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, Democrats swept three Tucson City Council races on election day.

Will that affect how the city approaches challenges, including public safety?

Plus, the longest federal government shutdown in US history continues, and low-income residents in southern Arizona are being hit hard.

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

(upbeat music) Welcome to The Press Room.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Our panel of journalists joining me today are Paul Ingram of the Tucson Sentinel, Dan Shearer of the Green Valley News, and Joe Ferguson of the Tucson Agenda.

Guys, thanks for being here.

Appreciate your time.

Sure, thanks.

So Paul, allegedly there were Tucson City Council races earlier this week, which not unexpectedly went the Democrats' way, but the dynamic of two new Democrats, and then Kevin Dahl being reelected, is there anything, even if it's still a Democratic-dominated panel, to see any way that, are we gonna hear about different issues, or are we gonna see a different sort of dive into some of the issues like public safety, for example?

I think that's a really good question.

I mean, I think certainly we're gonna see, we have two new council members.

We're gonna see a shift.

One thing to keep in mind is that we have the most women that we've ever had on the city council.

They were all elected.

So, you know, we have two guys, Kevin Dahl and Paul Cunningham.

Otherwise, the mayor's female.

Everyone else, you know, it's just a shift.

You know, it's something that there's a sense that the city council has been sort of static, and it really hasn't.

It's been really kind of in flux for a good long while, especially in the last 18 months.

I mean, Steve Kozachik left, Richard Fimbres retired.

So we have new members.

You know, I think it's sort of, I think everyone throws everyone off a little bit, because Karin Uhlich kind of pinch hits and jumps into a seat for a little while.

But we have really a new board.

One thing to keep in mind is like Miranda Schubert is a Democrat.

She's also someone who really is connected with the DSA.

At the party on election night, there were a bunch of members with a big banner who were celebrating her win.

So that I think is really gonna shift it.

Now, on the other hand, we have Selina Barajas.

She's the first woman for her board, and she joins the board, but she may have a different sort of point of view.

She may be more like Richard Fimbres, her predecessor, who was really sort of jobs-oriented, or she may have her own issues.

So we have to see sort of what the board does and how they really react to some of the major issues that Tucson faces.

So Joe, we'll get into the Safe City thing a little bit later as we talk about the supervisors sort of versus the council, but public safety has been coming up a lot.

Obviously transit's been coming up a lot, even in correlation with that.

What do you see, do you see the dynamic changing at all with this group?

I think that we're gonna see a renewed push to keep fares free.

I think that Miranda Schubert's really put herself out there as somebody who's gonna fight for this issue.

And I don't think that's gonna go away, but it sets up a contrast with the police department where there's a lot of pressure to hire more officers or put more money into law enforcement, whatever that looks like.

And so the push and pull of a $70 million program for transit is gonna have an impact on the police department whether anyone wants to link those two together or not.

Yeah, let's dig a little bit more on this too, especially I'm struck by the idea that people are thinking about running for council probably more than the year or so campaign of it, but what about a learning curve?

Do we expect to see a learning curve from some of these folks or have they been such activists maybe in the community that won't be that big a deal?

Well, I think that both Miranda and Selina had spent months watching this council and have relationships with members of the council.

So I think the learning curve is gonna be there, but I think it's more about where you get good coffee downtown than it is necessarily about policy or programs.

Paul, you wanna weigh in on that?

I think that's a really great point.

I mean, I think you're right about Miranda Schubert.

She's really gonna kind of push to keep the bus fares free.

And we'll have to see what that, I mean, the city faces a fairly significant deficit.

They're gonna have to start figuring out what to cut, where they can cut, what they need to spend.

And there's really, yeah, there's a substantial push for them to spend again, more on police and also on fire.

So they have to think about how to develop those things.

And the bus, I think is one of the things that maybe there's a substantial amount of money that they're leaving on the table that maybe they can get back, but that'll be hard for the council to pass.

Dan, one thing that came up related to just election day, Republican council candidate Jay Tolkoff complained that Pima County did not allow observers at ballot drop-off centers despite state law.

And the response was that observers aren't required or permitted for all- mail elections.

