The following is an original production of AZPM News.

Today on The Press Room, Tucson Unified School District approves of a four-day week for one of its high schools.

How will breaking from tradition make a difference?

A state spending proposal threatens downtown Tucson development and the city cuts off water to Project Blue.

All this and more on The Press Room coming up next.

[Music] Thank you for joining us this week on The Press Room.

I'm Tony Perkins and we've got a panel of journalists ready to discuss the week's major headlines in southern Arizona.

Let's meet Shannon Conner with AZ Luminaria, Nick Rommel with AZPM News, and Paul Ingram with the Tucson Sentinel.

Thanks for being with us on The Press Room.

Thank you.

Let's start with education and the Tucson schools are headed for a four-day week.

Shannon, you've written about that decision from TUSD.

What happened?

TUSD is really trying to grow its district.

It's lost about 11,000 students in the last decade.

It's down to about 35,000 students in 88 schools.

And Palo Verde started kicking around this idea with Principal Eric Brock last November, came to the school board in late March, early April, and said, "What if we did a four-day week, lengthened the school day by about an hour from about 8:10 to 4:10 and gave students Fridays off?"

And the board decided to kick it down the road a couple weeks and then voted on it last week and passed it unanimously in hopes that Palo Verde, with a populati of about 700 students, could grow.

And Palo Verde, among the 10 largest high schools in TUSD, has seen a lot of growth.

It has grown the most in the last five years.

So as a magnet school, it's looking at really trying to attract a lot of those, and they've already kicked off the campaign to attract those new freshmen and new teachers that get to rotate in on Fridays.

Have they done a breakdown of how much it's going to cost?

They've started that process, and they voted on it knowing that it's going to take some time to figure all of that out.

And the board wanted to do it no matter what.

It didn't give it a time limit.

It said, "Let's try it starting next school year," and it's not even a pilot program at this point for a certain amount of time.

They're just going to start it, come back, and check in maybe semester break and see how it goes.

Paul, it doesn't appear that they're sure if it's going to save money, not to make things that much easier.

Why do it?

Well, I think there's a lot of competition for TUSD.

I mean, TUSD is a huge school district.

It's the biggest in Tucson.

It stretches across most of the city, but it's also a real solid competition against other school districts.

There's Vail School District, which is really growing, has lots of brand new schools, but also the charter school system, and also just parents taking their kids out of schools because of the ESAs.

So they have to compete with that, and so they might want to take this as an opportunity to maybe look for kids in a non-traditional setting, maybe kids who maybe need to go to work because they need to help their families, or maybe want to get extra credits and go to the U of A or Pima College.

It's just trying something different, and I think probably for them, it's just a way of seeing what works.

You can try it for a little while and see if it does, and if it's effective, maybe you can expand it to other schools.

Well, Nick, how do you define if it works or not?

Well, my response to this is maybe coming from the fact that I was in high school only seven years ago, and thinking about that, I remember how long a regular school day felt already from like 7:30 to 2:30, so I don't know if distributing the Friday time between the other days, I mean sure you get a three-day weekend, but those four days are going to be tough.

This was the complaint from students.

Student got up in front of that board and said, "We are already tired, and making the day longer is not going to help that."

So if the goal is appealing to students, I guess we'll see how they like it.

Well, Shannon, there was a federal decision affecting the ability for charter schools in Arizona to unionize, and of course that's big news for teachers and staffers last week.

What happened with that story?

City High School, along with its two middle schools at Paulo Freire, both downtown campus and one on University Boulevard, started the process of looking at unionizing last fall when BASIS went to unionizing here in Tucson.

That was in August, September, and by December, City decided it was going to proceed.

There were some roadblocks.

By the time we got into 2026, when its board said, "You can't necessarily speak at a meeting.

We're not sure about this," and then hired a law firm to explore maybe thwarting this effort.

The same law firm that has thwarted efforts by Starbucks employees to unionize.

So the National Labor Relations Board weighed in.

We got the decision over the weekend.

Oh, on May Day, found out about it over the weekend, and they say not only can City and Paulo Freire schools vote to unionize, this can also pave the way for potentially more charters throughout the state to do the same thing.

So that vote is on May 19th.

It seems to be a trend that's happening in Arizona.

