The Show for July 20, 2026: Phoenix parks ordinance survey, an orchestra playing one note and more

The Ccty of Phoenix sent out a survey about its controversial new ordinance banning food distribution and medical care to the homeless in city parks. We’ll hear why it was put in a metaphorical drawer. Plus, what happens when three dozen musicians play the same note for 45 minutes?

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona. BannerHealth.com/nonprofitforAZ.

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, 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.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, we’ll remember former ASU president Lattie Coor, who’s died. And how one scientist’s personal experiences during childhood helped inform the kind of research she does now.

But first, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, says it’ll invest another $100 billion in Arizona. That money will be used to build potentially four more manufacturing facilities. TSMC last year broke ground on a third fabrication site. The first one was announced in 2020. Steve Zylstra joins me now to talk more about this. He’s the president and CEO of the Arizona Technology Council. Steve, good morning.

STEVE ZYLSTRA: Good morning to you.

MARK BRODIE: So what is the significance of another $100 billion investment from this particular company here in Arizona?

STEVE ZYLSTRA: Well, first of all, I think it’s the most exciting economic development story ever for Arizona. This brings the total investment to $265 billion. The $165 billion they originally committed was the largest foreign direct investment in the history of the United States, so this adds to it. And as a consequence, they’re going to build four additional fabs and create, in my view, outside of Taiwan, the largest semiconductor complex in the world.

MARK BRODIE: OK, so you mentioned the word fab. And for folks who are maybe not in the tech world, what are they going to be spending this money doing?

STEVE ZYLSTRA: Well, first of all, they originally announced the $165 billion to produce six fabs — fabrication facilities that make chips — as well as two packaging facilities. These are sort of value-added facilities that add the other components alongside the chips. And then an R&D center. So this additional $100 billion is going to be used to produce four additional fabrication facilities.

The first one is live, the second one goes live in I think the second quarter of 2027, and then the third one will go live in 2030. This is going to be eight to 10 years of construction of facilities here in Arizona. So not only does it create these high-paying, high-quality jobs, but it creates a massive amount of construction jobs for a long period of time.

MARK BRODIE: When you talk about the jobs that are going to be in the fabrication facilities once they’re up and running, are those jobs that Arizonans generally get? Are they jobs that TSMC is bringing in workers from Taiwan or elsewhere to take?

STEVE ZYLSTRA: So TSMC has had to bring in some specialized labor from Taiwan because they have the most sophisticated chip processing techniques in the world, and only certain people are aware of those. They’re very, very proprietary. But first of all, the existing operation employs about 3,500 people, the bulk of which are Arizonans. A lot of these jobs, all you need is a high school degree.

In fact, GCU, ASU and NAU are offering an 11-week course for semiconductor fab factory jobs free of charge. So there’s lots of opportunity for Arizonans. By the time these first three fabs are completed, there’ll be 6,000 permanent jobs there.

MARK BRODIE: And why do you think it’s important that Arizona is getting this investment instead of, you know, anywhere else? Why is it good for Arizona that TSMC is doing what it’s doing here?

STEVE ZYLSTRA: Well, a whole wide variety of reasons. First of all, the high-paying, high-quality jobs that it creates, the addition to the tax base. Think about the investments that are being made, the investments that are going to be made in infrastructure here. So if you’re an economic developer from the Arizona Commerce Authority, or the city of Phoenix, or the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, this is the best possible outcome you could ask for.

MARK BRODIE: Does it matter reputationally that this is happening here? Like, has this led to other either semiconductor manufacturers or other tech companies saying, "Oh, I hadn’t really thought of Phoenix before. Maybe TSMC sees something here, maybe I should too?"

STEVE ZYLSTRA: Yes. Well, Nvidia and Apple are now here as a consequence of TSMC being here. TSMC itself brought 50 of its supply chain companies to Arizona, again creating additional jobs in communities around Arizona, all the way down to Casa Grande. So, yes, it’s having an incredible economic impact here on Arizona.

MARK BRODIE: Is it your expectation that there will be more of these announcements, that TSMC is spending more money here, building more facilities here? Or do you think this is kind of it for now?