Is that something to keep an eye on, just how the Pima County Rcorder reacted to it?

I think that we are seeing what's gonna happen next year in spades, big time.

And I think we need to, in fact, we're working on a story about it right now, just what can we do to make sure that the elections are fair, that you have observer, that they're transparent, but we know that the trolls are gonna dive in and they're going to still make these baseless claims and it's gonna be a real, it's gonna be a difficult situation in 2026, we already see it, because we saw Tuesday night what happened to the Republicans and a lot of people are suggesting that that perhaps is gonna happen next year also.

Well, your troll point is an interesting one too, because I think, I'm gonna sound naive here, forgive me, I think the general public wants there to be some sort of stops and starts here, some sort of advising consent, whatever terms we wanna use to make sure, but then there is concern on both sides, maybe in Tucson, maybe there's more of a concern on one side or the other, that people are not necessarily being good stewards, being fair about this, like they're looking for things that maybe aren't there, well, maybe there are things that should be looked for, people don't believe each other.

You just described social media.

There's things that aren't there and that's exactly what's gonna drive all of this.

Look at 2020, probably the cleanest election in US history and we saw what happened with Donald Trump when he sounded the alarm and got everybody up in arms over it.

I look for that to happen again next year, but I think people are gonna be a little wiser and maybe have that initial uproar and then hopefully just dismiss him.

Joe, is this observer thing gonna be a story?

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, we looked at that social media post just from yesterday or two days ago that really got on fire about the ballots being processed.

There's literally an act of what they're supposed to be doing and somebody twisted it, and turned it into something else.

Last time I looked at that number was two million views and led to death threats and led to a social media response from the Recorder's Office and this was just plain government doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Everybody was doing their job and they still try to twist it in a different direction.

This is the second time this week that Tucson has been in the epicenter of social media misinformation.

Joe, it might've been you, but also there was someone who commented on the idea of whoever posted the video was saying, oh, look at what they're doing, look at what they're doing and someone in response said, yeah, we can see it.

So that's a good thing.

We can actually, if they were cheating, they're cheating in front of everyone who can see it now.

So any thoughts on that, Paul?

Yeah, I mean, I think what it comes down to is like every little, any tiny little foothold that people can get is a way to attack an election.

Just anything that it seems, and there's a sense that people don't really understand the process, they don't really understand how things work and then they use that to immediately attack an election.

It's usually an election where they feel, where they've lost.

That's when all of a sudden the uproar comes out.

It often comes from people who, when people were successful, oh, that election was great.

When people lose, hey, wait a minute, this is election is suspect.

Does it make it different in a community like Tucson, which especially with these council races, is so one party.

It's almost like with California's Proposition 50 with whether they should be redistricting or not.

And it's one of those, it's a state that is so dominated by one party, in this case, Tucson's dominated by the Democrats, but there are other communities where it's dominated by Republicans.

When we're thinking about some of the nuance of this, it almost feels like we learn more lessons in places that actually are called swing states where it actually would matter if people were quote unquote cheating or not.

With some of these other places, the accusations almost ring falsely because they're so dominated by one party or the other.

Well, I think in part, maybe, but I think it's really just a sense of looking at, just attacking every little, tiny little detail.

One of the complaints was that people walked out and they had badges on their lanyards, but they weren't clear enough.

Then they put it in the votes into a black bag.

If the bag had been blue, does that matter?

They're supposed to carry it in a sealed bag.

Everyone's following the law and doing the process as they're required, but people want to find some reason why this election didn't go their way.

Then that's when they really launched this sort of social media attack.

And you talk about people looking for a foothold.

They don't even need a foothold.

They just need some excuse to go out there and put some doubt in people's minds.

We saw this in 2020.

Two ladies who were putting ballots in a suitcase.

Today, by the way, they own an awful lot of property that once belonged to Rudy Giuliani because he was the one who was out there.

They had death threats and they had all of this against them.

We're gonna see more of that next year.

This was just a little taste.

Dan, longest federal government shutdown in history as of Thursday afternoon continues.

