City Council - Regular Meeting

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We're all looking wonderful today and wearing your green. Happy St. Patty's Day. Uh we are having our study session of March 17th and we have a really loaded super loaded uh agenda. So, but all good things and um we are going to start with item one. Time has been set aside to receive an update on activities of the PAG Regional Council and the RTA board. Mr. Manager, before I hand it over to you, I just want to note that um was it last week? Last week, the voters of Tucson and uh the entire Puma County uh voted uh for Proposition 418 and 419. Um I am very happy that the voters of Puma County decided to support 418 and 419. Um it looks on preliminary numbers that it passed in every jurisdiction including the city of Tucson. It passed in every ward in the city of Tucson. So thank you to my colleagues, those that supported. Uh thank you uh to many supporters in the community and of course the voters that passed this this item. Um, I want to uplift the community uh that as a city of Tucson representative on the RTA board, I requested an item in September that um asking um for the board to consider clarity on a citizen oversight uh commission and on reporting. And I also requested language uh at the RTA that be created uh that requires workers

to be classified correctly, hires contractors who do not have recent safety violations, invest in workforce capacity, hiring apprentices, and has goals for local hiring. Um, in December, the ITA board reviewed the changes that were made in the administrative directive that speak directly to the citizens accountability for regional transportation committee. Um, so I just wanted to again congratulate the voters, congratulate all of us. There's work that I mean this is when the work starts. This is when the work or in this case continues. Um and uh it's important that we um provide clarity for the voters of Tucson. uh make sure that we uh continue moving forward expeditiously on the projects that were not completed in the two uh in the 2006 ballot and that we continue delivering to the voters of Tucson and really showing them that this investment will make a difference in the quality of life and their daily life. So, um just wanted to start by thanking our voters and Mr. manager, you can you can move on uh jump in uh after this.

Thank you, honorable mayor and members of the council. Um as the mayor indicated, we're very excited about being able to not only keep the momentum going of the original RTA and get all of those promises fulfilled and those projects completed. Um quick little roundup. We have downtown links is getting close to completion and we have the 22nd Street Bridge has already uh begun construction and a number of other projects related to that. So uh at the same time we know we have a bunch of new promises, new commitments and new investments that we need to get moving. And uh I I'm confident that our team is going to be able to deliver. and I'm very confident that our relationship with the RTA is as strong as it's ever been um and probably stronger and is going to set us up for success. Um with that uh we're lucky to have with us today the executive director of the RTA, Mr. Mike Ortega, who I would like to invite to come up to the podium and just uh share a little bit uh some of his thoughts about as we go down this path together.

Thank you, Mr. Manager and and mayor, members of the council. Thank you for having me. What I thought I'd do, Mayor, I won't uh uh reiterate a lot of the things that you mentioned because that you kind of stole my thunder about the uh cart and some other things. So, uh first of all, I really need to acknowledge uh Mayor Romero's leadership in this effort. Um I remember sitting at that very table many times uh where there was a deliberation not only about the projects and the plan but also whether we even wanted to stay as the city of Tucson in the RTA and there was conversation around that. Um and so through that leadership I think you see a plan now that's been approved by the voters that addresses uh the various needs around the community. One of the pieces that I wanted to bring to your attention though that I think was a late ad um and it really was something that started here at the city of Tucson and then it evolved into a public conversation and that's a pavement rehabilitation. Uh the mayor was was tenacious in her support uh and really making sure that the plan included uh at the time we were calling it pavement maintenance, but we needed to to make a change there to to make sure that we were within the statute. But that really resonated with people because I think that taking care of the existing infrastructure was extremely important. Uh and so a shout out to to you, mayor. Thank you for that leadership. uh but also the support of the entire board and the mayor and council. I wanted to spend just a minute talking about some of the lessons learned. I think that's an important uh conversation to have. Uh first and foremost, accountability is on people's minds across the board. That was one of the messages and one of the comments that we heard throughout was, hey, what about RTA? Uh and oh, by the way, most of those projects are in the city of Tucson. What are you doing to complete those? uh you weren't able to

do that for all the reasons that we know. We won't go over those, but what does accountability look like going forward? And so, as the mayor mentioned, the citizens uh accountability for regional transportation, the cart committee, uh now has a direct line to the RTA board. That was not the case previously. So it wasn't just a reconstitution of that of that committee but also reporting structure uh is now directly to the board on a quarterly basis. They'll get together and look at the entirety of the RTA next program. So it's not just roadway projects but the delivery of the programs as a whole. And that has two two facets to it. Are we on schedule? Are we delivering as we said? but also what does the financial aspect look like both on the revenue and on the expenditure side to make sure that the projections that we used in the development of the RT&X plan are in fact coming coming through. The other role that they're going to play is in terms of citizen input that will be an avenue a conduit for the board to receive citizen feedback and citizen input on all aspects of the plan. And one aspect of that is the 30% plans. Um you may recall from a a previous conversation or conversations uh the 30% plan development on a roadway project is kind of what what sets the stage for moving forward. What we've done is we've instituted or or infused if you will the cart u as a part of that approval process or that um recommendation to the RTA board. And so there'll be a robust public feedback and public conversation around some of those projects leading to that 30% uh document or or or plan set which then goes to the RTA board. So there's a recommendation from the public and from the the cart to the RTA board.

Extremely important role going forward and I think that's where we're going to have a lot of very robust conversations as as time goes on. The RTA role has evolved very dramatically and very very much uh different than what it had been before. Specifically, the RTA had not been in a delivery mode. We as the RTA had not been actually delivering projects or programs with the exception of Sun Shuttle. So, it was really we were the bank, the financeers, if you will. We were writing a check and saying, you know, go ahead and get those projects done. What the board has given me direction uh to do and the authority to do is to say we as the RTA can assist and facilitate our partners, our jurisdictional partners so that the delivery of those programs and and of that those projects is something that we can make sure is is happening and happening the way that we told the voters it was going to happen. And if it doesn't happen for whatever reason, it's immediately escalated to the RTA board for resolution up to and including having a conversation in the future with the voters, potentially going back to the voters if things are not panning out like revenues or or expenditures or just pick it, right? Um there's an opportunity to go back to the voter after the fifth year and before the 18th year. We can exercise that if we need to because it's important that that that accountability and that directness of where that delivery of that 20-year plan is and what's the status of that and if we're struggling with that, there's an opportunity to go back and have that discussion. The other thing to keep in mind, as the mayor mentioned, the constitution of the cart, you know, with the four members that live in the city of Tucson, also have expertise, and there's a whole list of them in the admin code, which has now been approved and is online. Um, but it has the technical expertise as well as public outreach, including public transit. uh

and so those those experts if you will those those uh opportunities for those diverse voices to sit around that citizens group will be extremely important going forward. I mentioned the the quarterly analysis and I'll just suggest to you that the quarterly analysis is not just hey let's get together and throw a party because we did some really cool things the last three months. It really is an analysis of the entire program. So the entire 20 years and that's that's hard because you're really looking forward more than you're looking back because we want to make sure that if we see a problem, we see a challenge whether it's a utility relocation or there's a a railroad crossing or some issue that's out there that we make enough noise about that and start developing strategies for addressing that early as opposed to in the 18th year or the 19th year. When I talk about working together, um it isn't just in the project delivery. It's also in celebrations. I think you will see as you saw at the 22nd Street uh groundbreaking, you saw the the uh chairman of the Tohonotom Nation making comments alongside Mayor Romero and you had other board members there. It's important that people recognize this is a team effort. It is important for everyone to see that we are working together. Now, the project delivery components will be us tied at the hip on the delivery. Um, I'm I'm pleased to report we've been working closely with with uh Tim staff and Tim, we have uh strategies for how there's no gap in service, right? But we can also immediately start moving forward with uh intergovernmental agreements and all of the bureaucracy, right? But one thing I will commit to you and I will suggest to you is that we will not be the holdup. I've told the staff we will not hold up projects. We will not hold up those services up to and including as you saw on grant 56, you know, we'll send uh

notices to proceed even before we have some of those bureaucratic documents necessary, but we've got to make sure we keep moving. And what that does is it holds both of us accountable for getting things on agendas and getting them moving as opposed to waiting and and making sure that that uh you know all the tees are are crossed. We have to do that, but let's not hold up progress for that. Last thing I'll I'll leave you with is as a part of this robust accountability, there's also a need for us to have conversations like this with the entire region's mayor and councils, tribal governments on an annual basis, giving you a report so that you know and you hear directly from the RTA as to how things are going, what are some of the challenges that we've seen, some of what are some of the successes and and make sure that people keep it in mind. I think one of the challenges was people did not know the RTA as we went through this election effort. They did not know about the RTA and so that's okay because we had always taken a more subordinate role there. But here's an opportunity now to let people know here's what we're doing and here's what we're up to and let's make sure that that people are aware of the project. So you'll see a refresh logo, you'll see a refresh signage, you'll see a reimagined process for how we let people know uh our website total re reconstruction of the website to make sure that's userfriendly and information all of these public discussions are are very easily found on on the website. So with that, mayor and and city manager and members of the council, thank you so much for the opportunity. Uh it's a pleasure to serve and I'm here to answer any questions if you have any.

Mr. manager. Uh thank you, Mike, and thank you, mayor. And uh if it pleases the mayor, we also have an image that we could show um that shows the results of the vote from last week. And when you see it, you can see just how regional this approval was and how strong it was across the region, including in every ward in the city. And so we just uh this information will become more public as we go forward because it takes a little while to assess things, but our GIS team did a nice job of just basically giving a quick snapshot of the sea of blue um across the entire region, which was the the voters's approval of of RTA next. Um with that, I turn it uh back to you, Mayor.

Well, I liked seeing Puma County and I see a blue. I'm just saying. Uh thank you, Mr. Ortega, for coming to present to us. really appreciate the immediate changes that we saw in um the RTA as you uh took the reigns over the uh the organization. It was it was really uh something that as you will know well very well. Um uh I had a lot of struggle uh with uh with the RTA and uh the concerns that we all had as a mayor and council. Um it was my responsibility to take it to the table and uh still knowing exactly the value of working as a region. Uh this is something that um this infrastructure investment will um help our economy and create jobs in a time where our economy is very rocky. And so I'm really happy that Tonins's voted to invest in ourselves and that there's investments throughout our city um in both investments in transit and I was you know have some questions in terms of uh the investments and how they're going to start rolling in. Right. We had the pavement preservation investments. We have the investments for managing and operating the street car which is about $2 million a year. We have a $2 million a year for safety and security for transit. Um, and so I really want to know how how can we like jump in, Mr. Manager, and and Mr. Ortega, if you have um an idea in terms of how the timeline is going to work uh to receive the funds for implementing these projects.

Thank you, mayor. Happy to take that question. So, first and foremost, uh the transit element has three basic components to it and and I'll break them down. Excuse me. And those of you who remember, I battled this annual cough and so I I've got that cough. It's back. Um so, there's three components to the transit element. Uh and and the first is what I'll call the funding for the street car. That's basically a pass through funding. Uh that starts as early as April 1. Um, and so what I've suggested to to Tim and his staff is we will give a notice to proceed with that in a reimbursement role for now until the IGAs follow afterward. And so my expectation there is that there there will be a transfer of funds down the road once the the IGAs uh come in. So that's that's the first. The second is the safety and security. And I know that that you all had had a briefing a bit ago um with uh with some of the staff on some of the ideas and some of the strategies. What I've suggested there is let let's agree upon a plan first so that we understand what we're funding and then let's work on the funding piece of that. That's a $51 million investment in the plan. And so we'll break that down and and I'm I'm going to take your lead quite frankly uh on on a big part of that because I think that'll be that'll be an important component. Uh and then the third is that we'll call it the existing services and expanded services. And that's a longer conversation because that'll require a title six review and and and a potential uh change to some of the things that we're doing or expansion. Um and I'm expecting that that conversation will happen very very soon with implementation in the near future as long as it takes us to do the advertisement and and get moving on that.

Mr. Manager. Thank you, Mayor. And what I what I would add to what Mr. Ortega just said is I I I include a fourth element of that transit being the development of the bus rapid transit project itself. Large capital investment that then also has an operating component to it down the road once built. We now have a clear path to go and seek the federal funding that's necessary to bring that. We've secured the local match. We've secured we've done our part. It's now time to uh lean into the federal government for for their uh grant uh on that project as well. And with uh the bus rapid transit uh we've done a lot of leg work to prepare for that right can you explain

that's correct mayor we had done an equitable tr or uh equitable transit oriented development grant process where we looked at routing of that um feature. We've done up to a 10% design for that. We've actually got a file open with the FTA to already know they know about our project. they know it's coming and so we're actually ready to to submit formal grant applications for that and keep the work moving in the meantime. So, um, when we look at BRT going into RTA next and our positionality, we are years ahead of where we were with the street car going into RTA. So, we should be able to see that moving rather rapidly as well. Any questions for my colleagues, Councilman Lee and then Council Member Dah.

