The following is an AZPM original production.

From the radio studios of AZPM, welcome to the latest edition of The Press Room.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Coming up, the Tucson City Council and Pima County Board of Supervisors held a rare joint meeting.

What, if anything, was accomplished?

A panel of journalists joined me to discuss those and other stories next on The Press Room.

♪ UPBEAT BRASS MUSIC ♪ Welcome to The Press Room.

I'm Steve Goldstein, journalists joining me today are Caitlin Schmidt of the Tucson Spotlight, John Washington of AZ Luminaria, Alisa Reznick of KJZZ, and Nick Rommel of AZPM News making his maiden voyage.

Nick, thanks for being here.

- Thank you.

- Don't be scared yet.

- I'm so scared.

That'll be later in the half an hour.

Major meeting that we talked about last week, I feel like we were building up to it for weeks because of this, I don't know, has it been decades that the Pima County Board of Supervisors and the Tucson City Council haven't gotten along?

Got to test you though Caitlin because of Mayor Romero's Safe City Initiative and that Supervisor Scott went back.

Okay, so this joint supervisor council meeting happened.

Any fireworks?

I mean, it wasn't as explosive as one might've thought.

There was a lot of talk about getting along, putting past issues in the past and leaving it behind.

And then we went on to have our own separate meetings where we discussed these themes.

A lot of talk about solutions, a lot of unhappy community members in response to some of the solutions that were discussed as well as the ordinance that we'll get to.

But yeah, it was a little calmer than I expected it to be.

Yeah, John, what stood out for you?

Not that much, honestly.

I would say two hours, it was filled with plenty of platitudes.

There was an overture that sort of started the meeting both from the Supervisor Rex Scott and then Mayor Romero, sort of burying the hatchet perhaps, trying to smooth things over.

That was how the meeting also ended with Councilman Paul Cunningham saying that he would like to invite any supervisors into his office and he looks forward to hanging out with them again.

There was, I think, a sort of a list of all the things that they've been doing.

We had the County Administration and then the City Manager's Office.

Both presented, just kind of went through a litany of all the things they've done.

The focus was on sort of how to tackle the opioid crisis, mental health, and all those connections with the criminal justice system.

And there were some proffered solutions, some things that they were laying out, but I think the idea was that instead of taking these on piecemeal, they want to have a more coordinated, concerted effort.

This was the first step, just getting in a room together, seeing each other face to face, and then hopefully figuring out something to actually make it work.

Nick, you attended the meeting.

Is there something that, I think people's expectations, those of us who are kind of hoping for things, at the end of the day, was it a little bit sort of a, because John mentioned platitudes, I feel like it almost felt like a, let's have kind of a false kumbaya to sort of bury the rest of it.

Did you feel like there was any space to really advance going forward?

Yeah, I thought maybe the space to advance was something that the lone Republican at the round table said.

Steve Christy, county supervisor, doubled down saying enforcement, law enforcement's the only way out of the homelessness crisis, which was at odds with what a lot of people were saying at the joint meeting, but had some parallels in what both bodies were actually adopting in their own respective separate meetings that they also held that day.

A lot of the policies that they were looking at definitely show a greater willingness to use police to quote-unquote solve these issues.

Alisa I want to get an observation from you before we dig in deeper.

Anything stood out for you?

Yeah, I mean, just kind of piggybacking off of what others have said.

I think there were maybe some expectations of what this was going to entail, just given how unlikely this meeting is.

We don't just see it that often, and there are a lot of, there's been a few different public spats between these two bodies.

But I think to your point, there is maybe going to be in the future kind of more that we'll see as things unwind.

There also is a difference between what's said in these meetings, especially in this joint meeting versus the actions of both bodies and what they, the kinds of policies that they represent.

So I think we're going to, time is going to tell kind of what, where those odds are going to kind of meet.

Caitlin, you mentioned an ordinance.

I think we have to dig in on this because going into the meeting, a lot of the discussion was, some of it was related specifically to Pima County Attorney, Laura Conover, as far as whether she was doing enough.

There's talk about public safety.

There's talk about whether people in Tucson or, I mean, to be frank, are just afraid of seeing homeless people in different places.

So what is the ordinance, at least what we knew about it, and then what could it be going forward?

Are there going to be tweaks as it disappeared?

That sort of thing.

