At the Capitol

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We begin a new Monday night segment in which political representatives square off on state government issues. Tonight, it’s Barrett Marson, Director of Communications for the State House of Representatives and Bob Grossfeld, of The Media Guys, Inc.

Cary Pfeffer:
Tonight on "Horizon," get the latest on what's going on at the state capitol from both sides of the aisle. A conversation with sustainability expert Sir Crispin Tickell. And Chambers Of Commerce split over the employer sanctions bill. Next on "Horizon."

Cary Pfeffer:
Good evening, thanks for joining us tonight on "Horizon." I'm Cary Pfeffer. President Bush visited Yuma today, observer the changes along the border since the last visit in may 2006. The president cited toughening security and reiterated the need for a temporary guest worker program.

George Bush:
You cannot fully secure the border until we take pressure off the border. And that requires a temporary worker program that seems to make sense to me. That if you got people coming here to do jobs Americans aren't doing, we need to figure out a way that they can do so in a legal basis for a temporary period of time. And that way our border patrol can chase the criminals and the drug-runners, potential terrorists, and not have to try to chase people who are coming here to do work America is not doing. If you want to take the pressure off your border. Have a temporary worker program.

Cary Pfeffer:
And that will not be the last time you hear that topic. Tonight we're starting a new segment that will run every Monday night. Two political types face off on some of the issues that have been the focus of attention at the state legislature. The president's visit to the border provides a good starting point tonight for Barret Marson, the director of communications for the State House of Representatives, and Bob Grossfeld, founder and president of the media guys. Thanks to both of you. And the idea is that we're going to hear a little bit from both of you, sort of sounding off on these issues, and it makes sense that we would start with immigration and border issues and that sort of thing. Barrett, let's start with you. Representative Pearce today said if it looks like amnesty and smells like amnesty its amnesty. I'll let you weigh in on this particular situation.

Barrett Marson:
Well, for people who think that now that the president is engage and there's a Democratic Congress we'll get something done, it's been three months since Democrats have been in control of Congress. We've still yet to see -- we've still yet to see any real action on immigration reform. We've yet to see the promises made regarding a safe and secure border. Regarding the work that needs to be done to do something about the 12 million illegal immigrants now in this country. And so people talk about it's a federal issue.

Bob Grossfeld:
So your focus -- your folks think the president's right. Because here he is, and it is a short amount of time, and now here's a proposal, and it's getting pretty widespread support.

Barrett Marson:
It's not enough support, because they can't pass the Congress so far. There's yet to be actual action on this. And until there is action, it is going to be incumbent upon Arizona and the individual states to secure the border. Which is has always been the point. People think that the federal action is an anodyne to all the immigration laws, yet if we wait for the federal government to do something, we'll still be waiting as we've been waiting for four, five years now.

Bob Grossfeld:
Most of which under a Republican Congress where they were the ones saying no to the president, so now we've got the president basically saying the same thing he's been saying all along, and now he has a Congress that is making sense and is going to the try and do things.

Cary Pfeffer:
Are we looking at a situation to bring this closer to home and to talk a little bit about what's happening down at the legislature? Are we going to see things there that the two of you can perhaps weigh in on as far as that topic is concerned?

Barrett Marson:
Unlike Congress, the legislature actually does something. When Bob talks about action, the legislature is doing action. It is passing bills. Unfortunately the governor has been vetoing over the last couple years, but the legislature is passing bills on employer sanctions. On securing the border using the National Guard. Those important steps. I've yet to see that same sort of movement from Congress.


Bob Grossfeld:
Ok. So you pass the bill. Has one undocumented person been stopped anywhere that you can point to?

Barrett Marson:
Clearly, yes.

Bob Grossfeld:
So the problem solved. Outstanding! Let's move on.