Well, I just want to say, mayor, we are very lucky to have you in the role. Thank you so much for bringing our voice forward. We're lucky to have Mr. Ortega stepping into that role. I can't imagine what the outcome might have been had you not been there. And we're lucky to have the voters that we have right now. And uh Council Member Barahas just sent me the breakdown by Ward and it was awesome to see every single ward passing and amazing for W one and W five. You guys carried a lot of the weight u for the city. So, um, just immense amounts of gratitude for where we sit today and, um, I think we're all sleeping a little better at night knowing that we're moving in the right direction. Just amazing work to everyone. Council member Dah and then Vice Mayor Santus.

Thank you, Mayor. I'm agreeing that we're very lucky. Um, I remember four years ago, excuse me, when I first came on the council, one of the concerns was we obviously weren't going to have enough money to complete the things. And I remember my colleague um Steve Kazich pounding that question to RT. What are you doing about it? What are you planning to do about that? And there didn't seem to be any planning. Now, we were unfortunate in that there was an economic turndown and there was COVID. And in the next 20 years, knock on wood, I hope we'll be very lucky that we don't have a pandemic and very lucky that we don't have a economic downturn. But um I would like to ask Mr. Have you started thinking about how we keep public and the other entities on on peg informed of this and developing plan B's and plan C? So um I think your question mayor if you're okay with me answering uh council adult that I think your question revolves around what happens if

absolutely so keep in mind that the the revenue projections were on a pessimistic level. Um so that's number one. Number two, each of the roadway uh projects, which in my mind are the most risky in terms of potential overruns or cost uh implications, have between an 8 and 15% contingency built in. So, that's the second piece. Now, the third piece is those quarterly analyses where we're actually looking hard at the entirety of the program and projecting out. And so if we start to see inflation or we start to see something that we didn't anticipate, we tried to anticipate as many things as we could, but it's impossible. At least we'll know ahead of time so that we are in the say fourth or fifth year and we see a problem in the 17th year. You have time to address that up to and including going back to the voters. And so those safety nets, if you will, are built in. and the the the need for the plan B and the plan C will be a function of how catastrophic that possible uh challenge might be that we're we're facing.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

Uh yes, thank you, Mayor. Um and thank you. Um I don't even know what to call you now, just Mike. Um, I, you know, also been just feeling a huge sense of, of relief, um, with the passage of RTA because, um, as was stated earlier, you know, Ward One and Ward Five have been in limbo for a long time in getting the the safe streets and the mobility options that the rest of the city um, you know, gets to, uh, gets to have. So, I am really grateful to, you know, the voters who showed up. I am also very proud of W one and W five's turnout. So I think um it's a it's a new it's a new chapter you know for our

W three is like trailing W five and W one word three was 57.7% those are the latest numbers. But we will. So I think No, absolutely. It passed in every word, but

yeah, it's a it's a new day for our southside communities and I'm really, you know, looking forward to continuing working, you know, with council member Barathas and making sure that um we're uh we're doing right by our community. And just as as was stated earlier, you know, mayor, thank you so much, you know, for your leadership in this. I know we spent the past six years at this table um going back and forth on all our frustrations with the RTA and and you making sure that you advocated for the city that you codified the citizen oversight committee um in this next, you know, iteration of the RTA. Um and then just making sure that our projects, you know, came first and not last. And I also, you know, trust you, Mike, and having been part of these conversations at the table that you're going to do right by our community, making sure that it's a fair process and and that investment that happens here. So, um, thank you. I, um, am just curious um, Mike, Mr. Ortega, if you could briefly um, just share about the composition of the citizens oversight committee and then what's what's the process for getting that up and going? Mayor, uh, councelor Santa Cruz, uh, before I answer your question, I do want to say thank you, uh, and I will speak for the mayor. I don't normally do that, but thank you for including Silverbell Road on the list of rehabilitation projects because both the mayor and I use that frequently, and thank you for including that. Um, so what I'll do is is give you a couple thoughts on the citizens accountability um, for regional transportation. That's the cart committee. So, it's a 15 member board um that is made up of the eight jurisdictional partners. So, there's there's eight uh folks that are appointed by the jurisdictions in addition. So, there's there's seven members that are at large. Four of those members, four of those seven are city of Tucson residents. That's actually codified here. Um and then I'll just

quickly read the we'll call it the uh expertise of the membership that is ideal. Um and it's um at least four of those members would have expertise in audit, finance, multi-RO capital planning, project management, engineering, construction, land use planning, public outreach, public transportation and transit, archaeology, anthropology, habitat conservation, wildlife mitigation or related project delivery experience. The the current membership is set to we'll use the term expire in June June 30 of this year. So the members will have to be reappointed or new members will be need to be appointed. Now the way that the language works the actual cart will stay in place until the board replaces them. So even though their their terms have expired, they will continue to to operate so we don't have challenge with quorum or those kinds of things. Um but the I'll be sending out a note to the board saying hey you know here here's a list of the current members. Um, and what do you what would you like to do in terms of reappointment or appointing other folks within these criteria?

Council member Cunningham,

I agree with uh the assessment that we're really lucky to have the people we have involved in this, but I think it's the outcome has nothing to do with being lucky. Uh the outcome has to do with a great collaboration uh where uh a great collaboration with a lot of compromise and I've been doing this a long time. What makes this RTA compromise unique is that usually when we have packages that we put to voters with a lot of compromise, uh there's too many poison pills and we end up shooting ourselves in the foot. And that was my biggest worry about this package. So, the fact that uh it did pass demonstrates that the voters were really engaged and really looked at it and it actually tells us something about the great people we have in our community to pass this in this fashion because they actually took an open mind. They agreed to some of the compromises in there. They were actually willing to listen to other people and people who do that, that's what it's all about. And you know, as we try to bridge the gap, we have so much division in the United States right now. We try to bridge the fact gap to the idea that people can listen to each other, and that's what happened here.

Uh, Council Member Vgas.

Thank you, Mayor. Well, I may not have spent the last six years here around the table with you all, but I was in our streets literally conducting community engagement many um citywide like move Tucson and and South 22nd Street projects like Tucson North looking at the south end alignment um and the north end alignment as well, Tucson Rapid Transit and working alongside a lot of community residents, stakeholders, business owners ers, families, working families, and other elected officials like Ward One, Ward Three, our mayor's office, and at that time, Ward Five, Council Member Femes's office. And what I continue to hear from residents that many projects um again, South 22nd Street in Ward 5 and Ward 1 is that these projects are long overdue and we cannot afford further delays. So we must prioritize safety, equity, and the need. So many neighborhoods that we now serve, that I serve, the historically underinvested neighborhoods, um I want to make sure that equity considerations help guide the funding decisions. and additionally that those conducting community conversations and forums must reflect the diversity and lived experiences of the residents that live in here in these neighborhoods that they're at the forefront of the conversation and help you know guide us and I also would like to see u more room for the complete streets model specifically in Ward 5 and Ward one and um more green gray storm water infrastructure projects like what we experienced along South 12th venue, climate responsive, multimodal advocacy within these projects. And I did have a question um if we can layer on additional funding for roadway corridor element projects to add on more

multimmoal safety features moving forward. Thank you, Mr. Tamir. Thank you, honorable Mayor, Council Member Barahas. Yes. Um we can layer additional funding on top of RTA funding for any of these projects. We've done that in the past on some of our recent completed projects and we certainly could look for opportunities to do that moving forward. Any others? Council member Schubert.

Thank you, Madame Mayor, honorable members of the council. Um, just got to speak up for my word. Six people. Um, first I I really want to acknowledge mayor your leadership. Um, and I'm also so happy, Mike, to have you in your position. um and to have heard you speak um with with such um specific knowledge of the RTA about the different areas of concern. You you verbatim named some things that I had on my list. Um the CART u membership and structure, um the revenues and expenditures, the the focus on transparency, the five-year review. Um these are all things that we have heard repeatedly from our constituents um in Ward 5. and I feel very lucky to be sitting here at the table. Um, you know, as you said, Madame Mayor, um, it's just the beginning of the work. Um, campaigns end when there's an election and a vote. Um, but after that, it's up to us to follow through and ensure um, that things unfold in a way that um, is faithful to the people that we represent. And it wasn't easy. Um, we represent um, different perspectives around the table and around the region. Um in ward six uh we stood out as having a narrower um vote margin in terms of passing just um four point and two point differences. Um so so that leads me to feel a deep sense of responsibility to come here and to collaborate with everybody who's involved um to ensure that you know we remain committed to transparency and public process um accountability and project delivery, proportional representation for Tucson at the regional decision-making table um and safeguarding our safety and transit investments. So, um, again, I just I feel lucky to be here for the work, um, and lucky for the leadership that we have here, um, both in the city of Tucson and in the region and, um, looking forward to future conversations as we move forward. Thank you so much.

Well, thank you so much, Mr. Ortega. Thank you, Mr. City Manager. I am again um as the vice mayor put so well um relieved uh that the voters of Tucson and the region approve uh these funding and I'm really looking forward to the the work not that we now have to do. um happy that uh I think we were the city of Tucson mayor and council was the only jurisdiction that had such um uh important communication amongst each other at the table. Uh for me it was invaluable to be able to take all of your perspectives and your advice and um your um priorities to the table when when we were putting you know these uh these plans together and there was many iterations of the plan that uh many times I said no to. Um, and so the the the last plan that was approved last week by the voters of Tucson and and the region for me seemed to be the best plan um that we were able to uh build consensus around. So, uh thank you so much. I'm looking forward to the uh work. I too am very happy that vice mayor uh and DTM decided to add Silver Bell Road to the pavement preservation projects because I drive it every day and it needs it. And I think that's why at the end of the day voters uh voted to approve uh this initiative because it had uh it has a good investment in all of the areas that we need. So from um expansion of Marianne Cleveland Way to

investments uh incredible investments in Drexel Road investments we haven't seen in decades um including a bridge over the Santa Cruz on Drexel um investments in Ward 5 22nd Street I'm I'm anxious to start the work uh bus rapid transit is a gamecher Just like the street car was for downtown bus rapid transit system from Toono Tadai through stone into downtown uh all the way to Laos. The possibility exists. So, um really happy really happy to do this and I'm I'm anxious to get to work and uh make sure that we uh you know that we do uh discuss our appointees to the oversight citizen oversight uh commission and uh put to put people to work because at the end of the day this is also putting lots of people to work. So, much gracias and we move on to item two. Thank you, Mr. Ortega. All righty. So, item two, uh, time has been set aside for an update on the fiscal year 2026 budget and discuss discussion of the fiscal year 2027 budget. Mr. Manager,

thank you, honorable mayor, and members of the council. Uh, for today's study session, we're in the middle of budget development. There's really no decision making for today. We're really giving you a snapshot of where we are in the process and then some reflection on the various engagements we've had with the public over the last six months about the budget process. So, you're going to hear from our assistant city manager and CFO Anna Rosenberry, but you're also going to hear from some of our directors about uh where we are in the process and what our lessons learned are so far as we bring a package to you in April. So, with that, I will turn it over to Anna and the team. Thank you. Thank you members of the council. So um to kick off the conversation today, wow that skipped skipped forward fast. Um as promised from our last session, we have delivered a um an updated financial forecast that includes years beyond the year that we're planning the budget for. So, this this spreadsheet that we work off as a planning tool um has gotten a lot more complex looking at uh future years fiscal 28, 29, 30, and 31 to see the impacts of how the budget that we're developing for 27 might um grow and play out in future years. Is it sustainable? Um this forecast will continue to evolve over the next month as we work to bring you that balanced city manager's recommended budget. Um one of the things that is detailed in the memo that we start talking about first is um our revenue projections. We have taken the time within fiscal 27 um and we we further refine those revenue

projections. We're projecting at expected recent trends. Um but and at this point, this plan doesn't account for any risks of continued or further economic downturn or possible shifts in federal funding, trade policies, those types of things. Um and that is a bit of vulnerability for us. Um that has us uh needing to continue to moni monitor economic trends and um really favor re maintaining recommendations and putting together a budget that has um fiscal flexibility, maintains options for us as we move into the upcoming year. On the expenditure side, um within the preliminary budget column that we're developing, again, um we continue to focus on incorporating those employee investments. Year two of the three-year compensation plan that we had been put uh that we had put together um continues to be incorporated into our projections um as as well as amounts for what we're calling unmet needs and incorporated in your materials for this study session. You also received the schedules of those unmet needs that were requested by departments this spring. uh the amounts that we are we are currently labeling as tenatively approved or incorporated into our projected budget um and those that are um not tenatively approved. You can see all of those details. Where that leaves us with current with our revenue projections um and preliminary expenditure projections on an operating level is that we um continue to have a deficit. When we uh reported to you in February, February 18th, we were preliminarily forecasting