You've had some choice words for Congressman Ciscomani in terms of just a lack of town halls, a lack of transparency.

People on the other side of the aisle would say the same thing to some extent about Senators Gallego and Kelly.

What are your opinions on all this?

Well, those people on the other side of the aisle don't control the White House and Congress.

I think that's a big point.

Okay, so what do we have?

We have jobs lost.

We have people going hungry.

We have healthcare costs threatened.

We have now restrictions on flying.

What is Donald Trump gonna do next?

Kick our puppies?

I mean, what do we expect next?

And this is ridiculous.

And meanwhile, we have Juan Ciscomani in the corner wringing his hands and saying, let me get the quote.

I'm willing to consider pieces of legislation that have bipartisan support so we can move forward on this.

That is blah, blah, blah garbage, okay?

He should break from the party and he should say, the president needs to bring people to the table.

That's what hasn't happened.

And we need to get a solution here.

And he is afraid to do that because he's afraid of the president.

It's party over people.

And he's afraid that he'll get primaried and that he won't have a seat.

Juan, what is your seat worth if you can't serve with integrity?

That's my point.

Joe, it strikes me too.

This is such a close district.

And I'm not obviously one Ciscomani strategist, but it also, it feels like, okay, you're donating at the president because you don't wanna get primaried, but also this is a district that is tight.

So what if he makes, what if the shutdown continues, more people suffer?

Are there gonna be more independent voters who say, okay, Representative Ciscomani, we've had enough.

I think we're already seeing that.

There's a lot of groups that have been forming and coalescing to kind of push against Ciscomani already.

Also, I gotta tell you, I don't really buy the premise that there's going to be a Republican challenger to Ciscomani.

He's got millions of dollars in the bank and name recognition.

No one's running against him.

He's running against a Democrat a year from now.

And that's where he, what he's putting his money in his efforts too.

And so he's not going to do those things.

And so what we get is inaction instead.

Yeah.

And I think when it comes down to, I mean, you've got the Republicans have the power to put legislation in.

They can meet with the House.

They can put legislation for it.

They can say, what do the Democrats want?

They want legislation on the subsidies.

That's something they could do.

They could do it now.

And then once that's passed, they could do the CR.

They can continuing resolution.

I mean, one thing to keep in mind is the continuing resolution that was supposed to be passed is going to run out in a couple of weeks.

So even if they passed it, it doesn't mean anything.

They'd have to create a new continuing resolution.

And they really should by this point, but we're still in the same space.

And we've been in the same space for 37 days.

They haven't moved forward.

No one's moving forward.

And I think it's remarkable that, and Juan Ciscomani being a great example of somebody who seems to be just holding events as many as he can, although he doesn't tell us about those.

Yeah.

But he holds events.

That's one of the questions.

He's not doing town halls.

He's not doing events where he might find someone who might be critical of him, who might say, "Hey, we need subsidies because otherwise my healthcare is going to jump 50%, 200%, 300%."

People are facing massive healthcare bills and people are getting those letters now and realizing how much trouble they're in.

And there just doesn't seem to be anything from Ciscomani or other House Republicans to sort of think about what this means.

They've said that they have a healthcare plan.

They've been saying this for 15 years.

We haven't seen the plan.

It's apparently a secret at this point about what the plan is.

And they're not willing to take the system that we currently have and protect it so that people can have healthcare.

And they've shut down the government, which means, yes, exactly like you said, thousands of people are out of jobs.

Thousands of people don't have food.

Food bank lines are huge.

The county is now trying to put money into food banks.

The city will probably do the same thing.

The state has already done the same thing.

So the question is, of our Congress representatives, where are they?

Now, of course, for me, Adelita Grijalva is my representative and she's not seated yet because the House won't do that even, even do that.

So Juan Ciscomani pretty much isn't seated either.

He hasn't been in Washington in five weeks.

And so they were sent away and he wants to extend those benefits for a year and then we'll get it all fixed up in that time.

Hey, here's the real truth.

The Democrats don't trust you and why would they?

Look who's in the White House.

So Dan, one more question on this then.