Barrett Marson:
That doesn't account for the hundreds of thousands still coming into the state --

Cary Pfeffer:
We're going to let you weigh in on Senator Jack Harper's actions, and we'll start this time with Bob. Senator Jack Harper had something to say about Alan Stevens and his past in dealings with the governor.

Bob Grossfeld:
I never quite understood why people were referring to this man as Harpo, but I now understand. He is built-in comic relief that goes over the edge, and for the life of me, I don't know why he hasn't been held accountable by his own caucus. First of all, he used the excuse of looking into the Veterans Home as a reason to dredge up charges against Alan Stevens that were resolved ages ago. It was all dismissed. And he feigned like he had never heard of this before. The man is not a good actor.

Cary Pfeffer:
Your reaction, is there an apology on the way?

Barrett Marson:
First of all, let me just say as a Marx Brothers Aficionado, Harpo was always the silent one, Senator Jack Harper is not. Bob wants to zero in on this, but really what this is about is the veterans. What those hearings brought out was, the veterans were receiving shoddy care and by the way the legislature is continuing with those hearings. Those were the first but not the last. Veterans were receiving neglectful. The governor's office, when told about it, did nothing. And now once the governor -- by the time they were told most of these things were resolved.

Bob Grossfeld:
They were told on February --

Barrett Marson:
What do you mean that is not true? They were told February 9. They only -- [talking at once] when Girard notified the governor's office, the inspectors were still in the home. The inspectors were still refusing to leave the home because there were problems. The governor was not notified.

Cary Pfeffer:
We're going to fit in two other quick mentions. Barrett, you have you some discussion about Speaker Wires and what -- where he's headed.

Barrett Marson:
The point is the legislature is continuing to do something. The legislature is actively involved in making this state better. One of the things -- the speaker has asked for some records from the universities for the med school. To build the new med school. We're looking for accountability in that. So there has been a subpoena, there's -- that's been issued to the university to produce documents. It's just a part of accountability on the part of state government to the taxpayers.

Cary Pfeffer:
And the last word from Bob, climate control.

Bob Grossfeld:
I am waiting for you folks who control the legislature to look at this report that came out last week that showed basically unless we change our ways, Arizona is about to become a new dust bowl. And we're futzing over, well, when did the governor's office get notified about something that's been resolved. That's insane.

Cary Pfeffer:
The debut of our effort, thank you both for being here.

Cary Pfeffer:
ASU has created a new school of sustainability, which will focus on how to adapt to a rapidly urbanized world and sustainable energy solutions among other things. Sir Crispin Tickell is the director of the Policy Oversight Program at Oxford University in England. He's been at the forefront of this issue for several years, and he visited A.S.U. recently conferring with the director of A.S.U.'s Global Institute of Sustainability, Charles Redmond. Larry Lemmons spoke with both gentlemen during Sir Crispin's visit.

Larry Lemmons:
Well to begin with Sir Crispin, I wonder if you might just provide us with a definition of sustainability. Only because there may be many people out there who aren't familiar with that specific term. What is it?

Crispin Tickell:
Sustainability usually goes with an even more vague phrase which is sustainable development. Of course these phrases beg a lot of questions. And when I was running the British government panel on sustainable development, which I did for six years, we had a lot of -- really had difficulty in explaining ourselves. I remember hearing once on a radio program someone saying what it really means is treating the earth as if you intended to stay. I often think that is quite a good way of doing it. It means looking forward to future generations, without losing sight of the problems of the current generations, and seeing society as something continuous, facing problems, reacting to them, redirecting itself, and generally looking to the future and making the most of what is present.

Larry Lemmons:
We have a College of Sustainability at A.S.U. a relatively new college. Could you talk about why that has come into existence?