a fiscal year 27 deficit of almost $64 million. We have closed that gap quite a bit with the work that we've done since the 18th at um that projected operating deficit for fiscal 27 is currently estimated at 28.9 approximately $29 million negative operating. That's still not where it needs to be. It needs to be um at or uh at zero or to the better um is where we want to recommend a budget. So, there's still work to do, but we have made a lot of headway. Um, and we still have a number of weeks before we will have a recommended budget in front of you. Um, how we were able to close that gap, we've detailed for you on page page two of your memorandum. Um, and as I said, our projections uh will continue to evolve as we work towards bringing forward the city manager's recommended budget. the result um bottom line that we're looking after we take th those operating um impacts of the budget revenues and expenses add all of our one-time spending investment plan items. Um we get to this bottom line result that we also talk about frequently with mayor and council and you'll see at this point in time it's trending very negative um uh in the future years of the plan. So, that's not where we're going to be when we bring back a recommended budget. Just wanting to um continue to track on how this tool helps us um get you a a balanced, sustainable recommended budget each year. The other item that I have for you, as the city manager alluded to, we've got a lot of great information for you today,

and we're joined by um many department leaders to have a conversation about um our strategic budget analysis, um the prosperity initiative, and our in uh fall community budget engagement housing initiative projects. We'll kick off those presentations in just a minute. I did want to let you know and let the com uh community members know that we have two upcoming um efforts for um uh community budget information sessions as well as an employee engagement event happening tomorrow. So, we will be coming to the community with five different information sessions. Um after the city manager recommends a budget, we'll be presenting that recommended budget to the community both virtually and in person. Many of those uh they're listed up on the board for you. We'll be doing advertisement about that. Uh three inerson events, two virtual events um so that the community can hear more of the details about the city manager's recommended budget. And then we will be holding our third um employee budget town hall um tomorrow in a virtual format. First time we've done a virtual format for that. Um we've had a request for it. So um I'm hoping that that we'll continue to um expand and include or expand the number of employees who are included in participating in that event. So with that, I am going to turn this presentation over to our chief equity officer, Lorice Walker, who is going to kick off these next two presentations. Lorice.

Yes, good afternoon everyone. Um, thank you for the opportunity to to present um this uh good afternoon honorable mayor and members of the council. So, uh, this marks our fifth year doing, um, the strategic budget analysis process where we've had the opportunity to work with our department directors and have them take a deeper look at their budgets and their budget allocations to, you know, have a deeper reflection of their budget priorities and their impacts on our most vulnerable or underserved populations and their communities. And through that process, we've also had the opportunity to support them to look at the prosperity initiative, which is something you all adopted a couple years ago. And in alignment with that, this year, we've taken an opportunity to reflect on last year's fiscal year's um strategic budget analysis and help the department directors align that with um their budget analysis and help figure out what priorities aligned with the strategic um with the prosperity initiative as well. Um so today you'll see you'll have the opportunity to hear from several different department directors um including our department of transportation, our housing and community development department um our Tucson police uh public safety and communications and our public defenders um office. So with that um I'd like to invite up our first speaker. Um so Jen, please take it away.

Hello. Glad to be here. Thanks, Lorice, from wherever you are beaming down into this room. That's pretty special. Um, so already today we've talked about equity and the importance of that as a value in our how we're allocating our budgets and I would say that has been exactly what we have found in the years and um the multiple years that we've been able to use the strategic budget analysis tool. It's given us a focused reporting framework that allows us to kind of cross-check the things that have been uh put into place aligning our values, our transportation investments that lead to the things we're building in the community for the people who need them and will use them. It's been enlightening uh to be able to take for example um the move Tucson equity analysis that was developed as part of our first ever long range transportation plan adopted in 2021. In that plan, we identified ways to prioritize projects and select them using things like the equity analysis tool, which is a GIS application, allows us to put that over a map and we can identify that with our US census areas, all telling us important things about uh the the needs in our community. we have been able uh to now use the office of equity's um equity priority index the tepee and um with that sidewalk bike boulevard ADA improvements and traffic calming initiatives are all part of that assessment as we pre-plan projects we use tools like remix and census bureau data to analyze

who's living in the areas, what nationalities and languages they speak. And this allows us to actually do a bit better planning for the outreach. Um, helping us meet our title six requirements as well. We mentioned Tucson Nortes, favorite project of mine. Um, and this intentional engagement for the project is an example of how we can learn better about the areas that we're working within in different ways, obtaining information directly from them about their lived experience in those areas and the needs that they have. This uh one example from that has allowed us to directly understand the sidewalk connectivity that's needed along that future high-capacity transit line and um is impacting our transit planning that way. Additionally, DTM is working to create an accessible community where people aged 8 to 80 are able to move around our community easily. That's our goal. Our boards, committees and commissions are important to identifying and vetting investments and uh the commission on disability issue disability issues Cody uh is one such group and one of the things that we've been doing is not only meeting with them but also providing a seat for their membership on our other DTM focused BCC's that include the complete streets coordinating council and our Tucson transit advisory committee. with respect to the prosperity policies. Uh two really stand out as having that strong transportation nexus. Uh the prioritized transportation options to connect vulnerable communities to jobs and resources as well as improve quality of life and opportunity in high poverty areas. The selected projects that are up there on the screen are just examples of how the

shared mobility um options there, how we can locate them, um how we can make them easier to use by the folks that that want to use them and get around. And with that, I will pass it on. Who's next? Next, we have Housing and Community Development Director Chaneka.

Thank you. Good morning, honorable mayor and councel. So, I don't think it's any secret that the work that housing and community development does is to support tonins who are experiencing vulnerabilities. So, all of the activities we do are focused on advancing mayor and council's initiatives related to equity related to alleviating poverty. And so, we do that in many different ways. So yes, we do use data and different software systems to track key data. That quantitative data is really important. We use it to determine eligibility, to help when we're going after grants, to inform the programs that we administer, and really to look at where we can create efficiencies and better support our community. One thing I do think that is important in mentioning though, yes, I love data, but it's important to also talk about the qualitative data and talk about the families we serve. So, the numbers matter, but so do the individual stories. And that's something we've really worked on the last couple years is better communicating how the work we do impacts the community. And so, as I mentioned, everything we focus on really does try to address um and reduce poverty in our community. The main thing that we do is we provide how housing and housing assistance and to low-income families in Tucson. We know that having a roof over your head is foundational for everything else. And so the work we do across the board aligns with the different policy initiatives. So for increasing

increasing housing mobility and opportunity as I mentioned that's everything we do but some additional items is the people communities and homes investment plan better known as PIP where we provide funding to nonprofits who are working to address poverty. We also have really increased our resident services over the past few years and those are dedicated staff that provide case management and connect our residents and our voucher participants and those in our shelters to wraparound services in terms of improving quality of of life and opportunity areas. Over the past um five not to eight years now, we've been focusing on our thrive zones and really trying to concentrate investment in key areas that have historically lacked investments. We also created an opportunity tool which helps identify areas where citing affordable housing makes the most sense. It's higher income areas. It's areas that are serviceri and that helps that helps when we're looking to locate affordable housing developments. We obviously focus on improving housing stability. We support Tucson Puma collaboration to end homelessness that is geared towards trying to get people into housing. And then our housing first program runs a large permanent supportive housing program. And then finally, we are focusing on trying to increase income for our families. We do that through different ways. I mentioned our case management, which is really focused on providing employment opportunities for those we serve. And then we have two programs that specifically are focused on income. our

res resident opportunity self-sufficiency programs that supports our public housing residents and our our family self-sufficiency programs that supports our housing choice voucher participants. So, in summary, both equity and alleviating poverty are key goals and things that HCD works on every day. Next we've got Tucson Police Department and Chief Prito. Good morning, honorable mayor, members of council, Mr. Manager. I want to talk about the Tucson Police Department and its proactive efforts to stabilize our community um to all members of our community. And I'll go I'll speak to I'll highlight some of our public dashboards that um show our commitment to transparency and accountability. I'll speak first about our uh reported crime dashboard and our our Viva dashboards which tracks our progress and it tracks crimes that are reported and it's you can look it up by ward office by by sectors in the city. Um, and it really empowers our community members to to track what your police department is doing and what types of crimes they're responding to. Um, and like I mentioned, it it does break down information um through demographics um of victims and offenders. The um we do have an internal dashboard with Sunran and and the Tucson Police Department and that helps us to identify any incidents or calls for service that occur within 25 ft of a bus stop or a transit center. So that helps us identify key areas where we need to utilize um some resources to to ensure that we keep those spaces safe. Many of you know our unreported crime survey was sent out. Um we partnered with the University of Arizona on this

and it identifi it it wants to identify and ensure that that we are measuring our trust and legitimacy when it comes to um crime being reported and when crime is not reported. we want to understand why crime is not reported. And so, University of Arizona sent out the survey to 375,000 households um in the region. And it also worked with two nonprofit groups to ensure that we we focus on some of the areas um of underserved to include the undocumented and unsheltered populations. Um those two two nonprofits are Inner Mountain Centers and Chanosa. Um I want to talk about the cost of grant as as well and and the multi- agency effort that um that we that we undergo. We have a case manager that's embedded with our core unit um to ensure that we're working with the health department with our community service health and wellness and also our Tucson fire department and utilizing data to identify those most at risk when it comes to overdoses. Um and that way we can provide some some preventative measures and intervention measures for that. Moving on, next slide please. When it comes to prosperity policies, I'm going to focus today on our workforce development and also the crime reduction and prevention. Um I can't reiterate and and thank you enough for the $100,000 um to to our recruiting efforts. Um this past year we've seen a 50% increase in our applicant pool um with with our sworn um we are invested in ensuring that our workforce is is diversified. Um as you know we have csos um community service officers professional staff investigators analysts that um that are embedded in our department. It's not just sworn um some of the key numbers that I'll talk about today are our professional staff investigators. they

they it is made up of 80% um females and our entire sworn population for department members is u of Hispanics is 40%. So just a couple key numbers I wanted to go over. I know I didn't have much time today, but uh our Viva sites also I want to I want to reiterate that when it comes to our Viva sites and those four sites in the city that we identified to have the most gun crime in the city, we have seen a 60% reduction in all violent crime, which is which is key. And that's using our our strategies that we use, our our problem oriented precision policing strategies and other crime reduction strategies in those specific areas. And it it's really concentrated on those underserved areas and allows us to work with the apartment complexes, managements, businesses, and schools and businesses in those areas that have been identified. VI our violence prevention coordinator, Britney, she you've you've heard her um speak about the Goodwill program and the great work that she's doing with the with the Goodwill program, the village. Um, we did receive um a grant recently from the Tona ODM for $50,000 that will help us um give job training to 33 young individuals. That's 100 hours of job training for them. Um, and as you know, we refer young folks between the ages of 12 and 24 who've been victims or or involved in a in a violent crime in Tucson and try to get them um in the hands and the resources to to help prevent anything further any further harm. So, just a few ways in which the Tucson Police Department um works at providing services equitably amongst the city. Thank you. Next we've got public safety communications department and director Garcia.

