The following is an original production of AZPM News.

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Inside the city of Tucson's plans to stabilize its finances.

Sun Tran workers authorized a strike, what's at the top of their concerns?

And a coming showdown for Pima County state legislative hopefuls.

It's all on The Press Room, starting now.

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to The Press Room.

I'm Tony Perkins and I'm joined in the studio by our panel of journalists, Nick Rommel with AZPM News.

Tim Steller writes for the Arizona Daily Star, Caitlin Schmidt with Tucson Spotlight and Paul Ingram with the Tucson Sentinel.

Thanks for being with us again on The Press Room.

We're gonna start off talking about the Tucson City Council.

The city has a new budget for fiscal year 2026-27.

Nick, part of the plan was to bring stability to the city budget.

Every city wants to do that.

How's Tucson doing?

Yeah, the budget season started with some possible cuts to fire stations and rec centers, so kind of off the bat, thinking that maybe it wasn't gonna be such a stable year.

Well, in the end, somehow city staff managed to take that off, get most of the cuts they needed through overtime reductions for fire and police and end up spending actually slightly more than they're going to last year, but less in the general fund, which is the part that they really fully control year to year.

So the mayor, when they're voting on the new budget, she said that she did compare this year to the post-Great Recession years of '08, '09, but she said that in the end, the cuts didn't end up being nearly as drastic as they were back then.

Caitlin, any surprises in the budget for you?

Not really.

I think that they allocated money more or less where we thought they were.

It was nice to see them take some steps to respond to public feedback about things like fire station closures and what-not.

I mean, I do think it's interesting that they are looking to scale back on overtime for police and firefighters at a time when we know that both of those departments are severely understaffed and leaving administrative positions open, which does make sense, but the alternative of not doing these things is scaling back on services, which they have heard time and time again, people absolutely do not want.

Tim, there is a emphasis about public safety in this budget.

Anything unusual about that?

Yeah, well, I mean, one thing that they did this time is jump into a, grab ahold of, I should say, a couple million dollars for transit safety, and that comes out of the RTA budget.

That is, the RTA has money set aside.

So it's $2.15 million for Tucson this year.

And obviously that's become a big issue.

There's been a lot of, I don't know if it's a lot, but there have been a series of incidents at either bus stops or on buses.

And so they've done a bunch of different things to try to address that.

What they haven't done, of course, is reinstate fares.

They have decided that they want to keep fare-free transit going for another year.

All right, now let's stick with Sun Tran, the public transit system.

Workers for Sun Tran authorized a strike.

That's not the same as calling a strike, but it does set a roadmap in that direction.

Paul, what is happening on the city buses?

I mean, really, yeah.

So what they did is they voted, about 99% of the people that voted voted for going on strike.

That doesn't mean that they're immediately going on strike.

What it means is that they could go on strike later in the month as they're in the midst of redoing their contract with the city, and really building up how they're going to do this.

There's been a long time for the last few years, there's been really a big push about safety for the bus drivers.

And there's been lots of complaints.

There's been problems where people have threatened bus drivers.

There's been a few assaults.

And so really it's about kind of creating, at least pushing the city to create some kind of program or some kind of solution for that.

And some of the things that, as Tim mentioned, like the RTA money from the RTA Next, some of that's gonna include barriers.

It's also gonna include an ambassador program.

So kind of putting somebody else between the bus drivers and some passengers, especially unruly passengers.

Yeah, Tim, City Council Member Paul Cunningham wrote an op-ed saying that he was sort of starting to change his mind a little bit about the whole fare- free issue.

Yeah, I think that had been becoming evident over time.

This was in the Tucson Sentinel.

He said, I previously voted for a fare-free transit, I believed in it, but I believe the social contract has been broken by some of the people riding Sun- Tran and other transit options.

I think the way to look at this is in the context of the budget itself.

Nikki Lee, his fellow Eastside Council Member, voted against the budget.

And one of her primary concerns were with transit and the fact that we were not reinstating fares, we were forcing cuts or adjustments elsewhere rather than reinstating fares.

Cunningham didn't vote against the budget, but he at least laid out this argument that they should reconsider this policy.