It has disappeared from the public domain.

It was posted after the meeting on Tuesday night, and it was gone by yesterday morning.

There are a lot of screenshots, but it basically is a drug loitering ordinance that allows intervention on anyone who's engaging in behavior that makes it look like they're high or have drugs.

And there's some concerning language in there.

I mean, it definitely gives police permission to profile.

And I think a lot of the behaviors that it addresses, I mean specifically it talks about people leaning over, folded over, or acting erratically, but I mean, people not on drugs act erratically and do those things as well.

So it's, I mean, I think it's telling that it's been taken down.

I suspect that we'll see some different language come out of there, but it really of a relic of the past a little bit.

And it's targeting people that we've been working really hard on for the last decade, keeping out of jail.

So I was kind of surprised to see something like that come out of this.

- Yeah, John.

Yeah, so I have some of the concerning language.

I have the ordinance pulled up right in front of me, and one thing that people reacted to very quickly was this provision that says a person that behaves in such a manner as to raise a reasonable suspicion that they are about to engage in or then engage in a drug event.

So about to engage.

That sounds like future policing or something, and people reacted really swiftly to that.

And I was able to ask a number of local officials what their take is, or if they could explain how that was supposed to help the situation.

And the mayor told me very quickly that she was not tied to that language, that there's room still to finesse this ordinance.

I asked, again, a council member of Cunningham, and he seemed a little miffed that we would even suggest that this could lead to more incarceration or further crackdown.

And yet, I mean, you look into the history of the drug war, and we have 100 years of evidence that when police are given, any law enforcement, are given a tool to criminalize somebody, what that leads to is another sort of accelerant in the spiral cycle of criminalization, further addiction, further crises, mental health crises.

And so I think that people are maybe, local officials are sort of taking account for how this landed and maybe are reconsidering, if this is even constitutional.

Yeah, at least I see you nodding, and I wanted to follow up, have you follow up with what John said, but at the same time, it almost feels like this is a community that, probably like a lot of communities, doesn't really know what to do, because they're hearing from the average person, who's like, wait a second, I don't feel safe, so you have to do something, and then could that lead to a major overreach?

I think a lot of people are concerned about that too.

Yeah, I mean, I think Tucson's leaders are not alone in that camp of sort of being in a hard place to respond to community concerns about safety and community concerns about safety of people who are experiencing homelessness, and where is the middle line?

I think Community Care Tucson and other groups, mutual aid groups, have had spots with the city over the years about their responses, with things like sweeps or kind of criminalizing, potentially holding, handing out food or other resources at parks.

Other cities have of course seen that happen too, and it's kind of like when we talk about, the border versus immigration or something like that, drug use, fentanyl use, and homelessness are often seen as one issue, and they might not necessarily always just be one issue.

We have a lot of state funds and even local funds that go towards rehabilitation for drug use, and we've also tried programs, both through the county and the city, that look to redirect cases that might end up in court or in jail into more like community care focused programs, so I do feel like it seems like a bit of a diversion from, not a diversion, but a, we're kind of changing course from what we've done in the past, and I wonder if it's because of this sort of knee jerk reaction to some of these louder community concerns we've heard.

Yeah, I mean, and I think what it comes down to is the intent versus how this is gonna be put into action.

So the state of intent is that this will be a diversion program, and yet it is also further criminalizing, and what it is doing is it making a misdemeanor, a city misdemeanor, and so the idea is that they'll be able to catch people and send them to these rehab or recovery places, but if you then just follow the money, and you look at how much we spend on these recovery and rehab locations versus how much we spend on law enforcement and jailing or otherwise incarcerating our community members, you'll see that there just aren't enough tools on the side of recovery, of treatment.

There was an announcement also this week about the opening, I think about $2 million for another recovery place close to downtown Tucson, opioid settlement funds, that's gonna be a lot of money that's coming, but there's a lot of catching up to do on that side still.

Yeah.

Nick, why don't you jump in on this?

I would just add that I think contrary to what one might expect in a lot of cities, there actually doesn't seem to be a big electoral backlash about the city's public safety policies.

I think you'd expect with how heavily city leadership is pursuing this, that they're scared for their offices, but Republicans did about as well in the recent council elections as they did last time, and it doesn't really seem like the public, there's a large scale public rejection of current city leaders, rather than maybe it's more of like a constant influx of complaints than a voter's rejection.

