The Daily Agenda: County officials face tough choices this week
What should they do about asylum seekers and costly changes to the county jail? ... And much more in this week's rundown of what local officials are up to ... UA gets new athletic director.
The nightmare scenario for Pima County officials is on the horizon, now that the federal dollars that allowed local groups to care for asylum seekers are running out. County officials raised the alarm for months that without those funds hundreds of asylum seekers would be released on the streets of Tucson every day, along with hundreds more in Santa Cruz and Cochise counties. With Congress’ failure to pass immigration legislation, county officials say they are all but certain federal funding will end in late March. They are about to start winding down their five-year effort to avoid a humanitarian crisis, while coming up with contingency plans, such as providing the “bare necessities” at the Mission facility near the county jail, County Administrator Jan Lesher wrote in a memo last week. The board of supervisors will discuss what to do next at their meeting today.
Speaking of asylum, county officials gave their most detailed accounting yet of the cost of asylum seekers’ plane tickets from Tucson to their final destinations. Critics claim it’s a major cost to taxpayers, while county officials say public funds rarely are used for those tickets. At their Feb. 6 meeting, Supervisor Steve Christy asked about the “amount of airline tickets taxpayers are paying for, as opposed to a sponsor or an NGO.” The county, using federal money, generally buys plane tickets when a large family can’t afford tickets for every member of the family or when an asylum seeker has a medical condition that requires speedy travel, Lesher wrote last week. The county did not buy any plane tickets for asylum seekers from 2019 to June 2022. In the latter half of 2022, they spent $1 million on 3,900 plane tickets, which amounted to 4.7% of asylum seekers. In all of 2023, they spent $1.6 million on 5,300 plane tickets for 2.4% of asylum seekers. Just looking at December, it was 600 tickets for 1.3% of asylum seekers, and cost $187,000.
County officials’ tough choices don’t end with asylum. The board of supervisors also has to figure out what to do about the county jail. Sheriff Chris Nanos asked the supervisors to fund a new jail, citing the jail’s aging facilities, while rights advocates called for reform after more people started dying in the jail. The county formed a Blue Ribbon Commission last March to see what should be done. They came back in December with recommendations about renovating the jail or building a new one. The thing is, those options would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Lesher said she wants to look at smaller fixes, such as improving healthcare in the jail. County Supervisor Matt Heinz wants the board to consider a recommendation from Just Communities Arizona to reduce the number of people sent to the jail in the first place. The supervisors will discuss the commission’s findings at their meeting today, and probably many more times over the next few months.
A developer is claiming they lost out on affordable housing contracts in Pima County because of a conflict of interest. The board of supervisors will consider approving $6.9 million to develop or preserve 835 units of affordable housing. They’ll also hear an appeal from Rio Azul Partners and Southwest Nonprofit Housing Corporation. They sent a letter of protest, saying their proposal was scored unfairly due to a conflict of interest on the housing commission that recommended who got the funding. County officials said they reviewed the recommendation process and it was done by the book.
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The Tucson City Council is considering an ordinance that bans camping in washes as a way to deal with homelessness. The rationale for the ordinance is the danger of flash floods to people sleeping in washes, the difficulty for first responders to get to remote washes, and the damage to the environment from temporary structures and human waste seeping into the ground. In other news on the homelessness front, the city created the role of “encampment assessors.” They get to know specific areas, help prevent encampments from reforming, and speed up the city’s response to cases. The city still gets thousands of calls about encampments, but 77% are either duplicate calls or not actually an encampment.
The city council is going to appoint someone to replace Magistrate Antonio Riojas at their meeting Wednesday (not Tuesday, because of the holiday). The City Magistrates Merit Selection Commission recommended last fall that the council not reappoint Riojas, citing concerns he denied some defendants their legal right to counsel. A few weeks later, Riojas withdrew his name from consideration for the appointment. The merit commission recommended the council choose from Sarah Mayhew, a public defender for the city; Alfred McDonald, a criminal defense attorney and former judge pro tempore in the Marana Municipal Court; or Paul Skitzki, a longtime public defender for Pima County.