We had a viewer of The Press Room contact us and say, let's regenerate the debate over fare- free rides.

Caitlin, when the ridership gets into this issue, what are their concerns?

I mean, safety concerns are always an issue.

We're also entering the summer months where we know that the bus kind of serves as a mobile cooling center, making it more crowded, other issues.

It's such a controversial issue and it has been, I feel like, pretty much since right around the pandemic ended when we started talking about it again.

The last time that we saw a Sun Tran strike, I believe was in 2015 and it lasted about 30 days.

I think our ridership has gone up quite a bit in the last 11 years, and a 30 day strike could be quite devastating to some people's livelihoods, I think.

So I hope that we don't get there, but who knows?

I mean, we have a lot of safety items in this RTA budget, those physical barriers that they talked about, special duty police, transit ambassadors, station upgrades.

So hopefully there's some room at the table for discussion so that it doesn't come to this.

I would just add that one of the things over the course of the budget discussions that Nikki Lee, the council member brought up is like, let's have community engagement around free fares like the city does for so many other policies.

That was voted down by the rest of the council and never made it into any policy or the budget.

So in a way, they're not gonna get a full picture, at least not in that formal setting of how constituents feel.

One other thing about the strike authorization that I'd add is you definitely should look at it as leverage.

They are in contract discussions and they're also in the budget season.

So that's the teamsters saying, hey, you gotta take this seriously.

We're gonna strike over this if you don't do something.

And so the question then becomes, is what the city did enough according to the Teamsters?

And I think one of the things about the connection between free fares and assaults and other criminal activity that are on the buses, one thing I looked up and found some statistics.

I mean, there's been 14,000 incidents on buses across the nation over a 14-year period, which of course breaks down to a thousand a year.

And that's of course across the entire nation.

There are assaults, but there's also assaults on places that have, assaults and problems on places that have fares: Chicago, Los Angeles.

Miranda Schubert noted this during the meeting on Tuesday, that there are problems and that there's kind of now a connection between those two things that maybe isn't necessarily warranted.

The question, and I think the other question is, if the city went back and added fares, that has a cost too.

I mean, even just to simply like process fares has a certain cost to it.

It's not like that money just suddenly floods back.

All right, now let's move on to one of South Tucson's most visible properties and an issue about cleaning up the Spanish Trail Motel.

Tim, catch us up on the history of the property.

Thousands of people drive past it every year, I-10 and Benson Highway.

Yeah, it's a well-known landmark now infamous, because it's been the sign.

So stepping back decades, it was a landmark and a nice place.

People would go to the Spanish Trail to dance and dine and all that stuff going back.

I think what happened is the arrival of I-10 and the elimination of Benson Highway as the main thoroughfare kind of killed off that motel industry along that strip.

So fast forward to now, it's been abandoned a long time.

The sign has been destroyed.

It's a tall, very visible sign.

It's been destroyed for more than a decade.

And now also the motel itself, the buildings have burned down, burned repeatedly.

So the previous owner had been sued by South Tucson to force him to clean it up.

In the process of various negotiations, including Pima County making an offer to buy the property, that owner sold to another owner.

And that owner, the new owner, Kristian Gose, who I talked to this week, said he was in discussions with the city and was surprised that all of a sudden they dropped a lawsuit on him.

And so from his perspective as a new owner, maybe it was a surprise, certainly it was according to what he told me.

But I think from the perspective of South Tucson, it's like, if we don't see movement at some point soon, we're gonna sue every time until we get this done.

Caitlin, the location of this property makes it more complicated.

Oh, I mean, of course, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it's become quite the eyesore for sure.

And quite the touching point, they had sued Bowers, I think back in August and he offloaded it pretty quickly.

But it's near a busy intersection and a bridge, and there is a large unhoused population in the area.

It has become quite the hotspot for crime.

I think that they've said there have been almost two dozen fires there in the past few years.

And the cleanup process, as we've been discussing before, is not easy at all.

We're talking about asbestos, and God knows what other kinds of chemicals or substances are in there.

I'm honestly surprised that they've let it stand this long.

It is a public safety issue.

I cannot believe that somebody hasn't wandered in there and it hasn't collapsed on them.