Charles Redman:
Just following that idea, obviously sustainability is something that can be important to everyone. And here at A.S.U. and particularly under the leadership of President Crow, we've adopted this across the university to be a new way of thinking, to follow up to confront the problems of today, but in a context of understanding that the way we respond will affect future generations, and we have to do so in a carefully understood way. And so in a way sustainability to me is doing the right thing and doing the right thing in the context of the people alive today and the people who will be alive in the future. So this seems like an absolutely appropriate domain for A.S.U. to engage in in every way. So we've established a school unique in the United States that will be given undergraduate and graduate degrees in sustainability, and we're trying to work with all of the colleges and schools already at A.S.U. to infuse sustainability into their curriculum and collaboration to work with the community.

Larry Lemmons:
You said a new way of thinking, would it be possible to define the old way of thinking the way we have been operating, and why that's not necessarily sustainable?

Crispin Tickell:
I think my own response to the question that you asked, which is what the difference is, is that in the past we've been having a rather partial view of economics. We haven't -- the economics of the past have been looking much more to profits, fair enough, the present, fair enough, but not taking sufficient account of the future. That is the big difference. And I myself believe that the year 2007 is a very important year because of the sudden realization, I can explain why, the sudden realization that current modes of thinking, particularly about economics, are really no longer viable.

Larry Lemmons:
Please, go ahead, continue.

Crispin Tickell:
If you take the way in which you discount the future, one of the things being most important, and all of this was investigated by a treasury economist in Britain called Sir Nicholas Stern, and he took the subject of the economics of climate change and using climate change as his main theme, he explained the science, what was happening in the world, he then said that if in fact we continued as we were, the costs of what we were doing would be immensely higher than if we changed our ways very soon. And the Stern Report, as it's called, has really changed a lot of things because he's brought economics right into the heart of the discussion about the environment. And as it happened, I was in Beijing last November, even the Chinese have heard about it. Seven days after it was published. And so it was obviously and still is a very influential report. So the economics of planet change, which in a way means also the economics of the environment generally, needs an approach in which you include externalities, the true cost of doing things, it includes the price of doing things, it means the cost, all costs have to be recalculated, and you have to look much more at human welfare and well-being than at an immediate profit. That means qualifying straight market capitalism. That's something a lot of people don't want to confront. But that's what it means.

Larry Lemmons:
You had written "Climatic Change: A World Affairs," was originally published in 1977, somewhat precedent.

Crispin Tickell:
I have the good fortune to have a fellowship at Harvard, and I wanted to do something that wasn't Nato, east-west relations, the future of Europe, all those things. So I picked it out of the blue and thought to myself, having a scientific family, it would be very interesting to look into not just climate change, but the impacts of climate change. So indeed I wrote a book, and it was a lucky hit, I won't pretend otherwise. After looking into it and having -- I could then read all literature, all literature in three months, and I did a brief course in meteorology at M.I.T. to just make sure I understood what it was about. But having done that I then discovered I was on to something very important. And afterwards I went back into matters European and I was able to look at the common agricultural policy and see things that go along with this. I was able to talk to our future prime minister Margaret Thatcher about it, and I had a long discussions with her about climate change in which she was 100% on my side. And we began to really get the debate going. And she spoke to Ronald Reagan about it. And he was startled to hear about it, but she made the point, and I think that he carried the point and likewise, with George Bush senior, with whom she also had a good relationship. So we were bit by bit able to make the climate change point. And the climate change point has been made all the more important in 2007 by a report from the intergovernmental panel on climate change which produced a science report on the second of February of that shows very well the problems that we face and the problems the southwest part of the United States faces.