So if someone like Juan Ciscomani doesn't do what you suggest, which it doesn't feel like he's going to go to the President and say, "Listen, we need to get people to the table."

As Paul said, we're at 37 days.

What brings a settlement about?

Is it just the big foot of Donald Trump saying to a bunch of Republicans, "Okay, I've had enough, let's do it."

Or is there something else because it feels like seeing people out of work, seeing travelers completely kerfuffled, doesn't seem to be doing it at least publicly.

Right, do you know what I think could work is if someone like Juan Ciscomani, and I do believe he is a man of integrity, I think he's a good man, a good representative, but he is answering to the wrong person, not the folks who live in his district.

I think if he broke and said, "You know what, this is hurting my people.

These, everything that's been rolled out so far, it's hurting my district.

I'm here to represent my district, and I'm breaking with the President on some of these things."

He will never do it because Dear Leader will not allow him to.

And this is really frustrating for the people in CD6, even the Republicans, because they're starting to really get hit with it, specifically through tariffs on small businesses, and now even bigger ones.

And I think what's sort of surprising is there seems to be a distinct disinterest in this from the White House.

The President is traveling abroad, he's renovating the White House, they're doing everything else, and he's not going to Congress.

I mean, I feel like other Presidents have asked Congress to go to them, they have meetings in the White House, there's some agreement, there's usually a few people in the room, and they get to hash it out or argue about it for a little while, and the President seems to not be doing any of that.

And maybe that's happening behind closed doors and we're not seeing it, but I feel like we'd know about this point that that would happen.

Are you suggesting that Donald Trump is distracted by shiny objects?

Maybe.

He's distracted by anything.

He has the attention span of a net, and now it's hurting the entire country, and the country is pushing back against people like Juan Ciscomani.

I hope he listens.

Okay, Joe, let's move on.

But a lot of tension already between the Pima County Board of Supervisors, Tucson City Council, wasn't created by conflict because of Project Blue, but certainly that added to the mix.

So now, Supervisor Rex Scott has used some very strong language in relation to Safe City and Mayor Romero.

So he said that when Tucson officials introduced the Safe City initiative, they, quote, "felt obliged to attack the county, "disregarding or mischaracterizing "our equally dedicated work to take on these issues," end quote.

You reported on this in The Agenda.

What do you make of the supervisors versus the council, and where does Supervisor Scott fit in there?

So I think the first thing we need to accept is that there's tension always between these two bodies.

It's been there forever.

But recently, I think that there has been a push.

The Safer City initiative, Project Blue, and some other issues have really kind of bubbled up to the surface.

Now that there's a money crunch on top of it, there's a real push and pull.

One of the other issues is, the city really wants to prosecute more people on open use drug crimes, and we're not seeing that from the county attorney side.

Those, the charges are there, then the charges are dismissed.

And so I think there's a real push and pull right there between the two groups.

And so, Rex Scott has been pretty quiet so for a while, and I think he reached his breaking point at some point.

He wanted to say, "Clear the air before this joint meeting in two weeks."

But I gotta say that, I think that this was always gonna happen.

At some point, he was going to say something.

If it wasn't him, it was gonna be another member of the supervisors.

So there's some tension there, but we have to accept that it's been there all along.

But it was so direct.

I think that was what, this statement, some of these press releases we see are just so milk toast.

This was not.

No, he really let it out.

I mean, I think I counted 1500 words just on the two issues trying to explain himself.

And so, if you read it, it's one thing, but watching it at this council meeting in front of everybody is a real show at the end of the day, in terms of showing his ire for certain members of the city council who he specifically called out, which is pretty unusual at the end of the day.

Even the county, even the city didn't really do that.

Yeah, Dan.

As far as boring government meetings go, what we saw was a major league smackdown of Mayor Regina Romero, who more than deserved it.

Here she is, lording it over a city that has drug problems, crime problems, homelessness.

And what does she try to do?

Deflect and blame it on other people.

And he was having none of it.

And it was almost enjoyable to watch because every word he said was dead on accurate.

And what he wants to do is clear the air so that we can have this meeting on the 18th and that we're not bickering over this.

She's not gonna let it go though, I can tell you.

