Making their case to voters

Val Romero and Adelita Grijalva take questions from the public ... Leach feeds racist conspiracy about Haitians.

With just days before ballots are sent out, Pima County voters got their last side-by-side view of the candidates for supervisor in District 5 last week.

In a wide-ranging discussion, challenger Val Romero and incumbent Supervisor Adelita Grijalva fielded questions from voters for more than an hour at a forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of Greater Tucson.

Grijalva is well-positioned to keep her seat, with nearly half of voters in District 5 registered as Democrats. She also has 20 years on the Tucson Unified School District board and a four-year term as county supervisor to lean on.

Romero is running as an independent, and more than one-third of voters in District 5 aren't affiliated with a major party. Right now, he's two years into his first term on the TUSD board.

No Republicans are running for the seat, which has been held by a Democrat for more than two decades.

At the forum, Grijalva emphasized the importance of building coalitions and talking through decisions. Her goal is to “build up, not tear down,” which she says is made easier by her work with local organizations that are “dedicated to diversity, inclusion, education, and equity.”

Romero called for “unity in the community” and said he looked at the world through the lens of “aloha,” a way of life that focuses on “treating each other with love and respect.”

Romero says the biggest issue in the district is homelessness, which leads to problems with fentanyl use and public safety. He called for the county to bring together organizations that can train people for jobs and provide short-term help.

He also said officials should be aware that some unsheltered people aren’t interested in offers of a place to stay. He described an exchange he had with an unsheltered man who told him, “I love living in the wash, I don’t have any bills to pay. When it gets hot here, I move up to Colorado.”

Grijalva says the lack of a strategic plan is a “critical” problem for the county. To really make a difference on issues like homelessness, officials need to have a housing plan, an economic development plan, and a return-to-work program, as well as strong cooperation with all the cities and towns in the county.

She said she frequently meets with Tucson officials to work out problems, such as creating a transition center to help break the cycle of people going in and out of the county jail.

“It’s, I think, the first time in several decades that Pima County and the City of Tucson are not at odds with each other,” Grijalva said.

When asked about how the county handled the Covid-19 pandemic, Romero said he didn’t want to talk about the past, but he would “not necessarily agree” with everything the county did.

“I’m a big person of personal sovereignty,” he said.

Grijalva, who as a supervisor oversaw the county’s efforts to deal with the pandemic, likened it to a plane they were “trying to build while it was in the air.”

She acknowledged they could have done some things differently, but she said one of the “strongest pieces of what we did” was provide “vaccine equity” by sending health department officials to communities that had low rates of vaccination and the highest number of deaths.

While Romero did point to “personal sovereignty” with regard to the pandemic, he didn’t follow the often-intertwined ideology of election conspiracists. He said he didn’t see any major problems with how the county runs elections.

Grijalva offered a sharp defense of county elections, saying they are “very transparent” and voters can easily track their ballot through the counting process.

When it came to raising taxes, Romero said he would “probably work more towards the lowering of taxes.” He called for the county to look closely at its budget and “find out where we aren’t being held accountable or where there’s extra money.”

Grijalva has voted against raising taxes for the past several years and she said she would continue to do so until she sees widespread community support for a tax hike.

At the same time, she was just approached by members of a local firefighters union who were concerned that smaller jurisdictions wouldn’t be able to attract new applicants if the City of Tucson’s half-cent sales tax gets approved by voters and millions of dollars flow to the city’s fire department.

“We have a lot of first responders whose equipment is falling apart, who are concerned about their pensions,” she said.

The county is sending out ballots October 9. In the meantime, you can learn more about Romero at his campaign website, Val-Romero.com, and Grijalva at AdelitaForSupervisor.com.

Poor taste: Vince Leach, the Republican candidate for the state Senate seat in Legislative District 17, played off of a racist conspiracy theory at a Log Cabin Republican meeting in Pima County on September 22, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod Macdonald-Evoy reports. As Leach joked with the crowd about Democrats screwing up a job as simple as dog catcher, he said “They’d feed ‘em to the Haitians,” in reference to the nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio.

Council trouble: South Tucson Mayor Paul Diaz is trying to get three members of the city council recalled, KVOA’s Sarika Sood reports. Diaz filed an application to boot Roxanna Valenzuela, Brian Flagg, and Cesar Aguirre from the council, claiming Valenzuela didn’t live in South Tucson when she won a council seat in 2022, among other accusations.

Taking a bow: The head of procurement at Pima County is retiring in February and officials are forming a committee to find a replacement, County Administrator Jan Lesher wrote in an October 2 memo. Terri Spencer has worked in the procurement department since 2001 and took the reins as director in 2021. Lesher said she plans to choose a new director by January 1.

Too much heat: The summer heat in Tucson is lasting longer this year and that’s stressing unsheltered people and the public resources available to them, the Arizona Luminaria’s Yana Kunichoff reports. So far this year, 79 people died outdoors from heat-related causes in Pima County.

Border boost: Federal officials awarded a $275 million contract for the new port of entry along the Arizona-Mexico border in Douglas, the General Services Administration said in a press release. The contract was awarded to Hensel Phelps Construction Company in Phoenix. The project was funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Farewell to a familiar name: Sam Levitz Furniture is closing after seven decades in Tucson, the Arizona Daily Star’s Gabriela Rico reports. The company made an announcement online saying they were going out of business and they would start a liquidation sale this week.

12: The Tucson area’s ranking for secondary school teacher salaries last year, out of 12 metro areas in the West.