It's just kind of shocking that it's made it to this point without action.

And Pima County is definitely involved in the background.

The board has approved money to spend on it, but essentially they're trying to ensure that they get their value.

That is, the cost of cleaning the thing up may be more than the appraised value of the actual property, which is around 815,000.

So it's complicated.

All right, and fundamentally speaking, at some point somebody's gonna have to clean it up.

No matter who it is, whether it's the county or the developer or whoever actually has it, somebody's gonna have to do something about it.

So it's whether how much of that comes out of, say, Pima County's coffers, how much that comes from the developers.

And then I think the next question is what's next?

Looking at the history of it, it's been an area of housing at some point.

Somebody wanted to turn it into a shelter for veterans who are homeless, and now it's, well, it's a shambles.

And there's quite a bit of development in that area.

We're getting that new soccer training facility close by at the old greyhound park.

Barrio Restoration just opened their community hub.

We've seen a bunch of new medical facilities going in, so there is some potential for the area if they can get that property - cleaned up.

- It's a great spot, right?

Yeah.

Between, on the frontage road, between two near-adjacent interchanges.

All right, we'll see what's next for that area.

The University of Arizona's Health Sciences program is the focus of some significant changes that are happening.

The Tucson Sentinel is reporting at least 28 employees could be laid off this summer in what is described as a realignment.

Caitlin, just when we thought the financial issues were done with the U of A, this comes up.

Yeah, I mean, are we surprised?

No.

To go from a deficit that large to come back within a couple years and say, "We're balanced and we're fixed," clearly you're not balanced and fixed.

This Health Science Communications Department is relatively new, I think only six or seven years old.

So to be dismantling it that quickly is surprising.

And there have certainly been rumblings about other areas.

We know that enrollment is down for incoming students.

We know that we are seeing fewer international students attending.

So that money's gotta be made up elsewhere.

So I won't be surprised if we see some other kind of sweeping changes before the start of the school year.

And I think that maybe the other thing too is that this is also reorganization inside the U of A. They're putting more and more parts of the U of A under specific provosts.

They're narrowing this.

I mean, the Health Sciences has been around since the 70s.

It's kind of its own organization and has been built that way and actually praised for being that way and does a lot of great work.

But they're removing this part and also kind of organizing under the main provost.

Yeah, yeah, to be clear, they're dismantling the structure of the Health Sciences which included five colleges, the Colleges of Medicine, Pharmacy, Nursing, and Public Health.

They're just gonna report up.

They'll all still be there.

They'll just report up the same way other colleges do.

But yeah, this is 1973 was when the Health Sciences Division was formed.

So it's a very old and, I don't know, well-known unit of the university.

And Nick, almost a little bit, less than a year ago, the federal government took away funding for research for universities, including the University of Arizona.

Does this factor into it?

Well, it's easy to see how it could, although I will note that the university said this has nothing to do with federal funding, which is notable maybe because it seems like they maybe would be happy to pin it on the federal government if they could.

So maybe it's really true.

I'm not a higher education reporter, so not my area of expertise.

All right, let's move on now to a big development in the Chris Nanos story.

Pima County Sheriff Nanos, the effort to recall him, took a major turn this week.

Tim tell us about it.

Well, I just asked the man who started the recall effort, which is Dan Butierez, who is also a congressional candidate.

I said, "Hey, how's it going on the recall effort?"

And he said, "Well, we've got about 15,000 signatures."

Which sounds like a lot, but not when you consider that they need 122,000 by, I think it's July 11th, so within a month.

So basically it's dead.

I mean, you can't get 100,000 more signatures valid.

Let's include the word valid signatures because there's always some invalid ones that you collect in a month.

So, I mean, this is always gonna be an uphill push.

This particular effort wasn't particularly well organized in the sense that they didn't have a website before they started, before they pulled their petitions.

If you're really gonna get this done, you have to have everything lined up, including probably some money, before you pull your petitions and set that clock ticking.

The situation about Nancy Guthrie's disappearance is still unresolved.

And Caitlin, some weird stuff going on over there at the Guthrie neighborhood.

What's happening?

Yeah, those poor residents, many of whom moved there, I'm sure because of the nice quiet nature.

