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SUSTAINABILITY, EQUITY, DEVELOPMENT

SOMETHING ELSE:  Survival Is Not An Option

CHAPTER TWO - Perspectives Promising Nothing Very Cheerful

Web Site Home | The Blog
SOMETHING ELSE - The Beginning:  Introduction
SOMETHING ELSE - Chapter Three: A New Reality

PERSPECTIVES PROMISING
NOTHING VERY CHEERFUL

Facts are God's arguments; we should be careful never to misunderstand or pervert them.
Tryon Edwards (1809 - 1894)

Information is the currency of democracy.
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?  Four.  Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)

Facts are stupid things.
Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004)

I have opinions of my own, very strong opinions, but I don't agree with all of them.
George W. Bush (1946 -     )

The politics began before SAIAT opened.  PCC Vice-Chancellor Carol Gorsuch was already angry that she didn't get to be the star of the new show.  By intergovernmental agreement, the county had primarily responsibility for workforce development.  Since it paid for the rent and the executive director, the county made it clear it had a firmer grip on the steering wheel.  Seeing its influence fall further, PCC grew even more incensed.

While SAIAT would serve businesses with customized training, the county also wanted the organization to deliver workforce development programs in addition to HTHW.  Both the city and the county had obtained training funding through organizations including the U.S. Department of Labor, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), H1B, Welfare to Work, and youth programs such as Youth Opportunity or Rewarding Youth Achievement.  Some of these funds found their way to SAIAT for training at risk populations.

What did I have to do with SAIAT?

Four years earlier, Australian giant BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary) paid $2.4 billion to purchase Magma Copper Company, which had mines in Arizona, Nevada, and South America, and a copper smelter in San Manuel, Arizona, where I worked.  Magma was known to the copper industry as having the best smelter in the world, the best workforce, the most effective management, unparalleled, cutting-edge leadership, and Union Management relationships that caught the attention of U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich.  Reich dispatched staff from Washington, DC and flew Magma CEO Burgess Winter to speak with President Clinton.  Clinton's jaw dropped when he heard about what was happening in San Manuel, Arizona.

Executives from all over the world were coming to Arizona and paying $10,000 each just to observe some of the meetings Magma held.  How we spoke, how we listened, and our relationships produced an organization unlike anything the world had experienced before or since.  Magma Copper Company was THAT good.

Warburg Pincus, primary owner of Magma prior to the sale, described the development as follows: a complete change in company management, Magma reduced its costs of production from in excess of $0.80 per pound to less than $0.60 per pound and increased its production from 400 million pounds to 700 million pounds per year.

Having the money to buy an operation does not imply the ability to run it.  BHP destroyed everything in three years, losing billions.  Its stock plummeted and infuriated Australian stockholders.  Board members drew swords for a Melbourne massacre that included a pink slip for Managing Director and CEO John Prescott, as well as the arrogant and ignorant Jerry Ellis, the executive most responsible for the Magma purchase.  Numerous beheadings ensued, and the new BHP CEO Paul Anderson, an American (the Australians were so furious they refused to allow one of their own to take over) called the entire organization a "dysfunctional family" and wielded a machete in each hand.  The slaughter was extensive and rippled throughout the globe.  In 1999, Melbourne shut down San Manuel.  Instead of an LDP leader and senior engineer running a department of chemists, metallurgists, and various lab technicians, I was holding a pink slip along with 2,600 other workers. I extended my employment two months by transferring to the HR department and started meeting people that worked for the Pima County One Stop Center.  The processing of the 2,600 workers occurred at the San Manuel High School.  We developed procedures for taking people through a particular flow that included paperwork and the collection and dissemination of information.

Not to be overly dramatic, but the process had a creepy, Auschwitz dynamic.  Of course, no one was being killed, but they were being terminated.  Something bad, in some cases very bad, was happening to these people.  Some cried.  Some looked numb or disoriented.  Many were in denial, a forklift operator saying, "This is just a management trick.  They'll open back up when copper reaches 85 cents."

Some, like Rick Seaney, pursued retirement completely with a 12 gauge at point blank range, but there were fewer suicides than our statistics projected.  Marriages, on the other hand, were another subject.  I "lived" a little longer by becoming one of those processing the terminations.  Then I would be terminated.  I knew my termination date (8/31/99) and how to shoot myself.

