LAUREN GILGER: And primary voters are going to be a very different audience.

CHUCK COUGHLIN: It’s a hugely different audience because it’s 15% of Democrats participate in Democratic primaries —

LAUREN GILGER: Fifteen percent, that’s it?

CHUCK COUGHLIN: That’s it.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow.

CHUCK COUGHLIN: And 20% of Republicans participate in a Republican primary. And so, that’s of everybody, that’s the whole universe.

LAUREN GILGER: Sure.

CHUCK COUGHLIN: But that’s a very different audience from a general election audience where you have, you know, this fall, we’ll have 75% of the electorate will participate in the general election. And so, you know who your audience is. It’s not a general election audience in a primary. You’re just talking to a very narrow group of people who are all similarly motivated by certain ideas or prejudices. And so, that’s who you got to go recruit.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. But, I mean, so does that mean these kinds of overtly racist attacks are going to be more common in a primary?

CHUCK COUGHLIN: For the time being, yeah, until we shake ourselves out of this cycle, which I think will happen in ’28 or ’32. We’ll get back to some kind of normal narrative about, you know, that Judeo-Christian ethic of, why are we here? We’re here to help our neighbor. We’re here to —

LAUREN GILGER: What’s the purpose of government?

CHUCK COUGHLIN: Right. What is the purpose of governing?

LAUREN GILGER: Why do you run for office?

CHUCK COUGHLIN: Right. Am I just trying to prove myself right?

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, what did you make of this ad attacking Kimberly Yee, which is so overtly about her ethnicity?

CHUCK COUGHLIN: You know, it’s, I’m not surprised by it. I’m really not surprised, you know, that somebody would go to that length to out her, a statewide elected official, somebody who’s been elected statewide twice.

LAUREN GILGER: Right.

CHUCK COUGHLIN: And has had a — she was the majority whip, I think, in the state Senate. So, she’s had a long career. So, you know, I know her, but it doesn’t surprise me that somebody tries to use that in a way to exclude her from a normal discussion, particularly in a primary. I mean, it’s feeding that narrative.

LAUREN GILGER: So, if you were the candidate, or you’re advising the candidate, as I know you’ve done many times in the past, like, what should the response be? Because as you say, if the point is to exclude that candidate from the discussion about real issues, do you ignore it?

CHUCK COUGHLIN: Well, that’s why I don’t run candidate campaigns anymore, because I can’t do that. I can’t participate — it’s a violation of my own code, even though I’ve been guilty of it in the past, let’s be clear about that. But I just can’t do that anymore.

And so, my advice to a Yee would be to say, "This is completely unacceptable." I would go right at it and talk about my career, my background, my lineage. I would go right into that, and I’d use it to get back to my campaign. I mean, that’s the goal in a campaign. Every question you get asked should lead right back to why you are the best candidate. So, you’d bridge to that message.

LAUREN GILGER: Is that harder and harder to do today, Chuck, because so much of politics is bogged down in either, you know, racist attacks or personal attacks, or, you know, if it’s not about the real policy issues, it’s about, you know, talking points, it’s about culture wars issues, issues that often don’t even — the office you’re being elected to don’t have any impact on?

CHUCK COUGHLIN: Those have become the talking points.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, but if you want to run a campaign about issues, can you do it?

CHUCK COUGHLIN: You can’t. No, no. It’s done. I mean, that’s why you can’t do this anymore. I mean, we’ll have a general election this fall for governor. I wrote a blog about this the other day. With all these issues, hugely important issues on the table, none of them will be talked about. The public is not being served anymore by the narrative arcs of these partisan political campaigns.

LAUREN GILGER: But one of the things you point out, Chuck, is that the public does seem to care about those actual issues: education, water, healthcare. Why are those not hitting home for candidates, and why are candidates not focusing on those things? When you go to the voters directly, they will say, "Yes, we care about —"

CHUCK COUGHLIN: Yeah, right. We’ve done that, right? We’ve had four elections for Valleywise here in the Valley.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, like issues that end up on the ballot.

CHUCK COUGHLIN: That support that. Jan Brewer increased the sales tax to bail out the state in a deficit situation. We’ve had transportation elections here in Maricopa County that are hugely supported, you know, and win general elections.

But that’s not what this is about anymore. It’s not about those issues anymore. Those issues don’t get talked about because they don’t feed that narrative arc of a primary campaign. And as we’ve said, 80% of elected officials get elected in partisan primaries outright.