Morning, honorable mayor, members of the council. Thanks for having me here today. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about some of the great things that we do at uh the public safety communications department. Um as you know, we're kind of the the middleman and the the epitome of everything that uh things come in. And so we really uh focus on being aware of our community and um intentionally being inclusive uh because it really depends. It really matters how people can connect to us, right? And that's the way that we become accessible and the way that we can provide our services. We do that in multiple different ways. Um when we look at our offerings and our accessibility, we look at uh on the 311 side, we utilize uh a CRM platform. right now. It's called Cclick Fix that allows multiple different avenues for the community to uh report uh citywide issues or departmentwide issues to uh to the city and have a a oneway to report anything that they need to to the city. Um and then we also use utilize of course you all have heard of our CAD computerated uh dispatch system and that is really a wealth of data collection in and of itself. It's a universal tool that we can use, including our 311 folks to see what's going on across the city and really across our the region that collects a ton of of critical data that we can use and that we share. And it really feeds the the process for our police and fire partners on kind of where things are happening and what's happening and the criticalness of it. We can combine all that information and we can compare from those two sources to the city's equity index and other tools to see where things are happening um where underserved populations are maybe most at need and how that really uh impacts the the city and what services may or may not be getting delivered to those areas and allows us to provide that information to our partners. And we are really all about partnerships and

collaboration and the and the different uh departments we can work with. Um the other thing that we use and leverage uh immensely is the nextG 911 phone system and the way it comes in and the information that we gather for it and that is continuously growing and the way those tools that develop and the information that that is giving us and the access to information from the public that we can get from that is continuously growing in different tools that we can u bring in uh helps us get information like location. It builds in transcription and translation services also things like video and text to 911 so that people of different abilities can get access to us. Uh when we move into um how we serve the prosperity policies there's two that stand out although we cross uh multiples but the first is improving the quality of life and opportunity for poverty areas. uh one is we really started and worked uh through the MD Ally and tellahalth option for 911 callers. This is a much lower cost option for folks that are in difficult areas. One who maybe not have don't have primary care providers and whose maybe only option especially once you get an ambulance to the scene is to go to the hospital. That's thousands and thousands of dollars and lots of time wasted and a and a a resource when maybe you only need a prescription refilled or a minor medical issue resolved and we can get them in direct contact with a medical provider who can resolve needs right now uh at a much lower cost. Um and then we also have through the 311 community access uh to various different city services and partner providers and um you know that that's where we really are that middle person and and partnership has really become a core value for us and how many different ways and things can we connect dots for people. We we

don't provide the end services but we are just a staple of partnership. Um and that's included in the crisis specialists that we have embedded with us. So we have people and we hear it all the time, people in crisis on the streets and you know you send a police officer or firefighter, they don't have the ultimate answers and that's not you know that often times just doesn't serve the need. And having our crisis specialists um in the in the facility who can get different resources and can talk people down are really essential to some of the different ways that we provide services that people don't regularly have access to. And then when we talk about our prioritizing uh workforce development and underserved uh populations, uh we really work hard and strive to um bring in people who one represent our community and people who maybe wouldn't have thought about the city or different places in the city as opportunities. We work with Sam Miguel, we work with Jed. Um we are really low barrier entry. uh you know it's a typing test and a high school diploma GED that it takes to get in with us and we will coach you through a typing test and we will we work with JTAD regularly we work with um many of the different organizations out there where uh you know you have to have a clean record too and and that's actually essential to us because we know a lot of the people that come work for us want a um a job maybe in police or uh fire and you know they've got to be a little bit older and have some more experience to get there. And we can be that gateway. We're happy to be that. Um, we're happy to help them build a career with the city of Tucson. And we also have a career ladder for us. And it's been so rewarding and so fulfilling over the last several years to see our uh retention turn around and help people grow and have a career ladder built in.

to see single mothers who were struggling working multiple jobs and have now purchased homes and people that are, you know, we have, I think last time I saw 18 or 20 people working on degrees and getting education that they thought were was unattainable and we encourage that and we work with people regularly to improve their quality of life and to improve their final financial capability and we're a great starting point for that. So, thank you all. Appreciate it. And next we have the public defender's office and public defender Mary Tjo.

Come to the tall mic.

The tall mic. I'm growing. I'm growing. Thank you everybody. Um, honorable Mayor Romero, I don't know where she's at. She's behind. and members of council. I'm very excited to tell you about where we've been, where we're going, and where we're headed. It's been very exciting to see the public defenders office morph into a an agency where we're not just worried about people's criminal charge. You do your time and you're done. Now, we're looking at the whole person and we're trying to prevent um the we want them to be in a happier, healthier environment. We want to to give them the tools and the resources so that way they can become law-abiding citizens. Also, our goal is always to have our clients who speak really well and are convincing to be a peer mentor to others who are in the same situation, which that's huge. So, so where we were at, we were and and it wasn't until Louise had this conversation with us of because I also I'm with an everything that we do is to help our community members and everything that we do is in equity. You know, we don't pick and choose. We are appointed, but we will never turn anybody away. If anybody comes into our office and they need help with food, they need referrals to another agency, their lights are going to get turned off, we want to help them as well. So, we have morphed into something more than just taking care of your criminal case, which I think is huge. So, we currently have a case management system where we monitor the oldfashioned way, you know, of how many cases did you close, how many felonies do you have pending, and because of your support, we are now along with the prosecutors, we are getting a new case management system. With that new case management system, we will be able to do a better job in in tracking all of our equity um analysis.

And we hope to have a dashboard where we can ch track more of the age, gender. That wasn't something that we were focusing on because we we just do it because it's one it's the right thing to do. And and again, as I said, we don't turn anybody away or we try not to even though we're not appointed judge. Don't get mad. But we we we try really hard to help our community members in doing everything they do. One of the big game changers for us was getting the care coordinators. That was huge because in terms of the attorneys, we were doing an okay job. We were doing better than okay in terms of helping with the working with the providers and you know trying to get our clients connected, trying to get them housing, but we didn't understand how to maneuver a system. Their access was closed for some reason. We couldn't find out why. But having the care coordinators has helped us so much in terms of helping our clients. They are focusing on the whole person, not just the criminal charges as I'd mentioned before. And also now we are working with community court and we hope to include community court in a dashboard with our new system so we can track how did they get referred into the agency what was the final disposition of the case where are they now and we're also looking at recidivism as well. So it's it's been a a challenge. It's been um because now I have partners here at the table who are thinking the same same things that I've always thought. I've always wondered, well, okay, they're going to do their time, they do a 100 days in jail, and then what? So, now we're working on the and then what? And that helps our community members, and it helps our clients, their families, and you know, somebody at a grocery store, you know, because the clients keep going back. So, so it's it's helping everybody in the community. So now if we look at

the the prosperity policies we have done a lot when again when lice kind of forced us to look at all this we and again we we just do it because it's the right thing to do but in terms of the we are involved with the jail population release group with um on the felony level. So we coordinate efforts, we work closely with other departments without even I I never in my wildest dreams would have thought why am I working with a housing person you know but we have been really networking working with housing working with TPD and again the big key is our care coordinators in terms of the preventing and reducing crime. They work really hard with discharge jail plans. And again, it comes back to, okay, you do your time and then what? So, what some of that includes is transporting people to community court or to your provider because it's hard. I mean, for us who have transportation, we don't think about how hard it is to take five buses to make that that appointment in two hours. It it's not going to happen. So with the people at the transition center, they have been helping us and we've been coordinating and working with all of that. So that has been also a gamecher. Um also we've been working really closely with the treatment providers and the treatment providers and our care coordinators have been doing a phenomenal job. Trying to hurry here Tim. Um they also with our care coordinators they're able to help people with their access eligibility which was also a big a big deal. It doesn't seem like it is, but it is because when they go into jail and if they're a certain amount of time, their access gets turned off. So now our care coordinators are able to help them and then the continuing of medication is important and that all helps. Um again, I just

wanted to thank everybody here for having the same or mutual vision and helping our community and especially our clients because they sometimes they don't know they want the help. we're just helping them nudge them that way. So, I thank you all. We're going to move right into um filling you in on and sort of a recap from our department leaders who were a part of our community budget engagement on the housing equation. Lorice, you want to introduce this?

Yes, thank you. Um first I just want to say my heart is super full. um that equity work is transformational and not transactional. So that's just a testament to that. Um I remember pushing our directors to collect the data. So it's just cool to see the theme of it showing up in their strategic budget analysis. So kudos to all of them and all the hard work. So thank you all for that. Um yes, so moving on to our um housing equation budget forms from this fall. Shout out to Laura Sharp and Sarah Sherman from my team. This was a heavy lift and couldn't have done it without them. Um, you guys can find the full report of this feedback um on our city's website under the um budget uh office web page and if you go down to the budget forms, there's a link that clicks to the full assessment report and it's a PDF that you can download. Um here we have a team photo of all the folks that was a part of that planning session. So feel free to check it out. Um here is an overview of what we've heard from folks who've participated in the discussions. And I won't read verbatim from every single one of these here. Um but you'll be able to see that um there is just a top few themes here that folks have talked about from different residents. Um folks, you know, really wanted to see that there was from community safety and health and wellness. Folks talked about, you know, there was some gaps that they've seen from success stories that they wanted to hear more about. folks, you know, okay, the services that you did provide, you know, we want to know what happened to them afterwards. Um, when you think about um the housing and community development department, you know, folks wanted to know more about mental housing, especially since that was a new topic that was coming up. And then they wanted to know about more about eviction prevention and you know affordable housing and what's the disconnect between truly building that and how are we going to close the gap between the lack of uh new development and the need of housing um development that need for folks. So there was just

some of those themes that kept coming up. Um when you look at the one for Tucson Police Department um you know this was a conversation that a lot of folks wanted to know about the officer staffing and availability and response time. um funding and um funding constraints and how we were responding to that, what were the reporting procedures. Um so there was a lot of different things that was coming up, a lot of good healthy um dialogue and conversations that were happening at the table um with the community residents and our staff. And then the last one for planning and development services. Um some of the themes that came out of here was looking at zoning and permitting and like what was those guidelines and those restrictions. Um here a lot of folks wanted to know a little bit more. Are there trainings? Are there classes? Is there community forms or educational opportunities for residents and neighborhood associations to learn more about it and what is it like to go out for a permit and how do we learn more about that process? Um and what's the process for tiny homes and how do we have them on our property and what's the reimbursements and things like that or the incentives. So it was a really good process to kind of pull that out and pull the highlights and kind of hear from the community. but then also for directors to kind of get that feedback in real time. Next slide, please. Um my favorite slide here, um which is really cool. Um you'll see this uh chart here. It talks a little bit about these are the things that we've um some questions that we've asked folks. And again, I won't read every single one of these ones here, but we asked uh the community members, you know, what were their thoughts about uh some of these services here? And like the two bar graphs you'll see the darker one you'll see is uh the importance. So if we ask them you know the importance of providing a service you know they would tell us this is we thought this was important and then the lighter one would tell them they would say how effective they thought the city was doing at that. So for the first one you'll see that the

increasing the supply of affordable housing um with the net agreement score the community thought that you know there was a 54% you know uh agreement score of that being important but 11 the score for that was our effectiveness in providing that um I think for when you look at these type of numbers I don't think that this is bad data I think this is actually incredibly good data because it gives us an insight to show us that it's kind of like that impact and intent thing conversation that we've been having a lot of dialogue about most recently when we're talking about that emotional intelligence and um behavior change and organizational shift and change management. You know, we have our community members who are showing up and trying to be a part of this conversations and hear what the city's doing and it's nice to hear their feedback of like we think these services you're providing as a public entity is important. However, how we're receiving or hearing about them may not be landing as well as you think. And maybe the fact is we probably aren't doing a good job of telling our story, right? So, how do we do a better job as an organization to tell our story? We are doing these services. We are providing them. Um, so it's really good just to get that feedback. Um, some of the other ones on here, and again, you can download this and take a review at them um to look at is um let's see, this is a little small on my screen. um reducing barriers to uh affordable housing and middle housing. Also, another one in here, 43 people say it's important. How well are we doing that? 30 people say that we're effectively doing that. So, again, I think this is a really cool chart to look at again just to see people think that the services are important and then how effective are we providing that. Um so, we have two speakers. um uh our housing and community development director is going to come up and speak and talk about um the takeaways um from this process and then we'll have um our community safety, health, wellness um program director speak about what were

some of those challenges as well.

Thank you Lice. Hello again. So um I was at almost all of the sessions in the fall. I will say I found it really rewarding to have such engaged conversations with the community. I really credit Lice and the equity office for the format. So we all did presentations but then really getting to sit at tables and talk to community members I thought was a really rich part of that experience. A couple of the takeaways. So HCD engages with community members all the time when it comes to housing and so these are conversations we're constantly having but having an evening where we had different directors there to answer questions holistically I thought was really great. Um, and I do think overall what we heard from community members was they appreciated that opportunity to have those more direct conversations not just with housing but also those other departments. I will say many of you attended the session in your ward. The conversations were different depending on where across the city we had those conversations. I think that really speaks to the different needs of the different areas in our city. Um the title, the housing equation, we did have a conversation about we do think that really attracted folks who are really interested in housing. These are my type of people. Um but I also think they weren't necessarily representative of the city at large. And so as we think about doing this again in the future, I think being really mindful of what we are the conversations we want to have and what that title is will be important. And then I do think I mentioned I think the um what we heard

from representatives that attended is they appreciated the variety, the format. I think that last B bullet that talks about community members left the meeting enlightened that might be a little strong but I think they did leave with better awareness of the different issues the work we're spending a lot of time focused on in the challenges that we have. So, I do think overall it was a really productive conversation and I think we learned some things we could take moving forward.

