The Daily Agenda: As grassroots as it gets

Voting will open soon for Budget de la Gente's second cycle … Tucson's mayor wants to see it grow … Mexico gets green light in gun lawsuit.

On a Saturday in January, more than 300 community members gathered at the Santa Cruz River near downtown and spent their morning picking up a few thousands pounds of trash and planting wildflower seeds.

The event was one of nearly two-dozen projects funded last year through Ward 1’s Budget de la Gente, a participatory budgeting program that lets community members decide how to spend the ward’s $450,000 in annual discretionary funds. With many of the projects already up and running, Ward 1 residents are getting ready to vote next month in the second cycle. 

The goal is to increase community engagement and transparency and build trust, while also ensuring that local government spending reflects the needs of residents. The Ward 1 program is the first in Tucson and in the state, which Mayor Regina Romero said in a recent newsletter represents “a leap from traditional budgeting methods” and a “significant advancement in community engagement and decision-making.”

The process is simple: People who live and work in Ward 1 are invited to share and discuss ideas during meetings and an online application for projects they’d like to be funded. From there, volunteer “budget captains” develop the ideas into feasible proposals that residents who live, work and attend school in Ward 1 will vote on, selecting those they believe best fit the community’s needs. 

During Budget de la Gente’s first cycle, community members submitted 132 ideas, with 1,130 people voting to select 21 proposals for funding. The largest of those projects is the construction of the Cushing Street Skatepark, which will be located beneath the freeway underpass at Cushing Street and Interstate 10.

Although construction on the park hasn’t yet begun, it will be funded in part by $250,000 of Budget de la Gente money. The rest of the funds will come from Prop. 407, the city’s $225 million park improvement bond package, and other sources.

The remaining $200,000 was split up evenly among the other 20 projects, which are in various stages of completion. These projects included early child literacy programs, beautification and sustainability projects, and improvements designed to increase walkability in Ward 1.

Voting for cycle two will take place April 14 through 30, with budget captains working hard to develop proposals based on the 146 ideas submitted by community members. Ward 1 Councilmember Lane Santa Cruz has big plans to expand participatory budgeting both in their ward and citywide. Last Tuesday, Santa Cruz and their team presented ideas to the mayor and council, receiving a favorable response.

Romero wrote in her newsletter that she’s eager to explore ways participatory budgeting can be adopted across other areas of city government, saying the possibilities are endless.

In the meantime, Santa Cruz and their team are hoping to generate more support for Budget de La Gente and find ways to fund more cycles and eventually expand its reach, Ward 1 Communications and Policy Director Antonio Ramirez told the Tucson Agenda.

“Creating that space for community members to actually engage and contribute in a real way that’s not just taking a survey, I think that’s the most exciting part of this program,” Ramirez said. “A lot of these ideas, I don’t think we would have brought them up on our own.”

The process is slightly different in the second cycle, after the team received feedback that in some cases, the $10,000 in funding each of the smaller projects received wasn’t enough. This time around, there are different tiers to promote equity and prioritize by need.

While the budget captains are working on developing proposals based on cycle two ideas, Ramirez and other members of the Ward 1 team are working to complete the remaining projects from cycle one.

Among the projects still left in the queue are improvements to the area around the Tohono O’odham family monument, located at the intersection of Grande Avenue and Mission Road.

“La Primera Vista,” the bronze statue of a man, woman and child, is easy to miss, tucked between traffic lights and surrounded by native vegetation.

In addition to the $10,000 in Budget de la Gente funding, the project has also received $51,000 in funding from a Tohono O’odham gaming grant for additional improvements including landscaping and installing lights to illuminate the statue.

Ramirez said the implementation of participatory budgeting has been impactful not just because of the physical improvements to the community, but also in terms of engaging residents, including youths.

This time around, the Budget de la Gente team has been even more strategic when it comes to targeting kids and teens, hoping to develop more programs for kids and teens and implementing ideas based on their input.

They’re also hoping to bring in the youth vote and will offer in-person voting during April’s Día de la Niñez event, which Ramirez said is expected to bring in upwards of 500 people.

“To vote, the requirements aren’t 18 and older. You just have to be able to read, so a lot of the kids who go to the event will have a chance to vote,” he said. “I like to say that (participatory budgeting) changes how democracy works. And democracy is not a static idea, right? It’s evolving and this is what the future could look like.”

Pressing ahead: A federal judge in Tucson said the lawsuit filed by the Mexican government against gun dealers in Tucson, Phoenix, and Yuma can proceed, the Tucson Sentinel’s Paul Ingram reports. U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Marquez said the gun store owners should have recognized “red flags,” such as straw sales and bulk sales, as signs that the firearms were headed across the border to Mexico. The lawsuit is widely viewed as a landmark case, along with a lawsuit the Mexican government filed against a gun manufacturer in Massachusetts. 

Funding expectations: Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher expects the county will get at least $12.7 million in asylum funding, KOLD’s John Macaluso reports. Federal funding was going to end March 31, which could have led to street releases of hundreds of asylum seekers every day. The new federal spending bill includes $650 million nationwide for local efforts to support asylum seekers, but it wasn’t clear how much money would come to the Tucson area. Lesher said the new funding should start arriving in the next few weeks. 

Green light for tax election: The Tucson sales tax election set for this summer can continue as planned, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a legal opinion, the Sentinel’s Dylan Smith reports. State law says those elections must be in November, but Tucson officials argued the city charter allows them to set sales tax elections whenever they like. Mayes said the matter is a “purely municipal concern.”

Pay raise: The Arizona Board of Regents gave a pay raise to their interim executive director while the former executive director is on a temporary assignment at the University of Arizona, KJZZ’s Matthew Casey reports. Chad Simpson got a $45,000 pay bump to $258,000 a year, but it’s still about one-third less than what John Arnold, who’s working at the UA now while the school deals with its financial crisis, would’ve made.

More eyes downtown: The Rio Nuevo board may decide to install cameras and license plate readers in downtown Tucson, KOLD’s Bud Foster reports. The item was on the board’s agenda yesterday afternoon and Tucson Police Chief Chad Kasmar was expected to try to convince the board the new equipment would be a good investment. Board chair Fletcher McCusker told Foster noise was a big part of the problem downtown.

Lights out: A neighborhood association in Oro Valley turned off 226 streetlights along Rancho Vistoso Boulevard in an attempt to save $750,000, Tucson Local Media’s Dave Perry reports. They’re waiting to hear from residents of the 6,000-home community whether it’s worth it to replace the lights or it’s fine without them.

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