I asked where all these people would be going, and the answer was the Pima County One Stop Center.  These centers were run by Art Eckstrom, Deputy Director of Workforce Development, brother of Pima County Supervisor and South Tucson Godfather Dan Eckstrom.  He worked closely with Hank Atha, Director of Pima County Community Services. Art hired me as a SER Jobs for Progress Job Developer to help the One Stop Center deal with the laid-off workers - individuals I knew and understood.  I created spreadsheets with job descriptions as rows and transferable skills as columns.  One Stop counselors and job developers could consult a sheet, posted on a wall in my office, as they started to work with clients.  I began meeting the various One Stop employees, some working for the county, some for SER, some for DES, and learned about JTPA and the Workforce Investment Act.  The SER salary was no match for my earlier position, so I qualified for training funds, and as the Internet was exploding (this was fall 1999), I used them to learn Web design and became a certified Internet Webmaster.  I redesigned the Pima County Community Services Website.

I obtained the University of Arizona's Webmaster certification in January 2000 and became a CIW Certified Internet Webmaster in February 2000.  In March 2000 dot com became dot bomb.  NASDAQ plummeted by 70% and the desperate need for computer professionals turned into a desperate glut.  All that hard work now certified me to be unemployed.

I met Vera Westerman, a county workforce development specialist.  She told me that a training program with Pima Community College was having all sorts of problems and asked me to sit in on the steering committee meetings.   When I learned about the disastrous results of the preliminary algebra courses in the HTHW program, I designed the Math Skills Enhancement Program (MSE), tailored to prepare adults with weak math skills to succeed in a preliminary algebra class.  With a strong background in course leadership (more later), I could lead a room of frightened adults through algebra and its concepts more effectively than the average algebra instructor.  I framed the course for fractured adults and taught it myself.  On average the participants raised their math performance three grade levels in twelve weeks.

We modified the HTHW program.  All participants assessing below 11^th grade math would take MSE before PCC Math 086.  The failure rates dropped.  During 2000, I helped the displaced Magma workers, learned web design and built the community services website.  On the side I also built a website for City Councilman Jerry Anderson, taught MSE in the evenings, Applied Math in the mornings for PCC's machinist program, and web design for the University of Arizona's Extended University.  While not involved with the actual Virtual One Stop, I took the initial template created at Broadband Labs and populated the official website of the WIB, PimaWorks, publishing its strategic plan, board meeting minutes and schedules, board member information.  I just considered it part of my job and was not paid to do any work for the WIB.  I was happy to do it.

I started offering my services around town as a Webmaster.  Still at the One Stop, I sent Perry an email in January 2001 requesting consideration as SAIAT's Webmaster.  My portfolio grew.  I had the county's community services Web site, one for a training organization called the Arizona Consortium for Education and Training, city councilmember Jerry Anderson, PimaWorks, and hopefully could get SAIAT's.  I put a lot of work into Ward 3's Web site. 

News of the math program spread quickly.  Participants beamed, and just from the twelve-week course, added an average of $5,000 to their annual wage.  Seeing the results, Hank Atha shifted me to SAIAT in March 2001 as the Director of Technical Education, responsible for developing, coordinating, and delivering all technical education SAIAT provided.  Hank gave me to SAIAT.  I could teach.  Perry joked, "We're gonna work him 'till he bleeds."

How prophetic.

Also in March, GTEC received 80 resumes from individuals eager to become its CEO.  By April the candidates had been reduced to two, Steve Weathers from San Diego, and Jay Garner from Tampa.  The board selected Steve at an annual salary of $160,000.  In May 2000, the city chose to keep funding at last year's levels, $600,000 for GTEC and $140,000 for the clusters.

The press quoted new State Representative Carol Somers, "To abandon the ship now would make that all for naught."  Somers, R-Tucson, had proposed a bill in the legislature that would have provided $10 million to clusters.

$10 Million?

Bob Hagan's umbrella SATC and the Tucson clusters created marketing materials and hosted events about their particular industries.  Dr. Robert Breault, CEO of Breault Research Organization, actively supported the cluster concept and devoted significant energy to their development.

(Robert Breault)  Breault's company enjoyed the fruits of his doctoral work which involved controlling stray light in optical devices and attracted the interests of the U.S. military.  Breault had flown the F-100 during the Vietnam War and established relationships with the military.  He served as co-Chair of the Arizona Optics Industry Association.  His company, well established and able to "run itself," freed his time to support the optics industry in general.  His efforts, combined with the extraordinary optics program growing at the University of Arizona, produced a critical mass that led to the city's effort to promote itself as "Optics Valley," and SAIAT was told that it would receive funds for optics equipment.  (Remember that $500,000 from GTSPED?  We received the computers, but no optics.)  We were told the community needed optics training.

