August 2026
Loved this issue? Pass it along. Send it to a friend and tell them to subscribe — new issues land in their inbox once a month.
“I just love reading this newsletter, and the way you write is so engaging. I am in awe of your ‘interviews’ and how you make historical figures come alive with their own history and how they connect with our community today.” Deven Sloan
August in Oro Valley is the long exhale after July’s fireworks and the ballot box. The monsoon is in its stride now — afternoon clouds building over the Catalinas most days, the kind of storms that turn washes into rivers for an hour and then vanish. The election has a shape to it: a Mayor-Elect and three Council Members-Elect were elected. Kids head back to school this month, the desert is green in a way it only gets a few weeks a year, and the Town keeps moving. This is a month for paying attention to what comes next.
What's New in OV
Town Updates
The Primary Election on July 21 results. Congratulations to:
- Mayor-Elect Melanie Barrett
- Council Member-Elect Rosa Dailey
- Council Member-Elect Rhonda Pina
- Council Member-Elect Matt Wood
New Business Alert
The Town of Oro Valley continues to welcome new businesses this summer. Among the highlights:
- Complete Canine — 10140 N. Oracle Rd. #140
- Ciao Down — second location opening the week of August 4 at 10565 N. Oracle Rd., next to First Watch. Same wood-fired pizzas as the original, plus a new Zero Proof Sparkle Bar and Olipop craft sodas (beer, wine, and cocktails coming in September).
- Empty Cup Wellness — 10132 N. Oracle Rd. #180
- Freebird Shoppe — 11061 N. Oracle, Studio 150
- Jimmy John’s — 9660 N. Oracle Rd. #150
- Legacy Learning Community — a new private special-education school opens for classes August 5 at its West Magee Road campus, the organization’s first in the Tucson area. There’s still room to enroll.
- Pet Care LLC — 7861 N. Oracle Rd.
- Sanova Urgent Care — 15883 N. Oracle Rd.
Welcome, neighbors.
Ongoing every Saturday — Oro Valley Farmers Market at Steam Pump Ranch, Saturday mornings.
Featured Citizen
Dick Eggerding is 93, and he still remembers exactly what Oro Valley looked like the day he decided it needed art. “There was no town hall, no town, nothing,” he says of arriving in 1988. “I’m an entrepreneur by nature. I love to start things.” Nobody stopped him then. Nobody has since.
Before Oro Valley, Eggerding was a trained tenor who once shared a stage with Broadway composer Richard Rodgers, a Korean War draftee who survived a mid-Pacific rescue at sea, and a 20-something Army corporal who raised enough money from fellow soldiers to build a home for 34 mixed-race children ostracized in postwar Japan. He spent 35 years in commercial insurance before retiring to Oro Valley in 1988 — not to slow down, but to start again.
He recruited a friend, Bob Weede, and by the mid-1990s the two were running juried arts festivals that survived dust devils and drew artists from as far as Taos. In 1997 they founded the Greater Oro Valley Arts Council, and Eggerding helped push through the town’s public art ordinance — the reason Oro Valley now has hundreds of public art pieces scattered across town, funded by one percent of new construction costs. His arts council’s high point came on July 4, 2003, with a Tucson Symphony performance of the 1812 Overture complete with real cannon fire, drawing 8,000 people.
This is Part One of a two-part series. Part Two covers the fight to save Naranja Park and Steam Pump Ranch, and the origins of the Arizona Heroes Memorial.
Read the full profile → Featured Business
Drive along the frontage road in Oro Valley, and you might pass Toscana Studio and Gallery a hundred times without knowing it’s there. Ask around the local arts community long enough, though, and someone will eventually tell you: you’ve got to go see Linda.
Owner Linda Ahearn built Toscana almost by accident — a garage sculpture lesson for a few elementary schoolers that outgrew her home, then a neighbor’s empty commercial unit offered rent-free just to see what would happen. Two decades later, it’s both a working art school and a public gallery: a packed after-school kids’ program and summer camps that draw well over a hundred students, alongside adult painting, drawing, and life-drawing classes.
The gallery side has evolved too. Once mostly rented wall space for outside artists, it now shows primarily Ahearn’s own work — desert landscapes painted en plein air at spots like Catalina State Park and Sabino Canyon, original oils on linen with no prints or reproductions. “I like the real deal,” she says.
Ahearn’s own path here wasn’t a straight line — an early scholarship to art school, a year sculpting inside a Medici palace in Florence, a decade in retail visual display, and a serious neck injury that sidelined her for six years before her family’s move to Tucson brought Toscana to life. Today she splits her time between running the studio and, finally, her own art practice.
Read the full profile → Our Monthly Series: Featured Founding Citizen -- Alexander Hamilton
Conversations Across Centuries · Mythical Figures
Editor’s Note: Orphan, immigrant, soldier, Treasury Secretary — Alexander Hamilton built the financial architecture the country still runs on, and picked more fights than any Founder except perhaps Adams. This one is about the man who believed institutions, not personalities, were what would make the experiment last.
In our eighth installment of Conversations Across Centuries, we sit down with Hamilton not long after the ratification fights, ledger still open on the table in front of him. He talks about arriving in New York with nothing, about Washington’s staff and the war, about the Bank, the debt plan, and the argument that a strong center was the only thing standing between the states and chaos. He is characteristically unable to let a disagreement lie.
“A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing,” he says, then adds, almost as an aside, “though I grant you it is a difficult thing to explain to a farmer.”
He talks about local government too — about how a town’s water, its budget, its funding decisions are not small matters but the same argument he had at the Constitutional Convention, playing out at a smaller scale. “Union is tested locally before it is tested nationally,” he says. “Pay attention to your Town Council. I did not have the luxury of one.”
Read the full feature → Our Monthly Series: Mythical Figure -- Johnny Appleseed
Editor’s Note: Barefoot, tin-pot hat, a sack of seeds over one shoulder — Johnny Appleseed has been America’s patron saint of planting for two centuries. In a month when the desert is greener than it’s been all year and kids are heading back to school with new notebooks, we asked him what he’d plant in Oro Valley.
In our August installment of the Mythical Figures Interview Series, Johnny Appleseed turns up at a monsoon-swollen wash near Honey Bee Canyon, delighted and a little bewildered by a landscape with no apples in it. He is quickly talked out of planting an orchard and into a longer conversation about what “planting” actually means in a desert town — mesquite, palo verde, the kind of civic seeds that take root slower than fruit trees but last longer.
“I never planted for myself,” he says. “I planted for the folks who’d come after and wonder who left this for them. Seems to me that’s what a school year is too. What’s a Town Council, if not a nursery for seeds you won’t see bear fruit yourself?”
Read the full feature → August Events Guide
August is a month with an abundance of live music, Chamber events, and lazy evenings.
August 1
August 2 – 8
August 9 – 15
August 16 – 22
August 23 – 29
Recurring Events
- Farmers Markets: Every Saturday, 8 am-12 pm at Steam Pump Ranch
- Second Saturday: Second Saturday Each Month, 8:00 am-12:00 pm
- Town Council: August 12th, at 6:00 pm
Want to add your event? Email events@iloveov.com
See Full Calendar
;>)