The Show for Sept. 2, 2026: Proposed 'roadless rule' changes, Colorado River water and more

Why outdoors groups don't like a proposed change that would allow for roads in more parts of national forests, and testing how walkable the Valley is by hitting the streets. And Arizona will be getting less water from the Colorado River starting next year under new rules implemented by the federal government. But for most of us living here, those cuts may be difficult to see on a day-to-day basis.

Full 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/nonprofit4az.

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, why outdoors groups don't like a proposed change that would allow for roads in more parts of national forests, and testing how walkable the Valley is by hitting the streets.

But first, Arizona will be getting less water from the Colorado River starting next year under new rules implemented by the federal government. But for most of us living here, those cuts may be difficult to see on a day-to-day basis. That's because cities have been preparing for this for years and coming up with backup plans and backup water sources.

KJZZ's Alex Hager has been reporting on this. He joins me now to talk more about what some of those plans look like. Alex, good morning.

ALEX HAGER: Good morning, Mark. Thanks for having me.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for being here. So, let's start with Phoenix, kind of the big dog in the Valley here. What sorts of plans have they been working on to make up for lack of Colorado River water?

ALEX HAGER: The fact of the matter here is that water managers in the Valley have seen this crisis coming for years, sometimes decades, and they have been planning to weather the storm. And in this case, and in many cities' cases, that looks like finding other sources of water. So, when there are cuts to the Colorado River, there is less water coming through the canal that brings the Colorado River to the Valley. You just lean harder on another source of water. And for most cities, that's water from the Salt and Verde rivers, which is a different river system that's Bartlett Lake, Roosevelt Lake, all those reservoirs in the foothills to the east, or groundwater, which is sometimes naturally occurring groundwater, and sometimes water that has been stored there specifically for dry times like this one.

MARK BRODIE: So, are Valley cities looking at those other sources in proportion to how much they had been using of Colorado River water?

ALEX HAGER: Yeah, that's correct. For a lot of these cities, they're looking at cuts in the ballpark of 20% less Colorado River water coming in every year. And because they have diverse portfolios, they can fill that 20% by taking something like 20% more from one of those other sources.

MARK BRODIE: Are those other sources sustainable enough for the cities to continue doing that for some time into the future?

ALEX HAGER: This is a big, murky question. So, right now, the backup plans that they have are pretty rock solid for the near-term future while we figure out what the next chapter is for the Colorado River. Things like the Salt and Verde rivers, those river systems are generally a little bit easier to predict and have been for water managers, and they have plans to keep those in a way that they're using them sustainably. Groundwater, we know can be a useful plan B, but those reserves could be tapped pretty quickly if you lean on them too hard. So, that is why cities are going to the next chapter and building systems, manmade infrastructure that can go even beyond these short-term backup plans.

MARK BRODIE: That's sort of where the augmentation comes in, right? Either we've heard about desalination or water purification, things like that.

ALEX HAGER: That's right. Water purification is going to be a really big part of that next chapter. The city of Phoenix, for example, is spending more than $300 million on just one facility to take sewage and clean it back up to safe, pure drinking water standards. And the water leaders that I've talked to say if you can build infrastructure like that, you can guarantee, or come close to guaranteeing, a long-term water supply because it isn't dependent on how much it rains or snows somewhere or how much water has been naturally occurring underground or how much you stored there underground, because you can very predictably say we have this much water in the system and we can keep a large percentage of it there if we just clean it back up into drinking water.

MARK BRODIE: All right, so you mentioned hundreds of millions of dollars for one facility. I would imagine that these sort of backup plans come with pretty hefty price tags.

ALEX HAGER: That is how people are going to notice these water shortages. You will not notice it in water not coming out of your tap. You will likely not notice it in mandatory restrictions where you get a letter in the mail that says, "Hey, you can't water your lawns on these days." What you will notice is a gradual increase, and sometimes less gradual, in how much you're paying on your water bill every month. Cities that are building these multi-hundred-million-dollar infrastructure projects and say that they will likely be building billion-dollar infrastructure projects in the future, they say that they're going to have to find the money to pay for those, partially by leaning on the people who use that water.

MARK BRODIE: I think this is maybe a misconception for some water customers that when the prices go up, that it's because of scarcity, it's because trying to encourage conservation. But it sounds like what you're saying is, at least in many of these cases, it's not necessarily that, although if people use less water, that's great. It's because cities and water utilities need money to upgrade pipes and build new facilities and things like that.

ALEX HAGER: It varies city to city, it varies depending on the time of year and where you live. But overwhelmingly, the big changes that we're going to see in the long term to price increases for water coming out of your tap has much more to do with the physical infrastructure that's built to get the water there than the cost of the water itself.

MARK BRODIE: And are various cities building various things? I mean, you mentioned Phoenix building the water purification plant. Are other cities also having these pretty big capital projects?

ALEX HAGER: Yeah, that's right. I mean, not all of them are quite as big, but cities are a lot of times collaborating on big projects. So, instead of building their own water purification facility, a few cities might band together and build one that can serve three or four at a time.

