Flagstaff Today - News and Photos

Connecting the past with the future isn’t as easy as comparing apples to apples.But Northern Arizona University researchers are doing just that in an effort to preserve Sedona’s heirloom apple orchards for future generations. And the project is branching out to other campus departments in an interdisciplinary approach to preserving one of the most popular tourist destinations of the Arizona State Park system.

The historic orchards at Slide Rock State Park date back to 1912 and continue to produce varieties of apples no longer commercially available, said Patty West, an NAU ethnoecologist who is leading the orchard restoration effort through NAU’s Center for Sustainable Environments.

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In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Flagstaff man’s conviction for shooting and killing the only Flagstaff police officer to die in the line of duty.

An emotionally charged trial of a Valley man who claimed self-defense when he shot and killed an unarmed man at a county trailhead led to a conviction.

The guilty plea of a young Flagstaff man who drove drunk and ran down a bicyclist ended with a 38-year prison sentence.

The arrest of two northern Arizona residents accused of eco-terrorism in the Pacific Northwest ended with a guilty plea by one defendant and suicide in the county jail by the other. These were some of the courtroom highlights in 2006.

azdailysun.com

Two police officers who shot and killed a Flagstaff man in August have been cleared of criminal responsibility and returned to duty, Flagstaff’s mayor announced.

Flagstaff Police Officer Shawn Gilleland and Arizona Department of Public Safety Officer William Willis did not commit any criminal violations in the shooting, according to a review by the Yavapai County Attorney’s Office. That office was asked to review the case to avoid potential conflicts with Coconino County officials.

Kyle Garcia, 23, was shot and killed after the two gang officers pulled him over for playing his stereo too loudly.

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Friction between packing materials likely caused last week’s fire at the SCA Tissue plant in Flagstaff. Capt. Mark Johnson from the Flagstaff Fire Department said Thursday that investigators determined that the fire, which occurred late morning on Dec. 20 in the plant’s waste-paper warehouse, was accidentally sparked when baling wire and paper on the large paper bundles rubbed together and got overheated.

“It looks like, just in the process of moving some of that around, some of it got hot,” Johnson said.

Johnson said the fire broke out in a part of the warehouse that could not have been easily accessible by people, and there were no electrical components nearby, such as light bulbs or heaters.

azdailysun.com

People usher in the new year with horns, champagne and noisemakers. All well and good, but if you really want to do it right, there’s nothing like lowering a 70-pound, 6-foot-tall, well-lit metallic pinecone.

You might think such a New Year’s Eve breakthrough is recent, given advances in festive technology. But Flagstaff’s annual Pine Cone Drop goes back to 1999, a sand-weighted plastic trash can and lots of hot glue.

The huge pinecone that draws thousands to downtown Flagstaff each New Year’s Eve was merely a random thought launched at a meeting of Weatherford Hotel management seven years ago.

azcentral.com

Home improvement retailer Home Depot will build a second Flagstaff store, Flagstaff Mall officials announced Wednesday.

Expected to open next fall, the 110,000 square-foot store will be the anchor tenant in a new, 435,000 square-foot retail center adjacent to Flagstaff Mall, both owned by Westcor.

When finished, the mall expansion will double the amount of retail space currently at the mall.

azdailysun.com

Laura Tohe, an associate professor of English at ASU, grew up listening to stories, so it’s no wonder that she enjoys traveling the state telling tales as a speaker for the Arizona Humanities Council (AHC).For her years of work with the AHC, “telling the stories that help us to understand and relate to each other,” Tohe has received the AHC’s Dan Shilling Public Scholar Award for 2006.

Tohe, a Navajo, or Diné, has been a member of the AHC Speakers Bureau since 1994. She gives four different presentations: “Armed With Our Language, We Went to War: The Diné/Navajo Code Talkers,” “Dick, Jane, Puff, and Spot: The Boarding School Era,” “Storytelling Tradition Among Southwestern American Indian Writers and Storytellers” and “Women in Charge of Themselves: Southwestern Matrilineal Cultures.”

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PHOENIX — With 214 murders by November, Phoenix is on pace to have one of its highest murder tolls in a decade.

But because of its ballooning population, the city’s murder rate remains an average 14.5 per 100,000 people, the same as 2005. It’s about three times the national average.

The number of murders climbed this year in New York and many other major U.S. cities after many years of decline, reaching their highest levels in a decade in some places. But Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff appear to have bucked that trend….

