Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz) visited the Rialto Theatre this week to highlight federal funding designed to get local music venues open again.
The federal government allocated more than $16.2 billion to the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant for live venues, live performing arts organizations, museums and movie theatres, as well as live venue promoters, theatrical producers and talent representatives.
But when the Small Business Administration opened the portal for the first-come, first-serve program on April 8, the demand crashed the system. Two weeks later, Kelly and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz) joined many of their Democratic colleagues to send a letter to SBA urging them to reopen the application portal before “more independent businesses are forced to shutter permanently or file for bankruptcy.” SBA announced it would reopen the portal on April 24 and the Rialto Theatre was one of the venues that applied for funding.
“We’ve got 550,000 small businesses in the state of Arizona, many of which have been closed for a long period of time, through no fault of their own. Venues like the Rialto are a lot different than a restaurant. Restaurants, many of them, are open and in business, reduced capacity, but they can generate some revenue,” Kelly said. “A Tucson icon like the Rialto or the Fox Theatre down the street or the Van Buren in Phoenix, I mean so many of these places have been closed for over a year now, and these are valuable small businesses. So the purpose of the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant is to make sure that these businesses can get open and provide these good jobs that hundreds of thousands of Arizonans depend upon.”
The Rialto Theatre, like other venues, closed in March 2020 and had to cancel shows and events. Rialto Operations Manager Mark Martinez said they need the help as they have gone a year without any income, but continue to pay a mortgage and also have staff waiting to reopen.
With the venue closed, Martinez said they had to let go of more than 100 full- and part-time staff members.
“They’re waiting patiently, hoping that we can get back here,” said Martinez, who expects the Rialto Theatre will open up again in the fall. “We can’t wait either.”
Kelly and his wife, Gabby Giffords, are no strangers to the Rialto. They reminisced about their favorite shows seeing acts like Calexico and Snoop Dogg as they strolled around the Rialto Theatre Gallery Project, one of the only events the Rialto has offered since closing. The gallery showcases photos many of the acts that have graced the Rialto’s stage by C. Elliott and Martinez, along with concert posters by Ryan Trayte.
Kelly, a Tucsonan, and Giffords, a regular Rialto patron since she was young, said the community would not be the same if businesses like the Rialto closed.
“Tucson would be a much lesser place if the Rialto or Fox were not able to remain in business,” said Kelly. “It really is an important part of what brings us together as neighbors and to have the opportunity to enjoy a venue like this is one of those things that makes places like Tucson really special.”
Martinez hopes the venue will “let people know that we’re still here, we’re not going away and just to show a little bit of history because all the photos here were created here in the theater, and it’s a history that brings back memory for people.”
Kelly visits CBP tent facility
On his visit to Tucson, Kelly also toured the tent facility for undocumented minors in Tucson, which opened Friday.
The “soft-side facility,” which cost about $34.5 million, will hold people while undergoing processing. according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Kelly, who visited the site on Monday morning, said the site is currently holding about 50 unaccompanied minor children, with the possibility of holding 150 and, if not for COVID-19, “maybe 500.”
“It’s part of the process we’re going through right now to make sure the Border Patrol has what it needs to handle this crisis at the border,” said Kelly. According to Kelly, Border Patrol has a challenging job, but “they did a good job thinking through what they needed to support these kids.”
As someone who has visited the southern border multiple times and speaks with Border Patrol on a regular basis and spoke with Interim Chief Patrol Agent John R. Modlin on Monday morning, Kelly feels he understands the difficulties CBP faces.
“Just hear about the challenges they face. It’s a difficult challenge, the numbers are up right now. They’re trying to make the best decision they can with the resources they have,” said Kelly.
According to Kelly, Border Patrol will have 262 additional staff from the northern border to “provide some relief in the office, to allow Border Patrol agents to get out in the field to be able to do their jobs.”
Kelly said he feels “a little bit better” about how they’re handling the processing of children, with children to be held for a maximum of 48 hours.
However, Tucson Ward 6 Council Member Steve Kozachik, who assists Casa Alitas, the migrant welcome center that provides short-term housing for asylum seekers, feels the tented facility is “an absolute waste of money.”
“What we are doing right now is we’re putting families up in some hotels here locally and we’re scratching and clawing to get reimbursed for the money that we’re coming out of pocket on,” said Kozachik. “We can do it in a more humane way, using some of our local partners and hotels here.”
To this criticism, Kelly said he and Sinema recently passed legislation that allotted $110 million to reimburse NGOs for the costs involved in housing migrants. He is referring to the additional funding FEMA awarded to the National Board for the Emergency Food and Shelter Program through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 in mid-March.
“It’s up to Washington D.C., not communities in Arizona,” said Kelly. “Let me make that really clear, the federal government has failed the state of Arizona on this issue for decades now and it’s on Washington to get this right. It needs stronger border security, more technology at the border. Border Patrol needs the staffing to do this job. Also, a positive development would be if we had more judges at the border. I’d like to see that happen. So we’ve seen some improvements, but we can’t get our eye off the ball. ”
This article appears in May 13-19, 2021.
Sen Kelly, Closing the border will save billions of dollars. Don’t act like you don’t know and keep shuffling those children in and out of the country to be exploited by cartels and politicians.
I hoped that you would have been different. The time is now. Prove it.