Hello, honorable mayor, members of the council. Um, it was a really good thing. The housing equation was a really good thing to participate in and I think that we learned a lot from it. And I'm just going to repeat what Ann said. It was a lot of all the different wards had different people coming to the table. Um, one of the key takeaways for us was um people people were asking how are these people that you're helping doing um now 2 years later, a year later, 6 months later. And that's one of the gaps that we identified um that we really need to do better long-term tracking of folks. Usually when you close somebody out of a program where you're providing services um we're not getting how are they doing six months, a year, two years from now and um so we need to do better at that. We're really good at capturing the services we're delivering. Um but I think that a lot of the tables that we were sitting at wanted to hear well we want to know how are they now, where are they now. Um so that's something that we need to get better about. Um, another uh common theme was they had no idea that we were doing so many things at the city. They had no idea what was under the community safety, health, and wellness umbrella, all of our housing first, our office of violence prevention, intervention, all of those things. Our homeless encampment uh uh initiatives, they had no idea all of those things were taking place. So strengthening how we collect and communicate um these stories and and the data and stuff is something that I think is uh really critical. Um being transparent, right? Letting people understand all the different steps involved in the work that we're doing, inviting the media to our events, um um having a lot of social media presence and um announcing the things that we're doing um in these various programs that we're delivering. Um, also I think uh

one of the things that we recognize is we don't have uh people that are really posting on our social media websites um in our division, right? Um so getting uh our resources in line so that we can better do that and better get the word out on our events um the things that we're um doing in the public. Um so ultimately we learned a lot. We got to hear a lot of of of the community's feedback um and you know just doing better data collection and followup coordination and having better long-term outcomes.

Mayor, that concludes our presentation, but we've got lots of folks here who are available to answer questions. Thank you so much, Anna, and thank you to all the department directors um for all of the work that you've done, especially for the uh town halls and the conversations that you had with um you know, with the community. I appreciate it. And Louise, thank you so much for joining us. I know that you couldn't be with us in person today, but um you know, we we started this work uh with the council and I want to especially thank Vi Vice Mayor Santa Cruz for um her leadership in creating the equity office and going out to uh to hire an equity officer. Um and for us and also vice mayor leading on uh the prosperity initiative and that work uh to have datainformed policym to tackle an issue that it has been so difficult um and has been prevalent in our country uh since its founding which is poverty causes and the root causes of poverty. So the embedding equity and the prosperity initiative in our budget is very very important and this work has been happening for the last at least 5 years in uh the mayor and council and uh has been embedded now in uh department work. So really happy to see an update on all of the work that is taking place and um you know the the the departments and and our staff uh being very conscious of uh where we need to focus

to um uh to lift and invest in the quality of life for our folks. I know that there were a few presentations here including our budget uh presentation and so I'd really like to open it up for uh my colleagues on the council just in case you all have questions uh observations or advice for our city manager. Anyone to start? Councilman Lee.

Thank you, Mayor. I can get us started and I'll be brief because I know we're we've got lots going on today. Um appreciate all of the information in the memo. Um, we're at $28.9 million deficit. I know you guys are working on that and I appreciate the list of of how you reduced it from the 64 million. One thing that I've talked to you Tim about is if there is a way to connect these items to the impact that they will have on the community. I think that's really important when we talk about, you know, we're not going to do X Y or Z. Um, what impact is that going to have on the community? So, we're very clear. It's more than just a number on a page. we're really thinking about what that is going to do in terms of impact. Um the other piece, I can't help myself. You know, I get anxiety when I look at the end of that five-year projection and the huge $300 million um in the whole number that we're looking at. So, I'm immediately, and I've been doing that for years, looking at where we're headed. So, I really appreciate that forecast that we're looking at. Um, one thing that I I know a lot of cities are going through this right now, um, because of American Rescue Plan funding, cliffs, and whatnot, but the city of San Diego is facing $120 million deficit. And I know in previous years, we've put out a budget survey. I pulled up their budget survey, and I really like it. It, you know, it asks people to come up with their three top issues they're most concerned about, and it only lets them pick three. So, it forces some focus. everything from traffic safety, tree planting and maintenance, flooding and drainage, graffiti, housing costs, lack of park, recreation or open space, and a series of other things. So, it would give us the opportunity to again beyond the housing conversation that we had, understand core service related priorities of the community for now as well as when we get to these gigantic um deficits that we're going to have to navigate and and how we can approach those again, as the mayor said, in a very data-informed um way. So I think that is the only feedback that I have for today surprisingly. Thank you.

Any others? Any questions, comments? All righty. Wow. I'm I'm really impressed by you all. Uh thank you so much, Mr. Manager. Thank you, Anna. Really appreciate it. All righty. we move on to um item three. So item three time has been set aside to discuss the rate and free revision process and proposals for Tucson water, the transportation mobility and planning departments and development services departments. Mr. manager.

Honorable mayor, members of the council, in our spirit of hearing from directors, um we do have some of our directors joining us here at the table. Um lucky enough to have uh water director John Kami here and transportation mobility deputy director Jim Degrude. Um who's a star on both levels this item, but also he's one of our stars on RTA next. So, just uh wanted to give a quick shout out to Jim there. As well on this item, we have a number of potential rates and fees for our operating departments before you. This is a continuation of a conversation that dates back to late last year. In fact, you had a study session similar to this one back in December. Um, what I'll note is there's no action required at this study session except we are seeking your advice on the water rates and fees and which of the two options you might be leaning toward going out to the public with. We can go out to the public with both options or we can go with one option if you have some consensus here at the table here today. Um, but the action all happens tonight. You'll have four notices of intent tonight for each package to look at and consider independently. Um, and you'll note that when we met before, we had also um the parks and recreation as part of the discussion in the fall. We've actually pulled parks and recreation out to consider as a separate discussion as early as next meeting on April 7th. So today and tonight we're really focused on Tucson water transportation and mobility planning and development services and environmental services. Um so without

further ado I hand it to water director John Kami to talk about water. Thank you Tim. Thank you honorable mayor and councel. Go. All right. So Tucson Water is an enterprise fund of the city of Tucson, which means our water rates are designed to be cost of service based. We set rates to recover the full cost of providing safe, reliable water service to our community, covering daily operations, infrastructure investments, long-term water supply security, and debt obligations without relying on the city's general fund. In January of 2023, mayor and council approved a 4-year rate cycle for fiscal years 2023 through 2027 that included annual revenue increases of 5.5%. Since that time, several additional rate related actions have also occurred. In February 2025, adjustments were made to the commercial and industrial summer search charge to further incentivize conservation within that customer class group. Also included at that time was an increase to the water supply fee to cover the rising cost of Colorado River water supplies obtained from the central Arizona project in September 2025. Differential rates between incity and outside city customer classes were also implemented and this was done to further an equitable distribution of cost on those portions of our system that require more infrastructure and effort to serve. While that change was revenue neutral overall, it did shift how costs are allocated among customer groups. We now have updated Tucson Waters 5-year financial plan for fiscal years 27 through 31 and now have bringing forth a 4-year rate plan for consideration. While there is still one year remaining under the previously approved rate cycle, staff is recommending establishing the next four-year rate framework now covering FY27 through FY30. This approach allows us to smooth

further impacts and provide customers with predictability while continuing to cover the annual operating cost, capital improvement needs, and debt service obligations. This can be accomplished with a 4-year plan that increases revenues by 3.5% annually for the next four fiscal years. Uh the citizens water advisory committee or SEWAC have proposed to leave the FY27 revenue increase of 5.5% in place and add the FY28 through FY30 plan of 3.5% annually. Either option is acceptable to the utility. By choosing the SEWAC proposal, a movement towards increasing the holdings of cash reserves of the utility is an attempt to improve our financial position in the future that may allow for securing lower interest rates on future borrowing efforts. We also have completed an update on the miscellaneous fee plan, the first comprehensive update in 13 years. Like our rates, these fees are costbased and reflect the cost of service approach to many of the activities that the utility performs when reviewing engineering plans, special uses, and other activities that are generally customer-driven. As you see on the slide, one of the adjustments proposed to create an inclining is to create an inclining block fee structure for plan reviews. This is an attempt to create higher quality first submitts to the utility, which in turn would expedite reviews and ultimate acceptance of final plan sets. This concept has already been proposed to the homebuilding community and there's interest in pursuing this idea. Next slide. As part of the miscellaneous fees update, staff is also recommending an adjustment to the cap water resource fee. This fee is only administered to new portable water customers to recover the cost of acquiring a cap water

contract. It is calculated on a cost per acre foot basis and is then is associated to the capacity of the meter size necessary to serve. So in summary, Tucson Water is requesting a notice of intent on one of the two proposed rate plans. either the staff recommendation of four concurrent 3.5% revenue increases over the next four fiscal years or the SEWAC proposal to leave the current adopted 5.5% revenue increase adjustment for FY27 with three concurrent adjustments of 3.5% for FY28 through FY30. Also included within the notice of intent is the amended and updated miscellaneous fee fee plan and a proposed adjustments to the CAP water resource fee. Uh, thank you, honorable mayor and council. That concludes the Tucson water rate proposal.

Uh, good morning, uh, honorable mayor, members of council. Pleasure to be here before you this morning. Uh we are uh proposing changes to the rightway permit fees to simplify the fee structure, achieve full cost recovery, and make our fees more scalable through the use of hourly review and inspection fees for more complicated projects. Currently, the department is only receiving 61% of our or only recovering 61% of our rideaway fee permit related expenses, and these changes will provide for full cost recovery. These fees will be implemented fully in year one uh and will reduce the number of rightaway fee types. Uh we are also propo proposing there we go. Okay. Uh we also propose two new fees. The first of which is for pavement degradation or loss of value. Uh once a pavement is cut, it's never the same. Cuts in the pavement change how the pavement behaves and how stresses are transferred within the pavement structure. Pavement cuts also create an avenue for premature degradation. The degradation is particularly impactful on newer pavements and this is reflected in the fee schedule being proposed. This fee is proposed to be implemented over a three-year implementation period. The second new fee is a loss of use or lane closure fee. Our objective here is to fully recover our costs, recognize the loss of value the public to the public inconvenience by closures related to and their related congestion on improvements they've funded and incentivize more rapid work within city rightway. The fee varies by functional classification of the roadway impacted, the duration of the closure, the type of the closure uh which can vary from full roadway closure to a simple lane closure or a bus stop uh uh closure or

pedestrian path closure. The fee is scaled by length and duration and varies by time of day. For full day closures, they're obviously the most expensive. uh while nighttime closures which are less of an inconvenience to the motoring public are significantly reduced in fee amount. The collection of this fee not only allows for the city to recover the cost of review and inspection of the closure but also for our traffic engineering staff to monitor and optimize the signal timing at nearby intersections. Further, it's hoped that this fee will encourage more expeditious, better planned and coordinated projects. the use of double shifts, weekend and night work can all be employed by the contractors to reduce the fee amounts. And uh we are requesting uh this evening the notice of attempt for these three fees. So next up coming to the microphone will be planning and development services director Corin Manning. And I keep clicking. There we go.

Good morning, honorable mayor and members of council. Um, I'll give a quick overview of the proposed uh fee table as proposed for planning and development services. So, our goals with this fee increase were really to better align our fees with a cost of service. And we focus specifically on fees that do not adjust annually based on the increased cost of our construction. Many of our building permits are pegged to the cost of construction. So, are meant to increase annually kind of gradually with the cost of construction. So we specifically focused on fees that are not tied to building construction costs. That's our site review zoning fees generally. So what we're proposing is generally a 5% increase for most nonvaluationbased permits including site review zoning subdivision grading and development package fees. Then we're also proposing some targeted increases beyond 5% for certain fee categories that we found through our analysis are significantly below our cost of service. So those areas where we're proposing higher than the 5% overall fee increase are design professional fees where we're using outside design professional services. Um increases for our flood plane uh flood plane use permits and related flood plane permit reviews. um a 10 to 25% increase for special approvals like our neighborhood preservation zones, infill incentive districts, sign permits, and resoning and entitlement fees. All of those are categories that involve more complex staff reviews uh andor uh more involved public review that adds to again our cost of providing those review services to our customers. We're also proposing an increased fee for pre-application conferences for commercial projects to account for that substantial staff investment in preparing for pre-application meetings uh and providing guidance to applicants. But we're also proposing a new type of

pre-application for residential development that would have a lower fee, lower than what we currently charge. We're also proposing new site review fees for developments utilizing the community corridors tool. That's a tool that was adopted by mayor and council last year to incentivize development along our corridors. That's to account for the additional staff review time that will be involved in those projects. Uh keep in mind that this new tool is now an option instead of in many cases a resoning zoning variances much more complex um time consuming and costly projects processes. Um, and we're also proposing a new development package permit fee to account for uh the inspections that go along with development package issuance. Finally, we're proposing to increase the code enforcement reinspection fee as well as some related appeals fees for code enforcement processes. Um this fee would be increasing to $200 um to which would be charged in cases where property owners do not come into compliance um on a second inspection. Um that is an overview of our fee proposal. On the regular agenda tonight is a request to uh adopt a notice of intent to raise these. Thank you.