You know, I think that's a trend.

I mean, as you mentioned, BASIS was one of the schools that did it, and BASIS is a really well thought of school.

So for that school district- Exactly.

And it's one that hasn't had a union.

It's kind of a modern school outside of the union system.

But that one, of course, created a union.

And I think that was a bit of a sign that teachers who are in these charter schools want to have the same protections in terms of wages and time and their effort.

And so they're going to move towards this.

So the NRLB's decision really kind of laying extra groundwork of saying that charter schools aren't special from other schools.

Of course, if teachers want to unionize, they should be able to.

All right, let's switch over to the state legislature.

And lawmakers were busy last week in Phoenix.

Republicans advanced a budget bill that would have directly impacted Tucson's Rio Nuevo city development.

Paul, Governor Hobbs vetoed that, along with everything else in the Republican-backed budget.

But that's not the end of it with Rio Nuevo.

What's going on?

Well, we'll have to see what actually happens to this.

But Hobbs has really signaled that she will not accept a cut to Rio Nuevo.

And the one thing to keep in mind is that Rio Nuevo is a sort of business district that was created.

It was created as part of a vote in 1999.

Voters said, look, we're going to take some of the sales tax that comes from businesses in this district.

We're going to keep it here.

We're going to use that for business development.

So the Rio Nuevo district extends through downtown and goes up through all the way to Broadway up towards Park Mall.

And so it's really just an idea of keeping some sales tax in Tucson with the idea of being direct business development.

What the legislature is asking for is essentially saying, we want that $19 million to come to the state so we can decide what to do with it.

It seems like in part they want to use it for another tax cut.

So Hobbs has vetoed that.

And I think for businesses that are in the Rio Nuevo district, there's a bit of sigh of relief because this has been really important for downtown.

Now, legislature is off for the month of May, four weeks and not much action is going to go on.

But they do have a deadline to avoid a state government shutdown on June the 30th if there's no agreement with the governor on the new budget.

Shannon, the break is leaving a lot of plans for proposals on the table.

What do you think they're going to be talking about, if anything, over the next four weeks?

Education-wise, they may be talking about Prop 123, which is the proposition that voters approved in 2016 that said that the sale of state land, the money from the sale of state land, would be funneled toward education.

Republicans left that out altogether.

The governor says no.

And Tom Horne is even on board wanting renewal of Prop 123, which expired in June of 2025 because $7 million of that $300 million that it brought in, was going to his office.

So the governor is saying we need to revisit the issue of Prop 123.

Schools need that money.

And Republicans are not even acknowledging it at this point.

Nick, it's always one side seems to be blaming the other whenever there's a threat of a shutdown.

Which side do you think has any advantage at all?

And do voters notice this?

And especially in an election year for governor, how's that going to stack up?

I think there's several factors at play.

I mean, of course, the governor has a built-in advantage because she has the veto power at the end of the day.

At the same time, she is running for re-election.

So she might be more careful about how she's using that power.

It might get much more amplified this year versus another year.

But it's a favorable environment for Democrats around the country right now.

So she might be feeling like she has more wiggle room to kind of push back against Republicans than she usually would in this pretty purple state.

So it's hard to say they've come to compromis at the 11th hour in the past with the same governor, I believe same leadership in the state legislature.

So we'll see if that happens again this time.

But just going back to Rio Nuevo, I think whether they do or not is going to have a pretty big, and how they do is going to have a pretty big impact on the future of business in downtown Tucson.

Paul, is it easy to say who's at fault or is it just who's the loudest?

I think that's a really good question.

I mean, it kind of comes down to it.

I mean, one thing to keep in mind, the state legislature, their job is to pass the budget.

If any of the job that they need to do, that's it.

But this has been a problem for a while.

There's a tendency to take the budget past its deadline to keep fighting over it because of trying to figure out what to do with the money, trying to figure out how to use tax cuts.

The financing has become more difficult in part because of the flat tax.

There was a hope that it would bring in more money.

That hasn't happened yet.

The economy's been, has some signs of its struggling, which means there's less tax revenue.

Fundamentally, the state just has less money.

So the state has to come up with some cuts.

It's always a decision about what gets cut and sort of whose favorite projects get axed.

