Phoenix Independent publishes article by Richard Grayson, "Green Party must work harder to gain equal ballot access it covets"

Today, Tuesday, April 28, 2026, the Phoenix Independent published an article by Richard Grayson, "Green Party must work harder to gain equal ballot access it covets."

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late July, 2001 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late July, 2001 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early May, 2001 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early May, 2001 | Richard Grayson 

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late April, 2001 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late April, 2001 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late December, 1998 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late December, 1998 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-December, 1998 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-December, 1998 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early June, 1998 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early June, 1998 | Richard Grayson

Saturday Morning in West Mesa: Grand Opening of Mesa Grande Cultural Park

Early this morning, we were at the grand opening of Mesa Grande Cultural Park, the culmination of decades of efforts to preserve one of the most important prehistoric Hohokam sites in Arizona. When we first came to Arizona in 1998, our brother lived just down the block, on West 10th Street east of Date Street, so we knew the area pretty well but had never before been able to explore this ancient archaeological treasure.

According to the Arizona Historical Society,

The Hohokam, the ancestors of the Akimel O’odham (Pima), constructed the Mesa Grande temple mound. With walls made from “caliche,” the calcium carbonate hardpan that forms under our desert soils, the mound is longer and wider than a modern football field and is 27 feet high. Construction of the mound began by AD 1100 and continued to at least AD 1400. A large adobe wall encloses the mound and a large plaza in front of the mound. In one corner of the site, volunteers from the Arizona Museum of Natural History constructed a replica of a Hohokam ballcourt, an open-air structure where ballgames were played using a rubber ball made from a local plant.

One of two Hohokam “great mounds” in the Salt River Valley, the Mesa Grande mound was a dramatic symbol of the power of this ancient community. The village surrounding the mound once covered over one-half square mile and was home to perhaps two thousand Hohokam. Situated near the headgates of one of the two largest networks of irrigation canals created in the prehistoric New World, the site of Mesa Grande controlled over 27,000 acres of highly productive farmland.

The City of Mesa purchased the Mesa Grande ruins in the 1980s to preserve Mesa’s premier cultural treasure and to open it to the public as an educational and recreational facility.

This project has had the enthusiastic support of the community since 1927 when local citizens and the chamber of commerce held a parade down Main Street to promote its development. More recently, the Mesa Grande Neighborhood Alliance identified the development of Mesa Grande as a heritage tourism destination as their number one economic goal.

There was a free pancake breakfast after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, but we just were happy to walk around the site, learning a great deal about the Hohokam and their sophisticated society.

We're grateful to everyone involved in this, especially the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, which provided a lot of the funding. The visit to Mesa Grande Cultural Park made us think of Tom Outland's story in Willa Cather's The Professor's House, one of our favorite underrated novels, when Tom comes across the ruins of the New Mexican cliff dwellers:

I can't describe it. It was more like sculpture than anything else. I knew at once that I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber, guarded by the cliffs and the river and the desert.

Wednesday Morning in Downtown Mesa: Groundbreaking for the Metro Light Rail Extension

We were privileged to attend the groundbreaking for the first Metro light rail extension in downtown Mesa this morning, an important step in improving the East Valley's mass transit system, rejuvenating central Mesa, and getting some of us out of our cars.

The canopy over the event at Robson just north of Main Street, where the four new stops (Alma School Road, Country Club Drive, Center Street, Mesa Drive) of the first light rail extension will run, made things cooler but it made our dumbphone pics basically indecipherable.

No disrespect is intended -- we will be having a talk with our camera -- and we were impressed with the speeches of Mesa's visionary mayor Scott Smith; Valley Metro CEO Steve Banta; Mesa Councilmember and Metro Board Vice-Chairman Dennis Kavanaugh; the gentleman from Valley Transit Constructors, which will be building the project; the event's MC, David Schwarz, executive director of Friends of Transit; and others.

Michelle Moyer and the Take Cover band supplied the music,

and there was a lot -- really a lot -- of food

for the crowd that attended the event, which started at 8 a.m.

We got a "METRO Breaks Ground" pin, the first in a series of six "Mark the Milestones" pins that will end with the grand opening, sometime in 2015. And then, hopefully, the light rail will be extended to Gilbert Road and beyond. We have fantasies that someday the light rail will come all the way out to Apache Junction and extend to many other parts of the Valley, transforming the area into the kind of urban environment more and more people seem to want to live in.

As a kid growing up in postwar New York City -- inshallah, we're heading back there next week -- we saw the choices for urban development in what's probably a simplistic way, with Robert Moses and his large-project, highway-driven environment (if you haven't read Robert A. Caro's The Power Broker, you should) one one side and on the other, the street-life, neighborhood ethos of Jane Jacobs, as explained in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
For us, downtown Mesa is the one of the places in the East Valley in which we feel most comfortable, because it's walkable and it's got at least the start of a street culture that can attract what Richard Florida calls the creative class.

With at least three colleges coming downtown, along with other projects -- thanks to Mayor Smith and other enlightened leaders -- the light rail extension can really provide a way for a city with more people than Cleveland, Miami or Minneapolis to become something better than it has been. We're hopeful "Building a Better Mesa" is more than just another slogan.

2012 Best of the Capitol - Best Elected Officials: Greg Stanton & Scott Smith from Arizona Capitol Times Video on Vimeo.

Friday Evening in Downtown Mesa: 35th Birthday Party for Arizona Museum of Natural History

At 6:30 p.m. today we were back in beautiful downtown Mesa, walking up Macdonald past the music fans waiting online at the Nile Theatre to just north of Main Street, where the wonderful Arizona Museum of Natural History was holding its 35th birthday party, with the street in front of it blocked off for many fun activities for kids. Free admission brought scores of families inside the museum to see its many fascinating exhibits.

More coming. . .

We had a great time and learned a good deal at the Arizona Museum of Natural History this evening, and we're grateful we got to attend its 35th birthday party.

And we're sorry we didn't invite it to ours in 1986.