This week’s show is going to be an honor to a man who dedicated his life for the mission of making downtown Tucson a vibrant and welcoming city. Donovan Durband, you will be missed.

Today is June 18th, my name is Tom Heath and you’re listening to “Life Along the Streetcar”.

Each and every Sunday our focus is on Social, Cultural and Economic impacts in Tucson’s Urban Core and we shed light on hidden gems everyone should know about. From A Mountain to the U of A and all stops in between. You get the inside track- right here on 99.1 FM, streaming on DowntownRadio.org- we’re also available on your iPhone or Android using our very own Downtown Radio app. Reach us by email contact@lifealongthestreetcar.org — interact with us on Facebook at LifeAlongTheStreetcar and follow us on Twitter @StreetcarLife

Transcript (Unedited)

Tom Heath

Good morning. It’s another beautiful Sunday in the old pueblo and you’re listening to K-T-D Tucson. Thank you for spending a part of your brunch hour with us on your downtown Tucson community sponsored rock and roll radio station. This week’s show is going to be an honor to a man who dedicated his life for the mission of making downtown Tucson a vibrant and welcoming city. Donovan Durban, you will be missed. Today is June 18, 2023. My name is Tom Heath and you are listening to life along the streetcar. Each and every Sunday, our focus is on social, cultural and economic impacts in Tucson’s urban core and we shed light on hidden gems everyone should know about. From a mountain to the university of Arizona and all stops in between. You get the inside track right here on 99.1 FM, streaming on downtownradio.org. Also available on your iPhone or android with our very own downtown radio Tucson app. Of course, you can listen to us here on the show through our website lifelongthstreetcar.org. If

Tom Heath

you want to get past episodes, information about us or even details on the book we released not too long ago. There’s also instagram and Facebook if you are so inclined in the social media world to connect with us there. We always invite you to share your thoughts about what’s happening in the world of downtown Tucson. The urban core am out into the university of Arizona. One individual in particular who knew this area inside and out for many different reasons recently passed. We talked about that briefly last week. Donovan Durband. He was an administrator for park Tucson within the city for over a decade. And that’s where I first got to know him. And then I found out through meeting him that he was so interconnected with the development of downtown since the 1990s and had this really love of the knowledge and history of downtown and was so eager to share it. And a lot of the enthusiasm that I got for life along the streetcar sort of mirrors some of his paths. I didn’t know it at the time,

Tom Heath

but as I got to know him, I realized that he and I were really kindred spirits about understanding the value and importance of the history and culture of who has come before us and why we are here and how that impacts where we’re going. And if we lose sight of that, then it changes the direction of where we’re going and it’s not a good path in my opinion. So today I just want to talk a little bit about Donna, in case you have not heard, because I think he’s someone that deserves the attention that he is getting and it’s sad that it took his passing for us to come together with this celebration. But as you walk through downtown, the realto, the screening room, the fox theater, all these places with marquise had his name up there with a thank you message and an appreciation for all of the work that he had done. He was a member of the Downtown Tucson Partnership board of which I’ve been the chair for the last couple of years and again he brings with him an institutional knowledge something

Tom Heath

that is just not easy to replace because he didn’t learn about Tucson because he had to. He learned about Tucson because he wanted to. And I was reading an article in the paper which we’ll link to as a Tim Stellar column and talking about Donovan and taking over at the time was the Downtown Alliance. So this was kind of what the merchants in the Downtown Tucson Partnership have morphed into. But the idea was that the businesses would get together and make downtown a better place. Well, this was in the there wasn’t a lot happening there. There had been some really negative news. And reading Tim Stellar’s article he was determined to not let that stop him. And he started really looking at the history of downtown and bringing back the stories about hockey’s and levy’s department stores and looking at all the buildings and the blocks and recreating what had been there prior and creating this vision of what it could be. Just studied this, this was a passion of his. And then as the funding and

Tom Heath

the mindset started to change the R and Oevo process passed and that got sort of mired in some bureaucracy at the beginning. But Donovan worked with some others to bring some life back to the downtown area by instilling some art and culture into the arena and they brought down second Saturdays and he was instrumental in making that happen. That was just part of that understanding that if you got people to come down and experience the culture, the history, the atmosphere of downtown that you could start to build upon that and we’ve seen exactly what happened. That wasn’t of course the only catalyst but it was a big part of it was getting people to recognize the importance of this city center within our community. He went on to Co. Found the Festival and Events Association of Tucson in Southern Arizona.