MARK BRODIE: And share the water between them.

ALEX HAGER: That's right. And we're also seeing a lot of cities build new wells to access that groundwater, make sure that they can get enough of it if they need to draw more of it when there's less water available from the Colorado River.

MARK BRODIE: And how long, like how long-range are those plans?

ALEX HAGER: I have talked to city water leaders who are looking decades into the future. There is a great degree of uncertainty right now. The new plan for managing the Colorado River only lasts two years, and they don't know exactly how much water they will be losing after 2028. But some city leaders, especially in the larger cities with more money, they are able to look decades into the future and say, "Look, we're going to build a plan where it doesn't matter as much what happens in these two-year cycles of making new decisions about exactly what percent of water is not going to come down the Central Arizona Project Canal." They are trying to build systems that can go beyond that.

MARK BRODIE: Kind of future-proof themselves in a way.

ALEX HAGER: That's right.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, that is KJZZ's Alex Hager. Alex, thanks as always.

ALEX HAGER: Thank you, Mark.

MARK BRODIE: A whistleblower has raised concerns that the new rules developed by the U.S. Postal Service on mail-in voting are problematic, saying the process to come up with them was, quote, "secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed."

At the same time, someone familiar with the process says USPS officials have acknowledged the rules could stop ballots from getting to many eligible voters, but moved those rules forward anyway.

Jen Fifield of ProPublica has written about this and joins me to talk more about it. Jen, good morning.

JEN FIFIELD: Thanks for having me on.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for being here. So, let's start with the whistleblower complaint. This was the complaint was made to a U.S. senator from Connecticut. What is that whistleblower alleging here?

JEN FIFIELD: So, President Donald Trump directed the Postal Service to create new rules around mail voting. They had to have states give them lists of all eligible voters, voters that could receive ballots in the mail, and then they required USPS to use those lists to determine who gets ballots in the mail. They were tasked with creating new rules around this and new details for how the actual technology would work around it.

This whistleblower said that they were given a lack of direction as they started to work on the new technology. Their questions weren't answered. They were rushed. They were told to do this in weeks when typically a complicated system like this would take months. And they wouldn't acknowledge that any errors would occur. They were expecting it to be perfect.

If there was a ballot that was to be rejected because they didn't have a voter name on a list, that would hold up potentially tens of thousands of ballots in that batch. So, you would have wide swaths of voters that would not get their ballots, or wouldn't get them within the timeframe they were supposed to. So, this whistleblower came out and was warning that there could be disenfranchisement if this rule does take effect.

MARK BRODIE: That aspect you just mentioned in terms of like one problematic ballot or one mismatch ballot causing problems for potentially thousands of other voters, that seems to be a pretty big component of what critics are concerned about here, yeah?

JEN FIFIELD: This was something that I heard not just from the whistleblower, but also with someone familiar with the rulemaking process. Top officials at USPS met in meetings to try to figure out how to craft rules. And as they did, this person I spoke with said there was much discussion about how controversial this was, how they could limit the impact to voters while complying with Trump's rules.

And one repeated concern that came up was that if this one ballot problem came up, they would have to set aside the entire batch. And that's also something that came up at a USPS talk with election officials last month, where in Maricopa County, for example, the example was given that when we send out ballots here, it's more than 2 million ballots that go out in this first mailing because we have so many mail voters.

If there's one bad barcode, if the barcode is not printed well, if the voter information is wrong, say—it's really hard to keep voter information up to date because of how often people move and request ballots—then that could potentially hold up our entire first mailing here. So, that was definitely a theme as I spoke to people about this that they were most concerned about.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so given some of these concerns, why, like from the folks with whom you spoke, what did they say about why officials continued to move these rules up the chain anyway?

JEN FIFIELD: Well, when you get an executive order from the president, it's almost like getting a new law from Congress or getting a new directive from new regulations. These are public servants. These are people who are used to responding quickly to new rules and new laws. And so, they would treat this as if it was any other rule coming down. They need to try to make it work, try to make it work quickly on deadline.

And it's really not their choice as to whether it goes into effect or not. Others are challenging this rule in the courts, so it is on hold right now. But I think they're, from the discussions I had, it wasn't like the leaders were pushing this forward on their own accord.

MARK BRODIE: Okay. So, in terms of some of the concerns that folks had, how many of them were policy concerns, and how many of them were maybe technology concerns? Because obviously, some of the election officials have said, look, we don't necessarily have the capacity to do this in the timeframe that you're telling us we need to do this.

JEN FIFIELD: Right. So, in Arizona, we have these intelligent barcodes on our ballots where we're able to get text messages about where our ballot is in the system. Your ballot was just received. Your ballot is coming out to you. Not every place has that info. Most of the country does not. And that is what is needed to make this new system that USPS is proposing work.

So, before ballots go out to military voters this month, they would need to redesign their ballot envelopes to put these barcodes, get them approved by USPS, and figure out a way to send them these voter lists through this portal that has not yet been released. So, there's just everything is up in the air.