Oh, really?

The press noted that the PCC Desert Vista campus responded by offering a two-year associates degree and certification program for optoelectronics.  John Madden, Dean of Instruction, and Lazaro Hong, the school's technology department chair, were excited.  Hong said, "Right now we are in the process of ramping up."

Hmmm.

"There is a tremendous shortage here. This is very highly skilled work," Madden said. "I don't think we will ever keep up with the demand in this field - it will be impossible to saturate."

"This is a program the optics cluster here has really been pushing for," Hong said.

Hong declared that the optoelectronics program was designed for those eager to start a career or had a job but wished to climb to higher paying positions.  The associates degree would require two years of full-time study or "twice that long" for someone with a job who participated part-time.  Applicants should have a strong base in mathematics.

Duly respecting the distinguished professionals as well as the fine community college, please consider the southern Arizona population with a strong foundation in mathematics eager to start a two-year program at a community college.  Individuals working full-time would take how long?  4 years?  The classes were offered when?  Addressing reality, enrollment in the PCC technology programs "ramped" from around 500 students to less than 150 over the next five years, a 70 percent drop in enrollment.

Speaking of reality, SAIAT did manage to procure optics equipment that year.  In June optics companies ETEC, Chorum Technologies, and Schott Donnelly closed their operations and the employees in "impossible to saturate" positions suddenly had none.  Economic development conversations consisted of much talk, so much talk that it deserved its own special word.

I admired Dr. Breault's efforts to promote the optics industry, but despite his efforts Tucson's reality regarding optics remained almost entirely in the realm of research and high-end work where just about everyone had a PhD or masters degree.  The reality of BRO at this time consisted of more software and high-end work than assembly line positions for people with two-year degrees.

Manufacturing that involved optics would indeed come to town, and big time, but not in 2000, and not according to any playbook that involved a community college.  An Australian based telescope company, smarter than BHP, was about to figure something out, and optics would indeed arrive on the manufacturing map.  A perfect storm was indeed coming, worse than anything we would have suspected at time, and it would make the ability to operate external devices from inside a vehicle very important and most lucrative for some Tucsonans.

For computer and information technology training, using H1B funding in March 2001 Perry hired Bill Samardak, who claimed to be an MCSE Certified Trainer for Microsoft system administration.  Samardak became the Director of Computer Education, and when he arrived, I liked the man for about 90 minutes.  Vera liked him for 9 seconds.

SAIAT's purchase of computer labs did not go well.  Samardak's belligerent behavior almost killed the deal, but SATC's Bob Hagan stepped in and salvaged the arrangement.  Perhaps due to Samardak's behavior, perhaps for other reasons, Gateway took tremendous advantage of SAIAT / SATC in this circumstance.   Knowing what I know now, I would have recognized that Samardak knew little about computers, which had to be identical when populating a computer lab.  The truly adept bought clones with off the shelf components.  Brand names might use proprietary parts.  A $30 power supply could run $125.  The fiasco produced labs with machines having different network cards, hard drives, and even different processors.  Years later I had the opportunity to be on the phone with a surprisingly frank Gateway representative who knew about this deal and admitted they had thrown together leftover parts to clean up inventory.

I inherited the administration of the HTHW Program from the City of Tucson Office of Economic Development.  Noise already existed about the amount of money the college was charging.  I noticed at once that PCC was invoicing the program the full retail price of the textbooks when PCC paid at most 75 percent retail.  At once SAIAT starting to buy the books directly from the publisher, hundreds of them at a savings easily averaging over $25 per book, serious money for a small non-profit.

(Robert Jensen) PCC's Chancellor Robert Jenson was one of those people who knew how to make a buck, and I haven't the slightest interest in messing with this man's reputation.  He had no doubt made huge contributions to the community.  He also knew how to make the dollars flow the college's way.  The HTHW program was a sweet deal for the college.  They raked it in.  The contract charged for a minimum number of students regardless of class size.  If a class started with 14, it didn't matter, we paid for 18, but if there were more than 18, we had to pay for each additional student.  The list went on.  I have the contract. The already strained political relationship between SAIAT and PCC was not helped by the fact that PCC Community Campus President, Dr. Jana Kooi, the college's representative on the SAIAT board, a highly respected professional, happened to be female.  Jana seemed to be an intelligent, capable professional interested in having the right things happen.  However, if Perry was in the same room with a strong female executive who spoke something intelligent with conviction, the man would turn red.  I do not exaggerate.