It has been a media hotspot since February and we saw a couple streamers arrested this week for trespassing in various things.

The Sheriff's Department several months ago had tried to put a lockdown on the neighborhood.

They'd restricted traffic, moved parking.

I think it was one way for a certain point of time, but the control element just clearly is still an issue and with no answers in sight.

It's been an interesting, it's been really interesting to be here in Tucson and to once again be the subject of national news and to see the way it's been covered and what has merited news.

Really, my heart goes out to the family for the amount of coverage that has not been actual news coverage that they've had to endure.

The thing that's been different this year, this time, our latest time through the grinder of national news coverage is that these streamers exist and have big audiences.

And so as a result, it pays for them to be out there hour after hour after hour, even though nothing really is changing in the story.

Really, yeah, there's so little news that's happened.

I mean, we go through the first days of the investigation and then now to now, there isn't anything more.

So to do constant news coverage on a YouTube channel, I don't know.

It seems like a strange thing to do, except it's pretty profitable, I guess.

Let's switch over to elections real quick.

Momentum's still building toward the Arizona primary.

Nick, you've got a feature story coming up with AZPM News, looking at the way the candidates for Legislative District 20 are going about their work heading to the primary and of course, LD20, most of Pima County.

Well, most of inner city Tucson, I'd say.

But yeah, in the Democratic primary for state Senate, we got two very strong personalities going up against each other, both with a lot of support.

We got Alma Hernandez, who's trying to get a promotion from the State House to the State Senate.

She has a lot of donations, especially from Phoenix, from people around the kind of State Capitol world and kind of her little political fiefdom of its own, if you will.

Going up against her is Rocque Perez, only 27-years-old, was, I believe, the youngest member of the Tucson City Council ever, has ties to the Grijalva family.

He has a foundation that Raul Grijalva founded.

He's endorsed by almost the whole Tucson City Council, not the mayor, notably.

And while he's not fundraising like Alma, of course, he is raising a decent amount of money as well and has some strong allies in his corner.

So, and the attacks have been ramping up over the last couple of weeks, including some pretty nasty stuff that I don't know, if you're a certain kind of voter, maybe that's what gets you more into local politics.

If you're a certain kind of voter, maybe it turns you off completely, dredging up old tweets and things like that, that paint the other candidate in a bad light.

Okay, we're looking ahead for that one.

Let's give you all a bit of time to talk abouta story that's resonating in newsrooms around the country, even though the story has now gotten a little bit older.

And that is the firing of Scott Pelley, the CBS News correspondent and longtime contributor to "60 Minutes."

It goes to the question of how we cover stories and what we expect from that coverage and from our own people who support us.

Tim, that quote about without fear or favor from long ago in the late 1800s, early 1900s, comes into play now.

Yeah, I mean, we could see the writing on the wall as far, once the, was it Skydance that made the merger that ended up with them taking over CBS News?

So it's the Ellison family and they are very committed to the, well, I was gonna say to the Trump cause, but it's more that they are very aligned with Trump because Trump is in power right now.

So they are buying up outlets, TikTok, CBS, it'll be CNN soon, and realigning priorities so that they mesh better with the administration.

Bari Weiss is this former pundit who's kind of like ingratiated herself with billionaires and is rising and rising as a result.

So she's the one who kind of ultimately had the conflict with Pelley that drove him out, but she's gonna become more powerful until audiences say they don't want it.

One thing I think is interesting about that, one of the things that Scott did is he was very critical of Bari Weiss.

He was very critical of the new manager of the newsroom and that he was immediately fired afterwards.

And I think it's so interesting because thinking about like newsrooms that I've been in, I mean, reporters can be cantankerous.

And I think it's interesting that like a manager editor comes in and doesn't expect your reporters to push back and decides to immediately fire them for mouthing off is sort of an interesting, like, and I think problematic in sort of that he was making a critique of them and rather than saying, well, you're wrong and here's why in managing him, instead they immediately proved his point, which was to fire him and show that they're basically going to fire everybody at CBS News who has any kind of pushback.

And they're firing all the people who were longtime contributors of the network who spent 20 years or longer working for that particular news show and have helped really develop it.