STEVE ZYLSTRA: Well, I can’t predict that, but I did think that they were going to build more than their original announcement just because of the size of the property that they bought. Their first piece of property was something like two square miles, and they’ve been adding additional properties along the way. So who knows what the future might bring. But nonetheless, it’s exciting for all of us.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Steve Zylstra, president and CEO of the Arizona Technology Council. Steve, thanks so much for your insights. I appreciate it.

STEVE ZYLSTRA: Thank you for having me.

MARK BRODIE: A federal judge has ruled against the state again in an ongoing lawsuit over the healthcare that the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry provides. This time, the judge says Arizona cannot hire doctors who do not meet certain standards that had previously been agreed on. Jim Small of the Arizona Mirror has written about this and joins me now to talk more about it. Jim, good morning.

JIM SMALL: Good morning, Mark.

MARK BRODIE: So what exactly is the state trying to do that the judge says, "Uh-uh"?

JIM SMALL: Yeah, so first some context, right? This is part of a 14-year-long class-action lawsuit that prisoners brought against the state of Arizona alleging that their — the healthcare treatments that were provided to them inside of Arizona prisons are unconstitutional and violate the Eighth Amendment rights to not have to suffer cruel and unusual punishment. Court has agreed with that a number of years ago. The court ruled that, yes, that is the case, this healthcare is unconstitutional.

So three years ago, all of the parties entered into an agreement. And among the many provisions of this agreement were that when the state goes to hire doctors, or its private contractor goes to hire doctors, they have to be board-certified or eligible to be board-certified in internal medicine and family practice medicine, one of those two specialties.

Essentially, the state came back earlier this year and said, "Look, we’ve tried. We haven’t been able to hire anybody. We’ve screened more than 60 applicants who are otherwise qualified. Maybe they’re certified in emergency medicine or they’re certified in some other specialty, but they don’t meet these qualifications."

This proves — their argument was, "Look, this proves that we’re not able to actually meet this, the standard is too high. What we want to do is we want to be able to hire half of the doctors who don’t meet those standards we agreed to, and the other half we’ll go out and we’ll continue trying to meet those standards."

The judge — the federal judge in this case — came back and said, "No, that’s — you know what? You guys are not actually doing what you should be doing. You’ve been told over and over and over again for years that you need to increase pay. And the solution to this problem is not to lower the standards for the doctors you hire, the solution is to actually pay the doctors higher wages so that way you can attract better-qualified doctors."

MARK BRODIE: Is there reason to think that if the state were to offer more money, that more board-certified or board-eligible physicians in those two sort of general specialties would be willing to apply and take those jobs?

JIM SMALL: Well, certainly the court’s experts — an expert retained by the court to provide the court advice — has said so, as well as the court-appointed monitors, who a number of years ago were — again, the judge appointed them to essentially be her eyes and ears inside of the prison system, and they’re there watching what’s happening and seeing how everything is unfolding and what the state is doing to try to meet its obligations here. Everyone has said for years, "You need to not just increase pay, you need to aggressively increase pay."

And what the plaintiffs’ attorneys and what the judge ended up basically saying is like, "Look, you haven’t done that. ... Since we signed this agreement three years ago, there’s been one pay raise. It was for $2 an hour for these doctors, and that was it. And that doesn’t meet aggressively increasing." And that increase honestly happened two years ago, about two and a half years ago.

And the judge was absolutely really blunt in her response to the state, which was essentially saying, "No, you’re not acting in good faith, because you haven’t actually done what you’ve been advised to do. You’ve ignored this advice at every turn because you don’t want to spend the money."

MARK BRODIE: Do we have a sense of what an aggressive pay raise — I mean, $2 doesn’t seem terribly aggressive. Do we have a sense of what an aggressive pay raise might look like?

JIM SMALL: No, it hasn’t really been spelled out. But I think, very clearly that the court wants to see some actual effort made into increasing compensation as a way to attract a different pool of candidates. That may well be something that happens in the sometime in the near future.

The court on Friday appointed its formal receiver for the state prison healthcare system and granted her with a wide latitude of powers. Among them are determining the budget for this. And if that budget doesn’t fit within the budget approved by the Legislature and the Governor’s Office, the judge indicated that she may well just decide to overrule that and basically force the state into spending the money that it takes in order to come into compliance with the U.S. Constitution.

MARK BRODIE: Oh, wow. So that could have potentially significant implications for the budget for the fiscal year that started a few weeks ago.