Like I said, it's currently on hold by the court, but the Supreme Court is expected to decide this soon. But they still say that they don't see a way, election officials do not see a way for this to happen this month.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so given that, as you say, this is still in the courts, the Supreme Court will have to weigh in, but also ballots, you reference ballots going out to military and overseas voters in the coming weeks. Like how, I mean, I guess, how is all this going to play out?

JEN FIFIELD: I mean, North Carolina is going to send out military ballots in two days, and overseas ballots. So, other states may be a little bit even ahead of us on that. And, you know, I think Trump has said North Carolina can figure it out. They're smart, was kind of his comment on this. And, you know, that's what we hear within these concerns that were raised internally was that, you know, it's just this is what we need to do. And so, we will figure it out.

In the courts, that is a main argument that it is too late to do this for this election. Some of these things like the barcodes are best practices. Voters want to know where their ballots are, tracking is great. But it's just, you know, putting this all together within weeks and having this complicated system not developed yet.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, lots more to come on this for sure. That is Jen Fifield of ProPublica. Jen, thanks as always.

JEN FIFIELD: Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it's The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I'm Mark Brodie. Coming up, the Forest Service wants to remove a 25-year-old rule that prohibits building roads in some parts of national forests.

But first, an attorney representing the family of an ASU hockey player who collapsed during a workout is criticizing the way the university is handling an investigation into what happened. The player collapsed during what's being described as a military-style workout about two weeks ago. He was taken to the hospital, and his lawyer says he will likely not recover.

Katie Strang is senior investigative writer with The Athletic and has been following this. She joins me on the line now to talk more about it. Katie, good morning.

KATIE STRANG: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: So, let’s talk a little bit about what this workout entailed, because as you report, this was not something that like a coach or a strength trainer was leading. This is somebody who is not affiliated with the university?

KATIE STRANG: That’s right. It’s a non-university employee. It’s someone that has previous military service who has led these types of workouts with at least one other university that we’ve identified in the past, and really I think prioritized like this military-style rigor in, I guess, toward the objective of team bonding. But obviously this workout was extremely strenuous and punishing and had a devastating result.

MARK BRODIE: And took place in August, when, you know, Phoenix is famously not a great place to be doing lots of strenuous work outside.

KATIE STRANG: That’s right. And the training session took place August 20, which was the first day of Arizona State’s fall semester. So, that’s the earliest that NCAA rules allow hockey teams to start formal activities.

And on the day that this happened, the temperature in Tempe, to my understanding in our reporting, was 86 degrees at 6:51 a.m., 51% humidity, no wind, according to the Weather Underground website. And you have to imagine this happened on a track near a field, and Tempe Fire Medical Rescue were dispatched to the Sun Angel Stadium at 8:31 for a heat-related illness, to take all that into account.

MARK BRODIE: Right. So, OK, so what is the family’s lawyer saying about what they don’t like, how do they not like what ASU is doing here? What’s the problem?

KATIE STRANG: Sure. I think, you know, one of the major concerns is how this investigation is being conducted. Now, I want to point out that the athletic director actually on the Burns & Gambo radio show recently had said that he wanted to make this very critical distinction that this was not an investigation, they were not suggesting that someone did something wrong, but that this was simply a review.

I mean, I think the lawyer for the Mayich family, one, takes issue with that characterization, and that at the very least there should be an investigation considering the devastating results of this workout and what happened. But the fact that, you know, the university is using someone internal to conduct this investigation, and that, you know, typically, you know, I think the best rules of standards and practice is generally that, you know, you want to have some level of separation and to remove any potential conflict.

So that, you know, oftentimes you see schools use external firms or third parties. So, I think there is the initial concern that, you know, this is an investigation being performed by someone internal. And then also that, you know, the coaching staff has not been placed on administrative leave, which is seen as sort of standard and routine in these situations.

You know, typically when there is an investigation of this nature, you want to separate certain parties to the event from witnesses of that event. And so, you know, I think the attorney expressed concern that that was not happening in this situation.

MARK BRODIE: Is there a concern that they might, like, for example, players might be reluctant to describe what was going on during that workout, maybe in the moments leading up to to this incident, knowing that the coach who authorized this person to come in and lead the workout is still the coach and still sort of seeing, overseeing day-to-day operations of the program?

KATIE STRANG: Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, for players, first and foremost, I think their concern is for their teammate, and I think they’re devastated for what’s what the family is going through right now.

But then, you know, you have to also imagine like this this is, you know, a coach that controls their scholarship, their livelihood, potentially like their NHL prospects. And so, I think there is a very legitimate concern that these players could have in the potential implications of speaking in any way that could potentially warrant more scrutiny on the coaching staff or anything beyond that.

MARK BRODIE: Has the university said anything about why the coaching staff is still in place and not on leave at the moment?

KATIE STRANG: Not really. I have asked the university if there’s been any sort of instruction about whether the coaching staff can address the situation with the players, or if there’s any prohibition about that level of communication, whether anything’s off limits. And there hasn’t really been any firm response that has directly addressed that issue.

