The Daily Agenda: Taking care of business

The Tucson Metro Chamber questioned local candidates about business-related issues ... Their answers are boiled down to a simple numerical score ... Wadsack claims persecution.

We’ve been featuring wall-to-wall election coverage in the Tucson Agenda for the past few weeks and have been working hard to bring you as much information as we can so you can make informed decisions when it’s time to vote.

We wanted to point you towards another helpful tool that assigns a simple numerical score to local candidates based on their support for Pima County’s business interests. 

For the past several decades, the Tucson Metro Chamber has been producing candidate evaluations, in line with its role as the voice for businesses in the region.

Up until eight years ago, the chamber would also endorse candidates and donate to their campaigns, but ended the practice in 2020 after leadership no longer had a good answer to the question of how this benefited the chamber and its members, according to President and CEO Michael Guymon.

“When you endorse and that person that you endorse doesn’t make it, sometimes that makes the initial relationship with the person that did get into office and didn’t get the endorsement challenging,” Guymon told the Agenda. “And at the end of the day, we have to work with all of the politicians.”

Although the chamber doesn't endorse anymore, it still asks pointed questions about issues that are frequently discussed in the business community, including public safety, transportation, infrastructure and the workforce and access to talent.

The chamber’s candidate evaluation committee is made up of an equal number of Democrats, Republicans and independents and includes business owners, executives and policy experts.

“The reason we want to have that diversity on the committee is because the business community is diverse,” Guymon said. “Sometimes we get pigeonholed into the conservative-leaning compendium, but we do have members who have diverse opinions, as the entire community does.”

Guymon said that while the committee members might have philosophical differences, they are all united in the desire to build a stronger economy and a better business community.

In June, the committee reached out to candidates to gather their thoughts about issues important to the chamber’s members and their ideas on how to support a competitive local economic and business environment.

The candidates submitted both written responses and participated in recorded interviews with the committee, who scored them on the following nine points:

• Understanding of their statutory role

• Community experience and activity

• Vision for the office

• Communication ability 

• Ability to represent the chamber and its members’ interests

• Understanding of issues that impact the ability of businesses to grow and thrive

• Alignment with the chamber’s public policy

• Leadership ability

• Willingness to engage and collaborate with the chamber

Each candidate was asked between five and seven questions which were graded on a scale of one to 10 and at the end of the process, the totals were averaged out and each candidate was assigned a score.

The questions touched on topics including chronic homelessness, housing affordability, growing Tucson’s business community, substance use, addressing the community’s needs and more. Many of the questions were specific to the office, with sheriff candidates talking about the jail, budget and morale.

Scores ranged from 5 (District 3 Supervisor candidate Jennifer Allen) on the low end to 8.3 (Pima County Attorney candidate Mike Jette) on the high end, with all but eight candidates participating in the process. 

“It’s one of those situations where we may have one committee member that scores very differently than another,” Guymon said. “But when we average them out, it produced scores that were very reflective of the candidates’ thoughts and opinions and what they would do in working with us to create a stronger business community.”

While the evaluation isn’t new, the response has been bigger and better this year, according to Guymon.

And when it comes to the videos, the interviews for Pima County Attorney candidates Laura Conover and Jette “considerably outnumber” the views for the other videos, Guymon said, adding that he thinks the pair of videos have amassed more views than all of the others combined.

“Public safety is a really important issue to the business community, so they really want to watch those and read the information from the candidates,” Guymon said.

You can check out the evaluation and videos here and see where the candidates stand on various issues.

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This story was supported by the Local News Initiative of Southern Arizona, a fund of the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona.

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Storm aftermath: The fierce winds that blew through Tucson on Sunday left quite a wake behind them, the Arizona Daily Star’s Henry Brean reports. Tucson got a rare tornado warning and winds reached 76 mph, causing damage to buildings and toppling trees. Since then, trucks filled with tree debris have been lining up all week at Tank’s Green Stuff. The director of the yard said he’s “never seen it like this.”

High-speed immunity: Tucson-area state Sen. Justine Wadsack is claiming “political persecution” after she was busted driving 71 mph on Speedway, the Tucson Sentinel’s Dylan Smith reports. That’s twice the posted 35-mph speed limit. She didn’t get a ticket when she was pulled over in March, at least partly due to the fact she introduced herself to the officer as “Senator Justine Wadsack” and the officer consulted with a legal advisor at TPD about “legislative immunity.” But the legislative session is over and that immunity no longer applies, so TPD started the process of issuing her a criminal speeding citation. That’s where the “persecution” claims started. (An added twist to this story is where Wadsack claims is the “home” she was racing to when she was pulled over.)

Tech outage aftermath: When the global tech outage swept through Arizona on Friday, it crippled the systems Pima and Maricopa counties use for early in-person voting, Votebeat Arizona’s Jen Fifield reports. Pima County officials switched to using provisional ballots and Maricopa delivered new equipment to four sites. The outage did not affect the machines used to count ballots, which aren’t used during early voting. 

Doing it old-school: The tech outage also affected 911 dispatchers in Pima County, who resorted to using pen and paper Friday night as they took calls, the Star’s Sierra Blaser reports. Other than that, officials said there was no disruption to the 911 or 311 systems. Dispatchers are trained to keep track of deputies and caller information on a paper log. 

Big announcement: Prominent Democrats in Southern Arizona weighed in after President Joe Biden announced he wouldn’t run for re-election. Rep. Raul Grijalva, who previously called for Biden to drop out of the race, said Biden will be remembered as “one of the most consequential presidents in our history,” KGUN reported. Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said she will always be a Biden supporter, pointing to “transformative infrastructure investments.” Romero also said she will work to support Vice President Kamala Harris. Pima County Attorney Laura Conover said Biden ”literally just put the country above all his own wishes.”

Broken promises: A former diversion program manager at the County Attorney’s Office says Conover “decimated” diversion programming, which provides restorative justice as an alternative to prosecution. Jordanna Carvalho writes in an opinion piece in the Sentinel that she was excited when Conover ran in 2020, but Conover “broke her campaign promise” and her disdain for employees who worked for her predecessor, including Carvalho, damaged the program.

15,578: The number of signatures submitted by candidates for local school boards. In all 54, candidates have filed to run. (We’ll break down those races for you in tomorrow’s Tucson Agenda.)