JIM SMALL: It could. And the judge really singled out a couple of other laws as well that she said, "Look, these laws, everyone, all of the experts, all the monitors are saying that these laws are preventing the state, they’re roadblocks for the state to actually do what it’s supposed to do."

Among them was the requirement that the state privatize its prison healthcare system instead of running it in-house. And she was basically said, "I am very willing to overrule these laws and to essentially strike them down and say that they cannot be enforced in order to settle this lawsuit and meet the terms of it."

MARK BRODIE: Jim, do we have a sense of why it is that the agreement between the state and the plaintiffs was that the providers would be board-certified or board-eligible in these specific specialties, in either internal medicine or in family practice? Is it a problem if somebody, for example, is board-certified in emergency medicine? Is that a less good or maybe less relevant type of care that the inmates are receiving?

JIM SMALL: I don’t think it’s less good, but it is less relevant to a lot of the problems that have been identified over the years of this litigation and the treatment — and, frankly, the lack of treatment for a lot of these inmates, and some of the illnesses that have gone untreated that were very catchable, and that were a combination of overworked and underqualified healthcare providers in the prison is essentially what the court ruled led to a lot of these problems.

And so the solutions there are to get people who are essentially experts, field experts in internal medicine, in kind of your general practice stuff where you’re going to be able to catch most things. And if you need to, you can refer out to a specialist.

But there’s not as much emergency medicine in a prison setting as there is just routine medicine. The same way all of us, when we go to the doctor, we’re very rarely going to the emergency room, but we are often going to a general, going to our GP or going to our primary care physician, and that’s really what they wanted to have in the prisons.

MARK BRODIE: OK. And Jim, before I let you go, what was the state’s response to this? Like, are they going to aggressively raise pay and continue searching for these kinds of providers?

JIM SMALL: I did not get a response from the state. The Governor’s Office declined to comment, and the atate Department of Corrections did not respond to my request for comment. But I think ultimately at the end of the day, the solution here is going to be that receiver that was appointed and who is given basically all of the powers of the Corrections Department director within the realm of the healthcare system.

And that’s what the court identified as the only workable solution back in February when the federal judge announced that she was going to appoint a receiver. And that seems really, I think — the state I don’t think is going to lift a finger. They really haven’t done a whole lot to try to remedy any of this over the past decade and a half. And I don’t think they’re going to. I think they’re going to have to be forced into doing it by a receiver.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right. That is Jim Small with the Arizona Mirror. Jim, thanks as always. Appreciate it.

JIM SMALL: My pleasure, Mark.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, what happens when three dozen musicians play the same note for 45 minutes?

JOSH CASSELMAN: Having this number of people come together to do something so simple, it’s like obviously it’s about more than music and what it sounds like. It’s about the people.

MARK BRODIE: We’ll hear the intricate drone of the Human Sensory Society community orchestra.

But first, Lattie Coor Jr. has died. He was 89 years old. Coor was the 15th president of ASU, serving in the role from 1990 to 2002. After leaving that job, he helped found the Center for the Future of Arizona. Coor grew up in Arizona and, before coming back, served as president of the University of Vermont for more than a decade.

With me to talk about Coor’s legacy and his time leading ASU is Grady Gammage Jr. He’s an attorney, has written books about the history of Phoenix, and is the son of another former ASU president. And Grady, when you think of Lattie Coor’s time as president of ASU, what comes to mind for you?

GRADY GAMMAGE: To me, Lattie became president of ASU at a critical time as ASU was becoming a credible national institution. And he, as much as anyone, was responsible for shepherding it into the regard it has today. It became a Research 1 university during Lattie’s tenure.

ASU is an institution that has evolved over time, kind of like the city of Phoenix has evolved. Started out small, started out not of much consequence, and began to explode as Phoenix and Arizona grew and exploded.

MARK BRODIE: What was Lattie’s vision for what ASU could and should be?

GRADY GAMMAGE: You know, it’s interesting. Lattie came to ASU from the University of Vermont, which is a very fine institution regarded as one of the public Ivies, but is a fairly stable school in a fairly bucolic setting in a fairly small state.

And I think Lattie came back to Arizona, because he grew up in Arizona, he went to NAU, but he came back to Arizona seeing the potential for ASU and for Phoenix to be really consequential.

