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AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS www.ahwatukee.com
PIANO MAN
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
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Boom! goes bust: No fireworks in Ahwatukee this year
AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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hwatukee will not have its own Independence Day fireworks show and celebration this year – and maybe never again. The Ahwatukee Foothills Chamber of Commerce has canceled what would have been the 42nd annual Red White and Boom! And unless the Chamber finds a partner organization willing to pay its cost, the community celebration may never return. “The cost is escalating, the logistics are getting more complicated and city permits are getting more expensive,” Chamber President/CEO Lindy Lutz Cash told AFN.
“We’re saddened by the situation and we wish it was not the case, but it is what it is.” Even if the Chamber had held Boom! this year, it would have had to move the celebration out of Ahwatukee because the South Mountain Freeway construction has eliminated the fireworks staging area, she added. That was the original plan – until an organization that initially had offered to cosponsor the celebration with the Chamber abruptly pulled out. Cash declined to identify the organization, or even to say whether it was a business or nonprofit. She did say the organization’s decision to pull out came too late to find a new cosponsor.
“There is not adequate time to complete the complex planning process, nor secure the funding involved with this event,” she said. Cash said that long before she became its chief executive, the Chamber had decided it couldn’t afford to sponsor the celebration. “The board had been doing a lot of research on this before I was even appointed interim president,” she said. For the last few years, Boom! has been held at Pecos Park after Rawhide in Chandler, the host site for several years, decided to have its own July 4 party. Former Chamber board chair Martha Neese, an Ahwatukee resident and longtime Boom! volunteer, said she could not recall
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(Kimberly Carrillo/AFN Photographer)
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BOOM on page 10
Ahwatukee remembers Casey Thomas, a life too short
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Tom Thomas and his son Brady mourn the loss of a son and a brother during the Ahwatukee Little League memorial for Casey Thomas.
asey Thomas spent his life working toward the lofty goal of playing someday in Major League Baseball. His journey took him from Ahwatukee Little League to Desert Vista High School to GateWay Community College and to Texas A&MCorpus Christi University. Finally, Casey got the shot he had dreamed about last summer. He was drafted by the Oakland Athletics and played 37 games in the Arizona Rookie League – the first rung of professional baseball’s stepping
stone to the big leagues. No one could imagine that Thomas, 24, would suddenly die without warning at his mother’s Ahwatukee house on May 1, leaving a shocked family to grieve a life that was too short. The closest Casey would get to the major leagues was a moment of silence observed last week at Target Field in Minneapolis before the A’s played the Twins. And on Friday, some Ahwatukee Little League players also held a moment of silence to honor someone who was once their own – as well as a man who
Take the first step – it’s time to enroll! Accepting preschool and kindergarten students.
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CASEY on page 18
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