Don’t blink while driving through Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. You’ll miss your terminal and spend another 10 minutes looping around on a motorway modeled on one of those circles in hell.

But the future holds hope - at a cost of nearly $1.6 billion. It’s the automated people-mover, officially known as the PHX Sky Train.

From the peak of Mount Everest to 600 feet below the polar ice caps, algae can be found everywhere. The plant-like organisms come in many sizes, from microscopic and single-celled all the way up to complex, such as seaweed.

The forces of nature that blessed Arizona with the Grand Canyon also provided high-grade uranium, trapped in nearby layers of rock.

Whether the uranium is a blessing or a curse depends on whose side you take.

Pinal County, roughly the size of Connecticut and ranging from Chandler to just north of Marana, has long seemed a vast, dusty, sparsely populated region of small, bedroom communities. However, the recent economic downturn combined with a new mentality and focus among local leaders is ready to change that reality and perception.

Two hours after Tim Kieff was laid off, he called Jim Clayton.

As career management director for the W.P. Carey School of Business MBA program, Clayton works to find jobs for new graduates. Clayton credits the program for placing 92 percent of the 2008 master of business administration class, within three months of graduation.

Welcome to Arizona Capitol Times third annual edition of Leaders of the Year in Public Policy.

This awards program was created in 2007 to recognize the contributions of policy professionals across the state. It is a salute to those who advance public policy by implementing and championing creative strategies to positively impact the state and the lives of Arizonans, without regard to partisanship or political affiliation.

Though Marshall Trimble grew up in Ash Fork, a small town 40 miles west of Flagstaff, he was first introduced to Southwest history 40 years ago while working as a cowboy in Montana, driving cattle from the Big Sky State into train stockyards in Arizona.”It was like turning the clock back 100 years,” said Trimble, Arizona’s state historian.

Caught in what could be described as a perfect storm, the Arizona arts community is struggling to stay afloat.

Hit by reductions in public funding, cutbacks by corporate donors and a skittish audience that is staying home, arts advocates nevertheless are following that long-standing tradition - the show must go on.

Rosemary Lonewolf made a clay model of a scarlet macaw to present her idea for an art project. It was a piece of pottery that would fit in your hand.

For the New Mexico artist, this was a natural.