Tom Heath

We were actually due in July. We had talked about having a show featuring that because we hadn’t talked about that yet. So Donna Mind had planned a show but of course never got a chance to record that so I won’t get his perspective on that. But he was instrumental in helping get Tucson recognized as a world leader in festival events. With all the things that we do throughout the year especially in the spring, the early part of the year in the spring with the German Mineral Festival, the Agave Festival all the heritage festivals that we do, the Mariachi Conference he got that recognized on a large stage. He was involved with so many things. Like the Arizona Film Festival. Film Fest Tucson You couldn’t go to a major event in downtown without seeing donovan there and realizing he wasn’t just participating, he was involved with the creation of it. So it was, of course, very sad when we found out that he had passed very unexpectedly just a couple of weeks ago. And it got me thinking about my

Tom Heath

roots in this show. And I remember I actually interviewed him very early on. He was one of the first people I spoke to and we talked about the Tucson Change Movement. If you’re in downtown and you see those meters, those blue meters that seem a little out of place, it’s an effort to help raise funds for the homeless and causes that efforts to get the homeless into shelter. So we recorded that and that interview was I heard some outtakes of that and some notes and it was really helpful in understanding downtown, not just from the Park Tucson side of things, but really understanding

Tom Heath

what was meaningful about understanding the history and culture. So I thought what I’d like to do today is just take a snippet of that in honor of Donovan and just share the interview that we did that aired back in, I think it was like November of 2017, just talking about the Tucson Change Movement. So you can hear his voice, hear his understanding of just this one concept and it’s the one interview we have with him. So I feel like that we wanted to re air it today for you. Before I do that, I want to remind you that you’re listening to Life Along the Streetcar at Downtown Radio 99.1 FM and streaming on Downtownradio.org.

Tom Heath

All right, here’s that interview from 2017 with Donovan Durband about the Tucson Change movement.

Donovan Durband

Okay, well, I’m the administrator for Park Tucson, which is a division of the City of Tucson Transportation Department. And so we’re charged with operating all the city’s parking assets in the downtown area and also doing the parking enforcement citywide. So we manage six city garages, about seven or eight surface parking lots, over 1800 metered parking spaces, loading zones. We deal with reserving parking areas for special events and for construction throughout the streetcar corridor, basically from downtown Fourth Avenue Main gate square. And then we do neighborhood parking programs in 15 neighborhoods that surround the UVA and the Fourth Avenue downtown. These are neighborhoods that get overflow impacts from the business districts and from the campus. So sort of to protect the neighborhoods from that overflow, we have these established permit programs that allow the residents to be able to park and not have to be shut out of parking in their own block because there’s students or what have you.

Tom Heath

People like me going to the game trying to find yeah, I think we’ve all been there and then we have like I said, we do parking enforcement. TBD also does a little bit, but it’s vastly almost all Park Tucson. And we do patrols within those neighborhoods in the downtown Fourth Avenue area seven days a week. But then we also get referrals and complaints for parking violations citywide. So we do occasionally go out as far as Rear Ranch and basically anywhere within the city limits. People complain somebody’s RV is parked in front of their driveway or blocking the sidewalk or what have you, this kind of things going on.

Tom Heath

I didn’t realize that. I thought you were really U of a Fourth.

Donovan Durband

Well, that’s the focus. You’re not going to see Park Tucson agents cruising the city. If they’re out somewhere else, they’re going to someplace where they’ve been called to come. So anyway, how that relates to Tucson change movement is that when the Downtown Merchants Council was involved with some of these issues with the homeless, the Occupy movement and all the concentration of what was going on at Bente de Gusto Park two or three years ago and it was frustrating for a lot of people and the merchants were frustrated. But they also wanted to become part of the solution and not just complain. And so John Jacobs was the head of the Merchants Council at the time, and I believe it was his idea, or whoever it was, he was kind of the tip of the spear. But they had an idea of finding a way to raise money in these downtown Fourth Avenue areas to help provide funds for homeless services. And so the idea of collecting money with parking meters is not new to Tucson. You’ll see them in cities all

Donovan Durband

over the place. So they had the idea, why don’t we do that, basically, let’s get some. And so John approached me and said, do you have some old meters that we could surplus and use for this purpose? And I said, I can do you one better. Basically we can get a donation from our meter vendor, which is IPS Group of San Diego that manufactures the smart meters that we installed almost three years ago. Now, so those take credit cards. And so that’s better than taking our old surplus meters that just took coins. Obviously you can get bigger donations if you take credit cards. And so we’ve seen that now that the meters are in place, we see an occasional 25 or $30 donation the people made off their credit card that obviously they couldn’t have done with, I guess maybe if they had a quarter collection at home. It’s roughly about 50 50 on the donations. And obviously having credit cards a big component but anyway, so that’s basically I was approached and I said, let’s ask them for a donation IPS.