And I think he shared that with my dad (Grady Gammage Sr.), who became president of ASU in the 1930s and realized Phoenix was on an extreme growth trajectory and ASU would try to match that. And with Michael Crow, who has furthered that vision of ASU as being big and important in the scheme of American universities, just as Phoenix could be big and important in the scheme of American cities.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So Lattie Coor, as you say, had this idea that ASU and Phoenix could be more consequential, could be bigger. How did he go about making ASU more into what he thought it should be? Because it’s one thing to think it, it’s another to actually do it.

GRADY GAMMAGE: Yeah, I think there really are two things. One is that Lattie reached out to the business community and the philanthropic community in Phoenix to a greater extent than had ever been done before. So he really launched the first major fundraising campaign.

And for a long time, ASU was content to sort of be funded by the Legislature, to mainly train teachers and businesspeople, to do some research but not at the level that American universities throughout the US had done.

So the first thing was Lattie reached out to people in Phoenix and got them to understand that giving money to ASU was the No. 1 thing they could do to further the interests of not just ASU, but of the city of Phoenix as a whole. And then the second thing I think he did is that he represented ASU on the national stage with other universities, with the AAU, and this Research 1 status, which is a big deal.

ASU has always been kind of the upstart institution versus the U of A, which was the land-grant school and which was regarded as more academically respectable. And Lattie put ASU on a trajectory to at least match that, arguably in today’s world maybe to have exceeded the reputation of the U of A.

I’m sure there are lots of people in Tucson who would resent that statement that I just made, but I’m a partisan, so excuse me.

MARK BRODIE: We’ll just let that one go for right now. So do you see sort of the growth of ASU and the growth of Phoenix moving sort of in concert? Like, could one have maybe happened without the other? Or both needed to happen at the same time for both to become what they’ve become?

GRADY GAMMAGE: I think it needed to sort of be simultaneous. It’s hard to have a big city without a big university. And for a very long time, ASU was kind of the only game in town.

Now there’s Grand Canyon University as well, which is one of the larger private schools in the U.S., so that’s good. You need a couple of them. And the Maricopa County Community College system is the largest community college system in the U.S.

So in today’s world, Phoenix has a pretty robust suite of higher education. That wasn’t always the case because Phoenix wasn’t big enough to deserve it. So I think you had to have both the city growing and then ASU playing catch-up, and then ASU growing a little ahead and then Phoenix playing catch-up for it to really become a major force in American life.

In my mind at least, it was really Lattie who got the notion of ASU having more than one campus started. I think the West campus idea probably predated Lattie’s tenure, but it really didn’t take off. And the Downtown campus and the East Valley (Polytechnic) campus, the embryo of all of those was in Lattie’s tenure at ASU.

MARK BRODIE: Was that part of his idea of also sort of helping this community grow — not just specifically Phoenix, but the whole Valley — grow into what he saw that it could become?

GRADY GAMMAGE: Yeah, that’s right. He used to use a phrase something like “one university in many places,” or something like that, because I think it became clear to Lattie and to others that the very spread-out nature of the metropolitan Phoenix area needed to have four-year institutions more than in just Tempe.

And those of us who are old Tempe people kind of weren’t sure about that for a while because we really didn’t want everything to be moved out of Tempe. But clearly, clearly the right choice.

And that’s part of what made ASU explode and become one of the largest, if not the largest university in the U.S., and what made Phoenix explode is that those resources were distributed in a way that allowed Mesa and Glendale and the West Valley, the East Valley and downtown (Phoenix) all to be part of this vision of a university and a city working together.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right. We’ll have to leave it there. That is Grady Gammage Jr., a lawyer. His father was an ASU president. He’s a historian and an author, a whole bunch of other things. Grady, thanks so much for taking the time to help us remember former ASU president Lattie Coor. I really appreciate it.

GRADY GAMMAGE: Glad to do it. Lattie was a wonderful guy. I’m sorry he’s gone, but he did a lot.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

The city of Phoenix’s controversial new parks ordinance banning food distribution and medical care to the homeless in city parks is on hold right now after a judge granted a temporary emergency restraining order that prevents the city from enforcing it. But our next guest this morning reports city leaders may have known the ordinance wouldn’t be popular even before they passed it. Clarissa Sosin is a staff writer at Phoenix New Times, and she dug up an unreleased survey the city put out before the council took the vote that shows respondents were overwhelmingly against the ordinance. This despite the fact that a pollster she showed it to said its questions seemed slanted to try to drum up support for it. She spoke with my co-host Lauren Gilger more about it.