You don’t have a general election. So, the two parties, with the amount of money that’s involved in politics these days, the two parties — and the Supreme Court just augmented this in their decision the other day and said, "Hey, you can give as much money to the party as you want, and that party can actually coordinate your campaign, with your campaign, to coordinate your message."

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, there — so, let’s talk about, before I let you go, if there’s any coming back, right? You mentioned at the beginning that this might be cyclical, but it’s also obviously also about the brand of politics that President Trump has brought into the political spectrum in the last decade.

CHUCK COUGHLIN: Right. Well, I think, I’m with you. I think most voters are being exhausted by this. I mean, we tried in the last cycle to run an open primary campaign, Proposition 140. We got 41% of the electorate to agree with that. So, there’s hope there, there’s people there that actually recognize what’s going on.

But, you know, 58% said, "No, we’re not going to do that." Those are the definite partisans that you’re up against. And then, then in the middle, says, "Oh, well, any system can get gamed."

That’s true. I’m not going to argue that, but why do we allow two parties to coordinate what our taxpayer dollars are using to fund an election? It’s crazy.

So, the ultimate change will come. It will happen over time, whether that’s institutional reform inside both political institutions, if there’s an ability to begin to message to the broader electorate and grow your party to represent a majority of Americans, that may happen, or the system will change. It has to.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. Chuck Coughlin, president of HighGround, joining us. Chuck, thanks so much.

CHUCK COUGHLIN: Thanks, Lauren.

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

LAUREN GILGER: Coming up, making music with non-human collaborators. We’ll hear from an artist who places animal sounds at the center of his new synth music.

But first, it’s been months since Rene Gutierrez and Alex Preddy were shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. And for a while there, tensions died down.

But now, immigration enforcement is surging again. Earlier this month, federal immigration officials detained more than 10,000 people in five days. And then, a man who had lived in the U.S. for more than three decades was shot and killed by ICE officers in Houston. They claimed he tried to use his van as a weapon when they attempted to pull him over, an account that has been disputed.

The man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was a Mexican national, and now Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says her government will ask for criminal charges in his killing and the deaths of more than a dozen other Mexicans caught up in the U.S.’s immigration system.

Here to tell us more about it is KJZZ’s Nina Kravinsky with our Hermosillo Bureau. Good morning, Nina.

NINA KRAVINSKY: Yeah, so Mexico said last week that 17 Mexican nationals have died either in U.S. immigration custody or during immigration enforcement operations since the start of Trump’s term last year. But even before this high-profile case in Texas that you just mentioned, Mexico had been expressing its concerns about the treatment of its citizens in the U.S. You know, just in Arizona, two Mexican nationals have died in immigration custody since the beginning of Trump’s term. And the Mexican Consul General in Phoenix has asked for thorough investigations into those deaths.

LAUREN GILGER: So, it sounds like Mexico has already tried diplomatic routes here before now they’re asking for these criminal charges.

NINA KRAVINSKY: Yeah, exactly. So, Mexico says it’s filed several diplomatic letters with its counterparts in the U.S. about these deaths. Even after Salgado’s death last week, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said her country would go further, you know, it’s sort of moving out of the diplomatic sphere is how they characterized it and into a new realm. You know, yesterday she said her government had officially filed requests for criminal charges with the U.S. Department of Justice and with state prosecutors’ offices in the United States.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, tell us more, Nina, about their request to file criminal charges. Like, can they do that in the U.S. justice system?

NINA KRAVINSKY: Yeah, you know, so Mexico isn’t actually charging anyone here, right? ... Basically, what it’s doing is going to U.S. prosecutors and asking them to consider criminal charges related to these 17 deaths of Mexican nationals. You know, the requests on their own don’t carry any legal weight. But they do sort of mark an escalation in how Mexico is talking about this issue.

You know, the foreign minister said last week here in Mexico that the issue of ICE-related deaths was the most important issue before his department right now. ... Sheinbaum yesterday called on all of her country’s political parties and Mexico’s Congress to condemn what she characterizes as violations of human rights of Mexicans who live in the U.S. She has been careful to say though that, you know, Mexico and the U.S. maintain normal diplomatic relations and that this doesn’t mark some sort of new phase of the U.S.-Mexico relationship.

LAUREN GILGER: Sounds like President Sheinbaum is walking something of a fine line here.