Clear the air?

Yeah, I mean, as an idea that she's gonna clear the air, I think we might've kind of accelerated the bickering.

I mean, I think Joe's right.

I mean, this is a marriage between two different organizations.

And they've had long running disagreements over years because they have to.

They live in the same house, so to speak.

And there've been fights over differential water rates.

I think Project Blue probably kind of really kicked this up because it was a sense from the city that the county kind of just passed Project Blue without really thinking about it.

And that put it in the city's lap, which meant that they really had to deal with it.

It was very frustrating.

Now, we'll be clear, the city manager was the one who was actually kind of building the Project Blue in the first place and working through it.

So there's some sense that maybe the city kind of tried to blame the county for something that they actually did.

And then with this, I mean, yeah, the city and county have, there's a crime problem.

They're trying to solve.

They're trying to figure out what to do with people who are homeless, people who are drug addicted, and how to sort of solve those problems.

I mean, there's a problem with the Pima County Jail not accepting people who may have recently taken fentanyl, which means that Tucson police, when they arrest somebody who may have just taken it, they have to take them to the hospital, which might burn their time up for six hours to the waiting room for somebody to be cleared.

Then they can take them to jail.

TPD has been frustrated about that.

There's just been this continuous issue with this.

And I think in Safe City Initiative meeting, there was, our mayor really criticized the county.

She said that our court system is broken.

They want to see more prosecutions.

And certainly that's part of the initiative to do that, but there's a question about like, then what?

How do you use the transition center well?

How do you use the jail well?

How do you do these programs that we have built in?

I just wanted to say that, I think that we're gonna have this meeting in two weeks, but there are some people that aren't gonna be there.

The sheriff and the county attorney are not gonna be part of this.

They are elected on their own.

They have their own political authority, and they're not at the table, they're being just talked about, but they're not gonna be told what to do by anybody.

So they've got their own electorate and their own problems to fix.

So even this meeting isn't gonna necessarily solve those problems.

Dan, certainly most of our viewers and listeners live in Southern Arizona, but there's some who don't.

So to that end, can you give us sort of a brief primer?

Because people, I think, will think to themselves, okay, well, the Tucson City Council, dominated by Democrats, Pima County Board of Supervisors, dominated by Democrats.

So I know there's in-party fighting that happens, but what's the dynamic?

Why is it so different county versus city?

Oh, that's a good question.

I'm gonna take that in a little bit of a different direction.

If you're from the Phoenix area, you'll recognize this, that you have kind of a donut, and you have the more conservative on the outside, like Mesa, Gilbert, whatever.

Down here, we have Marana, Oro Valley, Sahuarita, where I live, Green Valley.

And then you have Vail, which is unincorporated, but also leans a little bit more to the right.

And I can tell you that I'm hearing more and more people, perhaps just threats, maybe not real action, saying we wanna move out to those areas because we're just done with Tucson and its cruddy roads and its poor government and its weak leadership.

Okay, Paul.

I mean, think about it though, like the roads is such a, its own sort of weird problem, because it has the RTA, and the way the RTA is designed is sort of put the city at getting the least amount of projects that needs to be done.

There's lots of things where the county has gotten a lot more.

On the other hand, people, I also feel like people always complain about the roads in Tucson, no matter where, no matter where you are and how it goes, we just have a perennial problem with road and construction.

But that's certainly one of the things that voters say.

They want to see that fixed.

That seems to be the two major issues.

Every election cycle in the city and the county is roads, what to do about roads and what to do about crime.

And those team issues keep coming up again and again and again.

I'm not even sure if we can solve those issues.

I mean, fundamentally, there's only so much money the county has, there's only so much money the city has.

Do you want to throw all the money into roads for several years and fire all the firefighters and fire, get rid of all the parks?

Maybe we'd have great roads, but then what?

So I think there's leaves, but it's big questions about that.

But there's really one road we should be talking about because it's kind of emblematic of Tucson and that's the one that leaves the airport and is awful.

And there's your, you're welcome to Tucson, clunk, clunk, clunk, and you're gonna lose a tire and you're gonna be carving me out of alignment and everything.