CLARISSA SOSIN: It wasn’t a very long survey, maybe 10, 12 questions in all. And it, I mean, it was pretty basic. It was: Do you live here? How do you use the parks? Which parks do you use? Do you feel safe going to the parks? And then the main question was: Do you support the the ordinance?

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah.

CLARISSA SOSIN: And then there were a couple open-ended questions of like, do you support it and if you do or if you don’t, why? So people could kind of type out their answers.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And this was not something that was made public. How did you find it?

CLARISSA SOSIN: I was looking among some of the surveys they’d put out in general, and so I put in a couple requests. I have a couple more that I’m waiting on. But I also was talking to someone who’s been working on the ordinance against the ordinance, and he said that he’d heard about the results and that they weren’t in favor of the city. And so I was pretty excited when I got the survey back since I’d heard it was going to be interesting to look at.

LAUREN GILGER: And then it was. So you took those survey questions, ran it by a pollster in town, Mike Noble. What did he think about the wording of this survey, the approach the city seemed to take here?

CLARISSA SOSIN: So he called that question, the one main question about the ordinance, he called that the key question. And he said typically key questions are supposed to be presented where if you support and oppose, it’s really important to put both those words in it so that people like both ideas come to mind, that the option of supporting and opposing comes to your mind while you read the question.

LAUREN GILGER: Mhm.

CLARISSA SOSIN: This question only asked if you support it. And then a couple other flaws he saw were that it didn’t define the ordinance. Nowhere actually in the survey did they define the ordinance, so it was relying on people who were responding to either have previous knowledge or do research themselves.

And then in the answers, there was also no way for someone to be like, "I don’t know." There was "I have no opinion," I forget the exact wording of it, but there wasn’t like, "I just don’t know. Like I’m not sure. I don’t know what it is." There was no way for them to say that and sort of opt out in a sense.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Was this an opt-in online thing? Was this something the city sent out to folks? How did they get folks to engage?

CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, from what I’ve seen, they they put it on their city website and then they’ll promote them on social media. I assume they send them out in some sort of community emails, but that’s how I’ve seen them promoted before.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And this survey was sent out during the debate around this very controversial ordinance, which was controversial kind of from the beginning. Lots of folks in the advocate community saying this will hurt the work that they do.

We’ve heard those voices on our show. We’ve also talked to City Council members, though, who say that lots of folks who are upset about finding needles in the parks or things like that, or drug use in the parks, wanted something like this put in place. Just remind us the debate around this ordinance.

CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, so this survey was sent out during the second half of the debate on the ordinance. They passed a first version, I want to say it was in December. This was before I actually started really reporting here in the city, but I was hearing about it on this show, actually. That’s how I first heard about the ordinance.

And that version only included medical care in parks, so it was banning medical care in parks. So they then went back to rewrite it, and they put implementing it on hold. And so this survey came out during that time period where they were having meetings with community members in neighborhoods and doing the survey and doing other ways of getting feedback about the ordinance and how they should rewrite it.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. We should say this is tied up in court now. There have been a couple of lawsuits filed to try to stop it. So the kicker here though, right, Clarissa, in your reporting is that this despite the fact that this pollster tells you these questions were pretty slanted in one direction, respondents overwhelmingly said they were pretty opposed to it, right?

CLARISSA SOSIN: About 70% of people who responded were opposed to the ordinance, even though the question didn’t even bring up the idea of opposition. And I believe it was about it was the majority of them were strongly opposed.

LAUREN GILGER: And it wasn’t an incredibly small sample size, right? Like, this was a couple of thousand responses.

CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, about about 3,000.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Talk a little bit about what Mike Noble told you about the methodology.

CLARISSA SOSIN: I mean, so it was very flawed overall. It was out for about a month, which he said is is way too long because like things can happen in that time period. Someone could respond and change their opinions, so you need it to be a much shorter period of time. Also, everybody who responded had to self-identify that they were from Phoenix, and they did that by putting their ZIP code, but there was no way to verify that. And then there was also no other gathering of demographics.