(Jana Kooi) At the April 2001 SAIAT Board Meeting, Perry announced that Samardak would begin teaching MCSE courses funded by H1B, and I was already an established instructor in the math program and was gearing up to teach a variety of technical courses.  Jana Kooi had it formally recorded in the April 2001 meeting minutes that she objected to SAIAT's having its own instructors or in any way becoming like a school.  About SAIAT's becoming like a school, I agreed with her, but I did think that for SAIAT to have employees who could also teach made sense.  The board duly noted her objection, and SAIAT proceeded over her protest to teach some of its courses for itself, further exacerbating an already problematic relationship.

We have reached an important moment in the SAIAT story.  Dr. Kooi was absolutely right about the absurdity of SAIAT's becoming a school.  Tucson had plenty of schools.  What made sense was a fast, nimble, outside-the-box thinking organization that could facilitate and piece together customized programs to meet specific needs.  The natural boundary that occurred to me was for SAIAT to restrict itself to short non-credit courses completed in days or a few weeks.

Talk persisted of merging SAIAT with PCC.  Dr. Kooi, Carol Gorsuch, Glenn Perry, Bob Hagan, Johnson Bia, Hank Atha, and others met for hours which culminated with a summary document stating that SAIAT would remain an independent organization with its own board heavily subsidized by the city and the county.  Perry got board approval for SAIAT to develop and run its own programs, seek state licensure as a school, hire its own instructors, and offer its own certifications.

I started attending GTSPED and WIB meetings, where an interesting array of individuals with different agendas showed up and, well, had conversations very different from those I'd experienced at the copper company.  A GTSPED meeting was the first time I'd ever been in the same room with the mayor of a city.  In fact, it was the first time I'd ever been in the same room with an elected official.

Teaching Math Skills Enhancement (MSE) was one of the highlights of the entire SAIAT experience.  It simply doesn't get much better than seeing people who have lived an entire life blocked by sheer terror of math suddenly realize they can learn the material and understand it.  The faces just beamed with excitement, joy, and sense of possibility.  I will never forget Jose, who arrived as a frightened teenager with 4^th grade math skills.  For twelve weeks he worked as hard as anyone, never missed class, and completed the course fully functional as a high school graduate.  Jose's final test placed him at the equivalent of completing 12^th grade math.  He learned EIGHT YEARS of mathematics in twelve weeks.

If that does not seem possible, remember MSE was not a traditional math class.  Every second was designed from a completely different pedagogical paradigm.  Jose became a changed person entered HTHW program where he completed an associates degree in electronics, one of the college's most challenging programs.  He landed a job paying $20+/hour with stellar benefits.  His story is just one of many that grew out of the work we were doing.

The City of Tucson OED assisted companies with the Arizona Department of Commerce Job Training Grants.  The grant allowed companies to be reimbursed for some of the costs of training their employees.  With their assistance, Bombardier Aerospace had obtained a grant involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in training.  Many of the courses were those SAIAT could design and deliver for them.  Vera set up a meeting with Bev Paul, Bombardier HR manager, and two of her staff, to discuss the grant and what training would be appropriate for SAIAT to provide.  We had networked computer labs, and it looked like we could help them.  Vera asked me to sit in and answer any technical questions.

Vera and I started the meeting just fine, but fifteen minutes into the meeting Samardak joined us, a problematic development as he had to insure he occurred as the smartest and most important person in the room.  The presence of women exacerbated this dynamic.  He ridiculed them, and within minutes they aborted the meeting and stormed out.  Samardak sauntered into Perry's office to joke about "those damned dykes" while Vera and I looked at each other, sick to our stomachs, knowing that about ten seconds longer than the time it took Bev to return to her office a phone call would occur.

It did, and City OED's BJ Smith filleted Perry over the phone and demanded he call Bev at once, apologize profusely, and "fix the problem."  Perry stammered and turned red.  Instead of calling, he sent an email, a response considered woefully inadequate.  News of the incident rippled throughout the network, and the blemish on SAIAT's reputation was substantial.  I cut Glenn a look and noted that Samardak's behavior was ample cause for termination.  He replied, "Don"t be ridiculous."  Samardak skipped work the next day.