Now that's interesting.

I mean, I think the hunger is not to further criminalize.

I mean, there are certainly, the Tucson Crime Free Coalition, and some Republicans, absolutely, but you saw the most loud expression of discontent is towards these crackdowns.

I mean, we saw that in the anti-new jail movement or flare up a year and a half ago, and a number of other situations as well.

Before we move past this, I want some weigh in on where mental health comes into this, because that is such a difficult thing, I think, to measure, especially when people are saying, was this a mental health incident?

Was it a drug-related incident?

Did they cross over in some way?

Caitlin, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, I think we're getting into dangerous territory there as well.

There is a lot of crossover there.

A lot of people are using substances because they have untreated mental illness.

That's, I mean, Arizona's consistently ranked last in the state, if not second to last, for mental health resources and whatnot, so I think we're gonna catch a lot of people in here that probably shouldn't be affected as well.

But, you know, I think part of this big public fear is the way that it's being portrayed by the media, so some of this falls on us, not necessarily people in this room, but the way that violent events are still sensationalized without context, without explanation, without, you know, I mean, most crimes are not a stranger on stranger involving homeless people, but you wouldn't know it from some of the headlines, so.

Somebody on a panel last night mentioned, it's really important that people understand that there's a difference between fact versus feeling, and it seems like a lot of this is feeling-based and not fact-based.

John, then Alisa?

No, I'll go to Alisa there.

Yeah, Alisa, I wanna get your thoughts on that, especially as someone who's covered the border, you mentioned immigration, and so it does feel like, well, this is another, not saying it's a straw man, but just another sort of group to blame for a lot of things.

There's a similarity to that.

Yeah, that's an interesting comparison.

I mean, I think, like, the sensationalizing these violent events has happened in the media, and the city has sort of been forced to respond, I would say, because it's been sort of this groundswell of that kind of content.

And also, some of the crimes that have happened have been violent crimes that were pretty random, violent crimes that did have some to do with mental health, thinking about the hatchet attack at the downtown bus station, I mean, sorry, the streetcar station a while back.

It's kind of this classic thing, right?

Where, like, rather than digging deeper into the systemic issues and where safety nets are failing, we're kind of, the easier response, or the easier reaction, especially from the public, is just to say, like, look at how unsafe Tucson is.

And then it brings all these other things into its net, like fare free bus services, you know?

Fare free transit has been caught in the crossfire of this debate over whether that ramps up crime, or whether that allows people to get away with crime.

I think it's all wrapped up into this conversation that kind of ends up getting really flat, rather than more nuanced.

Yeah, Nick, take us out of this one.

So you just moved to Tucson a couple of months ago.

So I'm not gonna ask you to compare Tucson to Chicago, for example, but does this feel like a place and you're taking the bus that it's less safe than other places?

Not, less safe than some, but-- This is anecdotal, by the way.

Anecdotal, I've been to, this is the fourth city, or fourth urban area I've lived in.

It's not the safest, but also not the least safe, like, feeling, so I'll put it that way.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, like I said, some of the incidents, they're shocking and they're scary and they're sad, you know?

It's just that you can't just take one thing and then, you know, not use things that we've already been trying to put in place in the city to respond to.

I mean, harms are gonna be committed no matter what, and aberrant violent crimes are not necessarily solved by further incarceration.

I mean, that's something that we do have evidence for.

It's not reflective of, yeah, the data or the evidence.

Caitlin, it would not be an episode of The Press Room without a discussion of Project Blue.

I thought I was going someplace else.

Your publication had a story about a group of Tucson residents who went to, there was a Corporation Commission meeting, got to enjoy Phoenix, the traffic, the heat.

It was really great, I'm sure.

So let's talk a little bit about what they were trying to do because Project Blue is not dead.

It's not even close to dead.

In fact, it may live for a very long time.

Who were some of these folks, not specifically, but what kind of groups did they represent and what were they trying to do?

Yes, it was the No Desert Data Center Coalition, which popped up and organized very quickly this summer.

It has been very vocal at every town hall meeting, city council meeting, board of supervisors meeting.

They're holding their own educational forums now, just to keep people posted about this.

