The following is an original production of AZPM News.

Coming up today on The Press Room, we delve into a couple of key issues for the city of Tucson.

The Safe City Initiative and a look at the city budget with a panel of journalists.

Plus, South Tucson Mayor Roxanna Valenzuela is in the house, kicking off a new series.

I'm David Lee and The Press Room starts now.

[Music] Welcome to The Press Room.

I'm AZPM News Director David Lee and today we are kicking off the show with a new series where we speak with various mayors throughout Southern Arizona.

A chance to really delve in to the diversity of their communities and find out what's important to them.

Right now, we are kicking it off with the City of South Tucson Mayor Roxanna Valenzuela.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you for having me.

First things first, for somebody who's not from the City of South Tucson, what do we need to know about the City of South Tucson?

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't even know that we are our own city.

But we are approaching our 90th year anniversary in August and we're basically a pueblo within a city, one square mile.

We're full of culture, identity, diversity, and we're just composed of resiliency.

I believe that South Tucson is also known for their Mexican food.

So I don't know if you've ever been to our city too, but I invite you to come to Mi Nidito, where President Clinton has dined, Crossroads, and Micha's.

We just have so many great places to come and dine.

But yeah, South Tucson, I mean, to be honest, we're struggling.

We're struggling to survive as a city.

There's not a lot of revenue that comes in.

We have some of the highest sales taxes in Arizona.

And we want to stay autonomous and keep our identity intact.

And we need regional partners in order to do that.

We are as much part of the region as Oro Valley, Marana, Sahuarita.

And so our goal is to bring in economic development so we can stay sustainable and the resources needed to serve the most vulnerable that live in Pima County, which is usually in South Tucson.

-You talked a little bit about some of the priorities.

Are there a couple others that are really at the forefront of what you want to do?

-Public safety is really important to us.

You know, I do believe that South Tucson has a huge burden on their shoulders.

You know, we do provide a lot of social services to the greater community.

You know, we have where I work, Casa Maria, the largest soup kitchen in southern Arizona there.

We have La Frontera, Primavera, the Salvation Army, and other entities that serve the most vulnerable.

But, you know, we also we have the Pima County Jail to the west of us, the VA hospital to the south of us.

So it's like a hub for social services.

But we don't have enough resources to pay our cops, for example.

We ask so much of them and they get so little.

So we have, we've been trying to prioritize how to enhance our public safety in different ways.

One thing we have done, this is my first term, and I've only been a mayor for a year.

But taking care of the fire department was very crucial to us.

You know, we had an unsustainable model that we were working with, having only one firefighter working for us full time.

The rest were volunteers or reserves.

And we outsourced the staffing to Rural Metro, which now guarantees a four-man crew at all times, plus an investigator and an inspector.

So I feel very really good about that, that the community can have more peace of mind knowing that, you know, the fire department is in a much better place now than it was three years ago.

Sure.

-One of the things that I know recently happened was you guys got rid of your contract with Flock cameras.

Those are the surveillance cameras that have come under some fire here in Arizona lately.

Why end that program?

The cameras itself were not the problem.

We are actively looking for other cameras.

It was the corporation behind it that we did not trust.

You know, it was very clear to us that our community members, which like 90% are people of color, were not feeling safe with their, with their information being scrutinized or being linked to the Department of Homeland Security.

So we gave our police department two months to find different alternatives.

And in that time, they didn't find anything that seemed feasible for us.

So we just moved forward to canceling the contract.

We just didn't feel safe with the surveillance overreach at this time.

And we are actively looking for other solutions.

With ICE and kind of amped up Homeland Security activity going on in this area, how is your community feeling?

How, what are their concerns right now?

-You know, I've talked to at least three families that have been separated, because somebody, a member has been picked up by ICE.

They're not leaving their homes.

They don't want to take their kids to school.

We've been taking turns and walking some kids to school so that they feel more safe.

And so knowing that those cameras are out there surveilling them, it causes more fear, more anxiety in our community.

But yeah, I mean, I think about my mom, you know, she's, she has dark skin.

And, and even though she's a citizen, I'm afraid that she's going to get pulled over.

And with her health, you know, it might be at risk.

So I think of all those people that are vulnerable and are subject to being investigated for just for the way they look.

I want to change the subject just a little bit and talk about RTA Next.

