Making the connection

We've got an easy way to track the Legislature ... Wanna bug some lawmakers? ... And that's probably not confidential.

Over the past week, the Tucson Agenda has been testing a new tool to help us shed light on the Legislature.

You’ve seen the result in the “Bill of the Day” sections, where we’ve shown you bills that would undo voter-approved groundwater regulations in Cochise County and legislation to make it harder for local officials to raise taxes or fees.

Those are just two pieces of a sprawling, high-stakes discussion that started at the Capitol when the legislative session began this week – a process that can be darn difficult to follow. Legislators have already introduced nearly 500 bills, and we’re not even through the first week of the session yet.

Reading through those thousands of pages of bills and amendments, tracking which bill is headed to which committee, knowing when lawmakers will vote on those bills and being able to quickly group, sort, organize and report on all those bills and hearings can be overwhelming for a small news organization in Tucson.

Enter Skywolf – a legislation-tracking service designed by our colleagues at the Arizona Agenda.

Skywolf is a suite of tools for political professionals who need real-time legislative alerts, bill summaries and tracking lists at their fingertips. It allows organizations to actively monitor and engage with the legislative process to make sense of the madness.

Who's already using Skywolf? More than a dozen cities in Arizona are using it, including Tucson. So are the Arizona Supreme Court, Banner Health, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, the Arizona Board of Regents and dozens of state boards and commissions that need to know what lawmakers are doing instantly.

And now we’re using it to keep tabs on the Legislature for you, our southern Arizona readers.

Those “Bill of the Day” sections were just the start.

We’re also creating live bill-tracking lists that paid subscribers to the Tucson Agenda can use to scrutinize lawmakers’ priorities and learn about what’s happening at the Capitol – starting with this list of bills introduced by Tucson-area lawmakers.

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Upgrade today to get access to our Tucson bill tracking list.

For our paid subscribers, check the footer at the bottom of today’s newsletter for a link to the report.

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Once we add bills to our tracking list, they’re automatically updated when new actions, documents, amendments, votes and summaries come in. So you can click the link any time to see the latest action with the bills we’re tracking.

Paid subscribers to Skywolf can create their own lists of bills they’re following, generate detailed reports about those lists, get instant text or email notifications when something happens to their bills, see how lawmakers vote and which lobbying organizations support or oppose a particular piece of legislation, and receive access to our calendars, directories, and suite of tools to help them better engage with their elected leaders.

And we’re creating other tracking lists on education, water and artificial intelligence policy that we’ll share with readers of our new policy-focused weekly newsletters, the Education Agenda, the Water Agenda and the A.I. Agenda.

On top of that, we’re also making tracking lists we’ll share with paid subscribers to the Tucson Agenda, like legislation related to the Arizona-Mexico border and housing policy.

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Leave a comment telling us which other topics you’d like us to use Skywolf to track for you.

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Bill tracking is just one of the services we can provide. We’re developing a whole suite of tools to help better connect people to their governments.

One of the tools we’ve been working on recently, for example, is Wolfpack, a unique email generator to empower grassroots lobbying.

It’s simple: you set up a campaign by writing a little context about the bill or issue you care about, pick whichever lawmakers (or anyone really) you want to reach, and click a few buttons.

Then, voila: You have a link you can send to everyone you know.

Each time a person clicks the link, Wolfpack will draft up a brand new email using your talking points. The user can then edit that email to their liking, and send it from their personal email to your targeted lawmakers with a single click.

Here’s a campaign the Arizona Agenda made to support a bill authorizing a monument to honor murdered journalist Don Bolles on the state Capitol lawn.

Click the button to try it out.

You’ll see us start using it next week in conjunction with the “Bill of the Day” section to give you an easy way to tell your lawmakers whether you love or hate each bill of the day.

For a long time, Tucsonans haven’t been getting much news about the Legislature from the perspective of Tucsonans.¹ We hope the Tucson Agenda, in conjunction with Skywolf, can help fill some of those gaps.