So to remove all those people just because they don't like the editor and manager is really like they're killing the product, which I think is entirely the point.

You know, we've seen the president himself carrying on his confrontational nature with the press during the past week.

Caitlin, is the general news consumer resonating with this or is it just us?

I mean, definitely the general news consumer is feeling this.

KXCI and the Loft hosted, a couple of weekends ago, a screening of a documentary called "Steal This Story Please" about Amy Goodman and Democracy Now and both screenings were sold out.

It was fantastic and such a good reminder of why we're doing this.

But I mean, I don't know if the average news consumer understands that what's happening at CBS National directly impacts what's happening at local newsrooms.

We have seen the shrinking of our local newsrooms over the years as these media monopolies increase.

And so this is bigger than Scott Pelley being fired for questioning.

We will see a trickle down effect if this continues to happen.

We already have seen jobs cut.

I mean, exponentially our legacy outlets here in town are a fraction of the size that they were just a decade ago.

And there's been a lot of support for independent news coming up, which is great.

I feel grateful to live in Tucson.

We have a really robust news consumer community that turn out and support and tune in and speak up when things aren't right and aren't fair.

And I wish we could see more of that across the nation.

All right.

Now let's find out what you're looking ahead to cover over the next couple of weeks.

Nick, let's start with you.

And you've got a career change coming up.

Let's talk a little bit about that first.

Yeah, I guess that's more front of mind.

I'm finishing up my time here in Tucson at the end of June moving back to my home state of Massachusetts to work for the Fall River Herald News, which is a newspaper back home.

And yeah, I've enjoyed my time in Tucson and appearing on The Press Room.

And of course, we're looking ahead to your story on Legislative District 20 coming up.

Caitlin, you've got an appointment with the School of Journalism at the U of A. You're gonna be the new advisory council chair.

Yes, running a newsroom does not leave me with time to teach anymore.

So I wanted to still be involved with the school in some way and continue to give back.

And I think this is a good way to stay involved with students and the education itself.

Okay, what stories are you coming up with?

I don't do much reporting these days but I actually did step back into my reporter shoes.

I have a very cool story about a local example of a concept called "social prescribing," which is the idea that perhaps medicine can give us more than just a prescription for pharmaceuticals, but for things that will benefit our whole body and mind.

Paul, what do you have coming up?

So we're working on a long-term project.

It's about homelessness.

It's really based on solutions journalism, the idea of not only reporting on problems that are in the city and especially with homelessness, but also what city leaders, what county leaders and other folks are doing to actually solve some of these problems to really come up with good solutions and really gonna spend the next several months doing this through the fall.

I have been mired in the debates about Tucson and which way it's going and that sort of thing.

And so I've come up with the idea of trying to measure it.

That is, instead of just taking vibes for an answer, like what is getting better, what is getting worse in Tucson?

So I'm trying to figure that out.

All right.

One of the big stories that'll be dominating headlines over the next week or so, it's gonna be World Cup Soccer, even though it is a sports story, is something that does have sort of a link to Tucson because one of the teams, the Iranian national team that was supposed to train here will not.

Tim, what is the impact for Tucson?

Well, yeah, and obviously we lose the money that would have been spent here as a result of the team being here.

And that matters.

I mean, we've had some bad luck lately.

We had the Mexican baseball team that was gonna move here and then the visa problems prevented that from happening.

The Iranian team in the end, there was a question for a long time as to whether they were gonna participate at all.

The country decided that yes, they would, but they would not train in Tucson and said they'd train in Tijuana.

All right, that'll do it for now.

Nick Rommel, thank you again for your participation.

Tim Steller with the Arizona Daily Star, Caitlin Schmidt with Tucson Spotlight and Paul Ingram with the Tucson Sentinel, thank you.

That'll do it for The Press Room.

For all of our staff and crew, thanks for being with us and we'll see you next week.

(upbeat music) (dramatic music) Support comes from Banner Health, a nonprofit healthcare system with an integrative health plan committed to giving back to Arizona.

Last year, Banner reinvested $1.1 billion into the Arizona community.

Learn more at bannerhealth.com.

This has been an original production of AZPM News.