The county obtained a Department of Labor training grant to train incumbent workers of local plastics companies.  We recruited a class of about 17 workers who would come to SAIAT after work for a class that started at 5:30 p.m. and ran until 8 p.m.  I taught the first course of the nine-month program, a six-week combination of applied mathematics, blueprint reading, the use of calipers, height gauges, micrometers, and steel rules.  Teaching the course was a blast.  They were bright, motivated, just not highly educated.  We all enjoyed what happened when they deepened and solidified their understanding of concepts they had been using for years.  For the remaining courses, I recruited instructors from local businesses including Raytheon, Honeywell, Universal Avionics, the Biosphere, and others.  Far more difficult than finding those who knew the material was finding those who were capable of teaching.  Rarer still were those who had the time and willingness to teach.  This was not easy but persistence prevailed.  I located instructors.  Some were stellar, others not so stellar, but we got the job done.  Mike Friend of PCC did a great job working with me for the HTHW part of this effort.

Words cannot capture the spirit and the contribution of these instructors.  Most people go to work in the morning and get home in time for dinner.  Instructors did not go home for dinner.  They grabbed something to eat on their way from work to SAIAT where they would teach until eight or nine at night.

Incumbent workers earning marginal wages and eager to earn higher paying positions through training proved to be a mixed population.  They were fundamentally different from the typical student attending high school or college.  These students were adults, struggling parents living on low wages.  Children got sick.  Cars broke down.  These people had jobs and families and lives and shit happened.  We learned to work with this population, and for a period of time, something truly wonderful and moving was happening at the SAIAT facility from 5:30 to 8:30 in the evening.  Thanks to the vision and work of individuals including Jim Mize, Claude Merrill, Jim Calderwood, Vera Westerman, Hank Atha, Steve Juliver, Kevin Prodromides, Walt Sickel, Denny Rossman, Ken Shaver, Art Toussaint, Mike Friend, elected officials, Mayor Walkup and Supervisor Bronson, and many others, SAIAT was altering lives during these evenings.  Individuals in dead-end positions at $7 or $8 an hour leapt into jobs paying double and triple those amounts.

The stories this activity produced included tear-jerking tales of parents buying new clothes (instead of used) for their children for the first time, of having the money to travel for a Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday, where families reunited for the first time in many years, and grandparents seeing grandchildren face-to-face for the first time.  The list went on.  A father was able to take his son to a Diamondbacks game.  One story that broke me involved those who had gone for years without health insurance finally getting access to proper care, and how they were now able to get "real medicine" when their children got sick.  When one man's eyes welled-up and his voice almost broke as he shared how incredible it was for the entire family to have as much to eat as they wanted, I just about lost it. 

At a cost of about $110,000 per year, we were increasing wages of our students by more than $1 million per year.  This was economic development I understood, and it was person-by-person putting people into high-tech, high-wage careers.

Sometime around February 2001, the IT cluster working with the City and the County created a program to train call center employees additional computer skills.  They called the program "Train to Gain" and promised the possibility of careers as an information technology professional.  Quoting directly from the press, "What started as a way to move call-center workers into high-tech careers is evolving into a comprehensive training program for unemployed and underemployed Tucsonans."

Were we actually saying that learning basic computer operation, word processing, and how to install software would lead to information technology careers?  After learning how to install software (press eject button, place disk on drive, push in), folks were going to be hired into "entry level" information technology jobs?  By whom?  People sure loved to site this program in economic development conversations.  It had all the right buzz words. A Star article dated May 27 quoted DeNinno as the executive director of ITASA.  Four days later another article referred to her as the "former executive director" of ITASA.  Shortly after that, she left Tucson.  I doubt she did anything wrong and only mention this as an example of the distinction between hype and reality and also to forward the argument that when it came to training the already-employed, the community knew very little.  Remember the $10 million bill Rep. Carol Somers, R-Tucson, introduced to institutionalize cluster funding, granting $3.5 million for workforce training, 3.5 million for clusters' organizational development, and other spending?  In March 2001, it died in committee.  Bob Hagan, chairman of SATC, was not pleased, "We haven't been successful in getting cluster funding in the budget yet," although the annual $500,000 direct state investment in clusters prevailed. In June 2001, APAC Customer Services Inc., an Illinois-based teleservices firm, moved into the 63,000-square foot facility once used by First Data Corporation, one of the casualties of the WorldCom fiasco.  APAC received inbound sales calls and planned to hire 450 employees, saying it could grow to 700 - 800 workers.  In the summer of 2001, Tucson was a call-center hub.  We had about 32 call centers employing close to 16,000 workers.  One out of every twenty workers in the city had a call center job.