NINA KRAVINSKY: Definitely a tale as old as time for her. She really has been since she took office. Mexico would say it’s incredibly important to keep these channels of communication open with the U.S. The two countries share a long border and are historically, you know, partners in security and economic issues.

So, she’s been really careful not to say or do anything that could, frankly, provoke the Trump administration. But at the same time, she clearly feels that it’s also important to characterize the issue of these ICE-related deaths as a human rights issue. That kind of high-wire act with the U.S. has really defined her presidency from the start, which was just a few months before Trump took office.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. OK, so what else is Mexico doing, Nina?

NINA KRAVINSKY: Yeah, so alongside these requests for criminal charges, Mexico’s foreign minister also said the country would file cease-and-desist letters to U.S. companies that operate immigration detention centers where there have been deaths of Mexican nationals.

And, you know, Mexico is taking this into the international law realm. They’ve formally raised this issue with the [Office of the ] UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, too.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. KJZZ’s Nina Kravinsky joining us from Hermosillo. Nina, thank you so much for your reporting here, appreciate it.

NINA KRAVINSKY: Yeah, thanks Lauren.

LAUREN GILGER: And in response to inquiries from other media outlets, the Department of Homeland Security has said there is no spike in deaths related to immigration enforcement.

LAUREN GILGER: Wildfires are starting to burn more frequently in areas that also get snow, and that’s causing snowpacks to melt earlier than they typically do, especially in the years right after the fire. Earlier this year, my co-host Mark Brodie talked about why and what that could mean with Arielle Koshkin. She got her PhD in Hydrologic Science and Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, where she studied how wildfires are affecting snowpacks in the Western U.S. She’s also an author of the paper describing this research. And they started with what about this study stands out to her.

ARIELLE KOSHKIN: Yeah, I think it’s a complex landscape, and not every place seems to have the same response to these wildfires. But I think it’s pretty clear that wildfires are causing snow to disappear earlier, and it’s really a question of energy balance in terms of how much snow you get and how fast that snow melts out because of the impacts of these burned trees, especially at like mid-to-high elevations.

And so, this first paper that was published in Science Advances really shows that yes, we see snow disappearing earlier, but that it’s way more severe in the Pacific Northwest and California than it is in Colorado and the Intermountain West.

MARK BRODIE: Do we know exactly why it is the case that the snow melts more quickly in areas that have been affected by wildfires?

ARIELLE KOSHKIN: Yeah. The leading hypothesis on this is that the black carbon from the burned trees gets shed onto the snowpack, which decreases the reflectivity, or we call it the albedo, of the snowpack, which allows the snowpack to absorb more energy. And especially in high-severity burns, when you burn down the entire canopy, it also lets more sunlight into those areas. So, you have this kind of dual effect of both getting more energy from the sun and absorbing more energy, and that causes the snow to melt earlier.

MARK BRODIE: And what did you find specifically in terms of the impact of maybe, you know, a coastal, maybe a more humid forest versus one maybe at a higher elevation, kind of thing?

ARIELLE KOSHKIN: Yeah. These warmer snowpacks, maritime snowpacks in kind of like Northern California and Pacific Northwest tend to have warmer storms and have what we call less cold content. So, cold content is the measure of how much energy it takes to heat up the snow to get to a point where it’s going to start to melt. And so, when you have a warm snowpack, it’s kind of always hovering around $0^\circ\text{C}$, so always kind of ready to melt.

And so, these small shifts in energy balance from the black carbon shed onto the snow, decreasing the albedo, increase in sunlight, really can cause kind of a cascading effect in the maritime climate, leading to up to two weeks earlier of snow disappearance, whereas in Colorado or the Intermountain West, these are continental snowpacks, they tend to have colder storms, higher cold content, it takes more energy to melt them. And so, these small shifts in energy balance have less of an impact. We still see it disappearing earlier, but more on a magnitude of maybe like two to five days. So, in terms of hydrologic impact, way less than two weeks.

MARK BRODIE: Understanding this might be a bit outside the scope of your research, but given what you said about what you found in forests in the Pacific Northwest and those in Colorado, that would seem to be good news for those of us who kind of rely on water from the Rockies going into the Colorado River, basically for our cities to exist.

ARIELLE KOSHKIN: Um, yeah, I mean, potentially that these burned areas are not having as much impact. However, we often see more burned areas in kind of California and the Pacific Northwest have had just like larger amounts of area burned. So, it’s kind of a trade-off. But yeah, as the headwaters of the Colorado goes, potentially less impact.

