Choices, choices

Winners and losers ... Smokescreens … And I can kinda make out the image.

There will be winners and losers as the Tucson City Council pencils out a $2.4 billion budget.

The budget discussion starts next week — in a month, the ink will be dry on this budget.

We outlined the various pressures on the budget in yesterday's edition. The $2.4 billion proposed budget is the same size as this year’s budget — but revenues are dwindling and costs are going up everywhere.

Something has to give and the Council members have some choices to make.

Here’s a quick list of the winners:

• City employees. The city set aside $23.6 million in raises for roughly 5,000 employees, including new contracts with unions representing employees. In some cases, these contracts are expired, with negotiations stalled over the last year.

  Another $4.85 million is being set aside for increased health care costs, although employees (and some retirees) will be asked to pay more in the form of their paycheck contributions and other types of co-pays.

• Police and Fire departments. In the wake of the defeat of Proposition 414, the city manager added $15 million into next year’s budget for essential services. Of the roughly 36 vacant positions in the city budget, 14 will be converted into firefighter positions.

• Public housing. After the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) labeled the city as being in “troubled” status, the city will invest an additional $2 million to address identified issues.

And here is where they are going to make cuts:

• Public transit. The Council has made the preliminary decision that will eliminate five bus routes, in an effort to save $1 million a year.

• Community Partnership Funding. The city spent $28 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds for 146 projects over the last few years. Funding dried up and the funding has been zeroed out for upcoming years.

• City manager’s office. The city manager eliminated nine vacant positions, as well as roughly $2 million in programs.

• General services department. The city manager red-lined 13 vacant positions.

This is the room where it happens.

To be determined:

• Sun Tran / Sun Link fares. The city is still looking into a number of possible scenarios when it comes to keeping public transit fare-free, but they might not come to fruition. While the program is popular in many circles, there is criticism (including from bus drivers) that buses are becoming more dangerous.

• Increase fees. The city continues to look at increasing parking fees, implementing an advertising fee and possibly increasing the fees for hotels/motels/AirBNBs.

A lot of decisions will be made next week, and you still have time to reach out to your city council representative or make plans to attend next week’s Council meeting.

A reminder that call to the public usually starts between 5:45 p.m. and 6 p.m.

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Buried in the middle of the Council meeting last week, City Manager Tim Thomure was deeply honest about how the city is relabeling certain existing services in light of new federal policies.

Anything that includes the word “equity” now has a target on it — so it's being rebranded.

Some programs are being targeted by the Trump administration solely by how their names appear in a database, regardless of their actual utility.¹

The relatively new Office of Equity at the city, along with its Chief Equity officer, their data managers and data strategists will be rebranded.

It doesn’t change the core mission of the department, and Thomure predicted more changes ahead.

“We are wrestling with on a daily basis about how do we continue to be who we are,” Thomure said.

Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz was critical of changing the name, essentially saying it was complying in advance. They didn’t want the city to try to “smokescreen our way through it.”

Thomure said Tucson is not alone with these soft rebrandings.

“For the most part, most cities are actually going through this similar journey of how to whether it's rebrand, reshape, refocus their efforts in this space,” Thomure said.

Final answers: Local school districts are making last-minute tweaks to their annual budgets, Tucson Sentinel columnist Blake Morlock writes. Sunnyside officials are thinking about spending $7 million more than what was in their original budget, while TUSD is doing the same with $40 million. It’s all part of the game of figuring out what the state budget will look like for local education, before lawmakers actually pass a budget (even though the Legislature was supposed to be done with its business late last month).

Stepping up: The Pima Council on Aging was never meant to be a crisis agency, but over the past five years of the housing shortage, they’ve had to slowly take on that mantle and confront a new issue: older adult homelessness, the Arizona Luminaria’s Yana Kunichoff reports. COVID relief money helped, but when that money ran out they started getting calls from seniors who needed emergency assistance. Lately, they’re getting those calls every day.

The hits just keep coming: The latest local cultural organization to see its federal grant funding cut is the Southwest Folklife Alliance, which puts on the Tucson Meet Yourself festival, KGUN’s Maria Staubs reports. Federal officials revoked a $45,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which had helped cover costs for lighting, sound and paying artists for the past decade. Federal officials said the grant didn’t align with “the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.”

Record lows: Despite all the talk from Trump administration officials about an “invasion,” the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector is still seeing record lows when it comes to arresting people crossing the border. The roughly 3,600 agents in the Tucson Sector apprehended 1,327 people last month, according to recently released statistics for April. The record high was about 80,000 in December 2023.

Department of the Fence: Late last month, Santa Cruz County residents noticed the first signs of the growing military presence at the border. An armored Stryker vehicle was positioned atop a hill near Kino Springs alongside the border wall, and another one was seen near Sasabe, the Nogales International’s Daisy Zavala Magaña reported. The Trump administration designated the area along the border as a military installation to aid its wide-ranging immigration crackdown.

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After pro-Palestinian protests swept through college campuses last year, several Arizona lawmakers set out to block them from causing such a ruckus ever again.

That led to months of back-and-forth among lawmakers, and Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a bill last week to clamp down on the encampments that protesters used last year.

It’s been quite a debate.

Some said the protests were anti-semitic and the bill would help Jewish students avoid harassment.

Others said the bill would chill free speech, or that it was so broad that it would pull in everybody from pro-life campaigners to immigrant rights activists.

And behind all of it lurked the Trump administration’s push to arrest international students who protest on campus.

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Well, we finally have a clear idea of what Project Blue is.

Actually, make that a blurry idea.

After months of whispers from our sources, the County finally sent out a memo about the project.

The county’s economic development team uses “Project xxx” to describe potential new companies coming to the region.

While the County says “Project Blue is a company that operates in the advanced and emerging technology industry sector,” the plans clearly list a number of buildings labeled as “data centers.”

The project will take up about 293 acres near the the Pima County Fairgrounds, although the county-owned land will be eventually annexed into the city to secure long-term water delivery.

Curiously, while the County published 138-pages worth of memos about Project Blue, including a map of where the yet-to-be-announced company wants to put the buildings on county-owned land, they blurred some of the images.

They might as well be stock images, as you can see below.

From these official images from the county, we’re guessing this is a satellite.

Yeah, we totally don’t know what this could be.

Well, in any event we hope it isn’t connected to Amazon, which is canceling projects according to Reuters.

1. Anyone remember when DOGE labeled the 177 scientists in charge of maintaining the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile as “non-essential” and fired them? We do.