Thank you Corin. And finally at the microphone, our director of environmental services, Carlos Deator. Good morning, Madame Mayor, members of the council. To maintain our current level of service and continue funding our vehicles, facilities, and equipment replacement program on a on a pay as you go basis, staff is recommending adjustments to residential, commercial, and landfill fees along with the adoption of the clean city fee. Uh these adjustments would also allow us to strengthen our graffiti abatement program and continue with a safe and clean community programs. So to highlight a few points in terms of our uh proposed residential rates for the 48galon and 65gallon contained the current fee is $21.25 for the 65gallon is 2225. Proposal is really to keep it that rate flat for the next four years with the intent really to incentivize uh waste reduction. Uh first uh increase proposed increase is for the 95gallon container. Current rate is at $23. proposal is really to increase that 75 cents in year one, an additional 75 cents for the subsequent uh years uh every year. Um another component is really the 300 share gallon uh 300galon shared uh alley container. Typically there's three homes per container. Uh that the charge today is $22.25 per customer. The proposal is really to bring that rate equal in par to a typical 95gallon bin that is serviced at the at the curve uh and just make that service uh the same uh at the same cost. Uh we used to have a cost differential uh a cost differential between alley service and and curbside service and that that was the service was a little bit uh cheaper. uh since then there's that those operational cost have increased and therefore that that that

change or or the reduction in cost is no longer there. So the proposal is really again to make it uh in parody with curside as well as ali service. Um one thing to point out is currently uh environmental services along with Tucson water do provide a low-inccome credit. Uh our credit is is is a flat fee. Currently, that fee is or that uh incentive or or reduction is $12 per uh month per residential customer. The proposal is really to increase that from essentially $12 to $14 uh beginning in fiscal year 2027. Um the other proposed rate uh is really uh to create this new fee that will be essentially be uh afforded or or will be charged to every residential customer and every commercial customer uh to the tune of $3 per month. And that is really intended to fund the graffiti abatement program. uh the the safe city or homeless camp cleanup efforts, the illegal dumping program, the Team Up to Cleanup, really modifying that from a from a just a a volunteer-based program to more of a proactive cleanup program citywide and really continue to fund the old Public Community Services homeless work program. And that's that really encompasses the the funding for three crews up to eight eight folks per day uh five times a week. Next slide please. Uh also one of the things we need to ensure is that uh our residential fees do not subsidize any commercial or landfill fees. And so the proposal is really to adjust all commercial fees starting year 2027 an increase of to the current rates uh to the tune of 25% and doing some uh slight uh increases uh over the next few years as well from from 25 20 and 50% by year 2030.

uh rolloff containers. Uh currently the current charge is $182 per pool uh on top of the the uh tipping fees. That uh charge per service will jump from $182 to $250 uh per pool. Um we believe that essentially those uh fees are very comparable to the open market. We don't really control the market per se. If we provide services in the community on a commercial basis, we're probably talking about anywhere between 20 to 25%. So, we don't believe a whole lot of customers will migrate our way or go the other way around. Uh I those those costs are very comparable marketwise. Uh and finally, landfill fees. Uh one of the key uh critical um components of that of the landfill fees is your selfhaul fee. So if I if if I clean up my yard and I want to take my stuff to Los Royalis, right now I'm assess a fee of $15 for anything up to a ton, the proposal is really to increase that fee from $15 to $18 and subsequently a dollar every year for the next four years. Uh that fee is very very comparable uh to other uh municipalities. Uh and finally really the gate rate that typical commercial customers pay when they go to the landfill. um typical landscaper companies or other commercial entities, the current fee is $35 a month and the proposal really to to modify that rate to $38 a month. Uh we also have in the code uh a contracted disposal services for for major haulers. Uh and all we're proposing is really to do a a slight increase to to that base fee. It basically just establishes the floor and so it's really just given us the ability really to increase that floor every year for the subsequent uh four years. With that, mayor, uh these u modest adjustments will ensure our staff has the tools and the equipment needed to continue delivering the reliable services our residents expect and

deserve while protecting the long-term sustainability of our programs. We hope that your deliberation and decision today results in your support uh as it's an investment to the cleaniness, safety, and quality of our community and ensures that we can continue to deliver the services our residents rely on every day. Thank you, Mayor. Uh Director Dator, just one quick um question for the record on the gate rate for landfill. I believe you were saying per day or per month, but is actually per ton. Is that is it per ton? The 35 going to 38? Per ton. Yes, sir. Yes. I guess yes. Want to correct that for the for the public. Thank you, directors. And

um what what are next steps? We have uh four notices of intent scheduled for this evening

that you can either approve or um or not. And we have if we're moving forward with one or more of these notices of intent, we would be getting conducting stakeholder engagement through March and April in our traditional town hall format uh where the departments would uh collaborate and present on these as a holistic package. Um public noticing would occur from March through May as um for most of these not all but most of these rates and fees do require a public hearing and those public hearings were applicable would occur on May 19th at your meeting where you would consider adoption of the rate packages and if we stayed on this schedule with those public hearings in May, we would have an effective date of July 2026. With that, we're glad to entertain any questions. Thank you, Mayor.

All righty. Lots of questions. So, Council Member Cunningham, uh, then Council Member Dah, and then Councilwoman Lee.

A few things. First of all, I wanted to in appreciate how much we have as far as comparing some of the cities. We compared cities both in um in Arizona that that we want to measure ourselves against in our region and then we also compared ourselves to cities that are like ours. Those are cities that have uh a a multi um metropolitan statistical area uh population of you know between 800,000 and 1.2 2 million and municipalities with you know 300 to 600,000 people. Um and uh with the exception with a few notable except with a few exceptions it seems that our rates are extremely competitive uh specifically with um uh the environmental service fees that we're proposing and I appreciate that. And so I wanted to let you know I appreciate that being in the material because it allows us to say look we're we're still uh $14 lower than Phoenix. we're still going to be uh uh uh $15 lower than Morirana and Oral Valley. So, I I'm pretty happy with the with the kind of where we ended up and the fact that the fact of the matter is is that we were very we're considering other jurisdictions and what they're charging. I think we're pretty affordable. That brings me next to the uh lane closures. And Jim, I think uh I want to challenge everybody to say this. I think the the lane closure fees are fine. They're pretty competitive with other jurisdictions, but I think there's an opportunity for us, and this is one of those procurement items that I'll bring around. I think there's some opportunity for us to take a look at doing lane closures inhouse and having a specific like subdiv that does the lane closures. And so, we collect the fees and do that inhouse. uh where the um the road construction project or the utility that's hiring someone to

close lanes and then pay that and then that subcontractor pays us. We're kind of getting middled right there and it's probably driving up some of the cost of those projects. So, I'd rather them pay us directly to close the lanes and our people do it and that's I think might I don't know if that's going to save us money or not. I don't know if that's going to save the private sector money or not, but I think it's something worth looking at. And that was one of the things that came up in this this lane closure because from what I understand, there's only like two firms locally that close lanes. And so I I'm just curious to see whether or not that's uh something where especially if it's a modest project that doesn't need a really significant uh land closure thing. if there's opportunities to do that in house and to do to lay out the barricades in house, stuff like that. That was one of my thoughts, especially if we're doing a project in house, like if we're doing a uh a fog seal in a neighborhood that requires a couple modest lane closures and we're going to do it in house and not go to a contractor, I think it could save us some money. So, I thought that was really good. I think our um I think our our our fees are on the right track for the uh uh developmental services as well. I want to thank Corin's team for working really hard on that. There's there's one thing that I'm worried about and that is that uh we might need to figure out some carveouts for some affordable projects especially when it comes to housing. I don't want to be driving costs up uh on

on what council member housing. Affordable housing. when it comes to affordable housing with what fees for the PDSD fees.

PDSD. So, I want to be careful because remember whenever we up fees for anything uh especially if we're going to be going into the uh when when we consider the adaptive reuse development tool and whether or not the adaptive reuse tool can um can be applied, how those development fees some of those development fees might be might be uh um avoided. Again, not trying to nitpick, but just knowing that there's some stuff we're really trying to do, and yeah, we want to be be aware of what our revenues are, but if we can't uh if we can't open as many opportunities as possible on the housing piece, uh then I think we're kind of defeating we're we're going in circles, right? So th those are those are the things. Again, great presentations and a lot of good I I really want urge my colleagues to check out how we're competitive and where we kind of stand both locally within Arizona and nationwide. I think we're we're very we have some a very competitive feast schedule and I don't think it's um uh too aggressive. So, thank you very much for the work and uh that's that's outstanding.

Council member Doll and then Councilwoman Lee. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Tim, and the directors. I think you did a very good job. Um, we all got some back briefing on this and I think the public should know that there were actual cost of service studies that support all this data and it makes so much sense for us to charge the people getting the benefit of um the the services that were provided with these fees rather than it come out of our general funds. Um, I have a a couple of one question and a couple comments on water. The cap resource fee, is that a one-time fee or is that an annual fee? It's a one time.

As honorable mayor, council member Doll, that is the onetime fee. That's a connection cost to buy into the contract that the city owns.

Thank you. And a question for water. Uh we were talking earlier about potential state preeemption because of the situation with the water company in Gilbert. And I think everybody needs to know about that. Could you tell us about that? That also I think Well, I'll comment after that. Uh yes, Council Member Dah. Uh yeah, we were talking earlier that there was a bill that is moving. I believe it's still moving. We'll get an update from uh Miss Denton in a little bit. Uh that was is at the state legislature that's looking to put a freeze on municipal utilities like water departments from being able to charge uh change their fees I think over a 5-year moratorum. Uh which would be of in my personal opinion a very destructive act to many municipal water providers. uh being able to not keep up with the cost of service, not keeping up with uh inflation. Uh so it would it would challenge us tremendously if that ever went through.

Thank you. And I want to say SWAC did a great job uh you know thinking a little bit out of the box and because of the potential for preeemption, I I like their proposal a little bit better of of putting some money aside. Um, DTM, my comment. Boy, we get a lot of complaints about road construction and most people don't realize it's not the city of Tucson. It's this utility, that utility, cable company, Southwest Gas causing um disruption and hard to get from here to there and it's not always coordinated. Um, anything we can do to make it more efficient. I I love my colleagues idea. Maybe we bring it in house and we'd have some more control. But um I I love the idea of using the fees to incentivize doing it at night, doing it 24/7. One some of the solutions people offer is why don't you do it quicker? And I like the idea of incentivizing this. I I really appreciate the thinking into that. Thank you. That's it. Mayor

Councilman Lee, any others on Q? Council member Vakas.

