The Daily Agenda: Swinging for the fences

Prop 413 would give Tucson's mayor and council a huge pay raise ... What is a politician worth? ... UA nursing program goes viral.

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Sep 13, 2023

Elected officials deserve a respectable salary. After all, the public puts a great deal of trust in them and they decide how to spend enormous amounts of money.

But right now, the salaries of Tucson’s mayor and city council members are embarrassingly low for a city this size. The mayor gets paid $42,000 and council members earn $24,000. It doesn’t make sense for Tucson residents to pay a part-time wage to people who decide a $2 billion budget.

But Proposition 413 on the November ballot is a bit too ambitious. It would nearly triple the mayor’s salary and quadruple the salary of the city council members.

If voters approve Prop 413, the mayor’s salary would jump to $96,600 in 2024 and council members would get paid $76,600.

The proposition doesn’t state those numbers explicitly. Instead, it ties mayor and council salaries to those of Pima County supervisors, which are set by state law at $76,600. The mayor’s salary would be 1.25 times a supervisor’s salary and the council members’ salaries would equal supervisors’ salaries.

But it’ll soon get even more expensive. The county supervisors are set to get a pay bump to $96,600 in 2025. That would push the council members’ pay to $96,600, and put the mayor’s salary at about $121,000. In a town where the median household income is $48,000.

Mayor Regina Romero and the council members didn’t say much when they voted unanimously at their June 6 meeting to put Prop 413 on the ballot. As City Attorney Mike Rankin explained at the time, the city charter requires that a nonpartisan commission review their salaries every two years and recommend any changes. The council’s job is just to say “aye” and put it on the ballot.

The real choice is meant to be made by the voters. And voters really don’t like raising the salaries of the mayor and council. They’ve voted it down every time it has come up since 1999.

Voters rejected a salary of $63,000 for the mayor and $42,000 for council members in 2019. They did it again in 2021, even though members of the Citizens Commission on Public Service and Compensation lowered their recommendations to $54,000 for the mayor and $36,000 for council members. (The city published a transcript of the commissioner’s discussions in June 2021 that’s worth reading. It’s an interesting view into all the different issues they considered.)

We asked Tom Warne, a member of the citizens commission, why the commission decided to aim so high, given voters have already said no to many smaller increases..

City and county officials have similar responsibilities when it comes to policy and they oversee similar-sized budgets and populations, Warne told us. The commissioners looked at the county supervisors’ duties and those of the mayor and council and recommended making their salaries match.

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On top of that, Warne said the commissioners wanted Tucson’s elected officials to get paid for what he considers a full-time job, as well as eliminate financial barriers that limit who can afford to do the job.

As it stands, council members make the equivalent of about $11 an hour, which is less than minimum wage1.

“In private business, if you oversaw the number of employees that the city does and you had $2 billion in sales, you would be getting a lot more than that,” Warne said.

That’s a solid argument. The city council debates a lot of intricate topics, weighs competing interests, and makes choices that affect more than 500,000 people. We want smart, qualified people in those offices — and they deserve to be compensated fairly.

Voters will ultimately decide in the November election if they think the salaries that the commission proposed were fair. But to us, $121,000 and $96,600 feels like a lot of money for public servants in a town with so much need.

What do you think? How much is a good city council member worth to you? And who on the city council do you think deserves to make six figures, and who does not?

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Slide controversy: Several Republican state senators are accusing the University of Arizona nursing school of grooming children after some slides including gender identity questions that nurses should ask children as young as 3 years old went viral on a right-wing social media channel, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers writes. The slides were presented to a group of practicing nurses as part of a seminar during the final semester of a nursing doctoral program, a UA spokeswoman said, adding that the material was not provided to undergraduate students.

“Some kids feel like a girl on the inside, some kids feel like a boy on the inside, and some kids feel like neither, both, or someone else. What about you? How do you feel on the inside? There’s no right or wrong answer,” the slides read.

Road improvements coming: The City of Tucson’s Department of Transportation and Mobility is holding a pop-up demonstration of the proposed street design for the Stone Avenue Complete Street Project, located on Stone Avenue just south of Alameda Street. The project, set for early 2024, will include a protected two-way bike lane and reconstructed curb ramps. The event is from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Friday as part of Park(ing) Day, a global event where communities temporarily transform curbside parking spaces into mini green spaces and interactive places for gathering. In addition to the bike lane demonstration, there will be games, food vendors and pollinator parks.

Spy games: Davis-Monthan Air Force Base is the lone site for a mission involving a new generation of electronic-warfare planes, the Arizona Daily Star’s David Wichner writes. Sen. Mark Kelly announced the arrival of the first of 10 planned EC-37B Compass Call planes on Tuesday. The EC-37B is a modified version of the Gulfstream 440 business jet that can carry new equipment.

Election drama continues: Cochise County Supervisor Tom Crosby, who refused to certify his county’s results of the 2022 election, filed a lawsuit against Gov. Katie Hobbs, Attorney General Kris Mayes, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Maricopa County Election officials over the 2022 election, claiming the county failed to follow the procedure to verify 1.3 million mail-in ballot signatures, Arizona Public Media’s Summer Horn reports. The lawsuit claims election staffers violating state law by comparing signatures on electors’ mail-in ballots to the most recent historical signatures submitted by those voters and not the signatures on each elector’s voter registration form.

Democracy on campus: UA students have a new opportunity to explore politics and democracy, thanks to the addition of a new student club, the Daily Wildcat’s Desarae Tucker reports. J Street U of A aims to teach students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and advocate for human rights, peace and democracy. It’s affiliated with the J Street, a national group that “organizes pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy Americans” to promote policy. The UA chapter was founded more than a year ago and registered as an official club last spring.

Federal funds incoming: Chiricahua Community Health Care in Cochise County has been awarded a $3 million grant for opioid addiction treatment from the Department of Health and Human Services, KJZZ’s Alisa Reznick reports. Cochise saw a 65% increase in overdose deaths between 2021 and 2022, the largest increase in the state. The money will be used to set up medication assisted treatment programs, hire and train behavioral health technicians, establish community health screenings and fund peer support specialists.

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297: The number of pages of reports Caitlin received from the Pima County Health Department in response to her request for August food service facility inspections that received ratings of “needs improvements,” “probation” and “imminent health hazards,” and for re-inspections that resulted in a “fail” rating. The reports were mostly restaurants, but a handful of other facilities received ratings of “needs improvement.”