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Newly released emails reveal that lawyers and lobbyists for mining companies, developers and the agriculture industry had a hand behind the scenes in shaping Arizona’s newly adopted law on clean-water rules for rivers and streams.
The emails show the involvement of these influential groups went beyond their public endorsements of the legislation. Their lawyers and lobbyists were given access to offer input while the final legislation was being drafted, and the emails show they suggested specific language, offered “wordsmithing” tweaks and requested significant changes that state officials incorporated into the bill.
The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality released more than 400 emails in response to a request by The Arizona Republic under the state’s public records law.
THEY were just fans at a football match. Spectators at a game, a banal everyday occurrence. They were there to support their team, Rangers, but they never came home. Instead on Stairway 13 at Ibrox Park, they met with crushing death and injury. Even 50 years later the sheer unfairness of it makes you weep – no one should die for being a football spectator, no one should die in such a manner. Remember the 66. For the sake of our common humanity, remember the 66. I told last week of how the disaster unfolded, and now I will deal with the aftermath. It was the sight of the bodies laid out in lines on the turf of Ibrox Park that broke hearts all over Scotland and beyond. Only some grainy newspaper pictures survive to tell the tale, as there was no filming of what happened – a mercy, given what unfolded that cold, foggy evening in Glasgow.