And that's really, really difficult.

It's a hard thing to do.

There's lots of money that everyone wants to spend on certain things, border policies.

Farming policies, land policies, school policies.

There's just a lot there.

And so there's a lot to fight over.

All right.

Let's move on to downtown Tucson.

And we talked about Rio Nuevo and the state budget earlier.

Nick, how much more is it going to cost to park downtown?

Is that something that maybe people are going to be talking about more than downtown development?

How much does it going to cost to park my car there?

Right.

Right.

Well, starting July 1st, street meters are going to cost $1.50 an hour instead of $1.

And city-owned garages and lots are going to cost $1.25 an hour instead of $1 an hour.

City officials say this is necessary because since COVID, since the amount of people commuting downtown and paying for parking has decreased, the money brought in by parking fees just doesn't cover parking operations like it used to before the pandemic.

And they say it's necessary to reinvest in parking infrastructu One pretty surprising statistic that came out of this discussion is that almost one-third of all parking meters in the city of Tucson are damaged in some way.

Officials didn't specify if they're so all so damaged that they can't collect payment.

But the fact that one out of every few parking meters needs to be fixed is, you know, that requires a pretty big investment.

So they're raising parking fees.

And yeah, I guess commuters and people going out will just have to think about that as one more factor in their decision.

We talked a little bit about City hHigh School and the two middle schools.

And there's a connectio here because although the teachers, the, you know, more than three dozen teachers and staff at those schools, they all have to pay for parking every day when they're downtown on University, on Fourth Avenue to work at their schools.

So something that they are potentially looking at is including that in their agreement, their new union agreement.

And it's actually funny that you say that because the city originally wanted to also expand parking enforcement to weekends on Fourth Avenue in downtown.

And what happened was a lot of the businesses on Fourth Avenue and their employees basically pushed back and said that employees already have to pay for parking.

So this is going to make that even harder.

So city officials, they, they kind of hinted that they might look at creating some more carved out parking spots for those businesses.

And one thing I think, what's in mind is like downtown always had, part has historically had parking meters, but Fourth Avenue for a long time didn't, did not.

And, and so that was an addition.

And so there were a lot of business owners at the time when they were installing the parking meters and start charging parking, we're worried about whether or not this would bring customers down or not.

Now I will say on the other hand, if you're charging more per hour for meters, then that tends to kind of increase turnover.

So it means that you don't have somebody parking at a meter for a while.

Instead they come, they get, they come to buy their book, they buy a sandwich, then they, they leave and someone else can park there, which means for business, that's actually a good thing.

So there's a bit of a trade off in this.

The other thing too is, I mean, we have to keep in mind, yes, certainly people want to park downtown, but of course the city has put a massive amount of investment into this Sun Link, which in part is supposed to be a key area people downtown so that we don't all park downtown.

And you kind of think about it when you, I want to park at the U of A and everyone wants to park downtown.

There are certain occasions, I think of All Souls Procession where there just aren't any parking spaces.

There just not enough parking spaces when all, everyone wants to park down in the same area at once.

And that's when things like the Sun Link and even this, the bus become really important.

It's going to be a balance for the city to maybe expand some of those services and make those work better for employees who are down there downtown, who are there at night, restaurants, things like that.

Downtown Tucson has developed and, you know, thought of it as more successful now.

Do you think people will say, well, it's worth it to pay a little bit extra?

I think people take, took the initial change from no parking meters to parking meters to some degree.

And of course all the parking lots are more expensive than they used to be too.

So yeah, I think people, I think people like going downtown and will probably build that into their budget.

Okay.

All right.

Now let's go to a couple of stories this week that are happening outside of Tucson.

Paul, you've been following the potential violations of state law involving Copper World mine.

Yes.

And the plan for the company to drill wells in the Santa Rita mountains.

What have you found out?

Simply put the Copper World, which is a developing copper mine in the Santa Ritas, is they're not done yet, but they're sort of on a private bit of land, but they need a lot of water.

I mean, 'cause copper mining is just water intensive inherently.

And so what they've done in part is they asked the town of Sahuarita that they could access to some water and they kind of made a promise.

They said, if we're going, water will pull, we'll replace for every 100% we pull, we'll give you 105% back.