Donovan Durband

They gladly did. They gave us 20 meters. They offered to custom paint them. So basically John and I worked out color scheme that would be different from the regular parking, parking meters, which are silver and black, basically. And we wanted them to be distinct, bright, eye catching and clear that they weren’t not for parking. We’ve installed them in areas where they’re not, like, right next to the curb. They’re not next to a parking space, so they shouldn’t be confusing anybody that you put money in and you’re going to get parking time. So we put them in plazas and off right away. That’s not next to the street exactly, or next to parking areas.

Tom Heath

They’re in unique places. I think that’s one of the catching things. You’re walking along, you’ll see this blue meter off to the side and think, Why is that present?

Donovan Durband

So right now we have 18 meters installed. We have two more, and we’re working with the University of Arizona to identify locations for two of these meters there, which I think would be obviously you got 40,000 students and 12,000 faculty and staff. It’s like its own little downtown area, very concentrated with a lot of foot traffic, so hopefully we can get that done and that’ll be very two productive meters. So we got the first one installed May 10 at the entrance to the main Library downtown on Stone, may 10, May 10 of this year. And we worked with Fourth Avenue Merchants Association to identify locations on Fourth Avenue. We worked with Main Gate Square to pick out three locations for meters there. And so then over the last, between May and September, we got 18 of them installed. And so there’s one of the Mercado right at the corner of Avenue Del Convento and that street south of Congress and Heros. And then there’s nine in the downtown core, including by the TCC box office by the entrance

Donovan Durband

of the arena. There’s one in front of the Children’s Museum. There’s the library one. There’s one in front of the City county Public Works Center at Stone and Alameda, pennington and Stone, which has traditionally been the highest foot traffic corner in downtown during the daytime in front of what used to be called the bank of America Plaza. 33 northstone. It’s the county office tower, so it’s set right next to the sidewalk by the planters. We’ve got one now at church in Congress by the Superior Court, northwest corner of Congress. Church? There’s one in front of the Romstead Center on Congress, and there’s one in front of the Historic depot on Tool by where you cross Tool on foot from the Hotel Congress. So I think that’s all of them on downtown. Then Fourth Avenue, we’ve got two on the west side, two in the east side. There’s one at what they call Spencer Park, little park with the sculptures on the north side of the underpass at 9th street.

Tom Heath

I now know the name of that park.

Donovan Durband

Yeah, well, that’s an informal name. I think the Merchants Association came up with that. But it’s not truly a park. It’s actually a transportation property because it’s part of the underpass property. And then next to Hagerty Plaza, which used to be called Windset Stage, they renamed it for Mike Hagerty a little bit further up. And then there’s one from Mabels in the block between 6th and 7th street near the streetcar stop. And then there’s one in the Creative Ventures parking lot but just next to the sidewalk. So that’s around Fifth Street, between Fifth and 6th street on the east side. So then in main gate, we’ve got one in Geronimo Plaza, one at the southwest corner of Tyndall and University, again by the streetcar stop and then one at the southwest corner of park and Second by the University bookstore. So that’s 18. And like I said, two more to come. And while we’re not probably going to put parking meters per se at the airport, the Tucson Airport Authority has agreed to facilitate

Donovan Durband

the installation of some type of collection device. The thought being, as people are approaching the TSA checkpoint for the security area, that they got to empty their pockets.

Tom Heath

Right.

Donovan Durband

They got to pour out their water. They’re going to have to take everything out of their pockets anyway. Why not? To get some change, put it in the canister so that’s coming.

Tom Heath

They should do that more like a toll booth where you throw the change when you’re going through the toll booth, right?

Donovan Durband

Keep driving. So basically our role with Park Tucson is that we installed them. We did really kind of the final site selection and whatever blue staking and permits and stuff was needed. We got those and installed the meters and we maintain them and we also do the collections. So coins got to be collected and we do the bookkeeping as far as the credit card income and stuff. And we send the check to the Community foundation, which then gets it off to the Tucson Homeless Work Program, which is a new program. I think it started last December and it’s a unique program, is modeled after a similar program, I think in Albuquerque or Denver. Denver, I think, where the homeless are given an opportunity to work a shift doing real labor that’s needed to clean up the city or whether it’s landscaping or whatever. Then they’re paid minimum wage in cash so they can actually take it and do something to improve their situation and hopefully move themselves into a better circumstance. That’s ultimately where

Donovan Durband

the money is going for the next year or two. But that program has been funded through some fairly large private sector donations, including from HSL Properties. And forget who else, but HSL donated $50,000, which matched what the city and county put in together, $25,000 and that’s.