I'm thinking, can they just do that one?

That, you talk about being a tone deaf right there.

It's a, that's people coming into your city and look what's welcoming them, potholes.

Do you have thoughts on that?

I just think that people moving to Green Valley and Vail, great communities, I don't mind, but they also are county suburbs where the city is not gonna get money, the county is not gonna get money for them because they're unincorporated.

So they go out to these areas and expect city level services and the county is really struggling to provide those services at this point.

And so I think that there's gonna be a pushback.

We're seeing a little bit already in that Redington issue where the Christmas murder happened.

And so I think that, you know, people moving out into those areas are still expecting city level services and the county can't provide those and it's becoming more and more apparent.

Okay, guys, about three minutes left.

Let's stick with Vail, Dan, since you mentioned Vail.

For a second straight year, some math teachers in the Vail School District dressed up for Halloween with t-shirts covered in fake blood along with the phrase 'problem solved.'

Now supporters of Turning Point went online to accuse the teachers of wearing the shirts as a reference to the killing of Charlie Kirk.

And I'm not exactly sure where the connection was made, but what do you make of this whole controversy?

Well, I think the connection was made because first of all, we're just not far away from that killing.

The shirt was white like his, the blood was on the same side as he was shot.

And it's just too much too soon.

They wore the same shirts last year, okay?

It was a really bad decision, even last year.

What are you doing walking across the school campus where there's, as we know, what happens on school campuses all over the country with a shirt like that, even on Halloween.

I think the best thing that can happen to the Vail School District right now is just to be happy that next year, Halloween is on a weekend.

(laughing) Joe, what do you make of it?

It comes back to the social media discussion we had earlier.

I think that the reality is that people sometimes are just grasping for controvers and legitimacy.

And so I think it was a stretch all along to try to paint these teachers as anything other than wearing holiday shirts.

They were all the same, they're all identical, they all look the same.

It was pretty clear that this wasn't a coordinated event.

This was a commercially bought t-shirt from somewhere and people went too far in reaching to get likes, clicks, and that social media buzz.

And so I think this was a terrible story all the way through.

And the people that put those stories up never apologized.

Many of them didn't take down their tweets.

They're still up right now.

No consequence.

I'm not stunned by the lack of apology.

I'm a little bit surprised by not taking them down.

It seems, I don't know, Paul, what are your thoughts on this?

Well, I think the problem, the central problem is we have people who look for things, something to get furious about, and they're unwilling to fact check or think it through or make any kind of comparisons or do any kind of digging.

They go at the first thing that makes them mad.

They put it out there.

And the problem, of course, is that you end up with a situation where lots of people react and they react really negatively.

I mean, the Vail School District received hundreds of death threats.

They had to have the Pima County Sheriff come to the school to make sure the school was okay.

And we've really seen issues where people have listened to this kind of stuff on social media and have acted, have shown up at schools with a gun, have done strange, crazy things.

And there's really, we need to really think about how people who keep promoting these kinds of things, who repeatedly jump on whatever the next social media flavor is and espouse it to hundreds and thousands of people that are their followers and create situations that could be really, really dangerous because there are people out there who are violent or could be violent and no one's taking any responsibility for it.

I mean, the reality is lots of schools have serious problems with violence because of outsiders who come into the school and do terrible things.

And you're going to add to that because you want to get more clicks.

It's a terrible thing.

Steve, we'd be remiss if we didn't say that.

The fact that we talked about on the Vail School District is very, very good.

I think that's the impression we get.

I think the reaction to even an apology to some extent in this letter from the superintendent of the Vail District saying that none of the teachers would intentionally cause hurt or pain.

I think that's fairly obvious, but in these days, you have to reinforce that.

All right, everybody, thanks so much.

Dan Shearer of the Green Valley News, Paul Ingram of the Tucson Sentinel, Joe Ferguson of the Tucson Agenda.

Thank you all for being with us.

And thank you all for joining us for this edition of The Press Room.

We're back next week with a new episode.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

When you want news that matters to you, turn to AZPM News.

Your voice, your news.

AZPM News at news.azpm.org.

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