Typically, you would look into more information about the people who are responding and what part of the city they live in and and who they are so you understand where you’re getting all of these responses from. And then he also just the way they were putting it out, too, like just putting it on social media or sending it out in a newsletter or the ways that they were doing it, like there are ways to make sure you reach a broad swath of people, and that’s not how you reach a broad swath of people.

LAUREN GILGER: What did the city have to say about this? Like, they seemed to recognize that this was not supposed to be a scientific poll or anything like that, right?

CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, they they said it was non-scientific. They said it’s just one part of the process of a multi-pronged process of how they engage with the community when it comes to doing things like this.

LAUREN GILGER: But they’ve used survey results like this in other city council debates.

CLARISSA SOSIN: They have. They have cited them saying like such and such percentage of respondents said this about this.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. What about this question that found 52% of respondents had been deterred from visiting a park because of safety concerns, 38% because of lack of maintenance, cleanliness? That seems to kind of bolster the city’s argument here in terms of this ordinance?

CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, that one was interesting because it does seem to to bolster it. But Mr. Noble pointed out that that question was flawed also because typically when you’re doing a survey like this, you you start with the do you enjoy the parks, right? The question right before it was basically like, do you feel safe going to parks, do you go to them?

And so only the people who said they don’t feel comfortable going to parks should have been asked the like, "Well, why do you not feel comfortable?" And instead, the question was asked of everybody. But it should have just been targeted at the people who said, "Yes, I am uncomfortable."

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you lastly, because as you said, there were a couple of open-ended questions involved in this survey that I think had some really interesting responses based on your reporting. Tell us about some of the ones that stood out to you.

CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, the ones that really stood out to me were ones from people who like you could tell they were either out doing the work or knew people who were doing the work, or who they just like there were a couple that were echoed a judge’s opinion.

One of the judges in the two lawsuits that are ongoing. She wrote that there were littering laws that could be changed or reinforced, or that like toddler birthdays also like put out a lot of trash, and so why aren’t they targeted? And so there were people who they wrote things like that, like echoing the exact same concerns.

LAUREN GILGER: It’s very interesting. All right. Lots to watch for on this front. Clarissa Sosin, a staff writer at Phoenix New Times, joining us to talk about her story. Clarissa, thank you so much for coming on The Show. I appreciate it.

CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, thank you for having me.

MARK BRODIE: How did a childhood in Mohave County lead to a career in public health? My next guest wasn’t sure at first but has since figured it out. Jenna Honan grew up in Kingman and is now a public health researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She recently wrote a paper for the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology called "On Why Environmental Justice Must Continue to Guide Public Health Research." In it, she argues the public health system should rethink how it evaluates risk and who is subject to that risk. I spoke with Honan earlier and we started with how much of her childhood and her own personal health experiences have shaped the kind of work she does now.

JENNA HONAN: I grew up in an era where we were really always outside as kids. And so, I absolutely loved the desert. But there were things that I was always warned by my dad about flash floods. And so I was absolutely terrified of flash floods. And because of that fear, I studied them. I would go to the library and I would read about monsoons and what that meant for our types of soils and living next to a wash. And so that really is what fostered, I would say, my interest in environmental science.

For me, the personal health problems, so just to orient your readers a little bit, I started menstruating very young. I was nine years old. I had a hysterectomy eventually a few years ago. And so I’ve always had some some issues with reproductive disorders, but I never really made a full connection personally between environmental science and my health exposures, right? My exposures that have led to different health outcomes.

MARK BRODIE: So at what point did it sort of click for you that your some of the health issues that you have dealt with throughout your life can be traced back to, you know, environmental health issues from your childhood?

JENNA HONAN: Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things about growing up in a place where it’s somewhat normal to not be in tiptop shape is that you you are kind of you kind of get used to it and you don’t really question it. It’s just sort of how it is, and I think sometimes it’s even a joke like, "Oh, there there must be something in the water," right? But the thing that’s interesting about it is that every woman in my family has experienced some kind of reproductive disorder or or metabolic disorder. And you could very easily say like, "Oh, that’s just got to be a genetics problem."

But then so did my neighbors, and so did my teachers. And so it was just one of those things where my health and my interest in environmental science were really pretty divorced for me because I didn’t recognize that it wasn’t it wasn’t common. And so when I started studying environmental science at the graduate level, that was the first time I really went, "Hey, what what actually is in the water though?"