All right. So appreciate also DTM the idea about pavement cuts and how we I' you know we've been on a road maintenance kick I have with you Joe. I really appreciate this idea. Um and also when I talked to him about um alternatives to cutting pavement water came up as a big pavement cutter. So I'm wondering if you guys want to arm wrestle or figure out something amongst yourselves to uh look at alternative ways John so we're not cutting into the road internally as much either. Um but really appreciate that. Also, the loss of lane use um and closure is really important. And I also appreciate the night idea to incentivize not just for traffic, but for worker safety because being out in the sun in this heat, I always wonder, you know, how safe that is and how effective that is for the people doing the work. So, I really like that. One thing I've talked to Tim about to to you about Jim and I just want to put out here for for my colleagues to think about is how do we trace the revenue that comes in from this so that it stays in the area that's impacted similar to impact fees right we don't want something that's being collected in W six because your people Miranda are being impacted by lane closures to go to Paul's ward right just as an example not picking on anyone here just using an example so how can we trace that and make sure that the investment is staying in the area where possible and improving the lives of the residents who are there. And then also just some clarity because I know this will come up in the community conversations is where the money is going to be spent, how's the money going to be spent. Um I don't think we have a clear answer on that yet. I think that'll be important to get clarity as this moves forward. So thank you all again to all the teams that have done the work to bring this together. I just wanted to thank everyone for the briefings and um I agree it's it's not too aggressive in the visuals and the comparisons. So, thank you all for bringing this to us. Um, I spoke to several of our commissioners about the proposed fees just to hear their feedback and they all just really stress

the execution. They too said, you know, it wasn't too aggressive, but the stakeholder conversations, the engagement opportunities are going to be key at sharing this information with our uh community at large. So, I look forward to supporting these uh efforts and working alongside you all. Thank you. Any others? Vice Mayor? Um, I just wanted to add I think that it's important for our departments, especially our enterprise departments, but including planning, development services, and department of transportation and mobility. um that we recover the cost uh to be able to deliver the service because we want to make sure that we're delivering the highest quality service to our residents and um the last I would say uh three years uh we have seen inflation uh and the cost of providing the services including the human resource investment that we have to make um going uh going up and and rising. So, we want to make sure that we have the appropriate human resource capacity to be able to deliver clean water, to be able to pick up trash and recycling on time, to make sure that we have the capacity in our transportation department, um to provide the services needed, including to be able to um uh recover the cost of um pavement uh in our city, right? We just went through an election on uh transit and transportation and we know that people value the quality of their pavement um so that we can commute

safely and um I agree that we need to make sure I agree that it is very comparable to what other cities are are are charging especially our environmental services fees are at the lower end of the scale in terms of uh providing um trash and recycling services. But most recently um we gave direction, mayor and council gave direction to make our um um L'Oreales uh a sustainability campus and that sustainability campus has added a lot of additional uh pilot programs and programs that we did not have there before. And so we want to be able to continue uh providing those environmental programs in including our tree center where we grow trees and where we recycle um uh tree cutting so that we can create mulch. We are creating a lot of new innovative and um and necessary programs for our climate action and adaptation program. I I love where we're going with our s uh L'Oreal sustainability campus. I I appreciate the clean city fee which will um elevate and continue investing in our uh team up to clean up efforts in our graffiti abatement in making sure that you know we continue uh investing in in teams that do um uh encampment cleanup and remediation. Those things take money and we need to make sure that we pay for them. I also want to comment on the planning and development services

fees, especially the fees um for um community corridors tool. Uh one of the reasons that I pitched the idea of creating a community corridors tool is because we want to see um investment in our urban core. We want to see density development and transitoriented development in our corridors. I don't want I think we're just going to have to make sure to play it by ear because I do not want these fees to get in the way of moving density development and transit oriented development quickly through our city. I also do not want to be the most expensive. Right? We if we are charging more then we need to make sure that we're getting better and better at delivering uh the projects and planning and all of the um service that we need to do to get developers including affordable housing developers through as quickly as we possibly can. The city of Tucson Planning and Development Services Department should be the quickest in our region. Our goal should be um developing in infill development as quickly as possible and that is something that I've hold dearly for a long time. That's why the community corridors tool is important to all of us. Um but we've we've got to be able to move as quickly as as possible in delivering those services. I know that we have an affordable housing uh program within planning and development services department. Let's make sure that the fees that we are charging for do not affect the affordable housing um uh program and and the steady movement forward with

our affordable housing plans as we move forward. And on the on the road closure, I just have one question. Um how flexible are we with the road closure when it comes to closing a lane? um for community use. I know that many in our community use uh sometimes our streets to protest and rally. We've seen that in, you know, escalated in the last year. And so I just don't want to get in the way of people's first amendment just because it will cost them money for for lane closures. Are we paying attention to that, Mr. Manager? Honorable mayor, that's a great question and in those cases uh quite often those are organic situations and we are very flexible at both TPD and and all of our supporting agencies and as long as people are peacefully exercising their first amendment rights, we're very supportive. We actually um work with them to safely take over a street and when that's the necessary thing to do and uh they're neither pulling permits nor paying fees. Um so those won't be barriers for that. In the case of a planned event, we can certainly um look at what kind of flexibility we have uh based on the community benefit of a planned event as well.

Right. As long as we keep that flexibility. I've been marching and rallying and protesting since I got here to do um more than 30 years. And so I know that there's groups that plan ahead months and months ahead. Um, and even then, uh, the cost to, um, do lane closures and and and pay for security and pay for, you know, all of the necessary equipment to to close the lanes. Sometimes it's it's expensive, uh, especially a, you know, a nonprofit group that's very grassroots and don't have the funds to do that. So, as long as we keep some of that flexibility uh to to allow for the first amendment to move forward, we do need a motion um to move forward with um uh the four annual revenue increases for Tucson Water. I personally prefer the staff recommendation which is an increase of 3.5 for the next five years versus the SEWAC recommendation which would recommend a 5.5 increase the first year and then a 3.5 the following year. So if any of my colleagues would be willing to make a motion.

Okay. So mot uh motion to approve option one which is a staff recommendation which uh meets um minimum financial metrics. There's a motion. I have a second. There's a motion and a second. Any further discussion on this motion? Uh council member do. Thank thank you mayor. I think both are are have pros and cons. I'm going to vote no just to show some support for SEWAC. Any further discussion on this item already? So, there's a motion on the floor and a second. Um, please indicate by saying I. If you approve, I. Any against?

No. Okay. Um, motion passes with a vote of 61. Anything else you need from us on this item, Mr. No, thank you, mayor. Just a little bit of highlight. We our next items are an executive session and um as you enter those the there there's some lengthy executive sessions ahead. So setting an expectation that we might be in there for uh upwards of an hour and a half to two hours just for for those watching along at home.

Thank you. Thank you so much for the presentation. Thank you for all the work and thank you to my colleagues. What I'm going to do is we're going to move on to the executive session pieces of our day today, but I'm going to give you guys a little bit of a fivem minute break and then we're going to come into directly into executive session. Is that okay, Miss Clerk? Very good. Your honor, do you need a motion? Yeah, we do need a motion. So, I move that we take a break and then go into executive session. I second. There's a motion in a few seconds. All those in favor, please indicate by saying I. I. Any against? Motion carries.

Oh no. because we actually have to read the we can't go directly into executive session unless we actually read the items. Oh, okay.

All righty. So, uh sorry about that everybody. Uh items four and six. Items four and six are executive sessions, Miss Clerk. Uh item four, executive session, discussion of the city of Tucson cyber security and critical infrastructure posture. And item six, executive session, prevailing wage litigation, Associated Minority Contractors of Arizona at all versus City of Phoenix at all, Arizona Court of Appeals, case number 1, CACV 24-0658. May I have a motion, please? I move that we adjourn to executive session. There might be a little bit break in between, but that's what we do. Second. There's a motion and a second. All those in favor, please indicate by saying I. I. Any against?

Motion carries. All right. Thank you all. Thank you, Miss Clerk.

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I need to come back from executive session. May I have a motion to return to study session? Mayor, there's a motion. May I have a second? Second. Uh, there's a motion and a second. All those in favor of returning to study session, please indicate by saying I. I. I. Any against? Motion carries. All righty. We have um I think we need a motion for item four and six. Mr. Attorney. Thank you, Madam Mayor. um an appropriate motion for this is f five item five five and seven I'm sorry thank you four and six item five

right uh for item five you're on an appropriate motion motion would be to proceed as discussed in executive session to continue to refine and implement the city's cyber security program and to update the mayor and council at least annually and as necessary as to actions taken recommended next steps and resources needed so moved second there's a motion and a second any further discuss Discussion on this motion hearing none. All those in favor of the motion, please signify by saying I. I. I. Any against? Motion carries. Item 67. We'll just pick a number. 67. 67. We're lucky to have

honorable mayor, members of council, an appropriate motion would be to move that the mayor and council authorize and direct the city attorney to proceed as discussed in an executive session to conclude the litigation related to prevailing wage and ordinance 1266. So moved. There is a motion a second. Um any discussion on this motion hearing? None. All those in favor please signify by saying I. I.

I. Any against? Motion carries and then we move on to item eight. All righty. Item eight. Time has been set aside for an update and discussion on the energy collaboration agreement between Tucson and Tucson Electric Power. Mr. Manager.

Thank you, honorable mayor and members of the council. Uh today's study session is followup as indicated on the um direction that you provided us some time ago to work toward developing in partnership with Tucson Electric Power a Energy collaboration agreement. This would be a voluntary agreement between the city and TEP that once signed becomes less voluntary. Uh but it would be uh an opportunity for us to work together on our clean energy goals and advancing the um topics of our Tucson resilient together climate um adaptation plan. And as such it is uh being brought to you today following significant public involvement and a most recent uh round of uh public town halls. um and it would be available to you for consideration and um would ultimately be brought back to you for approval at an upcoming uh mayor and council meeting. So today is is discussion on that and any feedback you have for staff. Uh presenting on the item today is our chief resilience officer, Fatima Maluna. And so I turn it over to her.

Thank you, city manager, honorable mayor, members of the council. Thank you for the opportunity to provide you with an update on the proposed energy collaboration agreement between the city of Tucson and Tucson Electric Power or TEP. And just as a way of background and also per your direction, um the city of Tucson and TP have been working on several uh energy and resilient efforts for several years. In 2003, both parties signed a letter of intent to negotiate agreements focused on clean energy for city operations and collaborating in enlightenment of the city's climate action plan to Sun Resilient together. So, building on that, last year a second letter of intent uh reaffirmed that commitment and also included direction to negotiate a franchise agreement and an energy collaboration agreement informed by community input. So, in response to your direction, last year, city staff uh hosted or conducted seven town halls to gather input uh community feedback on what they would like to see on the proposed energy collaboration agreement uh which is reflected on what you have in front of you today. And so, this agreement represents the first of its kind in the state of Arizona and there's only a handful nationwide. Um so what does the ECA or energy collaboration agreement do? So at a high level um it provides $2 million of TP shareholder funds uh with a 2% uh escalation clause every other day. Every other year.

Every other day. Every other day. We'll take the every other day. We'll take the every other day. That would be nice. So for clarity, every other year.

Every other year. um uh which totals about $56 million across 25 years. So these funds will support community prioritized projects aligned with Tucson Resilient together and these projects are included in five key areas and those are uh first reducing greenhouse gas emissions through spending um solar power, energy storage, electrification, energy efficiency and retrofit programs. The second is enhancing resilience infrastructure and emergency preparedness with resilient hubs, cooling centers, heat response coordination among other things. Uh the third one is supporting uh vulnerable communities through build assistance programs, outreach and access to programs. Fourth is expanding workforce and economic development with training and career pathways in energy related fields. And fifth is improving safe, reliable, and affordable energy systems through coordination and efficiency to help reduce long-term costs. So in addition to these areas, the agreement also allow for additional projects in section 10 if both the city and TP agree. So equally important um the ECA includes a commitment for annual joint updates from the city city staff and TP to mayor and council on progress on the programs and major initiatives greenhouse gas reductions uh customer assistant efforts and updates related to rates and affordability. In terms of term structure, the ECA is tied to the franchise agreement. So it takes effect if the franchise is approved by voters. um it runs for up to the 25 years of the franchise term and it can be modified um at any time by mutual agreement. Uh if

the ECA is canceled by either party, this serves also as a formal notice of cancellation of the franchise. So they're connected in that way. Um so now turning into community engagement. Um, as the manager indicated, uh, last week, uh, TP with support from the Gorly Group and in partnership with the city hosted three public meetings to review the ECA draft and also gather additional input. Um, I also want to share that in addition to these three meetings, there was also a comment box in the TP's website and also the city website. We received emails. Um and all of these input was essentially review, consolidated and grouped into four categories. And you have copies of uh a summary of the input that we received that includes those consolidated areas and also the raw uh or raw data uh community input that we receive. So you have those in front of you. So those four categories are comments around the ECA, comments on the franchise, other energy topics including public power, and then comments specific to TP. For the purpose of this meeting, I'll focus on the ones that are most relevant to today's item. So what did we hear? Um so overall uh the ACA is viewed as a very positive step towards the right direction. We heard that community members were very happy to see that most of the recommendations included during phase one and phase two were included in the actual draft of the agreement. um community members also share um their support um and having shareholder funds

uh support these the implementation of these projects and um additionally we receive some uh additional feedback and I would not go uh line by line on the feedback that we received but I do want to focus on four main buckets uh on the ECA. So the first bucket was on uh funding, governance, transparency, and oversight. Uh so in general, community members uh see the $2 million as um in insufficient. Some of them uh raised concerns about uh not keeping up with inflation. Some others recommended having a lump sum at the beginning. Uh there were questions about who controls the funding decision with an emphasis on maintaining city authority. Um there were uh some interest in having more clear governance uh oversight and um transparency and reporting. Um the second bucket is on specificity and program design and implementation. Um there were questions about um you know how programs would be implemented in practice eligibility and delivery. um also having clear goals, timelines and measurable outcomes. I do want to say that uh many of these um concerns will be addressed as the implementation strategy is developed. So kind of like the next step of this agreement. Um and the third bucket was some climate and energy goals. Uh there were community comments suggesting uh more clear defined climate commitments. uh there was interest in in aligning the uh city's climate goals and accelerating timelines. There were requests for clarity on um definitions of renewable energy and miss emissions

