County starts to pivot
Release the memo! … Your two cents … And bulls are faster than you think.
After a hectic two weeks on the national stage, it’s time to get back to what your local elected officials are doing.
And the Pima County Board of Supervisors won’t disappoint when they sit down for their regular meeting tomorrow.
At the top of the list is whether to release a confidential memo written by Pima County Attorney Laura Conover. The request comes from Supervisor Steve Christy, the lone Republican on the board, who’s trying to get his Democratic colleagues to release the memo to the public.
He asked to waive attorney-client privilege for Conover’s January 27 memo related to "Federal Law Enforcement Presence and Operations in Pima County.”
We already know a little bit about the memo. It coincides with a new set of policies and procedures for all Pima County employees if they encounter federal immigration officers with a warrant. It requires that all warrants be evaluated by a PCAO attorney before federal officials can enter county-owned facilities.
While Christy made the request on Thursday for the memo to be released publicly, a separate item was added to the County’s executive session agenda to allow the five-member board to talk about the memo privately before deciding whether to make it public.
If Christy prevails, it sends the message that the County will communicate more openly with the public about the potential impacts of immigration-related executive actions in the future.
On that front, Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher deserves some kudos for putting out four different memos related to other actions made by the Trump administration in the last two weeks.
However, the County as a whole is lagging behind other local governments in terms of talking publicly about how they’ll handle Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The City of Tucson, Tucson Unified School District and Pima Community College all publicly released their policies related to potential immigration raids, but Pima County did not. Instead, the county policy was sent to select staffers and elected officials.
Lesher told the Arizona Luminaria that the County does not want to have to screen for citizenship in county-owned buildings like courts, libraries, parks, and other public locations.
As of last week, County officials were still trying to determine how the recent executive orders will impact how the County can spend congressionally authorized grants. We’re hoping to get an update tomorrow.1
The grant that isn’t about immigration enforcement: The County Supervisors will also be asked to decide whether to accept a $350,000 grant for the state-run Gang and Immigration Intelligence Team Enforcement Mission (GITEM).
Despite the name of the grant, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told the Tucson Agenda on Friday that the money will pay for three deputies and a supervisor to focus on making arrests related to human and drug smuggling in Pima County.
“It is not immigration related,” Nanos said of the grant.
The County has been using GITEM funding for the last 15 years, working collaboratively with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, he said, adding their mission won’t change under the Trump administration.
Performance measures outlined in the agreement call for Pima County deputies to make an average of one arrest related to human smuggling per week and three arrests a month related to drug smuggling.
Nanos has repeatedly gone on record saying that his department would not focus on enforcing federal immigration laws.
His most recent statement was related to the now-signed Laken Riley Act, saying he does not have the resources to detain individuals based solely on their immigration status. He said his deputies will make a decision to detain based on the severity of the crime.
Can you hear me now?: The Supervisors will also go into executive session to decide whether a developer can build a 80-foot tall cell tower in Picture Rocks near the Saguaro National Park West.
County staff recommended the approval of the tower back in 2023, but the Planning and Zoning Commission voted to reject the application, siding with residents opposed to a tower that would be camouflaged as a faux eucalyptus tree.
At least one Supervisor is dead set against the tower. Supervisor Jennifer Allen, who represents the area where the company wants to put the tower, said she is listening to the residents opposed to the tower.
“Nearly 100 members of the Picture Rocks community are strongly opposed to the construction of an 80 ft cell tower in a residential neighborhood,” Allen told the Agenda. “Pima County’s Planning and Zoning Commission rejected this proposal 6-1. Gaps in cell coverage for a single wireless provider do not outweigh the concerns of my constituents, and I will be voting against this project.”
If approved, the tower would be built about a half-mile north of the intersection of North Bobcat Lane and West Rudasill Road.
Some meetings are more exciting than others. The formula for how the County comes up with a meeting agenda every two weeks is so archaic and bureaucratic that we thought it might be easier to explain it in magical terms.