And so the actual personal connection for me though didn’t happen until I was almost done with my PhD. I had participated in a workshop, a research training workshop in the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and it was specifically about endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And I had done my dissertation on a chemical called perchlorate, which is it’s a byproduct of things like rockets and fireworks and basically anything cool that explodes, right? And we knew that Lake Mead was polluted with perchlorate for decades, and I was specifically looking at the relationship between exposure to this chemical and then the types of health outcomes that we might expect from that, things like thyroid disorders or, again, metabolic dysfunctions, things like diabetes or obesity, and then reproductive disorders like mine, right? And so I was presenting this this work to a group of really incredible scientists and doctors, and I I pulled up this map of Arizona to show them Lake Mead and I was moving my pointer down towards the Colorado River, and there’s Kingman. It’s just hanging out right next to this big contaminated lake. And so, I think I probably I probably went silent for maybe like three seconds, which is kind of a long time when you’re actively giving a presentation, but that was really the first time that I was like, "Oh, wait. That’s kind of strange. I wonder." And so that was really what inspired me to write this this article.

MARK BRODIE: So let me read something that you wrote toward the conclusion of this piece. You say, "Environmental health disparities exist as predictable consequences of how we conduct risk assessments, how we blanketly define acceptable risk, and how we implement environmental policy." It sounds like what you’re saying is like these are all very predictable and preventable situations.

JENNA HONAN: You know, that’s really tricky. It is prevention is obviously the focus of of public health, but it is, I would say, somewhat naive to think that it would be feasible to have 100% protection for all the contaminants for everyone all the time. It’s just, you know, maybe that makes me a cynic, but I think really the discourse is around how we define protection and I think a lot of times when we do these types of risk assessments, we’re really missing the context of the people who are behind the numbers.

And it’s one thing that I think is hard about health risk assessments is a lot of times they’re retroactive. So we do these assessments when we know that there might be a problem. So I would say in the US, we we love to say innocent until proven guilty, right? And it’s kind of the same for for pollution. So we have to prove that something is bad or or leading to health problems for anything to really happen. And so the burden of proof for what’s making people sick is really on the people who are getting sick, whereas in places like Europe, you have to prove that something’s OK before industry can start using it. So something like that would be, I think, really really useful for us to transition to in terms of protection for people.

MARK BRODIE: Well, it’s interesting because one of the things you write, and I’ll have to paraphrase this, is that, even if an entity says, "Oh, this is 95% safe," that 5% for whom it might not be safe based on the population can be millions and millions of people.

JENNA HONAN: Right, exactly. And it’s it’s really hard because you think, you know, if I get a 95 or a 99% on a test, I am doing great, right? Mom’s proud. But really the biggest problem is that that percentage is also not equally distributed AMong everyone, right? We know that certain areas don’t have to worry about their water quality, whereas some areas it is an ongoing problem that is it’s really hard to find the resources to fix it. And so it’s really it’s really about figuring out who is in that 5%, why they’re in that 5%, and what can we do if we really want to help everyone. Reaching that 5% is the piece that’s missing.

MARK BRODIE: What kind of response have you gotten to your research, to maybe what you’ve written from some of your family members and the other folks back in Kingman? Like folks who were sort of affected by what you’ve been writing about and researching?

JENNA HONAN: I would say most of the the conversation has still come from the academic side of my world. It is extremely difficult, even as someone from the community, to grab the attention from people who are even most affected by this research. You are competing with so many other variables. I certainly haven’t gotten any hate mail, which is good. I I just I think it’s really hard. People have a lot of decision fatigue and conversation fatigue, and things are just really really kind of messy right now, so it’s it’s yeah, I just think it’s really competitive, very competitive field.

MARK BRODIE: Jenna Honan grew up in Kingman. She’s now a public health researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

MARK BRODIE: Earlier this year, a group of musicians gathered at a Garfield neighborhood church in Phoenix to play a single note for 45 minutes. The improvisational performance is a type of drone music, a genre that's been around for basically as long as humans have been playing instruments. It has a minimalist, repetitive, almost hypnotic sound, often featuring long notes with little variation. One of the best-known examples of drone is in the song "Tomorrow Never Knows" by the Beatles. The Phoenix performance was open to the public, and Show producer Amber Victoria Singer was there.