And some areas even showed that they get more snow because when you have a forest, the snow falls and can get caught in the canopy, and some of that snow can sublimate out and never reach the forest floor, so go back up into the atmosphere. But when you get rid of that canopy, that snow will fall and land on the ground and actually pile up more. And so, in some areas, especially at high elevation, we actually see more snow post-fire.

MARK BRODIE: There is obviously a lot of work that is done in forests after a fire to try to bring the the ecosystem back and restore the ecology to what it was. Is it possible, do you think, to have that impact with snowpack also?

ARIELLE KOSHKIN: Yeah, we do see recovery after a fire. In this current study, we saw that snowpack started to recover as early as like five years after the fire. And by recover, we just mean we started to see more snow in those areas. So, it’s not a lasting impact. [Coughs] And some of that, I think, is as time goes by, potentially you’re just getting less black carbon shed from those trees, and so it’s just—it’s impacting the snow less and they start to mimic a more just open area.

And so, we saw the fastest recovery at high elevations, the slowest recovery at low elevations, and those mid-elevations were kind of in that 5-to-10-year range.

MARK BRODIE: As we see wildfires—the number of them increase, the severity increase, the geographic areas where they can happen increase—I’m curious how you see research like this fitting into the overall structure of us thinking about where our water comes from and how much of it we might have.

ARIELLE KOSHKIN: Yeah, I think the other thing that I would add to that is that it’s also increasing in elevation, so we’re seeing kind of the largest increase in area above 2,500 meters, which is well into the seasonal snow zone. And so, we’re getting more overlap between where snow falls and where forests burn. And I think that is going to continue to increase the impact that these wildfires have on long-term water supply in the West, knowing that about up to 70% of snow, or 70% of water in the West comes from snowpack. So, I think the future landscape of water in the West is obviously very complex, and wildfire impact on snow is one component of this interconnected, complex system.

MARK BRODIE: How concerning do you think it is that the overlap between where fires burn and where it snows is getting bigger?

ARIELLE KOSHKIN: I think that’s a good question, and I don’t know if I’m like the expert to answer that in terms of the larger landscape of water in the West, but I think the biggest thing about fire impacts on snow is that we need to be able to model this and predict it so we can better capture water coming from the snowpack. So, if we’re disrupting patterns of snow accumulation and melt, can we adapt to that, um, to still try to capture as much water runoff from the snowpacks as possible?

MARK BRODIE: That was my co-host Mark Brodie speaking with Arielle Koshkin, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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

LAUREN GILGER: A few weeks ago, we here at The Show started something new. We took one of our round table conversations to you.

We held a live event called The Show & Tell at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix — to a packed house, might I add. And for our inaugural event, we focused on walkability.

Downtown Phoenix has finally happened. Condo towers, restaurants, entertainment venues and retail establishments now occupy once empty lots, and there’s nowhere to park — the sure sign of a thriving metropolis.

But can Phoenix ever be walkable? To talk about that, I was joined by David Crummey, a community advocate and transit expert who once told me he used to be known as "Mr. Downtown Mesa," as well as multidisciplinary artist Jen Urso. She often makes maps, which often explore the interplay between our urban and natural environments here in the Valley. And Arden Holloway. They are a transit planner with Valley Metro who has worked on light rail extension planning, and they do not have a car in this car-centric city.

We’ll be bringing you parts of our live conversation this week on The Show, beginning this morning.

[FROM THE SHOW & TELL]

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so I want to begin this conversation with a little bit of a flashback, because I think for anyone who has lived here for any significant amount of time, if you’re thinking about the growth of this city and the growth of particularly downtown, which is sort of this urban core that we’ve all been kind of trying to support for a long time.

It’s happened, right? Like, that’s the way I think we’ve phrased it in the language for this show. Like downtown Phoenix for a long time was like a ghost town. Does anyone — do you remember, any of you, what happened in downtown Phoenix after 5 'o'clock, 10 or 15, 20 years ago?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Nothing.

LAUREN GILGER: Nothing. David’s shaking his head. What did you ...

DAVID CRUMMEY: Oh, I used to live downtown.

LAUREN GILGER: Did you used to live in downtown Phoenix?

DAVID CRUMMEY: In high school, and so I would walk everywhere downtown. And nothing was open. There were a couple coffee shops that would be straggling on. But I would walk to the library and stuff. Not a nerd.

