Time to choose

Can you start right away? … Bookermania hits Tucson … And Fimbres to step down.

The four remaining Pima County Supervisors will pick one of six Democrats tomorrow to fill the seat vacated by Adelita Grijalva.

It’ll be hard to decide whether to offer congratulations or condolences to the person receiving the roughly 19-month appointment.

The selected candidate will assume the position immediately after the appointment. (A special election will be held next year for the remainder of his or her term.) And then they’ll be asked to vote on a number of high-profile issues: the County's stance on a potential city water rate hike for County residents, whether to sue the Trump administration and whether to advance Supervisor Matt Heinz’s proposal to raise property taxes. (And Heinz will likely be one of the three votes needed to appoint Pima County’s newest Supervisor. The successful candidate will then have to decide whether to back Heinz's tax proposal.)

An 18-page memo submitted by his office explains his plan to increase the average Pima County homeowner's tax bill by about $7 a year — and those additional funds would be dedicated to affordable housing.

Voters got a chance to hear from the potential supervisor last Wednesday, when the League of Women Voters of Greater Tucson hosted an online forum with all but one of the six candidates.

The forum had several preset questions, including about solutions for building more affordable housing.

So today, we're introducing you to your next supervisor — which will be one of these six very different candidates:

Karla Morales

We had our intern, ChatGPT, attend the forum and draw the candidates.

Morales is the vice president of the Arizona Technology Council, where she is in charge of the Council’s day-to-day operations in Southern Arizona. Last year, she was elected to the Pima Community College Governing Board.

During the online forum, the former social worker said affordable housing needed a multi-faceted approach. She said focusing on raising wages is key to any successful strategy.

“I think that there is a significant focus that we need to have on stagnant wages in our community members,” she said. “They're not matching or aligning with the rising cost of the market.”

In a way, Morales is already representing voters in District 5, she said, noting PCC’s Governing Board boundaries follow the same map as the board of supervisors. She said the pressing issues for the board are managing the county’s $1.7 billion budget during uncertainties in the current economic climate and providing more affordable housing.

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Kimberly Baeza

Baeza, who has worked for Pima County for the past 10 years, said one of her passions is preserving the Sonaran Desert, noting during the forum she has a background in regulatory compliance in conservation science.

“I am one of those individuals that cherishes these natural resources and I want to conserve them,” she said. “I'd be 100% committed, steadfast in my support on continuing to build on these, on this important conservation achievement that, you know, it took decades to put together."

Baeza wants to expand a new county program identifying county-owned properties and making them available for low-income housing projects.

She said she also wanted to work on regional approaches for pooling resources to create more solutions to a growing housing affordability crisis.

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Andres Cano

Cano has history with the District 5 office, working for former Supervisor Richard Elías for several years before running for the state Legislature in 2018, where he served two full terms as a state representative. He resigned in 2023 to attend Harvard to get his graduate degree, returning to Tucson last year and getting hired by the City of Tucson as their director of federal and state relations.

During the online forum, Cano said the District is facing a “housing and humanitarian crisis” that requires a regional approach with buy-in from all jurisdictions.

“We need to not have our county jails be a place that is trying to be our place of compassion and care for people who are unsheltered, who are poor, and who have mental health abuse and substance abuse issues,” he said.

Cano said his top priority would be helping to shape the County’s budget for next year and then reconnecting with District 5 residents, many of which he represented when he was in the Legislature.

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Cynthia Sosa

Sosa, an engineer at Texas Instruments, has volunteered with Big Brothers, Big Sisters and United Way Vita, a tax preparation program that supports low-income individuals.

During the forum, Sosa acknowledged that addressing affordable housing would require a community approach and praised recent successes by the city to build new affordable units.

”This is a multi-faceted problem that I think is going to have to be multi-department, multi-lateral approach across Arizona and federally to address different aspects of affordable housing,” Sosa said.

She said if appointed she’d focus on connecting with the community to better understand their needs and concerns, but said she’d like to focus on infrastructure upgrades.

“I’d prioritize things like improving street lighting, fixing roads in neighborhoods that have been long overlooked, and working with the city to enhance storm water systems,” Sosa said.

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Lewis Araiza

Araiza, also a retiree, has spent a lifetime on the Southside serving on school and community boards. A former teacher and social worker, he served two terms on the Sunnyside School District Governing Board.

During the forum, Araiza said he wanted the County to enter into more intergovernmental agreements with local governments to put more resources in rural areas, especially like those offered by the Pima County One Stop — saying he has the goal of zero unemployment in Pima County.

Asked about affordable housing, Araiza said a growing number of District 5 residents are living in mobile home parks. He said affordable housing on the Southside is tied to other issues.

”When you deal with drug, alcohol, when you deal with homelessness, it's a mixed bag but it needs to be addressed and it needs to be addressed at the community level, City of Tucson, City of South Tucson and the county, we need to work together,” he said.

He wants to see a major economic investment on the Southside, noting the county could create what he calls a “Riverwalk” — akin to the one in San Antonio but with a southern Arizona theme — on vacant land along the Santa Cruz River.

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Richard Hernandez

Hernandez jumped into the Ward 5 City Council race in January but did not turn in nominating signatures before the April 7 deadline. So he’s seeking the supervisor gig instead.