Proposition 418, 419, the voting is already underway on this the election of March, March 10th, that is.

$2.67 billion.

You voted to push it forward.

What happens if it passes or what happens if it doesn't for the city of South Tucson?

-I think our our survival is on the line because our community relies heavily on public transportation.

And that's why I voted for this to move forward.

If this doesn't pass, that means that like the abuelita might not be able to make it to, you know, a doctor's appointment, or a child might not be able to make it to school, because the routes will be cut, the services will be cut.

We cannot afford that bill.

We just don't have it in our budget to pay for those services.

Our roads need maintenance.

And then, we didn't ask for a fancy project.

And I'm against sprawl, especially in the drout that we're facing.

But I also understand that we need to be regional partners and South Tucson benefits because we need the transportation funds so that we can survive.

It's a lifeline for our community.

And I think that a lot of the investment, we went in there fighting for more investment in our urban core.

And I think we got that.

-Okay, so when you think about the city of South Tucson, one of the things that also came up recently is you guys lost Food City, the only grocery store in the area.

One, is there a chance that another one could come back?

And how devastating was that?

Or is that for the city of South Tucson?

Yeah, it's very devastating.

We have become like a food desert.

And even though we have the smaller mercados, we really relied on the affordable food from Food City.

We've talked to the property owner and he said that he has some tenants that are interested.

But one of the reasons that Food City left was because of the food tax we have, which Tucson doesn't have.

And we're hoping by removing this food for home consumption tax that will entice other groceries to come in.

We really hope to get a grocery store in there.

And so that's kind of our hopes.

And plus, taxes are regressive in our community.

We also have the highest sales taxes and one of the highest sales taxes in the whole state.

You know, people are going to choose to go across the street for their grocery stores.

Okay, so just about 30 seconds left.

I know it goes fast.

What is the most important thing that you want to make sure people know about the city of South Tucson?

Just really proud of our identity and preserving our identity, preventing displacement and making sure that our community feels safe, has been our priority all along.

And I think we hit the run running and we have a lot of work to do.

Okay, Mayor Valenzuela, thank you so very much for being with us.

Good luck to you.

Thank you so much, David.

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Joining me now for the rest of the show, we have Joe Ferguson from the Tucson Agenda and Nick Rommel from AZPM.

Nick, you just got back from today's Safe City Initiative meeting.

Tell us a little bit about what happened there.

Yeah, Mayor Romero and a few other city officials basically presented the draft action plan for their Safe City Initiative, which the plan has a lot of, you know, tweaks of we're going to communicate this a little better, we're going to change the way these two departments communicate, things like that.

Although well, I'd say the more important thing that happened is really they went over all these different city initiatives that the city has been doing for several months to address: public drug use, unsheltered homelessness, that they're kind of packaging under this Safe City Initiative umbrella.

They definitely highlighted a couple specific ones, especially one is the so-called 'safer center,' which is like a short term drug rehab facility that people can check into for 96 hours and are often brought there by police officers.

That's been up and running now for just a few weeks or a couple months or something like that.

And city officials say it's going well.

The other thing is the deployments that they talked about one of them, I think Joe and I were both out yesterday.

They're basically once a month, they're sending out police officers together with homeless outreach service providers, literally in the same team, which leads to them arresting people for drug paraphernalia, for example, but then immediately in the same spot, they're able to have a virtual court arraignment and also meet people that could connect them with rehab or housing down the line.

So, and yeah, those are the two things that they stressed.

Joe, since you were there yesterday at the event that they had, what was your takeaway from that?

-Well, I saw that, you know, some of the services that city has been offering are now more closely coordinated so that they overlap each other.

And so we saw three people who were trespassing in an alleyway.

They were briefly detained and arrested so they could go to court.

That court date will then put them into the what's called the community court program, where they are working with social workers and others to help them find the resources to get them off the street and get them back into a way where they are no longer, you know, struggling so hard.

And so those are really good options.

The arrests are usually kind of waved away afterwards, but it really does get people going from a passive way of addressing their issues to something where they are now in a room full of people that are motivated to do the same thing, to get them the services they need, to get their ID cards, whatever it is that they're working on.

And for those that need help with substance abuse, there's now a program that you can go and walk in and enroll and, you know, start getting the services that you need.

That's always been a barrier for a lot of people at the end of the day.