You know, when it was at the Phoenix Art Museum, and then when it moved to Burton Barr. And then I loved going across Hance Park and all of that. And I just — I loved it, and I’m like, "Man, Phoenix is made for walking, but no one is walking."

LAUREN GILGER: Let’s just remember what that was like, and now think about what it’s like today.

And if we’re looking at, you know, the massive growth that we’ve seen in this city, especially in downtown, and in various downtowns I think we should say around the Valley, "is it walkable" is kind of the question we’re going to focus on here. But I want to start with a slightly different question, and I want to start with you, David.

I don’t think the exact question to start with is "is it walkable?" I think we should start first with: What does it mean to have a walkable city?

DAVID CRUMMEY: So, humans have been in cities for 11,000 years-ish. That’s a little bit longer than I can remember. But humans get together in cities and do cool things.

It’s only been since about the 1950s that we’ve had this suburban experiment where we’ve completely, radically and very expensively shifted how humans live in cities. And so, the last 75 years have been an aberration in human history.

And to me, what walkable cities is, is really about: What does it mean to go back to being human and being in a place together to have shared goals, whether they’re economic or social, or what have you? But we gather together in places, in libraries and bars and coffee shops and just in parks, because we like being around each other, most of the time.

And what we’ve done over the last 75 years is really inhuman. And I think that that suburban experiment has failed, but we haven’t figured out how to, what to do about that failure.

LAUREN GILGER: How to get ourselves out of it, you think? OK, all right. We’ll leave that to lie for a moment, we’ll come back to these ideas.

Let me turn to you, Jen. You’ve mapped various things in the city. I mean, like, you’ve mapped Roosevelt Row, you’ve mapped cactuses, you’ve mapped Eastlake Park, like, my favorite, the "Running While Female in Phoenix" map.

But I want to talk about this one because I know you took a map of Phoenix once and you said you scraped out kind of the built environment, like the parking garages. What was left?

JEN URSO: Yeah, so I had no idea that who made that map would be a future client, so it ended up being kind of strange. But I took like the general tourist map of downtown Phoenix, and I think I scraped out all of the tourist destinations that were marked in the key, and then kind of did a performance walk around all the spaces that were left after that.

And it was sort of a way — like I’ve always had issues with authority, so it was like: How can I, you know, sort of deny what the city’s telling me I’m supposed to be looking at, what my destinations are?

And then the curious thing about that map, too, was what was left behind was like a lot of parking structures. So mostly the map was a map to parking. It wasn’t so much a map to like where would you want to go, where would you want to walk around to, what would that experience of walking be like?

And it just made me kind of angry. You know, I was like, "No, this isn’t what I want my experience of the city to be, this isn’t what I want people coming into the city to travel to." So, you know, that could have been a little bit of a push for me to start making maps that were like what I think is interesting about the city that I see on foot, you know?

LAUREN GILGER: Right. Like your cactus map, things like that. Is that what you’re talking about?

JEN URSO: Yeah, exactly.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, OK. Arden, I want to turn to you. You do not have a car, and this is I think a very car-centric city. That’s an easy argument to make. So tell us first, you know, what is it like to try to live in this city with no car?

ARDEN HOLLOWAY: So, I actually moved here from Tucson about two years ago, and when I was choosing to move here from Tucson, I had to think through: What is it going to be like living car-free in this city? And what are the criteria of the place that I want to live, that will help me to fulfill that goal?

It has been no easy feat to be car-free in Phoenix, but I will say that it has brought me a lot of beautiful experiences, I would say. I live in Midtown, and the reasons that I chose that area are because of the light rail access, because of the frequent service buses that run through the Midtown area, and also just thinking about where there are activity centers and different places to gather with people, just like Changing Hands, third spaces, and also access to grocery stores that I could bike to very easily.

And Midtown was the perfect place for that. Once I moved to Phoenix, my transit experience actually improved because of the light rail being regional and connecting Phoenix, Mesa and Tempe. And also, the buses were more frequent.

And in terms of walkability, the downtown area around Roosevelt, and also the Central Ave corridor, are both very walkable areas with pharmacies, cafes, bars, museums, like a lot of places to access that are walkable, with more shade as well.

As I have been car-free, I’ve realized as a pedestrian it’s difficult in other areas of Phoenix outside of those places. And one of my first experiences here was walking down Seventh Avenue on the sidewalk coming down from Camelback. There is no shoulder on that road, and that is kind of a harrowing experience being 2 feet from a vehicle.

