BICAS given five-year lease in Citizen’s Warehouse
My readers know how much I adore and admire BICAS, Tucson’s Bicycle Inter-City Arts and Salvage cooperative. BICAS, in its 20th year now in Tucson, provides low-cost bike repair classes, recycled bike parts, and offers public, do-it-yourself, low-cost shop rental with experienced mechanics on hand to help you.
BICAS also has an art program that uses recycled bike parts. The education folks at BICAS regularly give classes and bikes to Tucson’s refugee community, youth, and low-income communities. They also provide, free of charge, ghost bikes for any Tucson-area memorial. What’s not to like?
Unfortunately, BICAS has in the past year or so been under continuous threat of being kicked out of the basement warehouse it currently occupies. The building is owned by the State of Arizona and leased to David Aguirre, a local figure of some reputation here in the Tucson art community. Aguirre sub-leases, or did sub-lease, the space to BICAS. He unsuccessfully attempted to raise BICAS’s rent over 100 percent last year, and when the State made him knock it off, he then told BICAS that they would no longer be permitted to use any of the bathrooms in the building. That edict was also reversed by the State.
Fortunately, the City recently took over the building from the State and asked for bids from the public for managing it. BICAS teamed up with the Warehouse Arts Management Organization and in return for a guaranteed five-year lease offered to pay a significant portion its rent up-front to help WAMO do needed repairs to the building.
Aguirre subsequently wrote to WAMO and asked them not to partner with BICAS, and stated that he intended to bid on the management of the building himself and was the logical best choice as a manager.
But in the end he didn’t even submit a bid, and today the City announced that WAMO would be granted the bid to manage the building. This means BICAS gets to stay for the duration of the City’s contract, which is five years.
I couldn’t be more pleased! As a board member of BICAS I have spent many, many hours and days fretting over the fate of this great organization should they have to vacate their crummy warehouse basement. It now looks like it will be some years before I have to go through that again!
–Erik Ryberg
May 18th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
[...] got a few more calls out to officials at WAMO, but in the meantime, be sure to check out TucsonBikeLawyer’s post about it. AKPC_IDS += "1726,"; May 18, 2010 Post Under News – Read More blog comments powered [...]
May 18th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
Hurray for BICAS! I’ve always enjoyed their Bicycle Art.
May 18th, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Yay! BICAS really deserved this. I am so happy
May 19th, 2010 at 4:55 am
I am so happy for this! Thank you so much for all your hard work Erik!!! I can’t wait to see you all again in August! I will come down help out and build bikes whenever I can!
May 21st, 2010 at 7:34 pm
Huzzah!
June 3rd, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Yay! BICAS really deserved this. I am so happy
June 4th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
I am curious about a few things. First about the toilet situation- it seems that the outhouse gets filled up with crap about 72hours after it is serviced and your blog suggests it’s no longer necessary at all.
Second is there still no cooling for employees who have to be there half a dozen or more hours beyond the airspace being in part below grade?
Green cooling isn’t no cooling. Making it and it’s employee’s hostile doesn’t serve the mission. Green management would have the hours changed so that they need not commute to work during the brightest hour of the day, nor work during the absolute warmest ones.
Just one person driving there instead of biking because of the afternoon but only until before sunset hours it’s exclusively open uses a considerable amount of energy compared to that of thermostatically controlled evap, or better given the basements lack of heat gain.
Rainwater can be used to operate evap cooling. INdirect evap cooling can use graywater. Ice can be biked in- I biked ice to ahome for a few months albeit downstream/hill. I’m not even sure it’s legal for a landlord to let tenants not have control of the temperature to such an extent. Evap coolign would increase ventilation, decrease chemical fumes, especdially over keeping the door closed to keep heat out.
I would like to donate perhaps a graphing thermometer so we know what we are dealing with in terms of not just heat but humidity (composed too much of sweat I’m sure). I bet there are usb ones that can be plugged into the cash register withojut much ado.
June 4th, 2010 at 7:22 pm
Hi Karl,
On June 30 the lease transfers, and hopefully many of the changes you seek will be made very quickly at that point. BICAS’s hours are tailored to the community BICAS serves more than to the comfort of the employees, but I think the employees may like those hours anyway.