| Text of Napolitano address
There was no plan to give Arizona's children the early start they need and deserve. Teacher pay was lagging, and we weren't doing what was necessary to support our new teachers and keep our best educators in the classroom. Phoenix was the largest city in the nation without a university-based medical school and our state was not graduating enough students with college degrees to keep up with our growth.Fast-forward to today. We've created a new grade level by making full-day kindergarten available to every Arizona family. We've made historic investments in early childhood education and in teacher pay. We've broken ground on an all-new medical campus, tripled our contribution to student financial aid, and built up our universities.This is progress, and it is precisely where we needed to go.Now, we must move quickly this year to implement the voter-approved initiative aimed at early childhood.
Panel: Build 'Early Action' projects on time
The staff came back Friday with other options: Delay other projects while carrying the Trolley forward, delay all of the early projects, or keep all of the projects on schedule and work to fill the gap later.The panel opted to keep every highway, rail and bus project on schedule.But in doing so, Santee Councilman Jack Dale reminded colleagues that they were committing themselves to "a mission to find additional dollars."And Del Mar Mayor Dave Druker, representing coastal North County on the panel, warned that if the mission fails, the agency will have to leave other projects behind in the second go-round of TransNet.Besides the Early Action Program, TransNet proposes to fund a slew of other projects. Those include popular North County projects such as car-pool lanes on Highway 78 between Oceanside and Escondido and widening of Interstate 5.The discussion was prompted by the need to adopt a TransNet financing plan as the agency prepares to sell $600 million in bonds this April to jump-start the 40-year campaign to make traveling around the county a little easier.The panel was persuaded to stay the course by John Meyer of Escondido, chairman of a regional watchdog group that oversees TransNet spending.
Primaries post most agonizing choices
If it's any consolation, this is the hard part. When it comes time for the general election campaign, voters will be faced with a clear choice on the major issues. The primaries, meanwhile, are forcing us to figure out not just who the candidates are, but who we are as well. On what is now the issue of greatest concern, according to surveys -- the flagging economy -- Democrats and Republicans truly seem to live in different solar systems. All three leading Democratic contenders have set forth elaborate stimulus plans, all three have ideas for rescuing families caught in the subprime mortgage trap, and all three serve up their proposals with great heaping buckets of empathy. Message: They care. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee does the empathy part but then shifts quickly to his weird idea about replacing the income tax with a consumption tax.
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