The council will consider whether to offer a property tax incentive to Central Barrio Development for a project at 941 N. Stone Ave, just south of Speedway, that would include 18 residential units. The developer worked out an agreement with the Dunbar Springs Neighborhood Association, where the association would support the project as long as the developer put a locally owned coffeeshop on the first floor; preserved the Joe Pagac mural on the wall; installed energy-efficient units; added bike racks and a water station; and consulted with the neighborhood association during and after construction. The city will do an economic analysis, funded by the developer, to determine the value of the tax incentive.
The council didn’t put anything on the agenda regarding the sales tax election they’ve been talking about for more than a month. It has something to do with improving quality of life, but they still haven’t explained what it is voters will consider. The window to do so shrank a bit last week when the state Legislature moved up the election date from August 6 to July 30. The council’s next meeting is March 5. If they direct the city attorney to write the ballot measure, they could approve it at the March 19 meeting. Then they will have to launch a publicity campaign to get support for the tax before early ballots go out July 3.
Write a letter to the editor (email Curt at curt@tucsonagenda.com), or reach out to your Tucson City Council member or county supervisor. You can watch meetings of the Tucson City Council here and the Pima County Board of Supervisors here.
Transit trouble: Another item on the agenda for the Tucson City Council is a discussion of City Manager Mike Ortega’s concerns about whether the city should participate in the next phase of the Regional Transportation Authority, in what Tucson Sentinel columnist Blake Morlock calls “zero hour” for their negotiations with the eight other local jurisdictions that make up the RTA. Ortega says he can’t justify participating if the city puts in more money than it gets back in projects. Ortega also thinks the RTA’s revenue projections are far too pessimistic.
Red scare: If you’d like to be able to ride your bike on Tucson’s streets, instead of driving a car, guess what? You’re a Marxist. That’s what some GOP state lawmakers are claiming as they add restrictions on anything that would reduce car travel to the state’s transportation budget bill, Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller writes.
Making history: Back in 2019, Caitlin wrote about Sunnyside’s Audrey Jimenez, when she was a 13-year-old middle schooler training with the high school boys wrestling team and turning heads with her talent. Jimenez made history over the weekend, becoming the first female to win a state championship in a boys division. She's graduating early in the spring and has been courted by several top-tier college programs, so we’re eager to hear where she will be continuing her wrestling career.
UA gets new AD: The University of Arizona hired Desireé Reed-Francois as its new athletic director, KGUN’s Ryan Fish reports. Reed-Francois earned her law degree from the UA and then went on to work as athletic director at UNLV and the University of Missouri. She takes the spot left open when former Athletic Director Dave Heeke was fired last month. Reed-Francois will be the first woman to be the UA’s full-time athletic director when she starts March 3.
New faces: Pima County voters are going to cast their ballots this year for county supervisors in a time of “political upheaval,” the Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel writes in his rundown of county supervisors’ races. After all the changes to the makeup of the Pima County Board of Supervisors over the past few years, the longest-serving supervisor is now Steve Christy, who was elected in 2016. (It’s a whole package of stories, so be sure to click on the links for each district race)
All hands on deck: It’s not just county officials who have their eye on the upcoming funding crisis for local efforts to help asylum seekers. The Star’s Emily Bregel reports spoke with members of the nonprofits and religious groups who have spent the past five years helping more than 400,000 asylum seekers as they came through Tucson.
“It flows from Matthew’s Gospel, where he says, ‘What you do to the least of these little ones, you do to me,’” Bishop of Tucson Edward Weisenburger said. “I think it’s one of the areas where Jesus is speaking profoundly, directly and literally.”
$7.2 million: The value of the contract for a major renovation of the Richard Elias-Mission Library. They are going to demolish the office, bathrooms, and meeting areas and renovate the reading area, outdoor areas, and parking.