And which is a deal that they made with Sahuarita that's been happening for awhile, but in recent days they've been pulling water and they kind of forgot to tell anybody.

They're required to do reports.

They're required to put reports to the town of Sahuarita.

They're also required to put the reports to the state and they just didn't do it.

You know, the company basically said this was a fault of the contractor.

They just, it was a mistake.

We'll do better next time.

But it kind of puts under pressure.

I mean, you know, there's a lot of environmental groups who have been very concerned about the water usage.

There's just, the amount of water that the mine will eventually pull is incredible.

And trying to figure out how that water is going to be replaced is going to be a huge issue for not only for the town of Sahuarita, but also for Tucson, for Green Valley, for all the places that are sort of downstream.

Nick, the city of Tucson leaned in on this issue too.

You mean with Copper World?

With Copper World.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, the city of Tucson, Pima County, it's become kind of standard practice, you might say, to kind of vote on resolutions condemning this or the other thing, even if they don't have immediate jurisdiction over it, which they don't, right?

No, not really.

So, I mean, clearly, I think that shows that a lot of people in Tucson are very concerned about this, and the electeds are feeling that, and they want to reflect that.

All right.

Well, there's another story down on the border, some wall construction and a site considered sacred by the Tohono O'odham Nation.

And that site got bulldozed last month, about 30 miles west of Sells.

Right.

So, what this thing is, it's called an intaglio, and essentially it's painted rocks that have been kind of painted and then set out.

This thing's been around for millennia, and it's sort of an iconic symbol, and it's been in the desert.

It's really, really important to the members of the nation, and they were very careful about telling the contractors and US Customs and Border Protection who were in charge of the border wall construction that this was important, it was sacred, and they needed to protect it and leave it alone.

And somehow or other, a contractor bulldozed it.

They bulldozed a swath about 30 feet wide, right through the middle of it.

They broke the back of it.

And it's, I think, hard to explain why this matters.

I think when we talk about metaphors, about what this means for people, and every metaphor sort of falls apart, but it's sort of like, imagine someone driving a bulldozer through Arlington Cemetery.

And how do you undo that?

How do you bring that back?

So, it becomes a huge issue for the tribe, and also for the tribe who have been very, they pushed very hard back against the idea of a border wall across their land.

They've continuously asked for no, one not to be built.

There is a barrier, there's what's called a bowler barrier, sort of short concrete and steel steps that sort of sit out there to keep vehicles from crossing, but they don't want a full blown border wall.

Border Patrol has said that they do want to build a border wall.

They want to expand surveillance.

They want to do a double wall, even through the TO nation.

And so for them, this becomes a much bigger deal.

And the other thing too is it's worth noting that this is in Cabeza Prieta, which is a national wildlife refuge.

This is land that was set aside to be protected.

And so for a contractor to drive a bulldozer through the section of it, a hundred feet from the border wall and destroy this thing, to desecrate this thing, is an immense issue for the tribe.

Nick, there seems to be an issue that's going to be coming up time and time again with anything around the border, land, especially around the border.

There's going to be a debate over how important this land is to people in general and then how that's going to be resolved.

Yeah, for sure.

And I think one thing worth noting is that the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, he actually in his confirmation hearings did signal that his relationship with tribal nations would change compared to the department under Kristi Noem.

So I don't know what that example shows.

I don't know how personally involved Markwayne Mullin is and what his contractors are doing on the Tohono O'odham Nation.

So far, they haven't said that Markwayne Mullin has gone and actually talked to the nation.

Rodney Scott, who's the head of the Commissioner of CBP, he was there and he spoke to Verlyon Jose and some of the other leaders.

But I haven't heard whether Markwayne Mullin is actually going to come.

There would probably be a good opportunity for him to come and actually speak to that.

He might have more luck in some ways than some of the other folks.

So unclear if that kind of vibe shift has happened yet at the Department.

Paul, real briefly, let's talk about this agreement between three states, California, Arizona, and Nevada about sharing water from the Colorado River.

It is apparently a kind of a stopgap measure.

Maybe it will lead to the larger agreement that everybody's waiting for for the seven or for the western states that are trying to deal with shortages on the Colorado.

What is it about this early agreement that's going to make a difference?