MARK BRODIE: And do we have any sense of when the review, as the AD is calling it, might be done, or what like if it will be released when it is finished?

KATIE STRANG: Nope, I don’t think they’ve given any indication of a timeline or like any sort of commitment to transparency.

MARK BRODIE: OK. And in terms of the family’s lawyer that we’ve been talking about, like are they like is there anything else that that they’re able to do? Like they can obviously call for an investigation. I would imagine they can’t like start one on their own to some extent, right?

KATIE STRANG: Well, I do believe that there is going to be a fact-finding mission conducted on behalf of on behalf of the law firm that has been retained by the family. And, you know, the attorney has been very vocal about what he has already heard from people with knowledge of the workout, and that, you know, he has every reason to believe that this was grueling, onerous and dangerous.

And he has certainly stressed that they are going to make every effort to obtain any documents that are relevant to this investigation, whether that’s text messages, cellphone videos, any sort of contemporaneous statements, and that, you know, they are going to make sure that the university is aware of their sort of document preservation responsibilities.

MARK BRODIE: OK, we’ll have to see what happens with all that. That is Katie Strang, senior investigative writer with the Athletic. Katie, thank you.

KATIE STRANG: Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: You might know our next guest this morning from a very viral video he made recently, documenting his 18-mile walk to the new Buc-ee's all the way from downtown Phoenix.

JAMIE TRUFIN: Is Buc-ee's walkable from downtown Phoenix? Well, we're going to find out. Starting here from Central and Van Buren in downtown Phoenix, we're going to be taking Van Buren all the way down to the new Buc-ee's in Goodyear. Look at my outfit. I'm wearing all like UV material because it is very sunny today. Walk to IKEA was a little bit more enjoyable. Welcome to Buc-ee's, I love you. Now I got to go pet a beaver or something. I guess it's too hot to touch the beaver.

MARK BRODIE: That's Jamie Trufin. Trufin Sees Transit on social media, where he asks, "Is it walkable?" and then finds out.

Trufin has walked from downtown Phoenix, where he lives, not just to Buc-ee's, but to IKEA in Tempe. He walks to work every day, and when we asked him to come to our studios for an interview, he walked here.

JAMIE TRUFIN: Today I'm going to be walking to KJZZ's studio for an interview. They'd like to interview me about my walking journey in Phoenix. They did let me know that the parking structure is open, so that shouldn't be a problem, which it isn't, because I'm going to be walking there.

MARK BRODIE: Trufin is not just doing this for social media views. He's a true advocate for walkability in Phoenix, as well as a board member for the Urban Phoenix Project and the Downtown Phoenix Farmers Market. And he uses his social media to shed a light on transit in Phoenix and the region, and just how unwalkable Phoenix can be.

So, when he walked to our studios recently, my co-host, Lauren Gilger, asked him about his goals here and where he plans to walk next.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay, so we have to start with the fact that you walked here, Jamie, from downtown Phoenix. We should say we are kind of on the border between Phoenix and Tempe here by the Broadway Curve. There's a lot of freeways surrounding this building at Rio Salado College. I mean, are you okay? You need some water?

JAMIE TRUFIN: So, for the most part, I got a lot of water on the way here. I brought my big boy water bottle, and then I drink a lot of these Sparkling Ice drinks that I like to admit that I'm addicted to.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay, okay. But it's hot out there. How many miles is that walk?

JAMIE TRUFIN: I think it was roughly on my Strava, like over 9 miles.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, it takes me, I don't know, 20, 25 minutes to drive in from central Phoenix. How long does this take you?

JAMIE TRUFIN: About 3 hours and 10 minutes.

LAUREN GILGER: 3 hours and 10 minutes, what a difference! Okay, so that right there, I think gets us into the conversation about the walkability of this city, which you walk around all the time, and you do on your social media. You just kind of hit it big recently with this video of you walking all the way from downtown Phoenix, where you live, to Buc-ee's, this big, you know, exciting new gas station, which is how far away?

JAMIE TRUFIN: So, according to Google, it says about like 18 miles. With all my stops, it was more about 20 miles with everything in between when I was tracking it.

LAUREN GILGER: 20 miles you walked. Okay, and just straight down Van Buren basically west.

JAMIE TRUFIN: Yes, just all the way.

LAUREN GILGER: Why'd you decide to walk to Buc-ee's?

JAMIE TRUFIN: So, on my Strava heat map, I haven't had much of the West Side of Phoenix. So, I was trying to get more of my Strava heat map completed and—

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us what that is. What are you doing on Strava when Strava, we should say, is this app where you can mark, you know, and track runs and walks and things like that, and share them with folks?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Yeah, so I really enjoy walking and exploring new places. I hate backtracking or going like round trips. When I go hiking, I don't want to take the same way back. I want to take a different way to get out of the mountain.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay.