[drone music plays]

AMBER VICTORIA SINGER: It’s a Monday evening at the end of May, and three dozen musicians are warming up for the second, and likely last, public performance of the Human Sensory Society Community Orchestra. The musicians range in age from 6 to over 50. Each is sitting in a large circle around the perimeter of the room, grouped by type of instrument, and each has been given a manilla envelope with two timestamped cards sticking out of it. A drummer, bass player and guitar player are in the center of the room, along with an audio engineer.

Guitar player Caleb Dailey, one of the musicians responsible for making this all happen, welcomes the crowd and gives a little instruction to the band, counts down for them to set stopwatches on their phones, and then the performance begins.

At first, the music sounds like what you’d expect it to sound like if a lot of people all played E at the same time. But when Micah Dailey starts drumming, the energy shifts.

Micah and Caleb Dailey are brothers and co-founders of the independent label Moone Records. They’re conducting the orchestra as they play. The Daileys say the idea for the Human Sensory Society Community Orchestra first formed at small house shows they hosted starting in 2022.

MICAH DAILY: We would have like artists performing and we would ask all the artists usually to kind of like create an experience around this show, like, don’t just do what you normally do.

CALEB DAILEY: People that are there to just be a part of what’s happening. There’s kind of this like symbiotic relationship between the people that are coming to watch and the people that are creating stuff.

AMBER VICTORIA SINGER: Through years of small experimental house shows, the Dailey brothers compiled a list of musicians who would be interested in doing something a little out of the box. Something like playing the same note for 45 minutes.

The Human Sensory Society Community Orchestra’s first public performance was supposed to be a one-off. Sixteen musicians played E for 25 minutes.

MICAH DAILEY: And it was just — it was, it’s just simply moving. It was quite a special experience.

AMBER VICTORIA SINGER: Micah and Caleb Dailey decided they would do it again so they could record the performance. This time, twice as many people have shown up to play.

JOSH CASSELMAN: I’m Josh Casselman, I’m 51 and I was playing a harmonica … Having this number of people come together to do something so simple, it’s like, obviously it’s about more than music and what it sounds like, it’s about the people, and it was a really, really beautiful experience.

GAGE DIEHL-GONZALEZ: My name is Gage Diehl-Gonzalez, I’m 21 years old and I was playing the upright bass … It was what I imagine playing with toys is like for a five year old. It was exceptional, and I was telling everybody that it was a really big morale boost.

JANIE DAILEY: I’m Janie Dailey, and I’m 33, and I was playing melodica and peruvian shakers … what I take away from this experience is that you can kind of lay down your ego, lay down, like, any imposter syndrome and just kind of be curious and childlike again with music.

AMBER VICTORIA SINGER: Audience members — and there are about as many in the audience as there are in the orchestra this evening — are invited to walk amongst the musicians during the performance to experience how different areas of the room sound.

The smartphone stopwatches serve two purposes. One, to make sure everyone stops playing at the same time. And two, so the musicians know when to open the timestamped cards given to them before the performance. Each musician has two cards, and each card has a prompt.

What were the prompts in your envelope?

JAKE LEROUX: Try to play with your hand in your pocket for five minutes.

JOSH CASSELMAN: Make your sound feel like this: La, La, BOOM.

STEPH CARRICO: Feel nervous about being recorded.

AMBER VICTORIA SINGER: The prompts are meant to reset the musicians’ intentions as they play. Here’s Caleb Dailey again.

CALEB DAILEY: Maybe you’re still playing the same, but inside of you feels different.

AMBER VICTORIA SINGER: It’s unlikely Moone Records will host another official Human Sensory Society Community Orchestra performance.

CALEB DAILEY: It’s hard for us to even think about doing another one because we don’t- like, this is such a special, almost like sacred experience for us that we, we wouldn’t want it to come off as like a novelty thing because it’s not that at all.

AMBER VICTORIA SINGER: As the smartphone stopwatches tick closer to the 45 minute mark, the music starts to sound more urgent. And then, the orchestra stops.

[applause]

For KJZZ's The Show, I'm Amber Victoria Singer.

MARK BRODIE: And the Daily brothers plan to release a vinyl pressing of the Human Sensory Society community orchestra's performance.

MARK BRODIE: 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. 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 @KJZZTheShow.

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.