….In Flagstaff, Sgt. Tom Boughner said police reported just one murder in 2006. Boughner said police usually investigate about two murders each year in the northern Arizona city of about 57,000 people.

KVOA

The downtown revitalization project may be the perfect microcosm in a study of outgoing City Manager Dave Wilcox’s role in Flagstaff city politics.

Heritage Square, once a vacant parcel of land destined to be a parking lot, has become a vibrant economic beacon in the heart of downtown area, with tourists and shoppers spending their hard-earned cash in shops, galleries and restaurants.

Absent from downtown’s city streets is the common urban detritus — broken glass, discarded trash and used gum.

But the roar of a passing fire engine, carrying three firefighters, instead of four, is a reminder of Wilcox’s iron fist in budget matters.

Over the last 14 years as city manager, Wilcox has served seven city councils and two mayors and lasted nearly three times as long as the typical city manager.

But along the way, he has become a polarizing figure, publicly praised by friends and colleagues and privately criticized by some segments of the community, who believe Wilcox has micromanaged the city’s budget and ignored the current city council’s priorities.

“Anything you like about Flagstaff that has happened in the last 14 years, Wilcox has his fingerprints on it,” says former Mayor Chris Bavasi. “On the other hand, anything you don’t like about Flagstaff, also has Wilcox’s fingerprints on it.”

azdailysun.com

President orders his VP to quit interfering in Desert Rock affair

Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. has directed Vice President Frank Dayish Jr. to “curtail any and all efforts to intervene” in the Desert Rock resistance movement.

“By the authority vested in me as President of the Navajo Nation and pursuant to 1 N.N.C. (Section) 203(C) and 2 N.N.C. (Section) 1005(B), I write to inform you that I am personally addressing matters related to the Desert Rock Energy Project situation.

“I am working closely with the Navajo Department of Justice and representatives of Din Power Authority,” Shirley said in a Dec. 19 memorandum to Dayish and copied to Attorney General Louis Denetsosie.

“To avoid conflicting and inconsistent messages from the Office of the President/Vice President, I hereby direct that you curtail any and all efforts to intervene on this matter,” Shirley told Dayish.

Gallup Independent

Flagstaff’s hotels don’t like the timing of tonight’s public hearing on a plan for a new 164-room competitor.

Mark Ross, president of the Flagstaff Innkeepers Association, said he was dismayed the public hearing on the Courtyard Marriott would be heard by the City Council less than a week before Christmas, saying some residents will be unable to voice their concerns about the project.

“It is being pushed through awful quick,” Ross said….

….Nackard pleaded no contest to charges that he illegally cut down hundreds of trees on the site that hindered his plans for a conference center. He paid a $9,000 fine.

City staffers acknowledge that the current plans for the proposed three-story hotel would be difficult to implement if the trees had never been cut down.

Concerns over the hotel’s proposed roofline and revegetation of the denuded limestone hillside dominated the planning and zoning commission hearing in late November, prompting commissioners to attach a long list of conditions to the rezoning request before approving it.

The commissioners had tabled making a decision on the hotel earlier in the month, saying they were troubled by the height of the lodge-style hotel.

Hotel Online

The dirt road winds through desert grasslands and over sandstone outcroppings before it ends — sooner than expected — at a camp built by Navajos who refer to themselves as the “resisters.”

For more than a week, they have blocked the road to the site of a $3 billion coal-fired power plant planned by the Navajo Nation’s Dine Power Authority and Houston-based Sithe Global Power.

They see the Desert Rock Energy Project as a threat to tribal resources, the environment and cultural landmarks that dot northwestern New Mexico.

“We’re here to stay,” Lucy Willie, vice president of the Dooda Desert Rock Committee, told supporters on an Internet blog site Wednesday.

But Sithe and DPA officials plan on staying, too.

They were granted a court order Wednesday that allows access to the site to continue survey work for an environmental impact statement. The study, along with an air permit from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is needed before construction can began.

Jackson Hole Star Tribune

The search for a missing plane has been expanded. The new search area has been expanded to an 18-hundred square mile zone in Eastern Arizona.

The single-engine plane piloted by Cynthia Anderson took off Monday from Winslow heading to Henderson, Nevada. A search was launched when relatives reported her overdue.

Anderson is a nurse on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona. The Arizona Division of Emergency Management is coordinating the search.