JAMIE TRUFIN: Same thing with walking. So, I like to discover and find new places just by walking. And so, I use Strava, the heat map, which can tell you where you've been already when you use the service. So, I've been building up my own personal heat map to figure out where I haven't been. And I haven't seen a lot of the West Side. So, I wanted to explore it and then challenge myself to see if I could go to Buc-ee's.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay, so you made it to Buc-ee's. What did you see along the way? What was this walk like?

JAMIE TRUFIN: You know, I was actually surprised, I will say, for how unwalkable Phoenix is, the entire way all the way to Buc-ee's essentially had a sidewalk, except for one portion that was like some farmland once you hit the Tolleson side.

LAUREN GILGER: I'm surprised by that, too. How hot was it, though? My goodness!

JAMIE TRUFIN: That day was a high of 105. For summertime, actually wasn't too bad.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, it could be worse.

JAMIE TRUFIN: Yeah, when it gets really hot, I have to bring like a little portable mister system, but I had my UV umbrella. I drink plenty of water the day before, and I was prepared to do this walk.

LAUREN GILGER: So, talk about that, like how do you do these incredibly long walks around the city in the middle of the summer, the hottest city in the country, right? And it's getting hotter, and not die.

JAMIE TRUFIN: So, first off, I don't recommend anyone trying to do these like crazy walks. So, part of it is you have to get acclimatized to the heat, which means if you haven't been outside out of your AC car or AC house going back and forth, you're not going to be able to do any of these extreme walks or be outside for long because your body has to adapt to the heat, and it takes about two weeks to just kind of put yourself out in the heat a little bit and get used to it. But when you do acclimatize, you actually require more water. So, you're sweating a little bit more efficiently. So, I drink tons of water the day before, the day of, and as I'm doing it. And not just water, I do electrolytes. I have a UV umbrella, and it kind of depends, like this walk, I had my UV sleeves because even though I had my umbrella, the reflection of everything was still burning me. So, I have UV leggings and UV long sleeves to protect me, and I'll water myself down on my sleeves during hotter days. That day wasn't too bad, but when it starts getting 110, I have to pour water on my sleeves.

LAUREN GILGER: Man oh man, I can't imagine. So, okay, so that's like a big, extreme walk. But you don't have a car in this very car-centric city on purpose. You're an urbanist, a walkability kind of advocate, right? I mean, what does this walking look like around Phoenix on normal day-to-day basis when you're not walking, you know, to Buc-ee's?

JAMIE TRUFIN: So, my daily, I daily about 12 miles a day of walking. So, I start off my morning when I go to work, I walk about two-ish miles to work, and then two miles back. So, it's about a 40-minute walk each way to and from work, which for me is a lot of peace time, so I get to enjoy listening to an audiobook, some music, and just enjoy being outside.

LAUREN GILGER: So, I got to ask, because I think people will be wondering, do you change clothes when you get there?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Yeah, I so for my work, I actually start really early. So, even during the summer, like I'm not breaking sweat going to work. Coming back, I definitely do, but I'm going straight home usually. But I kind of have everything planned out, like here, you can smell me. I don't smell bad at all.

LAUREN GILGER: No, you smell fine, that's amazing! I'm amazed.

JAMIE TRUFIN: So, I do have like wipes I bring sometimes for like longer walks like this so I don't smell, and then I do have a change of clothes that I usually bring because I have like a black long UV sleeve that I wear, and then I switch into I'm wearing my neighborhood shirt right now.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. Okay, so let's talk about walkability in Phoenix. Like this is, as I said, a very notoriously car-centric city. Most people are going to drive or take public transit here, even though public transit we know can be a challenge to take here as well. What are your biggest observations from trying to just walk in Phoenix?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Um, and I don't think this is exclusive to Phoenix, but it's just like out of nowhere, you'll just get missing sidewalks. And you'll be surprised, like in some areas you're like, when I walked to Buc-ee's, that entire way was, except for like one portion of it, had sidewalks all the way. But then you walk through Central City, like Midtown and Downtown, and then you're like, why are these neighborhoods that are so close to Downtown just not connected? And you kind of look into the history of why some of these neighborhoods don't have that infrastructure, just south of us in some of the barrios, they purposely did not have any sidewalks. And it hurts to kind of see because there were these tight-knit communities and they don't have sidewalks to bring people together.

LAUREN GILGER: Interesting. So, challenges kind of in the just the way the city's built. What about like trying to cross major thoroughfares or go under freeways as you probably just did coming coming here to KJZZ?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Uh, the one right here had I actually so I recorded my journey here and I made a point that it was insane that there was two lanes, like you can take a right on red, but the thing is there wasn't even a light. There was a light to get to this crossing, but then there was just a yield sign and you have to cross in front of oncoming traffic taking a right.

LAUREN GILGER: I know exactly what turn you're talking about, yes.

JAMIE TRUFIN: And I was like, how is there not a light here? Like, it's already bad enough, but like the just like surprise that there aren't like built-in infrastructure, and it's not a surprise to me that like Arizona has over a thousand deaths in traffic incidents a year.