It’s a good month to be a high-profile elected official in Pima County. Pretty much all of them got a nice pay raise.

At the City of Tucson, the mayor’s salary jumped up to $121,000, while council members are now getting paid $96,600.

This wasn’t a stealth move on the part of the council, the increases were baked into 2023’s voter-approved Proposition 413.

This is the second pay raise Prop 413 gave them. A year ago, the measure boosted the mayor’s salary from $42,000 to $96,600, while council members’ pay went from $24,000 to $76,600.

Prop 413 also tied their salaries to those of the Pima County Supervisors.² And countywide elected officials throughout the state also got raises this month, thanks to a law passed in 2021 by a Republican-controlled state House, an equally divided state Senate and signed into law by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey.

That meant $20,000 raises in their annual salaries for Pima County Attorney Laura Conover, Assessor Suzanne Droubie, Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, Sheriff Chris Nanos, Superintendent of Schools Dustin Williams and Treasurer Brian Johnson.

New face: The race for the Tucson City Council seat in Ward 5 just got another candidate. Selina Barajas, the co-owner of Luna y Sol Cafe in South Tucson, filed her paperwork with the city late Wednesday night. She’s now the third candidate, all Democrats, interested in taking the seat after Councilman Richard Fimbres retires next year. Both Richard Hernandez and Jesse Lugo already filed paperwork ahead of the August 5 Democratic primary, the first step to getting on the ballot. Each candidate needs to gather at least 252 qualified signatures from residents living in the southside ward ahead of the April 7 deadline.

Nanos says no: Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos says his agency will not cooperate with federal officials if the Laken Riley Act, which is still in the U.S. Senate, is signed into law. The law would require federal law enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants charged with misdemeanors like shoplifting, Arizona Public Media’s Danyelle Khmara reported. Arizona’s Democratic Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly, as well as Republican U.S. Reps. Juan Ciscomani and Eli Crane, all publicly support the bill, but they wouldn’t answer specific questions about how the bill would be funded or specifically enforced.

“I do not have the staff. I do not have the resources, the funds, and, more importantly, the desire to do the job of the federal government. If I did, I guess I could run for Congress, just as my deputies have no desire to enforce immigration laws. If they did, they could have applied for Border Patrol,” Nanos said.

Web of services: As temperatures plunge, the homeless in southern Arizona rely on a mix of government-run and local non-profits to find resources, the Arizona Luminaria’s Carolina Cuellar and Yana Kunichoff report. From finding resources to managing their health care to getting temporary shelter for their pets, homeless families must deal with the various agencies across the greater Tucson area.

Big bucks for affordable housing: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has awarded the City of Tucson and Pima County a $7 million grant to lower various barriers to create affordable housing, the Tucson Sentinel’s Natalie Robbins reports. The funding will be used to offer incentives for small-scale infill developers, subsidies for affordable housing developers, and allow for homes to be built on city-owned land. Since 2002, the city and county have received $100 million in funding for affordable housing and shelter services.

Humane Society settles with Farley: The Humane Society of Southern Arizona has signed a settlement agreement with its former CEO Steve Farley, KVOA’s Chorus Nylander reports. Farley was fired in 2023 after 250 small animals went missing after they were transferred from San Diego became a national story. The Humane Society board put out a statement about the agreement, but nearly all the terms of the deal largely remain secret. The nonprofit did put in their statement that "no donation, grant, sales, or any other HSSA income was used to fund this settlement."

Maybe confidentiality is a state of mind.

At least it is in the minds of those working for GDS Associates, who slapped the term on their latest report for the City of Tucson’s study on establishing a municipal utility.

The city, in a model of deep transparency, posted the entire memo, which had “CONFIDENTIAL” stamped on nearly every page of the document.

1. Fun fact, the last time the Arizona Daily Star had a Capitol reporter was 2008. It was Daniel Scarpinato, who later went on to be chief of staff for Gov. Doug Ducey.

2. Prop 413 ties the mayor of Tucson’s annual salary to 1.25 times what the Pima County Supervisors get.