Really trying to Arizona, California, and Nevada are really trying to put themselves in the position of trying to accept some cuts so they don't get bigger cuts.

The fundamental problem is that Arizona especially, we're the junior member of the junior states at the lower basin.

So when it comes down to who gets cut the most, Arizona is going to get cut the most.

So Arizona, but also California, Nevada, want to put themselves in position of kind of building negotiation and creating an opportunity to save some water, to get some of that water and not get such a large cut.

There was a cut that was high as 27% of Colorado River water, which is going to come down really on the heads of Arizona.

The question for Arizona especially is that if this cut happens, then what's next?

CAP water, which uses Colorado River water, feeds a lot of water for Tucson.

It feeds water for Phoenix, for the whole Phoenix area Valley.

Also, of course, we can't forget about the agricultural... agriculture that's at the bottom of the Valley in Yuma.

So all those things are affected by the Colorado River.

These states are really trying to set kind of a good condition, the best case scenario of saying, "Well, if we only get a 20% cut, that's okay."

We have to kind of think about a 20% cut is still a loss of a lot of water.

All right.

Let's move to what you guys are looking for as far as stories we'll be covering over the next week or two.

Shannon, let's start with you.

I'm really looking forward to getting a first look at all the candidates for a state superintendent of public instruction.

So those first debates, one is May 13th, the other is May 14th.

We get to see the Democratic candidates.

Teresa Leyba Ruiz, who has been a teacher and an administrator, was the president of Glendale Community College for eight years.

She is facing in the Democratic primary, which will be on July 21st, way moved up.

Brett Newby, who is a dad and a mental health professional based in Chandler.

On the Republican side, we get to see Tom Horne, who is the incumbent vying for his third term as state superintendent against our State Treasurer, Kimberly Yee.

And that will be the debate on the 14th.

So I'm looking at that.

Nick, what do you have coming up of things that I'm kind of mulli is I want to take a closer look at the Tucson police department's new strategy to deal with street racing.

Apparently, they've completely shifted to this kind of intelligence led proactive approach where they scour social media for tips and hints to bust these races before they start and even are looking into criminal syndicate charges for participants.

All very inter like to look at that in these tw And the other thing is on May 19th, there's an interesting election in the small town of Benson in Cochise County, where half the city council is facing recalls as a result of intense community backlash against an aluminum facility that's under construction.

It would be interesting to see if town government can get complete reshuffled by a grassroots movement like that.

And I'm working on a story actually from today.

Adelita Grijalva, a US Rep, visited an ICE facility in Florence.

She was able to go in and do an unannounced inspection for just about a half hour.

That story will be out.

And also we're working on a large story, large package about homelessness in Tucson, about sort of looking at solutions for homelessness, what the city and county are doing, what other things that the city and other folks can do to mitigate homeless, to deal with drug use, other sorts of problems that are really happening in the city.

So it's something that we've been working on for a little bit and we're looking forward to getting it out there.

Shannon, I was going to talk to you about the state legislature and the empowerment scholarship accounts and the vouchers.

You know, I think people, you see them all the time these days collecting signatures for potential ballot measures.

Where does that stand right now?

We've got two potential propositions that are looking for signatures right now.

But, and the issue is that they are very, very similar and people don't necessarily know which is which.

So one of the propositions is called the Protect Education Act.

It is sponsored by the largest teachers union in the state and Save Our Schools Arizona, which is a nonprofit that supports public schools and teachers.

And it is looking to regulate empowerme scholarship accounts.

It's the biggest difference between that and the other proposition is that it would like to limit, put a cap on the amount of money that a family can earn to apply for the account.

The other proposition, which doesn't have a name, was formed about a week after the Protect Education Act.

It has earned about a quarter of the money in the first quarter of the year.

And it is sponsored largely by a nonprofit school choice group out of Dallas.

And it wants to leave vouchers as they are in Arizona.

It wants to regulate them, but it wants to leave them open for universal acceptance so that anybody can get in.

All right.

Thank you, Shannon.

Thank you for the rest of our panelists.

That wraps up this edition of The Press Room.

I'm Tony Perkins for all the staff and crew at The Press Room.

Thanks for joining us.

See you next week.

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