LAUREN GILGER: Pedestrian deaths in traffic incidents, yeah. And I want to talk about the like the the policy changes that you think would help, right? I know you've been involved in that, you've been involved with Vision Zero in Phoenix in the past, like what do you think needs to change fundamentally here to make it at least more friendly to people who want to walk, even if it's not, you know, walking only like you do?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Yeah, you know, and I think what's tough about something like that is that we have kind of built this environment where we treat our surface roads where our communities are, our neighbors where we meet people, we treat those streets like highways. Um, and our highways, we obviously our highways, I don't think that's the issue of how those are designed, but we apply that same idea into how we apply our local roads. So, for arterials, for example, I know Streets Department typically has this clear zone policy where you can't have like trees, right? But part of walkability is you need trees and shade to cool off the street. So, we're cutting off these trees and the visibility because we're treating it like it's a highway so we can have more visibility for drivers, not pedestrians.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, so these kind of fundamental ways that we approach this this idea. What's the thing that drives you crazy the most when you're trying to walk around Phoenix?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Uh, nobody yields. Ah. And what drives me crazy is people are in a in a metal box that is AC-ed. And maybe I'm just really nice as a driver, but like I've I just yield to people. If I see someone crossing, but people will try to race you when you're using a crosswalk and so I and I do the finger wave, I like I try to wave to drivers to like let them know, and, you know, I'm pretty reasonable with walking, but like I have the legal right to be in a crosswalk. I believe the state law is any crosswalk is a legal crosswalk, unmarked or marked.

MARK BRODIE: That's Jamie Trufin, the social media influencer who famously walked to Buc-ee's. We'll have more of his conversation with my co-host, Lauren Gilger, after the break. You are listening to The Show.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it's The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I'm Mark Brodie. And now let's return to our conversation with urbanist Jamie Trufin. He's known on social media as Trufin Sees Transit, and he walked three hours to our studios recently to talk to my co-host, Lauren Gilger, about walkability, transit, and why he chooses to be car-free in a hot city.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay, so let's back up for a moment, Jamie, and talk about what led you here, because this is not out of nowhere. You you were hit by a wrong-way driver on the I-17, right? And severely injured, you had to relearn how to walk when you were in college, right?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Yes, I uh I needed someone to stay at my I was working as a shift supervisor at a pizza place, and the bus stopped running I think around like 11:00. And I I had a car. It wasn't me that the issue was, it was uh my coworker, I needed him to help close. And he was like, "Hey, if I close, I need a ride home because the buses don't run." And I'm like, "Okay, I don't mind I don't mind giving someone a ride home." I take him home, drop him off, and then I get back on I don't remember this part, but I get on back onto the highway and I just wake up in like a two-day coma or something. I don't remember.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow.

JAMIE TRUFIN: Yeah, my family was like making little pizza signs in front of me, but yeah, I broke my femur, pelvis, and shoulder all at one time.

LAUREN GILGER: My goodness. What was that recovery process like?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Uh, I was in like a hospital for like a month, which I thought the food Everyone is complaining that the food isn't good in the hospital. I thought it was great.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay.

JAMIE TRUFIN: Uh, but apparently like I was cracking jokes while I was unconscious to the firefighters and medics. I don't remember.

LAUREN GILGER: I don't know, I mean talking to you right now, I can I can guess that that would be true. You would do that. I mean, so you had to be in a wheelchair for some time, relearn how to walk. I mean, what did that do, that incident, what did that do to the way you think about driving?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Um, you come at a better perspective of accessibility and just like understanding like universal design, which is a principle in planning where it's like you create designs that benefit not just yourself, but it benefits everybody else.

LAUREN GILGER: So, also a story we have to talk about from your past, although before any of that that traumatic stuff happened, right? In high school, you became kind of famous here in the Valley for being the watermelon man on Camelback Mountain? Tell us about this.

JAMIE TRUFIN: Yeah, so I uh I was hiking one time and I found a watermelon in a cave and I was like, "Oh, I wanted to start a tradition." I found this watermelon, we brought it to the top, and we did like this photo op with like my cousin and a family friend.

LAUREN GILGER: Sure.

JAMIE TRUFIN: And so I was like, "What if we did this like every Wednesday and like we made this like a fun, you know, activity?" So then I started doing it, and then somehow I got involved with being barefoot while doing it. Don't recommend doing that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yes, you were barefoot.

JAMIE TRUFIN: And, you know, I was young, it was probably not the smartest decision, but I did it for an entire year of uh of my life, and I brought props, and it was a fun way of like community building. And I probably didn't at that time really understand what like building community and having neighbors and friends and all this stuff that I do have now today, but I I think that's kind of what led me into my direction now.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, that's interesting, right? You're you're making community on the top of Camelback Mountain by literally hiking up with a watermelon and sharing it with everyone. I mean, when you when you don't drive now, when you walk, when you take the bus or the light rail or whatever it may be, I mean, do you find community in that?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Oh yeah, I run into people all the time on the bus. I was doing a trip to Ajo on the bus, and I ran into I think his his tag is LA Guy in Phoenix, and, you know, he knows me and I know him, so like we ran into each other on the bus, uh and then—

LAUREN GILGER: He's another social media influencer guy?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Yeah, but like we didn't plan that, it just happened. A lot of my interactions with my community isn't planned, it's just it just happens.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, but it's because you're you're out there in the world and willing to be in a place where you're going to be around other people and not kind of in your metal box like you described it, right?