You couldn't just walk into a clinic and say, "I need help, necessarily."

Nick, how impactful do you think this is going to be for the community?

Because in a lot of reporting, folks talk about being safe, feeling more safe.

Is this going to really seep in and work?

Well, I don't think anyone knows the answer to that yet.

I know that one of the things the city is going to try to work on is they have all this short-term data of like when they do one of these deployments, how many people accept services versus turn them down, but they don't really have any way of tracking what happens a year down the line, two years down the line, like whether people are really helped to exit that crisis that they're in or whether they just end up in the same spot again.

So that's something they're looking at that would definitely help analyze that aspect of it.

And the mayor also stressed that there are still gaps, like not enough low barrier shelter.

I mean, something that you hear from a lot of people in this field and people who have been homeless is that it's just often very hard to get into a shelter.

If you don't meet all the requirements and you kind of without getting into a low barrier shelter, you can at least kind of get on your feet again.

It's harder to take that next step.

So that's something the mayor apparently recognizes and is vocal about as well.

Joe, new police chief Monica Prieto, is she going to be able to put her own stamp on this or is it one of these things where she'll be a part of it and then kind of assess where things are going and then she can do more?

I think it's more of the latter.

I think that, you know, she's been in the department for 26 years.

She knows what's going on there.

She knows the challenges in place.

But to get the resources to the right places, she needs help from the city manager and the Tucson City Council.

And those are hard issues that the city has long struggled with at the end of the day.

And so while a safer initiative is a very good example of how we can move things around inside of a budget, you know, putting her stamp on something is more about the day to day operations than it is about putting out a prestige kind of new program.

OK, you brought it up.

We're going to talk about it.

Budget.

City of Tucson, I believe it was about 2.44 billion dollars.

That was the budget for this fiscal year.

There's still about 27, I think, million short of that.

How are they going to find money to make up and what does it look like for the future?

So first of all, we want to start with, you know, it is 2.4 billion.

That's an undeniable number.

But that 1.7 billion of that is just dedicated to things that you cannot take out of the checkbook and put somewhere else.

This is pension obligations.

This is insurance.

This is bonds.

These are a lot of things that lawyers will get involved very quickly if you try to go from that.

So they have a much smaller budget of about 750 million in their general fund that they have to close.

Last week they found 10 million of it.

And they did that in part by pushing forward with not paying back some of their debt really early.

And then they have a program in the city manager's office that they're going to just slowly push back as well to make some savings.

And so they're looking for those kind of fixes where they can.

But I think there's a much bigger problem just over the horizon with next year's budget, which is ballooned from the 40 million that we've talked about on this program now to 67 million.

So it's getting worse instead of getting better.

Nick, Mayor Romero probably wants to protect some things.

When you think about the budget and think about the mayor in particular, are there any things that are just probably off the table?

You mean things that she wouldn't touch?

Yeah.

Well, there's definitely things like this public safety.

I mean, that's something I've heard many council members say it's the number one thing.

People complain about.

Number one call they get is about drug use and homelessness.

So I'm skeptical that the city would get rid of any programs that, that could ameliorate those things.

And I think part of the budget issue explains why we see city leaders so gung ho about our next and about a lot of these proposition is that that gives them a separate funding source for things that they think are important to achieve.

That doesn't have to come out of the general fund every year.

So OK.

Now you brought this up.

RTA Next.

We are in the middle of early voting right now.

Propositions for 18, for 19 both have to pass in order for RTA next to move forward.

I know you just did another report on the whole process.

What did you learn and what can you share with us?

Yeah, I focused on the roads for this one, which I know Joe's reported on as well.

But and, you know, that's what RTA Next is.

RTA was this, is primarily a road building project.

But I looked at how the state funding works for RTA a little more and how certain kinds of projects are able to attract huge amounts of money from the state versus other kinds like something like redoing, you know, Grant Road and in inner city Tucson.

That's kind of the art.

It's on its own.

That's like that's the RTA's money, whereas building highway interchanges specifically in Marana and SahuaRita, but also out on the side of Tucson, those kinds of projects often get three times as much money from the state as they do from the RTA, which explains why there's this kind of incentive in a way for local leaders to put those projects on there.

They can get something big that done without putting a ton of money towards it from the RTA's own pockets.

So that's one thing.