That summer, Sun Microsystems endorsed SAIAT as an Authorized Sun Education Center.  It made the headlines and the evening news.  The curricula involved system administration (Solaris) and application development (Java programming).  Samardak, already a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (we thought), committed to learning Solaris, and although I had a minimal background in computer programming, I committed to learning Java.  To teach, we would have to pass the certification exams, as well as Sun's instructor training programs.  I bought over a half dozen books and started reading about Java Programming. Sally Fernandez headed the aerospace cluster (SAIAA).   The last week of June 2001, Sally gave six state legislators a daylong tour of eight manufacturers in Tucson, "If we can give them exposure to what companies do and what issues businesses have sorted through, legislators will know what will be the most important thing for industry in Arizona, " Fernandez said.

The press quoted Representative Carol Somers, R-Tucson, "In the beginning (of the legislative session this year, legislators were saying), what's a cluster? Does it come with peanuts or cashews?  Some of the pain businesses feel has to do with federal regulation. When I see Congressman Kolbe, I can communicate those concerns.  How can we work together to remove red tape instead of put red tape in place?"

The state funded $100,000 in 2000 and then $500,000 in 2001, and this was matched by city, county and private funding to provide about $2 million for workforce development, market development, technology transfers, and supply chain development in support of Tucson's six clusters: aerospace/industry, optics, plastics/composites, information technology/teleservices, biotechnology, and environmental technology.

Somers was joined on the tour by state Representatives Steve Huffman, Randy Graf, Mark Clark, Gabrielle Giffords, Sylvia Laughter, and Pima County Supervisor Ann Day.  They toured T.A. Caid Industries, PolyPore, Spectrum Printing, Advanced Ceramics Research, Sargent Controls, Valpar International, Thermal Engineering and R.E. Darling. "There has to be coordination between state and federal delegations and city and county to make sure we're doing everything possible to attract jobs and retain jobs," Huffman said.  "We create a lot of job training programs, but some businesses don't qualify because of a definition thing."

"Such was the case for the new Southern Arizona Institute for Advanced Technology, which offers training tailored for manufacturer needs," Fernandez said.

Had I been the executive director of SAIAT at the time, I would have asked Sally what she and Huffman were talking about.  What definition thing?  However, I was buried at the time, teaching for Pima Community College in the mornings, working at SAIAT during the day, teaching MSE in the evenings, and oh, certified Java programming?  I was pulling 60+ hour weeks.  I didn't know Sally, anything about the tour, or any of these elected officials.

(Larry Aldrich)  Steve Weathers started his job at GTEC July 2, 2001.  Two weeks later, still struggling in its efforts to generate support from private industry, GTEC Chairman Larry Aldrich changed its verbiage for soliciting private funds from "donations" to "investments."  He stated, "If you think this is charitable, then give your money to a charity, but if you want to see a return on your investment and hold us accountable, invest it in GTEC." For FY 2002 the City of Tucson gave GTEC $540,000 and SATC $126,000, decreases from $600,000 and $140,000.  Pima County upped its support to $500,000 and SATC received $300,000.  GTEC also got $20,000 from Oro Valley and $50,000 from Marana for FY 2002.

In July 2001, the Star noted our relationship with Sun Microsystems and acknowledged us as the first Authorized Sun Education Center in Southern Arizona.  From the article:

The Southern Arizona Institute of Advanced Technology has received a contract from Sun Microsystems Inc. to provide training in Sun systems administration, Sun Solaris software and Sun's Java programming language.

The institute, which is known as SAIAT, will be the first Sun Authorized Education Center in Southern Arizona, the second in the state and one of only two nationwide with a primary focus on work force development.

Also in July, The University of Arizona's Science and Technology Park, headed by Bruce Wright, paid the Bablove Ridgewood Workgroup, a Tucson-based advertising and public relations firm, to create a brand for the park.  The company produced, "Technology's Best Address."

(Prahbu Dayal) The Environmental Industry Technology cluster was developing momentum with an annual international get together in Tucson.  From recyclers to handlers of industrial waste, these firms looked to expand their horizons overseas as demand grew for clean, affordable energy sources.  In August 2001, this cluster hosted an event focused on renewable and sustainable energy.  Certainly, some cluster and SATC activity produced results.  The communication and networking amongst the various organizations provided value.  However, the talk-to-reality ratio was high.  Most of the businesses involved succeeded (or didn't) based on the cold, hard reality of running a business effectively, not cluster support or GTSPED meetings. For many, cold, hard reality was about to get much harder.

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