JAMIE TRUFIN: And I think that's probably why I'm not a very angry person.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay, so where are you walking next?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Uh, so I just walked uh the other day to PV Mall for the IKEA. I did one video where I walked all the way to the IKEA in Tempe and then everyone was like, "You should do the one in uh Paradise Valley." Fun fact, it's closed on Tuesdays, so I walked 20 miles and it was closed. But as far as my next walk, once the weather's a little bit cooler on this one, I want to do a uh I want to walk all four ASU campuses from one to another. And then I still have my ASU ID, so I want to take the shuttle back.

LAUREN GILGER: Nice, you might want the shuttle back at that point.

JAMIE TRUFIN: It's not my craziest walk. I did a 20 I didn't record any of this, but I did a 24-hour walk.

LAUREN GILGER: Where?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Uh, so I started downtown, I went through Piestewa Peak, uh Scottsdale, I took the canal to Scottsdale, there's uh Crosscut Canal, I went to Tempe, then followed that all the way to Mesa, and then looped all the way to Gilbert, Chandler, and then followed the canal back to Tempe, and then to Wash. It was 57 miles of walking in one day.

LAUREN GILGER: My goodness. Did you eat along the way?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Oh yeah, yeah. I it was a lot of walking. I think that that's the most walking I've done was 57.

LAUREN GILGER: What shoes do you wear?

JAMIE TRUFIN: Um, I wear Skechers, so I found this uh type of Skechers that I really like. I'm a pretty simple person and I don't really like buy crazy stuff, but I just bought the same shoes in different styles, and that's kind of what I wear. They they do melt the bottoms like pretty often because it's so hot, so I the grip on the shoes aren't the best because not because of the shoes, but just because they literally melt off.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So, okay, you've got your heat map, you know where you've walked and where you haven't, but I'm sure you've covered a lot of the Valley at this point. Where are your favorite places to walk?

JAMIE TRUFIN: So, while Phoenix is well known for being just unwalkable, I think we don't we don't give enough credit and frankly we don't build enough towards them, is our canal system. We have so many canals that you can kind of like sneak through Phoenix without a car if you really wanted to, especially like if you have an e-bike or just a regular bicycle, you can really get around Phoenix without a car using the canal system. And they have been just getting better and better. I think there is some gaps, especially towards like the West Side, but I used to take the canal, I'd bike up 3rd Avenue, take the canal over to 15th Ave and Indian School to go to the Shamrock Foodservice when I'd do bulk food shopping over there.

LAUREN GILGER: Well, it sounds like a a great adventure and more to come. Jamie Trufin, an urbanist, Urban Phoenix Project board member, he's also on the board of the Phoenix Farmers Market, and online influencer advocating for urban issues and walkability and more. Jamie, thank you so much for coming on The Show, I really appreciate it.

JAMIE TRUFIN: Thank you for having me, appreciate it.

MARK BRODIE: The U.S. Forest Service wants to get rid of something called the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The 2001 rule prohibits building roads on millions of acres of national forest land nationwide, among other provisions. The Feds argue eliminating it will help treat forests to prevent wildfire. A report from the Center for Biological Diversity, though, says getting rid of the rule will move 400 endangered species closer to extinction, among other findings.

But many environmentalists and outdoors groups oppose the proposal. Jamie Ervin falls into that camp. He's the policy director with Outdoor Alliance, which represents climbers, backcountry skiers, runners, mountain bikers, and others. He joins me, and Jamie, give me your elevator pitch for why you don't like the idea of doing away with the roadless rule.

JAMIE ERVIN: Sure. Well, just to to start, and for folks who aren’t familiar, the roadless rule is this policy that’s been in place since 2001 at the Forest Service. So this protects what’s called Inventoried Roadless Areas, and these are some of the last undeveloped places on our national forest.

So that law’s been in place since 2001, and it protects in total about 58.8 million acres of national forest land, and these include some of the best places to go do all types of outdoor recreation activities on national forest.

If you are the type of person that likes to get outside and go hiking, you’ll know that oftentimes the entire objective is to get away from the road and get to a scenic, natural, undeveloped place. And so these are places that recreationists, whether whether we know we’re in an inventoried roadless area or not — usually you don’t, there’s no sign or anything — these are places that we gravitate to because they are the very scenic, very beautiful, great to enjoy parts of our national forest.

Like lifting the rule doesn’t necessarily mean that these areas are developed on day one, but it does put us in a place where the Forest Service can now entertain proposals to develop these places, and we lose this certainty that that recreation experience and all the conservation values — clean water, healthy forest, wildlife, all that stuff — we lose the assurance that those things are are protected for the future.