So, I have found that being a pedestrian can sometimes be difficult in different areas of the Valley. But there are areas where walkability is being encouraged through transit-oriented development and mixed-use areas and kind of encouraging that human-centric experience that David talked about.

LAUREN GILGER: So, does not having a car here make you think it’s possible, like does it give you hope? You said you have had some beautiful moments kind of being in the environment and not being in your, you know, box of a car. Tell us about one of those.

ARDEN HOLLOWAY: One of the things that I’ve noticed is a lot of my friends live in areas very close together and develop like little neighborhood groups and, like, live in the same apartment complexes. I live with three different friends in a complex of studios. And we’re actually able to hang out by the pool together, go out to bars, go out to cafes.

And that has been one beautiful aspect of living on — like I live on Osborn and Central, and it’s very close to Park Central, so lots of access to restaurants and places where people hang out and spend their time. It’s definitely more difficult in the summer, gets really hot, for sure.

LAUREN GILGER: And we’ll talk more about walkability in the heat of the Phoenix summer, as well as the role of public transportation and pedestrian safety.

That was Valley Metro transit specialist Arden Holloway, along with David Crummey, a community advocate and transit expert, and artist Jen Urso.

We will bring you more of this live conversation at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix tomorrow on The Show.

LAUREN GILGER: Brian Fogarty has been making music for more than a decade. But over the past several months, he started working with new collaborators: animals.

He says he’s been trying to introduce more organic sounds to the synthesizer music he makes. As part of that, he’s partnered with the Phoenix Zoo and the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California. Fogarty says he’s made eight or nine songs that feature animals as the primary focal point.

And when he came by the studio recently to talk about his music, my co-host Mark Brodie asked when he tells people he’s a musician and they ask what kind of music he plays, what does he tell them?

BRIAN FOGARTY: So, I kind of go back to my roots. I did study music theory and I took a couple years of piano, and I was obsessed with the guitar as a teenager. So that’s kind of where it all started.

But lately, I’ve been getting into kind of more like synth-pop. I’m really inspired by the bands like LCD Soundsystem and Sylvan Esso. And so I have a lot of music out like that, but I just wanted to have some fun this year.

So, I started like — I heard a mourning dove call outside of my apartment, and I was like, “Wow, I really want to integrate that into a song,” and that was my first one. And then I just started looking to different animals. I found a coqui frog, and then I found some sea lions and stuff like that. So now I’ve just been making some fun music that kind of incorporates more organic sounds, especially animal noises.

MARK BRODIE: All right. So, I want to play just a few seconds here of the the song that you wrote with the mourning dove. Let’s take a quick listen.

[MUSIC PLAYING WITH A MOURNING DOVE CALL]

MARK BRODIE: So, how did you get close enough to the dove to record its sound? I mean, typically birds, like you approach them, they fly away.

BRIAN FOGARTY: So, I actually do a mix of two different things. I’ll either record the animals myself, or I’ll use recordings that I found online that are like pretty high-fidelity. And that’s what actually led to me partnering with like the Phoenix Zoo and the Aquarium of the Pacific, was I found them, like, “Oh, they have really good clips online, both the video and the audio,” because obviously they can get really close to the animals. So by partnering with them, I was able to like use their sounds with them.

Other than that, I have a co-worker who got me a little microphone that plugs into my phone so I can like pop it in on the go. I always have my backpack on me, and so I’ll just set my phone to record and I can walk up and try to get the microphone as close as possible.

MARK BRODIE: But like, you have a song with a jaguar. I assume you weren’t like approaching the jaguar with your phone and microphone to try to record its sound. This is one maybe that you found the sound of the of the cat making?

BRIAN FOGARTY: I am not that brave, no. I will give all credit to the Phoenix Zoo for that one. That was their video.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So, when you heard the mourning dove, what went through your mind in terms of, “This actually could really work in the kind of music I do”?

BRIAN FOGARTY: I think, so, the mourning dove call is a very — they repeat the same note like three times after their call in very like steady, rhythmic form. And so, I just kind of had that note going over and over in my head and I just started thinking of music around it. And so, when I first got a recording of one that was usable, I just plugged it in, started using it.

I found a video online that really had a good visual aspect for it, and I did edit the sound of the mourning dove to kind of repeat where I wanted to, to line up with the metronome for the song.

But I try to keep all the animal noises as organic as possible. There is so much you can do with digital audio software to kind of distort the noises and fit into some sort of narrative that you want, but I thought the point of the whole process was to like showcase the animals how they sound naturally.