Tom Heath

All part of the Tucson Work Program.

Donovan Durband

That’s the Tucson Homeless Work Program.

Tom Heath

Right.

Donovan Durband

Which is run by Old Pueblo Community Services.

Tom Heath

The money from the meters are collected by you through the Community foundation and then to the Tucson home to Old.

Donovan Durband

Pueblo Community Services which operates the Tucson Homeless Work Program.

Tom Heath

What kind of if you know this.

Donovan Durband

A lot of names I know.

Tom Heath

Do you know how much is going directly to the Tucson Homeless Work Program or how much is caught up in administrative costs?

Donovan Durband

There’s no administrative costs.

Donovan Durband

We’re not charging anything for a little bit of bookkeeping. And we committed, and our city manager committed that we would provide those ongoing collection services at no cost. That’s fine. We work it into our normal collection cycle and not really, but nothing is charged through the program. So everything that’s donated, the only thing that’s deducted is any credit card fees from the bank that can’t get waived. But the meter manufacturer waived all the fees that they would normally charge, gateway fees and stuff. So that’s all clear. So it’s very high percentage goes directly to the program. Very high.

Tom Heath

Outstanding.

Donovan Durband

I mean, it’s a function of how much the donations are. Credit card determines what the actual percentage is. So in theory if all the donations were coin then it would be 100% but we collect more with credit cards.

Tom Heath

So you’re still probably 96, 97%.

Donovan Durband

Exactly.

Tom Heath

That’s phenomenal. So I put a few dollars in a meter while I’m getting ready to go to a hockey game. That money gets eventually put back into the hands of someone who is doing work for our community and earning a wage that they otherwise would not be getting.

Donovan Durband

That’s right.

Tom Heath

Outstanding. You said for the next year or so that’s the targeted plan. Is there a long term?

Donovan Durband

Well, Tucson Change Movement is basically it’s a committee populated by representatives of the business districts along the streetcar line. And John Jacobs has kind of moved on from that group but he’s sort of been sort of the founder of this project. So he’s the director of the committee or whatever. Chair of the committee. And then I’m on it and the director of Housing and Community Development for the City is on it. So then the Mercado district is represented downtown? Partnership Merchants Council Fama main gate. And then I think Startup Tucson is on it. There’s downtown innovation district, a couple of other groups. So really now the ball is kind of in our court, I think with this group to try to promote the program, get the word out. I think we need to do a little bit more with how we present the meters so that you can get an idea at a distance of what they are because you tend to see them. I mean, you see them at a distance and I think you said you were like what’s that? And why

Donovan Durband

is there a parking meter in this location. Then if you get close, there’s a bunch of details on it that tell you exactly what’s going on, and the message on the Led tells you what’s going on, but at a distance, you may not know what to think of it. So I think we need to get something more in the way of signage that draws people in and then promotion, some public service announcements or I appreciate you inviting me to be on this program.

Tom Heath

Well, this is definitely a big part of Life Along the Streetcar.

Tom Heath

That was my interview with Donovan Durban from 2017. It was actually a little bit longer than that, but I thought it was perfect to end with that life along the streetcar comment, because Donovan was life along the streetcar. He understood this as well, and if not better than anybody else out there. There’s definitely no one, I think, that has more knowledge of the area, the history since the 1990s. But yeah, anyway, it’s a sad day when he passed, but it’s a great celebration to know the things that he’s been connected with that have continued to fruition, like the Tucson Change Movement, the Film Fest, the Tucson International Film Festival, second Saturdays, the Arizona Festival and Events Committee. These are things that are going to live well beyond Donovan’s time because he built them as a strong foundation and he did it out of love. My name is Tom Heath and you are listening to Lifelong Streetcar on downtown Radio 99.1 FM and streaming on downtownradio.org.

Tom Heath

Thank you very much. Enjoy your evening. Bye bye. Celebration of Donovan’s Life will be held at the Fox Theater on Saturday, June 24 from noon until two. And the family is asking the event to be an upbeat remembrance of our beloved Donovan Durban. It’s going to include a photo essay looking at his life of music that he loved, the food, and his absolute passion for downtown and our local culture. It’s a Fox Theater from noon until 02:00 P.m., and I want to thank you for bearing with me through today’s show. It wasn’t easy to put together. I wasn’t quite sure how to do this remembrance and struggled with it a little bit. The reality is we decided just to do what Donovan would have done and just get out there and do it and not be too concerned if it was the most polished, just make sure it was right and accurate and genuine, and that’s what we did. And we’re going to leave you with music today. Nice upbeat song and it is a beautiful day. I hope you have a great week and tune in next Sunday for more life along the streetcar.