And the other thing is just, you know, the big theme with RTA Next, one of the big themes is the incomplete projects that's kind of hanging over its head as voters fill out their mail in ballots and just, you know, it's still causing frustration.

I was at a local Walmart.

People are frustrated about it.

There's constructional like on G and Alvernon, that Walmart.

Actually, I talked to a store employee who said their sales went down 30% since that construction started.

So certainly that's maybe the number one way the RTA makes itself known to people, at least while they're still building.

Joe, the early ballots are out.

People are voting right now.

Again, March 10th is the final election, the final vote for this.

Are you getting a sense or are you hearing how this may be leaning one way or the other?

So there's a lot of things that This may be leaning one way or the other.

So there was polling done a while ago now, a few months ago, that showed that people were in favor of the RTA Next and that it was going to pass.

And it's one of the reasons why we've seen donations of approximately one point three million dollars into the RTA.

Yes, Program Connect Pima and their latest report shows that they've already spent one point two million on that on different social media.

So I think there's a lot of people that put a lot of money in it, assuming that it's going to pass or at the very least trying to make sure that it does.

But we had a lot of groups now come out against it and they rarely share a political allegiance to each other.

We've got socialists and Republicans on the same page about this.

We have former people who are deeply connected and involved with the original RTA process now saying no to it.

We have a member of the city council saying no to it.

So it's going to be a close election.

And I think turnout is going to be where we really are going to find out whether this passes or not.

And I would say also just something that maybe doesn't get talked about quite enough is what these cities would do if RTA does fail.

I emailed and called around some local officials and it's interesting to see the differences there, like Sahuarita and Oro Valley.

Both mayors went out and said we are, we would try to do our own sales tax if RTA fails and get the same kinds of projects funded.

Marana was a little bit kind of more on the fence.

They were they weren't quite sure.

And then Tucson, you get different responses from different members of city council and the mayor basically where some are say, yeah, we have we'd have to turn to that.

And some are saying, well, if voters reject this, why would they why would they choose another one?

I think that we've we saw Pima County tried to really ramp up.

I have some sales tax last year.

It fell apart and didn't go anywhere because you need five votes for that.

So Mr.

Christy is unlikely to vote for that ever.

And so I think the city of Tucson is likely to push forward with one if there is a plan B. I just think that it's a question of is it going to be on November's ballot or is it going to be on a ballot two years from now?

Yeah.

Talked to the mayor yesterday and she brought up could be a year.

It could be more than a year.

So we'll have to see the vote coming up on on March 10th.

Time now for our viewer questions segment each week.

You can send in a question here at ampm dot org slash the press room.

You could also write a question on our YouTube channel and we'll pull one of them and open it up to the panel.

This week's question coming from our viewer, John Bramley.

And he asks, I would like to hear your reporter's comments on the Colorado River water negotiations, which appear deadlocked.

What are the likely outcomes and scenarios and their potential impact for water supply, economic development and agriculture for southern Arizona?

Joe, I know you've covered the Colorado River talks from the Tucson perspective.

Any thoughts about this question?

I think we are in a very poor position at the end of the day on these negotiations.

I think that the likelihood is that at the end of the day, when a deal has been met, Tucson will no longer be able to bank water as it has for decades.

And so we will be living a little bit hand to mouth and begin to start pumping into our aquifers, which is not a viable long term solution.

And so I think questions of industry that uses high water are going to be front and center as we learn how to grow together.

As for agriculture, it's looking more and more likely that agriculture will be easier to grow in other parts of the state and other parts of the country than it will be in southern Arizona.

And how much will the data centers and the water usage there be a factor here as well?

Well, for Tucson, I just don't think given the current political makeup that we're going to see another data center happen.

The city is already moving forward with making new regulations governing high water users.

And the initial feedback that we've heard from the community is that it doesn't go far enough.

OK, well, I thank John Bramley for that question and stay tuned because here in the month of March, we're going to do some more water stories and have a conversation deeply on the water topic just overall, especially as it affects southern Arizona and Tucson in particular.

We'll have a group of our environmental beat reporters handling that in the month of March.

So with that, Nick Rommel, thank you for making the hustle getting here on time and Joe Ferguson.

Thank you very much.

That's going to do it for this week on The Press Room.

I'm David Lee.

We'll see you next week.