So I really try to do as limited editing as possible on the animal noises, just make them sound good or maybe make them more rhythmic. But that’s what really drew me to the mourning dove was that steady, repeated call that they have.

MARK BRODIE: What’s the process like for you to come up with the music around the animal sound? Like, do you get an animal sound and then come up with something? Do you have to wait to hear what the sound sounds like from the animal and maybe what you can do with it rhythmically? Like, what’s your process like?

BRIAN FOGARTY: So, I will say — I think this applies to anything creative — is you just have to start. I can sit back and like try to imagine in my head what a good song might be, and sometimes that is fruitful and I do think of something that I end up using. But a lot of the times, I’ll sit down with the audio, and I’ll try something for an hour, I’ll go on a little walk to refresh my ears, I’ll come back, it’s terrible, I don’t like it.

And I’ll just try again. And I think, like, it’s so fundamental to the creative process to just get in there and just keep trying, because it’s almost like lightning. You never know where it’s going to strike, but you’re never going to be able to see it if you’re not looking for it.

MARK BRODIE: Have you found that using the animal sounds has helped your music evolve or change in any way?

BRIAN FOGARTY: Absolutely, yeah. So, I really like recording and producing music. I’m not much of a performer, so I really have fun recording and producing music, and every time I sit down and work on a project, I learn something new.

MARK BRODIE: Are there animals that you would like to incorporate into a song that you haven’t either gotten or found the sound for yet?

BRIAN FOGARTY: So, I’m a member at the Desert Botanical Gardens. I go there all the time. There’s some frogs there that sound really cool. I’ve captured them a couple times. I don’t know how I want to incorporate them yet.

MARK BRODIE: I noticed that one of the videos you made included giraffes, which famously don’t make sound.

BRIAN FOGARTY: Right. So part of it — I did not use any giraffe sounds in there. The Phoenix Zoo is kind of enough to give me tickets to go and like get recordings, and I did use some flamingo recordings I got there and some gibbon calls.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

BRIAN FOGARTY: But just for the visual aspect of it being kind of a visual story too, I just included some clips from that trip.

MARK BRODIE: So, I am far from an expert on club music, but listening to the songs you’ve made, it wouldn’t seem out of place to hear those at a nightclub.

BRIAN FOGARTY: Yeah, I think that is a good take. I really like Daft Punk. They’re a big inspiration. And one thing that I’ve learned is that sometimes the most genuine, simple music is what resonates with people the most. And it’s actually really difficult to come up with something that’s both new and simple. But I try to do that, even though I’m incorporating like kind of like basic club sounds, I try to do something fresh with it every time and come up with something new and simple.

I remember when I first got into playing the guitar and I learned how to solo and I was just soloing over something and I listened back to the recording, and yeah, I had technique and could hit notes, but they didn’t tell a story at all. And that’s when I learned that ... because music is a language, the best thing we can do is just be authentic and genuine and kind of like speak through it to deliver like a fully formatted thought.

MARK BRODIE: Has doing all this given you a different appreciation for nature or helped you see animals or other aspects of nature in a different way?

BRIAN FOGARTY: Yeah, I definitely would say that’s the case. I have been a member at the Desert Botanical Gardens and Boyce Thompson Arboretum and all of that for a while, and I actually went to college for environmental science, so I’ve always been a fan of nature. But it’s really opened my ears.

MARK BRODIE: All right. Brian Fogarty, musician, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

BRIAN FOGARTY: Thank you.

[“REWIND” BY THESE ARE SHAPES PLAYS]

LAUREN GILGER: The song you’re hearing right now, “Rewind,” is by Brian Fogarty. He makes music under the name These Are Shapes, and he told us this is his favorite song he’s ever made.

And that’ll do it for today’s edition of The Show. We thank you as always for listening. Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram, we are @kjzztheshow. And you can sign up for The Show’s weekly newsletter, it’s called Radio Heads. You can sign up at theshow.kjzz.org.

The Show was produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton, as well as Bruce Drummey. Sky Schout is our digital editor, and Claire Lawton is our newsletter editor. Chad Snow is our news director. The Show was created by John Hoban, and our executive producer is Amy Silverman.

For Mark Brodie, I’m Lauren Gilger. Thanks for joining us.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created for audience accessibility. Transcripts are created on deadline with the assistance of AI tools and then edited, and may not be in their final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio segment.