The Agenda Review: Curt's top five from the archive

We’ve gained a lot of new subscribers since our launch in July and we know that our readers are busy people who probably haven’t had time to pore through the Tucson Agenda archives.

Taking a page from the Arizona Daily Star’s book, we’re each highlighting our top five favorite stories of the year (or the past five months) and giving you some behind-the-scenes details about why it made our list and what’s happened since it published.

Curt is sharing his favorite stories today (in no particular order.) If you missed Caitlin’s, you can find those here.

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This one still gets under my skin. I was paying close attention to campaign finance reports in the weeks leading up to the August primary elections for Tucson’s mayor and three city council seats. As I waited for the reports to come in, I also was watching the daily tally of ballots voters had returned already go up and up. By the time voters saw the updated finance reports, nearly half the ballots were already cast.

The public has the right to know who’s financing candidates’ campaigns. That’s why we have laws requiring candidates to file these reports. But the way state law is written, the deadline for candidates to file their reports is long after most Tucsonans get their ballots. As a result, Tucson voters had no idea who funded the bulk of the campaigns.

I wish I could say the problem has been fixed. Maybe legislators will deal with it in the upcoming legislative session. But my money’s on the same problem rearing its head again during next year’s elections.

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I’m not a creative writer, so this was a bit of a risk. But I couldn’t resist the chance to satirize national news coverage of the border. National outlets have gotten better at covering the border in recent years, but for a long, long time they made it sound like the only people who lived in Southern Arizona were a handful of ranchers.

When New York City started dealing with tens of thousands of asylum seekers, I figured turnabout was fair play and made it sound like the only people who lived in New York were characters from television shows and movies.

Our readers seemed to like it, so I’m looking for my next chance to use satire in the Agenda. Something tells me I’ll get more than a few chances once the Legislature is back in session.

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I’m never happier than when I’m digging through archives. This fall, Tucson voters were debating whether to give big pay raises to the mayor and council. Their salaries are absurdly low and they hadn’t gotten a raise since 1999. So a city-appointed citizens commission came up with Prop 413.

An Agenda reader pointed me to an archive of the commission’s meetings. It turned out to be a gold mine of transcripts and audio recordings. I went through them all, read the binder of information the City Clerk’s Office provides the commissioners, and put together a story about how they came up with Prop 413.

The final vote was really close, with the “yes” votes winning. The margin was so small most people expected it would trigger a recount under state law. But the city attorney looked at the statute and said it didn’t apply to this kind of election.

Since then, Tucson officials asked the attorney general to weigh in on whether they need to do a recount. No word yet. The attorney general still has that request listed as pending.

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When we launched the Agenda, we knew news coverage of local government was a shadow of what it was years ago. That fact slapped me in the face when I started doing research for this story.

I used documents from the City Clerk’s Office and the archives of local news outlets to see how often incumbents win in Tucson (pretty much always, it turned out). I worked backward from the present and when I got to about 15 years ago, the number of news stories about local politicians exploded.

We had the Arizona Daily Star, the Tucson Citizen, the Tucson Weekly and other news outlets all digging up dirt and sharing gossip from City Hall. Together, they painted a vibrant picture of the personalities that shaped Tucson’s politics. That’s the kind of local government news coverage I’d like for the Agenda to help rebuild.

As for incumbents winning, the pattern held in November and all the incumbents kept their seats on the council.

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To me, this is a quintessential local government story. I want to write stories like this over and over again.

I was putting together a timeline of city water regulations for a different story when I noticed one of those ordinances pop up on the agenda of an upcoming Tucson City Council meeting.

The ordinance required businesses use more rainwater for their landscaping. The council passed the ordinance in the late 2000s, which got the city a lot of credit from water experts and news outlets. But the ordinance didn’t exactly live up to the hype. The city wasn’t enforcing it at all and business owners didn’t take it seriously.

So I went through council agendas over the past two years and watched how the council members discussed it. There were some awkward moments in there when they realized nobody had been paying attention to the ordinance.

To their credit, the city made a lot of progress over the past two years, including hiring more staff to work with businesses to comply with the ordinance. But as the Star’s Tony Davis reported, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

We have a little more than a week left in our tax-deductible fundraising campaign to hire a part-time digital storyteller, thanks to a partnership with the non-profit Local Media Foundation for their 2023 Local News Fund program, which allows independent and family-owned news organizations to solicit tax-deductible donations from their communities for journalism projects.

We want to take our reporting beyond the newsletter in 2024 and make news about politics, government and the election more accessible to more people through podcasts, videos and more.

We’re 21% of the way to that goal, which is not bad, but we only have a few more weeks left in the campaign.

Whether it’s $5 or $5,000, please consider chipping in if you can.