The Daily Agenda: Campaign finance isn't just dollars and cents

Don’t expect to find smoking guns … But you learn a lot about how serious candidates are … Border bill gets slammed from both sides.

When we report on campaign finance, it’s about so much more than money.

Ideally, a reporter would root out candidates who get money from gangsters or from people who would create an obvious conflict of interest. But it’s rarely that dramatic, at least in local elections. Instead, campaign finance reports show how serious a candidate is, where their support comes from, and what voters can expect from them.

When it comes to the county races this year, we now have our first look at who’s for real and who might fade away. The first round of campaign finance reports was due Jan. 16  and we found reports for 22 candidates for sheriff, county supervisor, county attorney, school boards, and other offices. 

That’s less than half of all candidates running for those offices. We’d like to berate candidates for flaunting election laws, but Pima County’s campaign finance database is so unwieldy we hesitate to say for certain they didn’t file reports.

At this early stage of the campaigns, one of the things we’re looking for is which candidates already raised significant amounts of money. That indicates they’re organized and serious about running, unlike candidates who have the gumption to say they’re running, but don’t put in the work. 

The finance reports also show how widespread a candidate’s support is. Do they have a lot of people making small contributions or are they backed by one or two people with deep pockets?

Take the sheriff’s race, where incumbent Chris Nanos just launched his new campaign committee. He reported raising $0 so far, but you can expect to see some big dollars flow to his campaign. When Nanos ran in 2020, he raised more than $150,000.

He’s facing a half-dozen challengers this time. Sandy Rosenthal and Bill Phillips are self-funding their campaigns so far. Terry Frederick raised $7,100, almost entirely from a man in Las Vegas, with a couple local contributors in the mix.

We couldn’t find any financial paperwork for Brian Hofmann and Trista Tramposch Di Genova. Heather Lappin’s campaign raised $7,500 from more than a dozen Pima County residents and one person from Virginia. 

As a voter considering candidates, which ones do you think are serious about running? Which ones will get widespread support?

It looks to us, in a way-too-early kind of way, that Lappin is most likely to give Nanos a serious challenge.

If we move over to the county supervisor races, which are bringing in the most money so far, District 3 candidate Jennifer Allen has raised $40,000. 

The bulk of Allen’s money, about $30,000, came from her family. But she also got small contributions from about 50 other people.

So what do you make of that? To us, it says she has the money to stick around long enough to make a real run at the supervisor’s seat. And the fact that 50 people already contributed suggests she has a network of supporters that could easily grow. 

If 50 Tucson Agenda readers upgraded to paid subscriptions, we’d take a big step toward being financially sustainable.

We also watch for well-known elected officials giving their support. In Allen’s case, she got contributions from former Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild and former Council members Karin Uhlich and Nina Trasoff.

Allen’s fundraising also sticks out because most of the candidates with the deepest pockets are incumbents.

Rex Scott, the incumbent county supervisor in District 1, has $33,200, while one of his challengers, Steve Spain, has about $1,800. That doesn’t bode well for Spain’s campaign, but he did show he could raise money when he ran against Scott in 2020, to the tune of $70,000.

Supervisor Steve Christy in District 4 is running unopposed, so he won’t need to spend much of his $32,000 unless a well-funded challenger emerges over the next few months. 

Laura Conover, the incumbent county attorney, has about $27,000. She faces Mike Jette, who does not appear to have filed a campaign finance report yet.

This is all valuable information you can glean from the reports. Now let’s take a look at what you can’t learn from them. 

In Pima County, campaign finance reports are just PDF forms housed in a massive database. You can search for candidates, but if they didn’t use their name in the title of their campaign committee, then you have to look through every entry in the database.

For example, if you wanted to see Scott’s campaign finance reports and searched for “Scott,” you’d come away thinking he hadn’t filed anything. But he did. It’s just filed under the name “Re-elect Rex.”

The City of Tucson, on the other hand, organizes its reports by election year. Each candidate is clearly labeled. If you don’t see a candidate’s reports, then they didn’t file them. The city’s system has its problems, but at least you can be sure of what you’re looking at. 

Want to know whether a local rich guy has their thumb on the scale? Instead of being able to search for “Jim Click” or whoever, you’d have to spend hours going through every report from every candidate, and you could easily miss something. That’s true for both the city and the county. 

But that’s where we are. Until local officials invest in upgrading their campaign finance systems, this is the information the public has to work with. 

We’ll check back on campaign finance when the next reporting deadline comes up on April 15.

Bipartisan rejection: U.S. Reps. Raúl Grijalva and Juan Ciscomani say they’ll be voting against the Senate’s border bill, both citing different reasons and underscoring the challenge in trying to overhaul the U.S. Immigration system, the Tucson Sentinel’s Paul Ingram writes. On Sunday, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer released the 400-page bill. Ciscomani said a tougher approach is needed to address the chaos at the border and Grijalva said the bill is a missed opportunity to create thoughtful and lasting immigration reform.

Big bucks for a new jail: The commission evaluating the Pima County Adult Detention Center said building a new jail could cost upwards of $800 million, the Arizona Luminaria’s John Washington writes. The commission’s final report recommends hiring a consultant to evaluate how to best spend taxpayer dollars and says that while there’s no jail population crisis now, one is on the horizon. The 269-page report doesn’t offer a definitive answer as to whether or not a new jail should be built, but commission members agree that something must be done to “relieve the strain of current conditions.” About 2,000 community members weighed in through a public survey, with responses varying between people who want and those who don’t want a new jail.

Space tech at the airport: Sierra Vista is getting a new satellite manufacturing facility at its airport, Arizona Public Media’s Summer Hom writes. BlackStar Orbital Technologies focuses on building reusable satellites and will be building and testing the first generation of micro shuttle space drones at the Sierra Vista airport. Sierra Vista tourism officials say that BlackStar will be leasing the land for their facility from the city and that the project has the potential to generate “well over $100 million in impact.”

Augment your reality: A new collaboration between the Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona Center for Digital Humanities and UA Poetry Center uses augmented reality technology to tell community stories about culture and history at seven different Tucson locations, Inside Tucson Business’ Karen Schaffner reports. The “Discovering Community in the Borderlands” uses QR codes to provide guests with behind-the-scenes experiences at the museum, Dunbar Pavilion, Chinese Cultural Center and more. 

Changing her tune: UA Faculty Senate Chair Leila Hudson accused President Robert C. Robbins of “tone deaf mansplaining” at a Monday faculty senate meeting, the Arizona Daily Star’s Ellie Wolfe reports. Hudson previously said she hoped to be able to work with Robbins and Interim CFO John Arnold, but said Monday that leadership sees “shared governance as an irritation or something that needs to be paid lip service.” Robbins was at the meeting, but didn’t respond. Hudson says she’s concerned that layoffs at the UA will hurt Tucson’s larger economy.

Road work ahead: Santa Cruz County has begun the long-awaited renovation of Ruby Road, Rico Rico Drive and both frontage roads along Interstate 19, the Nogales International’s Angela Gervasi writes. The project design is being funded by a $3.2 million grant from the Arizona Department of Transportation that does not cover construction. The design is expected to be finished by May 2026 with construction set to begin January 2027 and completed by early 2029.

1,629: The number of bills introduced by state lawmakers since the legislative session began in early January.