So they gathered a group together to go up to Phoenix, to the Arizona Corporation Commission meeting, who, while they were not planning to discuss at this meeting the energy share agreement that TEP has on file, after all of these people showed up in their red shirts with their signs, the Corporation Commission indicated that they intended to approve this at the next meeting.

So I suspect we will see No Desert Data Center there again.

This is not going away, but I also don't think Amazon is going away, so.

Yeah, John, that really strikes me though.

This is how many times can this project, at least part of it be rejected, and yet that's okay.

We'll come up with a different idea and we'll spin it this way.

It does seem like this is something that is inevitable.

Yeah, but we will see how the community continues to step up and push back.

I mean, there are a number of steps that need to go forward before this can actually become an actual humming, loud energy, and water guzzling data center.

And what they were focused on in Phoenix was the energy part.

So TEP is saying that they won't raise rates, and yet the incredible amount of energy that is gonna be required for this raises some eyebrows about how that's possible.

Maybe in phase one they can get through that, but a lot of people are really questioning if they're not gonna need more energy generation when phase two and phase three come online, which is years down the road.

And another thing to point out here is that Project Blue isn't the only possible data center coming to town.

So you see the No Desert Data Coalition really trying to take a wider view right now.

There is proposed data center by the same team in Marana, and there's a potential data center on the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

All of that is gonna require vast amounts of energy, likely vast amounts of water.

And the claim is that we just don't have it.

We can't afford it.

Well, I was struck by the fact that Beale said the company's committed to matching 100% of the data center's energy use with renewables.

This is not a Corporation Commission right now that is in favor of renewables.

They have voted to, when Kris Mayes was the chair of the Commission years ago, they've decided to upend that.

So renewable though would appeal to folks in Tucson, but maybe not to the Corporation Commission.

I mean, there's also a distinction to be made that actually the county supervisors, a couple of them have made as well, between a promise and a contractual commitment.

And so far, what we have for 100% of renewables is just a promise by Beale.

There's nothing contractually written for that yet.

Okay.

Alisa, let's turn to the border wall.

And Arizona's newest member of Congress.

It took her a while, but she got to do that.

And your story had her spend her first weekend.

Tell us why this specific area was important as far as the border wall, as far as environmental concerns.

Well, this is the San Rafael Valley and it's this bi-national biodiversity hotspot where jaguars pass back and forth, ocelots.

It's important waterways pass back and forth.

It's an important habitat space.

It's also one of the large swaths in Arizona that's left without a border wall, even after the first Trump administration.

Right now there's what are called vehicle barriers that are sort of these squat, metal, fused together railway pieces that are, yeah, Normandy-style barriers or vehicle barriers.

So the idea is that animals are able to pass through this kind of barrier.

The data bears that out in terms of, you know, what groups like the Sky Island, Sky Islands have shown to, you know, their wildlife cameras have shown animals being able to pass through there.

What is the hindrance per the data of those cameras is, you know, these huge border walls with the metal bollards.

They've seen videos of bears like pacing up and down sections of the new border wall, javelina finding little spaces, but if they're a little too big, they can't fit.

So, you know, before all of this started, sorry, before January, a lot of these groups, you know, in Tucson and, you know, borderlands at large were trying to talk to the federal government, CBP at Customs and Border Protection, to see what could be done about protecting this area, bringing that kind of data that they have.

Of course, as we know at this point, this 27-mile stretch of the San Rafael Valley is, has been, you know, that DHS has used its waiver authority to speed up construction there and there will be a border wall built, doctors about a mile long stretch that's been built already.

So this was this called rally for the valley and that's where Adelita Grijalva showed up for her first Saturday.

- John?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth underscoring just how beautiful and pristine this valley is.

It is really remote and you referenced the Sky Island, Alliance report that found very few humans are seen in this valley at all.

That includes migrants.

So most people who get out there are birders or local hikers or Border Patrol agents, but it's not a crossing corridor for migrants and yet they're putting up this multimillion dollar wall, 30 foot black painted wall that is going to pause or stop wildlife migration.

Right now, I mean, there is hope among the people who are pushing back against this that they will eventually take this down or potentially block it, but I think more realistically is mitigation.

It's making sure that there are crossing corridors or some small like animal holes that they can sneak through so some wildlife can go back and forth.

Yeah, even a tiny little etching into the bollards makes a difference.