Searchers asked for support from Arizona National Guard Black Hawk helicopters. Fixed-wing aircraft with the Civil Air Patrol have been searching an area northeast of Phoenix where Anderson’s Cirrus SR-22 was last tracked on Tuesday.

Anderson’s last known radar location was 37 miles north of Globe. Officials believe she was heading southeast toward the Chandler Airport to avoid bad weather.

KVOA

A Navajo Army reservist seriously wounded in Iraq is going to be spending Christmas at home.

Army Spc. Alry Billiman, 27, of Buell Park was initially told by his doctor in San Diego that he wouldn’t be able to make the trip because he was recovering from his eighth surgery on his amputated right arm.

But Billiman says the doctor reconsidered 10 minutes later and decided the best place for recovery was the Navajo Nation among family and friends.

Within hours, Billiman, his wife, Katara, and their one-year-old daughter found themselves on a small plane heading to Window Rock.

He was honored after his return by the Navajo Nation Council, which was meeting in special session.

Arizona Republic

Arizona’s new ranking as the nation’s fastest growing state illustrates challenges already well known to the state’s leaders.

Relief for commuters on urban freeways with Los Angeles-style clogs. New schools and campuses for both kindergartners and university students. Water for people living in cities far from reservoirs and flowing rivers. And thousands and thousands of new jobs every year as the state’s population swells due to migration both from within the United States and from other countries.

Census Bureau data released Friday said Arizona’s population growth rate of 3.6 percent during the year ended July 1 was the fastest in the nation, ending a 19-year stretch when Nevada had that distinction, with Arizona usually nipping at the heals of its Sunbelt neighbor….

….Meanwhile, the University of Arizona (Tucson) and Northern Arizona University (Flagstaff) have established outposts in tandem with two-year community colleges in other parts of the state long regarded as rural but increasingly the nexus of population growth.

FOX11AZ.com

At least five men arrested, more than 80 counts levied, a yet-unknown number of victims and an undetermined amount money scammed lie in the wake of a recently busted check washing ring.

According to Flagstaff police, detectives began investigating the criminal syndicate several months ago. Police say the suspects stole checks from street-side mailboxes, altered the documents to show different payees, dates and amounts, then cashed the checks at local businesses using false identification.

azdailysun.com

The search continues for a missing plane that vanished from radar after taking off from Northern Arizona.

The plane took off from the Winslow Lindbergh Airport on Tuesday and is believed to have been en route to Henderson, Nev.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Cynthia Anderson took off right in the middle of a storm and not long after takeoff the plane fell off the radar.

An FAA spokesperson said a signal believed to be from the plane’s emergency beacon has been picked up in southern Nevada.

Anderson is said to work as a nurse in Chinle, Ariz.

azfamily.com

A third incarnation of the proposed Courtyard Marriott emerged during a public hearing Tuesday night, a middle ground between the two proposed rooflines showcased at two planning and zoning meetings last month.

The latest design was a combination between the first design, which used a lodge-style architecture and was criticized by commissioners for being too tall, and a second design with a lowered roofline.

The new design saw the return of the lodgelike design, although the roof was scaled back from the original design’s height.

azdailysun.com

A Flagstaff firefighter has been injured today while battling a two alarm fire at the S-C-A Tissue plant.

The fire broke-out shortly before 11 this morning.

When firefighters arrived, they were faced with heavy smoke coming from the front of the 106-thousand square foot business.

A Flagstaff Fire Captain says the blaze quickly escalated and a second alarm was called. About 30 firefighters fought the fire.

The injured firefighter was transported to Flagstaff Medical Center with non-life threatening injuries.

The fire is under investigation.

There’s no immediate indication as to cause. Damage amounts are pending.

S-C-A Tissue produces paper towels, napkins and tissue.

KVOA

Wing Mountain opened for sledding Tuesday under the management of a Phoenix company that will be charging most visitors $10 per car to enter.

This will be the only pay-to-sled hill and snowplay area near Flagstaff, anticipated for use mostly by Phoenix visitors.

Personnel from Coconino National Forest, Flagstaff Nordic Center, law enforcement agencies, Coconino County and the Flagstaff Visitors and Conventions Bureau sitting on a task force agreed to offer management of the sledding hill to a private company following complaints about too much trash and cars sliding off the road.

azdailysun.com

See also: Forest Service Wing Mountain Website