The Daily Agenda: Budget season heats up at county, and much more

The County Attorney wants $2.4 million back ... What happened with the opioid settlement money? ... It's tamale time.

Today we have a mix of news nuggets from tomorrow’s meeting of the Pima County Board of Supervisors and last week’s governing board meetings in the Sunnyside Unified and Amphitheater Unified school districts. The Tucson City Council isn’t meeting this week.

A budget battle is brewing between the county supervisors and the Pima County Attorney’s Office. County Attorney Laura Conover wants the supervisors to return $2.4 million to her office’s budget that the supervisors cut last year. In a memo to the supervisors ahead of their meeting tomorrow, Conover said her office has “significant concerns related to the management of its budgetary authority from entities outside of its control.” Her office has numerous vacant positions, which she said at the March 19 supervisors’ meeting is due in part to the lag between offering jobs to law school students in February and those graduates getting their law licenses in November. Conover said she’s concerned about offering jobs to people without knowing whether her office will get the $2.4 million back in the upcoming budget.

The supervisors are weighing their options as they pick the next County Treasurer. Tomorrow they’ll decide whether to schedule a forum so the public can hear from the people who want to replace outgoing Treasurer Beth Ford. Voters won’t decide who replaces Ford, but last year the League of Women Voters of Greater Tucson held a forum so the public could weigh in on who would be the best fit to replace Supervisor Sharon Bronson when she resigned (that ended up being Supervisor Sylvia Lee).

At the March 19 meeting, Supervisor Steve Christy urged the board to appoint Ford’s handpicked successor, her deputy Chris Ackerley, who also is running for the seat this year. The board opted for a more deliberative process instead. The two candidates besides Ackerley are Patti E. Davidson and Ray Carroll, the county said in a news release Friday. Davidson is a chief deputy at the Treasurer’s Office and Carroll is a former county supervisor who now serves as a justice of the peace in Green Valley. The supervisors plan to appoint Ford’s replacement on April 16.

The county was set to get $48 million in a nationwide legal settlement with pharmaceutical companies to help cover the cost of the opioid epidemic. Now Supervisor Rex Scott wants to know what the county is doing with that money.

“Very little of the settlement proceeds have been budgeted for and expended. The Board needs an update on the reasons for the delay in making effective use of these funds. We have not had any update on the plans for opioid settlement funds for many months and yet there are many significant concerns that could be targeted and alleviated by their prudent use” Scott wrote in a memo.

The problems at the county jail aren’t going away and the supervisors are deciding whether to charter a new Blue Ribbon Commission to find a fix. A similar commission tried to find a solution last year, but they didn’t come up with a specific recommendation. Sheriff Chris Nanos insists the jail is beyond repair and the county should build a new one, while the supervisors are hesitating to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on it. County officials have spent years trying to find a solution, as County Administrator Jan Lesher showed in 274 pages of memos she and her predecessor sent to the board over the past few years.

If the Agenda had another reporter, we’d happily go through all those memos. Why not upgrade to a paid subscription, so we can get closer to hiring one?

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In school board news, Sunnyside Unified School District employees can now pursue higher education at no cost through American Intercontinental University. AIU is an online university that allows students to pursue their associate, bachelor's, and master's degrees at their own pace. Eligible SUSD employees can get a grant and all costs not covered by the grant are billed directly to SUSD, so they can study without taking on debt or out-of-pocket costs. Degrees they can pursue under the grant include Master of Education, Doctor of Education and Leadership, and Master of Arts in Education.

Like a lot of school districts in Arizona, Sunnyside received money from a nationwide settlement with the vaping company JUUL. The governing board decided last week to deposit the $310,000 they expect to get from the settlement into their litigation recovery fund, to help with future legal costs. Statewide, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office received $14.5 million from the lawsuit, which was filed in 2021 and claimed JUUL’s marketing strategy targeted minors, SUSD’s Chief Financial Officer Karla Walter told the governing board last week. The litigation was filed on behalf of 16 million students at 1,500 schools nationwide, including schools in SUSD and Tucson Unified. Walter said that after all legal fees and costs were covered, SUSD would receive their share in installments through January 2027. 