I mean, the footage from Sky Island Alliance shows, like I said, javelina finding these little places where it's like an eight and a half by 11.

So basically the size of a sheet of paper that's cut in and there's these rows and rows of javelina and even a mountain lion and her cubs or her kittens moving through the wall.

So it's unclear at this point though, how successful they will be at getting through to the administration in order to make those changes.

And as John mentioned, there is a legal effort to try to bring this down which takes aim at the waiver authority.

Now Nick, I know you've had a chance to talk with Representative Grijalva.

Obviously her dad environment was, if not his number one thing was very close.

Did you get a feel for her when you've talked to her if that's gonna be a major effort for her in general to protect the environment in Arizona?

Yeah, I spoke to her yesterday about her new committee assignments in the House, which include the Natural Resources Committee, responsible for most, if not all federal lands.

And she framed it mostly as continuing the legacy of her father.

She said that she would, or suggested she would seek to revive his Environmental Justice For All law or bill from a few years ago that put in place various environmental justice reviews for federal actions is currently not a law, still a bill, introduced quite a few years ago, but she mostly framed it in those terms and in terms of how much federal land there is in her district.

Yeah, go ahead John.

Yeah, and to tie it back to Project Blue a little bit too, one of the major concerns is water.

And the border wall is a very serious threat to water.

They need a lot of it to pour tons and tons of concrete to actually build the wall.

But there's also two adjacent mines.

There's South 32 and Hermosa Mine.

And it's interesting that all of that now falls under newly appointed, or newly seated rather, Representative Grijalva.

Yeah, Caitlin, let me get final thoughts on that.

I mean, the fact that she doesn't wanna be another Grijalva, she wants to be her own person, but the environment's gotta come through in a big way for her, I would think.

Oh yeah, I mean, constituent wise, she can't ignore that.

But I think we'll see her pave her own way when it comes to workforce and education.

She's gonna bring that Tucson Unified School District experience, like she has been a lifelong champion for public education.

So I think it'll be exciting to see what she does as a voice for that space.

All right, Alisa, so let's wrap up.

We've got a couple of minutes left.

You reported on the complication related to more immigration cases, and yet early in this particular Trump administration, a number of immigration judges were fired and they're not gonna be replaced.

Let's talk about the contradiction of that and how that's causing an even bigger backlog with immigration cases.

Yeah, so my reporting this week was from a report released by the Migration Policy Institute which found that there's a crisis, as they called it, inside immigration courts in regard to the backlog.

There's a ton of backlogged cases, especially even just new asylum applications.

So those are both affirmative and defensive, what are called claims, so people that are at the border and in removal proceedings, for example, or people who are already in the US and file a claim request for protection.

There's a couple of different theories about why that's happening.

The legal pathways are narrowing for immigrants everywhere, whether it's temporary protected status or parole or all these other programs are becoming kind of non-existent or very threatened.

So asylum is turning into one of the only options, even though it is extremely rare that you win your asylum case anyway.

At the same time, though, there's just a lot more people in court, right?

The children's docket, for example, is happening a couple of times a month in Tucson alone.

That did not happen in the past.

Children were not maybe always going to court, maybe going through their process through USCIS, Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The court is overburdened at the same time, as you mentioned.

Judges are being let go, retiring early or being fired.

139 judges as of last count, according to the MPI.

So the Trump administration has proposed putting things like military lawyers in to fill the gap, but it's really an open question about the legality of that as well.

About 30 seconds, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's important to remind everyone that immigration court is under the executive branch.

And so not only is there a crisis of backlog, but there's a crisis of the executive branch pushing judges to pause cases, put them into expedited removal, and then what seems like from some AP reporting this week, like coordinated ambushes between government prosecutors, the judges, and then ICE waiting in the halls of these courts, effectively scaring people away from following the legal process of applying for protection from the United States.

That's why at the same time we're seeing denial, the rate of denial is for asylum application specifically is the highest it's been since 2015.

Okay, thank you all for the great conversation.

Alisa Reznick of KJZZ, John Washington of AZ Luminaria, Caitlin Schmidt of the Tucson Spotlight, Nick Rommel, very successful first voyage, Nick Rommel of AZPM News.

Thank you all for being here today.

Thank you all for joining us for this edition of "The Press Room."

We're back next week with a special edition.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

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