Larry Lemmons:
Would you mind talking a little bit about Phoenix? What are the specific challenges we have here in the valley? It's growing like -- I think -- isn't it the largest --

Charles Redman:
Right now it's the fastest growing metropolitan area, the fastest growing county in the country. We participate of course in the global changes that are going on, so all the kinds of things that Sir Crispin mentioned, the citizens of Arizona will be suffering or at least be responding to them as well. But we have some special challenges that climate change and environmental change that goes with it. Specifically threaten us with. And I think people in the valley are beginning to respond and try to think of solutions, and among them, and the most obvious, is that the climate will on the average probably get warmer, more important than that is the idea being to stabilize, which means we may see more radical shifts in the climate. And that for us is a great threat. So clearly in an already hot climate getting any hotter is very important. And where we've become most sensitive to that in the thing we call urban heat island, which has to do with the retention of solar radiation in the environment in the concrete and asphalt in the world, and reradiating it during the night, warming up our supposedly cool evenings and mornings. This has -- is largely an anthropogenic force from the built environment, global climate change will exacerbate that, and already this is something that people on the street everyday life are concerned about, because I think they recognize that it's not cooling off as much each year as we go forward. So global climate change will advance that process. The other area that we're quite active with in partnership with people in the community is what it might do to our water supply. We have a mixture of very interesting portfolio of water, but among those is the flow that comes either through the Colorado River, or the Salt Parity River that largely originates in snow pack. And the real threat to us here is under many of the scenarios from this recent report; the snow pack down scale to the southwest could be significantly threatened.

Larry Lemmons:
Sir Crispin, obviously one of the biggest impediments is the reluctance of people to change their way of life. So I was just wondering, you mentioned you were with Richard Branson and Al Gore recently. Could you talk about that? That obviously is one way via the media to sort of increase awareness about the need for this.

Crispin Tickell:
Richard Branson, as you may know, is a major British entrepreneur. A most interesting man who has launched many prizes, done many things, runs an airline, runs a train service, does a lot of things. And he has set up a prize which is called the Virgin Earth Challenge. And the prize which is $25 million U.S. dollars, quite a lot, is for finding some commercially viable way of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or indeed preventing its secretion in the atmosphere. I'm one of the judges. The others are Al Gore, a man called -- let me think. Jim Hanson from New England, Tim Flannery from Australia, and a couple of others. So far I've been deluged with emails, people who think $25 million isn't worth sniffing at. We're going to have to think about it very carefully. Its part of the process of saying, if you set a high enough prize, a lot of people will be thinking rather harder than the others would have done.

Larry Lemomns:
Sir Crispin, Mr. Redman, thank you so much for joining us.

Cary Pfeffer:
Finally tonight, Representative Russell Pearce of Mesa reportedly expects his employer sanctions bill to be passed by the Senate this month. It's already been passed in the House. Whether Governor Janet Napolitano will veto the bill is still uncertain. So Pearce wants to get the measure on the ballot in 2008 and has announced a coalition to gather signatures to do so. The Chamber of Commerce in Arizona have previously opposed the bill, that would punish employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. But last week the East Valley Chambers of Commerce Alliance split with the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, saying they support the bill in concept. Joining us now to explain the two positions, Jessica Pacheco of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, and Eric Emmert who represents the East Valley Chambers of Commerce Alliance. Thanks for both of you being here. It's chiseled in stone somewhere that the Chambers of Commerce are in lock step on issues, so this is reasonably unusual. Eric, we'll start with you, because if there's an example of it not going in lock step, you're there. Explain a little bit about -- explain a little bit more about why you've decided to take this stance.

Eric Emmert:
Currently in federal law it is illegal for employers to hire illegal or undocumented immigrants. However, until the federal government steps up to the plate and funds its obligation to enforce their own laws, we believe that the state is in order to come up with some sort of solution.

Cary Pfeffer:
And you're in a situation where those -- there's a situation now where this bill is moving forward, and the feeling is that there's a chance for a veto, and that's why we're seeing this measure being also pushed towards the ballot. Are you sort of caught in the middle here?

Jessica Pacheco:
I wouldn't say that we're caught in the middle. I would say we have a philosophical difference with the East Valley Chamber Alliance. We believe it's a federal issue and it needs a federal solution. Peace work immigration policy or patchwork immigration policy on a state by state basis is not a solution. It's not something that is viable for Arizona or for the United States. So we need comprehensive reform at the federal level. Employer sanctions is a piece of the entire reform package.