A pinch of scheduling, drops of time lines, hand-written requests from a Supervisor on the finest parchment, a handful of legal threats, enchanted revenue projections, exotic legislative mandates, and enough time for call to the public.
Then put all of it into a cauldron large enough to fit everything into a single meeting, without that meeting lasting six hours.
But even with all that toil and trouble, some meetings are short or relatively non-controversial. When that happens, it makes us wonder: Should the Supervisors — who attend roughly 100 meetings during their four-year terms — put more items on their agendas?
So, we’re asking you, our subscribers, what do you want to see on their future agendas?
We put together a quick, one-question survey to gauge what you all want the County Supervisors to spend more time on. We’ll take your answers into account each week as we decide which agenda items to highlight and explain.
If most of our readers answer with say, “budget updates,” we might re-assess whether we should discuss local budget decisions more often, or maybe start a series of small, digestible vignettes to remove the more mystical elements of building a $1.7 billion budget.
Or if you checked the box for items that are routinely discussed, we could start moving some of those items to the top of our list of stories we cover each week.
We couldn’t fit everything into this list, so we added an option to write-in your favorite topic. Feel free to sound off!
The survey is only available to paid subscribers. Upgrade today if you want to add your two cents to the conversation!
Kozachik to stay at PACC: We resisted several puns here,2 but former Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik has been named the permanent head of the Pima Animal Care Center. While it was only supposed to be a temporary gig when he was appointed the interim head of PACC last fall, County Administrator Jan Lesher said Kozachik was the best choice. The national search for a new head for the county-run animal shelter yielded two outside candidates, and only one of them went through the entire hiring process.
“As I reflected on the [other] candidate’s skills and read through the written feedback from community and staff, it became evident that our community would be served best by naming our Interim Director, Steve Kozachik the permanent Director for PACC”, Lesher wrote.
Water rules wanted: Two Tucson lawmakers are making their pitch for new groundwater regulations, the Arizona Republic’s Ray Stern reports. State Sen. Priya Sundareshan and Rep. Chris Mathis, both Democrats, sponsored the Rural Groundwater Management Act, which would set up a five-person council in rural areas like Cochise County and put limits on how much groundwater can be pumped. The bill is backed by Gov. Katie Hobbs, but it would have to get through the GOP-controlled Legislature before Hobbs could sign it into law.
No money, more problems: The Trump administration’s decision to cut federal funding for “green” projects, may put water conservation projects at risk throughout the West, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis reports. That includes farmers who get checks to conserve water.
"It’s really simple. They are asking farmers to forego planting crops and to do other things that conserve water at the expense of their revenue on the farm. Without that (federal) revenue, there’s certainly not going to be any farmer wanting to cooperate with conservation," said Bart Fisher, a longtime official and former president of the Palo Verde Irrigation District, based in Blythe, California.
An ounce of prevention: Although local officials have been building up affordable housing options, the Tucson Pima Collaboration to End Homelessness found a “bleak picture” when they took a look at the local homelessness situation, the Arizona Luminaria’s Yana Kunichoff reports. They recommended focusing on preventing people from becoming homeless, saying they have “not yet observed any slowing of inflow into homelessness” in recent years.
This is going to get wild. OId Tucson Studios is hosting a “running of the bulls,” like they do in Pamplona, Spain.
You’ll get to run alongside 12 bulls for a quarter-mile during the event, which is tied to Cinco de Mayo celebrations. Those bulls can run as fast as 40 mph, and they can toss you around like a rag doll.
We’ve previously reported that County officials believe $64 million in grants are impacted by the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump.
We were thinking something like: County says “stay.” Kozachik “sits” at PACC. You get the idea.
Does Koz have two county jobs now? He left the Ward 6 seat a year ago when he got a county job overseeing the development of a large sports park with ice rinks, multiple restaurants and other amenities.