He has run for elected office several times and he has long been active in Southside politics. Back in 2014, he played a key role in ousting Bobby Garcia and Louie Gonzales in a successful recall of Sunnyside school board members.

He did not participate in last week’s online forum.

Saying he wants to be the first District 5 Supervisor to come from the Southside, Hernandez said the County will need to find ways to deliver services cheaper, given the pressures on the County budget, including declining federal and state revenues.

He offers the example of a team he watched filling a pothole outside of his home, noting several people were watching one person fill the hole.

“People need to get to work and grab a shovel,” he told the Tucson Agenda.

As he began listing issues in the Southside, Hernandez says the Supervisors have a number of important issues ahead of them, including people continuing to die in the Pima County Jail.

The Supervisors are going to make their pick tomorrow. If you want to make your voice heard, you can reach out directly to any of the Supervisors through their offices or speak at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, which starts at 9 a.m. You can reach the Supervisors at (520) 724-8126.

Whoever gets picked will have a lot of responsibility. That means somebody is going to have to keep a close eye on them. Joe is happy to do it, but you know what would make it a lot easier? If you click that button and subscribe today!

Tucson City Councilman Richard Fimbres announced on Friday that he will step down from his seat on the Council, ending 16 years of service to the Tucson community.

His Ward 5 seat, which covers the Southside, will be vacant on May 2.

“I had hoped to complete my current term of office, but I need to turn my full attention to my family and my health,” Fimbres said in his resignation letter. “I'm providing you this notice now so that you and my peers on the Council can begin the steps you choose to take to fill the vacancy that will occur on the effective date of my resignation.”

Fimbres had signaled earlier this year that he was having health problems.

“After several conversations with my family and putting my health in the forefront, I have decided not to seek another term,” Fimbres wrote in one of his January newsletters.

The Council will set up a schedule to fill the Ward 5 seat next week.

One of Fimbres’ last votes may be on a controversial push to criminalize camping in washes.

Welcome to the Old Pueblo: Democratic U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey brought some friends to the “People’s Town Hall” on Sunday, held in Republican Congressman Juan Ciscomani’s district. U.S. Sen Mark Kelly, Phoenix Congressman Greg Stanton and former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords spoke for roughly 90 minutes about fighting for Democratic values during President Donald Trump’s second term in office. Joe delivered a blow-by-blow of the Democratic star-studded event on his Bluesky.

Uncertain future: Asylum seekers in Tucson followed the rules set up by federal officials under the Biden administration, but now they’re caught in an ever-widening net, the Arizona Daily Star’s Emily Bregel reports. One woman made the perilous journey from Venezuela with her children and waited for months in Nogales, Sonora, for a chance to speak with U.S. immigration officials. She finally got permission to enter the country and was given one year to file paperwork for humanitarian protection. But now she doesn’t know what comes next.

“I feel desperate. Everything is so tangled up,” she told the Star. “I’m afraid to even go out on the street. If they took my children away from me, I would go crazy... It’s like I’m between a rock and a hard place.”

It’s all a military base now: While the Trump administration starts blocking legal pathways to stay in the U.S., it’s also converting a 60-foot-wide strip of land that runs along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, California and New Mexico into a military installation, the New York Times reports. President Donald Trump issued a memo Friday that would allow military forces to temporarily detain migrants for trespassing on military property. (Curt wrote about the plan for our sister newsletter, the Arizona Agenda, when news broke about it last month.)

Caving on DEI: In the face of threats to cut state funding from GOP lawmakers, University of Arizona President Suresh Garimella sent a letter to Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen listing the steps the UA is taking to remove DEI from the school, the Star’s Prerana Sannappanavar reports. Those steps include removing DEI statements from job postings, taking down the UA’s website for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and eliminating programs, services and committees related to DEI.

The court of public opinion: Tucson Electric Power may have narrowly escaped an effort to create a city-owned utility in Tucson, but voters could still decide TEP’s fate this fall if the utility’s 25-year franchise agreement with the city goes on the ballot. In the meantime, TEP is facing intense public pressure to produce more clean energy. To show their progress, they created a public dashboard that allows you to track clean energy output by the hour, or even by individual wind or solar facilities.

If you want reporters to keep tabs on the ins-and-outs of the TEP franchise agreement situation, then help us do the job by upgrading to a paid subscription today!

Out of the ashes: A German soccer team is going to build a youth training academy on the site of the former greyhound racing track in South Tucson, the Star’s Gabriela Rico reports. A rep from the Borussia Dortmund team visited the track the day after it burned down last year. Coincidentally, the team’s facility in Germany also was built on a site that burned down. The Tucson site will have three outdoor soccer fields, and later expand to include an indoor field and overnight rooms for players’ parents.

Those jokers at the redistricting office got us again.

In last week’s “Listening In” story, we said Congressional District 6 was in Pima and Cochise counties.

But thanks to redistricting in 2022, we failed to mention that the district covers all of Greenlee and Cochise counties, along with parts of Pima, Pinal, and Graham counties.

It takes forever just to memorize all these crazy political boundaries. And then blerg. They pull the rug out from under us every 10 years!