MARK BRODIE: So, one of the reasons that the USDA is saying they want to change this is to help deal with wildfires in national forests and make sure that fire that is burning in areas where maybe we would prefer it not burning can be accessed and preserve the forests for for future generations. Is that an argument that you buy into?

JAMIE ERVIN: It’s not an argument that we buy into in terms of justifying a need to rescind the entire roadless rule. So what they proposed is to rescind the rule in all states where it exists except for Colorado and Idaho. Both of those states have their own roadless rules, so this rescission would affect 45 million acres, tons of outdoor recreation opportunities.

But, um on your question about fire, so it’s a little more complicated than the Forest Service has made it seem. I think like they’ve put this press release out, this announcement out in the middle of a very intense fire season. A lot of people are breathing smoke, a lot of people have been threatened by fire, are threatened by wildfires. It’s a very serious issue, um and the relationship between roadless areas and fire is complex.

But having said that, so the science itself, wildfire science does not bear out that the roadless rule is this big impediment to effective fire management. We know that within and outside of roadless areas, wildfire extent is about the same, or the rate of wildfire is about the same. There’s not been documented a significant increase in the severity of wildfires in roadless areas versus roaded areas.

And actually, on top of that, we know that most wildfires start near roads. So, the idea that we’re going to build roads into these currently undeveloped areas raises the possibility that we’re going to see new ignitions of wildfires in times when conditions are extreme and fires are difficult to suppress. So, that’s one side of our thinking.

That said, where it becomes a little complex is that roads are pretty important infrastructure for fire suppression, and they can be important infrastructure for doing things like hazardous fuel projects that mitigate the risk of future wildfires.

Think about roadless areas: They’re unroaded, they’re remote, they’re far from communities. These are largely places where um if you were going to target a fuel reduction project or some kind of wildfire mitigation project that was intended to protect a community from fire, these are not the first places that you would look, right?

To the extent that roadless areas exist near communities, Outdoor Alliance, many of our partners in the conservation and recreation communities, wildfire scientists all submitted comments on this about a year ago and engaged with the Forest Service and offered our full support in designing: Is there some targeted, different regulation you could have that protects these remote areas and allows for the types of activities that might help protect communities in the event of wildfire?

The Forest Service has not considered that. They’ve moved ahead with this full rescission of the roadless rule, and that’s where we’re at.

One of the great things about the roadless rule, in terms of fire and in terms of everything else, it’s very flexible in the way that it’s worded, right? The basic prohibition is that you can’t build new roads and you can’t cut timber, but there’s exceptions to both of those things to deal with things like wildfire.

MARK BRODIE: So, am I hearing you correctly that you don’t necessarily oppose building roads in some places where there is some utility or a need to, or they’re near a particular community that needs protection from wildfire? You just don’t like the idea of the rule being taken away for everywhere. Is that a fair assessment of where you’re at?

JAMIE ERVIN: Yeah, that’s mostly fair. I think a way of thinking about it is like, if there are places where science shows or the wildland fire leadership shows that a road would help to suppress wildfires near a community or help to complete some sort of fuel treatment or other wildfire mitigation type project that has also been shown by data needs to happen, yes, we would be very open to targeted changes to the roadless rule that would accomplish those objectives.

But the onus is on the Forest Service to show that, and they’ve not done that here.

MARK BRODIE: Does this become maybe more of a complicated issue in a place like Arizona where what’s called the wildland-urban interface, where, you know, people are living closer and closer and into forests, like that line is blurring somewhat where people are now living closer to areas that are more prone to wildfires?

JAMIE ERVIN: Yes, absolutely. And that wildland-urban interface area would be the primary place that I’m talking about. If you were going to make changes to the roadless rule or any type of federal regulation to protect communities, that’s the first place you want to look is near where there are people.

MARK BRODIE: Do you think that all of this points to changes or a rethinking in some way of the way that we deal with wildfire in this country, be it suppression or fighting or letting fires burn, that kind of thing?

JAMIE ERVIN: Somewhat. I want to push back on the roadless rule being primarily a wildfire policy a little bit. If you read the USDA’s announcement, I mean, yes, it talks a lot about wildfire up top, but then when you get a little lower down into what they’re saying, like it’s, you know, rescinding the roadless rule supports this list of executive orders, and they list off pretty quickly the uh executive order about increase about increasing timber production, the energy dominance executive order about doing more energy extraction on public lands, the energy from Alaska executive order.

All of those things, we feel are probably more their primary objective here is how do we increase like commercial uses of the of public lands. But, at the same time, I mean, this is a pretty serious wildfire season. It follows a number of pretty bad wildfire years in Arizona and throughout the West, and there are a lot of different things outside of the roadless rule that are also that are going on that people are certainly rethinking how we address fire.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Jamie Ervin, policy director with Outdoor Alliance. Jamie, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

JAMIE ERVIN: Thank you. Have a good one.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for listening to The Show's podcast. The Show is produced by Xativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by John 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.