Cary Pfeffer:
And are you hopeful that there's going to be some sort of compromise with what's currently there? In other words, given the fact there's opposition on the part of the chamber that there would be some sort of compromise along the way?

Jessica Pacheco:
Compromise with the East Valley Chamber Alliance?

Cary Pfeffer:
No, on the bill specifically.

Jessica Pacheco:
We had been working with Mr. Pearce and with leadership the entire time, and we've given him input and we've given leadership input. We do oppose a bill because we don't think that the state of Arizona can give us a solution that's workable. We need a federal solution to this federal problem.

Cary Pfeffer:
Eric is seems like your point, is that we're in a situation where there's not likely to be success there, and so you're hoping to make the most of what's possible dealing with Representative Pearce?

Eric Emmert:
Currently when you have employers that are going out and hiring illegal immigrants. It creates an unlevel playing field for those business that are playing by the rules that are requesting documentation when they hire someone, filling out those I-9 forms that are required by the federal government, and following the letter of the law. Those businesses are then competing against the businesses that are hiring illegal immigrants and just creates an unlevel playing field and until the federal government can do something, it's appropriate for the state to step up and come up with some sort of response.

Cary Pfeffer:
The reality is that you're sort of behind the scenes factors here are that you're hoping to try to make some progress here to avoid the measure going to the ballot. Correct?

Eric Emmert:
Good question. Back in the mid ‘90's, there was an initiative on the ballot called the Voter Protection Act. And that basically says that anything that is passed by the voters is very, very, very difficult to change. Conversely, if the legislature passes a bill, sends it to the governor, it's signed into law, and it doesn't work out the way folks had hoped, they can then go back and change it. So obviously in the context of this discussion, the legislative response is preferable through an initiative.

Cary Pfeffer:
And just on that same question. Trying to do something that then makes the ballot measure less likely is also your goal?

Jessica Pacheco:
Absolutely. And we would also say that this bill does not address the two primary factors that contribute to this problem here in Arizona and nationally. And that's the cash economy and fraudulent documents. And so many employers are acting in good faith, but they're given very good fraudulent document and they're not immigration document experts. And we here in Arizona, we understand the frustration that everybody is feeling, both leadership, and folks, everyday folks that are trying to run their business and just live here in Arizona. However, a solution for Arizona is not a new Arizona law to address this issue. We really need to harness this energy, focus it towards Washington, and demand comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level.

Cary Pfeffer:
We also know what can happen when these measures go to the ballot. That people are frustrated about the immigration situation in general.

Jessica Pacheco:
There is a lot of frustration. However, a ballot initiative is not the solution.

Cary Pfeffer:
Alright. We will see this debate certainly played out a great deal more, but we appreciate both of you being in here and being able to articulate the two sides of what normally are not opposing on issues in general. Thanks very much to both of you for being here.

Jessica Pacheco:
Thanks for having us.

Cary Pfeffer:
You bet.

Merry Lucero:
Many plants and trees are pollinating at the same time this spring. This is fueling a nasty allergy season. We talk with allergy doctors about causes, symptoms, tests, and remedies, and how bad this season is. And we look at what people can do to help prevent their allergy problems. That's Tuesday at 7:00 on "Horizon."

Cary Pfeffer:
On Wednesday we'll take a closer look at Payson's tough ordinance aimed at illegal immigration. Thursday a visit from Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. And Friday, don't forget to join us for the "Journalists' Round Table," as always.

Cary Pfeffer:
I'm Cary Pfeffer. Thanks very much for joining us. We hope you'll be here again for the rest of this week's discussions on "Horizon."

Barret Marson.:Director of Communications, State House of Representatives;Bob Grossfeld:Founder and President, The Media Guys;Sir Crispin Tickell:Director, Policy Oversight Program, Oxford University in England;

Ted Simons, host and managing editor of

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