Amphitheater Unified reported a dip in instructional spending last year, but they did increase how much they spent per student overall. Instructional spending accounted for 51.6% of the fiscal 2023 district budget, down 0.6% from the previous year. But overall classroom spending stood at about 66% and Amphi spent an estimated $15,000 per student, up about $2,500 from the previous year. The district’s spending broke down like this:

• Classroom instruction: 51.6%

• Plant operations: 14.4%

• Administration: 9.4%

• Classroom student support: 9%

• Transportation: 6%

• Classroom instructional support: 5.9%

• Food service: 3.7%

Teacher pay at Amphi still lags the statewide average, but they can get a bonus if they teach dual-enrollment courses. The average teacher salary at Amphi last year was about $57,600 in the district’s spending analysis, which was $5,300 lower than the state average. The bonuses will come from the Educator Recruitment and Retention Unit at the Arizona Department of Education, which awarded a one-time incentive bonus of $500,000 to be distributed to Amphi. Each eligible teacher who has qualified to teach a dual-enrollment course, where students earn both high school and college credit, and taught in either Fall 2023 or Spring 2024 will receive a one-time bonus of $1,000 this year. 

As you can see, budget season is upon us. That means officials have a lot of hard choices to make over the next few months. What would you like to see them do?Send letters-to-the-editor to Curt at curt@tucsonagenda.com. If you want to watch the Pima County Board of Supervisors meeting tomorrow, you can do it here.

Bring on the tamales: Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a revamped version of the “tamale bill” she vetoed last year, which expands foods that can be legally sold after being prepared in home kitchens, KOLD’s David Baker reports. The law used to apply mainly to cakes and cookies, but the bill allows items with meat and foods that have to be prepared and kept at specific temperatures. Hobbs didn’t explain why she decided to sign this time around, after saying last year that she was vetoing it due to what she believed would be a significant increase in the risk of foodborne illness.

Constructive criticism: The Arizona School Boards Association is panning Sen. Justine Wadsack’s idea of turning school board elections partisan, with one board member calling the proposal “stupid,” Capitol Media Services’ Howard Fischer writes. Senate Bill 1097 was approved on a party-line vote in the Senate and cleared a House committee, also with a party split. It’s now waiting for a vote in the full House, where Republicans also are in the majority. The law is based on Wadsack’s argument that voters don’t know much about school board candidates and putting a party label behind a name on the ballot will provide some idea of what the person believes.

Honoring greatness: Longtime former Pima County prosecutor Rick Unklesbay was honored last week for his sustained contributions for the advancement of equality and democratic principles through his work in the nonprofit and public sectors, KVOA’s Myles Standish writes. Unklesbay was awarded the Arizona Region of the American Jewish Committee’s prestigious Judge Learned Hand Award during a ceremony in Phoenix. Unklesbay, who worked at the Pima County Attorney’s Office from 1981 through 2021, established and ran the Conviction Integrity Unit, the first of its kind in Arizona and one of the first in the nation.

Taking a stand: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a brief with the United States Supreme Court, urging justices to keep a preliminary injunction that would require Idaho hospitals to provide emergency abortion care, Arizona Public Media’s Paola Rodriguez reports. Mayes filed the brief after a near-total abortion ban in Idaho forced providers to stop care even in cases of emergencies where patients are at risk for serious harm. Mayes and 23 other attorney generals say the law is inconsistent with the Federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires all emergency departments that participate in Medicare to provide patients who have a medical emergency with necessary treatment.

Exploring their options: The Star’s Tim Steller is urging Arizona’s Republican voters to vote for someone other than U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, in the wake of her admission last week that she defamed Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a fellow Republican. Steller said that the admission brings up questions about why Lake is so popular among Republican voters, when 18 other Republicans submitted statements of interest to run for the party’s nomination and most of those people don’t have Lake’s baggage. So far, Lake and Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb are the only two Republicans to turn in signatures, which are due today.

Creating community: Nearly 100 artists gathered over the weekend to create a collaborative mural on Tucson’s west side, as part of the Southwest Beautification Project’s first mural festival, KGUN’s Alex Dowd reports. The theme of what organizers hope will be an annual event is “Bring the Rainforest to the Desert,” with the artwork totaling nearly two miles of mural space. The mural was painted on private property, with each artist given a space based on how long they’ve been involved in the art scene and the design they submitted to the project.

$1.8 billion: The spending cap in Pima County’s budget last year.