tracking. Um, I do want to share on this item that in Arizona, uh, investorowned utilities like T are regulated by the Arizona Corporation Commission, which has constitutional authority over utility rates, services, and uh, resources decisions. And so while the ECA Arizona Corporation Commission does not formally approve uh integrated resource plans, it exercises binding authority over implementation of those plans through decisions on infrastructure investments, co cost recovery and rates. Um and so therefore the city um does not regulate uh power generation directly nor are the franchise or ECA intended to do so. Um the fourth bucket in the ECA feedback was public power. Several community members raised concerns about the ECA's termination provisions uh and how they could potentially discourage consideration of public power options. Um, as the agreement is written now, the ECA will terminate if the city takes formal action condemning partial or full assets of TP. And by formal action, uh, we mean taking it to the vote voters for approval to begin the municipalization process. Um and then there were some concerns about the process itself um and how there was limited time to review the documents or the facility where the meetings were hosted. Um I do want to share that uh there were negotiations very close to the time of the meetings and we tried our best to provide the community with the drafts um w with the drafts ahead of time. Um but that's part

of the reason that there was limited time um in terms of the franchise feedback. So we um in general the feedback uh we receive focus on the term length. Um also who pays the franchise fee and border clarity. Um so the 25 year was um view as too long and suggesting suggestions included having like shorter terms or even sooner negotiation periods. Um there were also some recommendations that shareholders and not rate payers pay the franchise fee. There were some requests for um clear explanations to the voters on the relationship of the ECA and the franchise. And then um there was interest in linking the performance um the the franchise to performance expectations such as energy uh progress and and clean energy progress. Um so I do want to share that um while the ECA focuses on climate provisions, the franchise is mostly focused on rightway usage. Uh and so the climate provisions would be more on the ACA. Um so with that I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. Um again um it is my view that most of the community input um is reflected in the ECA uh especially those actions that are within the city's authority and jurisdiction.

Thank you uh Fatima. I really appreciate the presentation. I know that Roy, if you want to jump in here as the attorney, you're been negotiating as well uh with TP. It's been a tact team approach with um our chief resilience officer and you and so I don't know if you wanted to add anything to the conversation.

Thank you, mayor. I think that uh that Fatima covered it pretty clearly. I think that I would agree with her that this is a unique uh proposition for the city and TE. It's it's a unique agreement uh in the sense that it provides direct funding for our climate action plan and it's an it's an appropriate way for us to move forward in collaboration with T as well. Um and those uh conversations have been ongoing obviously for some years now and and I think we've come to something that's that's going to be beneficial for the community. I think the the my first question and and thank you both for the incredible work that you've been doing. I know that we mayor and council have requested that you all, you know, do this work together uh with TP and make sure that we included the voices of the community. As a matter of fact, it was the community that came up with the idea of um an energy collaboration agreement. And so um throughout the townhouse uh halls that you have put together and your team uh Fatima, we've been able to implement uh those suggestions directly from the community into the energy collaboration agreement. So first and most importantly, I want to recognize um the incredible work that has been done by you all by our city manager. I know Christina Swallow has played a role. I have played a role in some of the negotiations. Um, but let's not um dismiss the incredible work that you all have put in this and especially you, Fatima, and and your team that have been doing the leg work and the town halls and the conversations, the the group conversations, the one-on-one conversations that are uh reflected in

the energy collaboration agreement. So, thank you so much. Um it's I always think that recognizing people's work um is important uh to be able to start from facts, start from what has been done and then continue moving forward uh with the work. So um as I know it, the energy collaboration agreement is the first of its kind in Arizona and only a few cities around the country, maybe about five of them have an energy collaboration agreement with their uh private utility. Um uh this is important to know because we didn't start there. We started with a failed initiative uh with a franchise agreement that tried to do everything at the same time. Uh this one uh was separated energy collaboration agreement from the franchise agreement. But I just wanted to ask you Roy about the legality of connecting one with the other.

Sure. Thanks mayor. So the the the structure of the two agreements is is one that we sort of have been negotiating for quite some time. Um you're correct. It is a unique agreement as I've mentioned before. Um what we've tried to do is to instead of in as you mentioned combine everything into one franchise agreement. We thought it was very important to separate the what we what the T or what T and the city felt were the important aspects of what the community wanted, including the uh shareholder funding of of the climate action plan, including the commitments to do the things around resilient infrastructure around um greenhouse gas emissions around uh uh so uh implementing solar in the community as well uh and many other items. But the the reality is is that it was just getting sort of convoluted and a little confused when we were trying to put it into an already sort of established franchise agreement. So we decided to just sort of take it all out and create a just a standalone agreement that says these are what we're committing to. This is what it's going to look like. This is what the relationship is going to look like going forward. Uh and this is what the support that we're going to ask of TAP and T agreed to provide that support. Uh more importantly, uh the the energy franchise or the energy collaboration agreement is completely tied to the franchise in an important way. And that means that if for some reason that relationship is is uh inappropriate to to move forward with at any point because we're we're no longer interested in the energy collaboration agreement or TP is no longer uh interested in the energy collaboration agreement, that sort of resets us to back to where we are right now. So that what that says is that we're going to uh use this as a way to relate T and the city and then uh if we decide at some point in the future we want to change that relationship we sort of start all over. We we we uh terminate the energy collaboration agreement that will then terminate under the terms of the franchise terminate the franchise

agreement as well and then we'll sort of start over again and hopefully develop a different relationship at that time. If if we continue forward and the energy collaboration is functioning and and works well and works well for the community, we'll continue that for as long as the franchise will will be in place. I appreciate that because I think that there's a lot of misinformation and confusion out in the community that um you know it doesn't tie one with the other that there's a possibility that TU would just walk away from the ECA. Um but that's not possible legally. Both documents are legally binding with each other. Correct. Yes, that's correct. All

righty. Um I know that when we first started, the community first started the conversation um about what to have in the energy collaboration agreement. Um you had several town halls uh Fatima with your team around the city of Tucson. you had very particular ones that there was outreach to Spanish language um community residents. Uh did you notice any cons differences in their input um with the energy collaboration agreement?

Honorable mayor, members of the council, yes. Um so we started phase one uh engagement and then we received feedback from that phase. Um and then we address the feedback by having very uh specific monolingual Spanish speaking town halls with community members. And um it was very interesting to see the the difference in priorities uh in both uh English speaking and monolingual Spanish speaking town halls. Um the Spanish speaking town halls focus more on affordability. Uh so like the build assistance, education and workforce development. Uh while some of the uh English um only town halls focus on like the clean energy goals and um the amount on the shareholder funds. Um so that was very interesting uh to capture. I think that's really good to point out because there's uh certain needs that particular members of the community have, right? Um affordability, weatherization, things that will help bring down the bills uh was something that our Spanish language town halls brought. Um in terms of uh you know what I see what we have in front of us, it's you know some people try and always say it's either this or that. It's either gray or black or black or white. Um I think what we see here today again uh something that we've mentioned because it's worth mentioning that this energy collaboration agreement would be the first of its kind in the entire state. We the city of Tucson would be uh leading the state and many other um uh cities around the country. would we would become the sixth uh to um

do a collaboration agreement with a private uh energy company. There was lots of negotiations, lots of engagement uh before we got to this point. Uh this is far more than the uh first iteration suggested um uh in an energy collaboration agreement. throughout the course of the negotiations, I remember that um one of the important pieces for for community and for myself was to make sure that we had uh funds that were not paid by the residents but were paid for by shareholders uh into the system. Uh we started I think it was at half a million dollars. Um and for contribute yearly contributions it made it up to a million dollars that would have been competitive grants issued to the entire region. Um, and through the negotiations, we were able to get it to a $2 million yearly contribution with an escalator that is dedicated funding source that help us weatherize homes. um in pay for solar panels especially for low-income communities, battery storage systems, um that would invest in our Tucson Million Trees initiative in workforce development opportunities for youth and others in our community. Uh resilience hubs, cooling locations. I mean it it it it really um is open to whatever our uh commission on energy and sustainability which I view as the place where the uh citizen input would be where we would invest these funds. Um

ultimately of course mayor and pan and council being the um uh the decision makers in terms of how this investment will be done. Um talk a little bit about the comments that were not included in the energy collaboration agreement that are not within the scope of the city of Tucson. Honorable mayor, members of the council, um some of the feedback that was not directly included in the ECA, I think it falls into a couple of buckets. The first one, um there were many uh comments uh with very specific uh programming details like um home retrofits and weatherization programs for homes built, you know, before XR. And so instead we, you know, it includes the retrofit program which includes also weatherization. And so we brought it up to like a higher level that level of detail that the community was asking for. Uh it's the next step. It would be part of the implementation strategy and and it's um too much detail for these um scope of of agreement. Um the other bucket that um was not included well it was included in the recitals um but it's not legally legally binding. It has to do with requiring the utility to generate um you know their mix of energy. And so, um, again, that is and and as I understand it, because, um, it has to do with, um, part of what the Arizona Corporation Commission does through their regulation like rate making, um, and cause recovery and the

implementation of the integrated resource plan. That's something that is beyond the scope of this work. And maybe Roy, if there's anything that you want to add on that.

Sure. So, uh, and this came up a couple of times and and totally understand why it would come up, but the but the reality is is that obviously the city of Tucson doesn't regulate generation anyway. It doesn't regulation regulate generation within its within its boundaries nor outside of its boundaries. But more importantly, the concern I think that the our TP partners would have is that if we were to try and regulate their regulation through this through an agreement such as this, then uh any investments that they make pursuant to that agreement could be disallowed by the current ACC, which has expressed it its intent to do so uh on on numerous occasions because of their because of the current makeup of the ACC and their concerns over uh rateayer rateayer cost versus uh uh um renewable generation. So, we we didn't want to put TP in that that position. Obviously, it's it's the community is is well within its its right to expect that from TP and that's a TB conversation that that they can have with that with the community, but it's not part of this agreement because it doesn't really deal what our focus is on this agreement is really uh concrete real steps that we can take right now for the city. And I and I do want to address just a a little bit about um uh some of the conversation around implementation because there has been uh rightfully so again um the community has asked for sort of more specifics on implementation and the reason why that is not within the ECA is because as you alluded to earlier mayor and thanks to your leadership on this and and the city managers as well. Um uh originally the agreement had very specific implementation uh discussion and was very uh much guided by TE and TE had some very sort of specific ways to to do that implementation including grants and those sorts of things and and of course you may and and the city manager both pushed back and wanted to ensure that the city of Tucson is the

one deciding how we implement our our climate action plan and TAP uh uh uh understood that and and was willing to sort of let that let us make those decisions and make the decisions with the community involvement. So, we wouldn't want to we wouldn't want to include in this agreement that is sort of uh sort of newer to the community what the community desires and how we want to implement make those implementation decisions. We want to make sure the community is involved lock step through the whole process. Thank you, Ryan Fatima. I do want to open it up for my colleagues on the council. Uh should we go to the line or council member D?

Thank you mayor. Uh kudos to our whole team starting with you mayor Roy Fatima Tim others Michael Kadansano who worked on this. Um it took a long time and that has once again compressed the the public engagement and that's unfortunate and I think kind of want to apologize for people who are upset about that but at the same time now is the time. We have some time to do maybe some little tweaks, maybe not, but we want to hear everybody's. And I've just finished reading your handout, so I've looked at every comment that we've gotten now. And and um there are some interesting ideas and we have a little bit of time to to think about them. Um there's a lot of as you already mentioned, things that we cannot do even though people say, "Oh, you can do it. It's a voluntary agreement." Well, ACC has very specific authority over over um private utilities and Tucson has has a franchise agreement ability which we've expanded into something that I think is absolutely wonderful that will power our climate change and our support of of um people who can't pay their bills and other good stuff. So, um but there's still time for comment. That was my point. The portal that we have is still taking comments. We'll get them. please email me or my colleagues directly. And just because we're not including it in the ECA doesn't mean it's we don't agree with you. We should we should lobby the legislature to allow um community choice or aggregate power or other things that were suggested. There are other avenues for our voices to to find purchase. Unfortunately or appropriately not the ECA agreement and the franchise agreement. And and one thing I I I want to point out because it seems like, oh, the franchise fee should be out of shareholders. No, no franchise fees ever come out of shareholders. That's always a cost of doing business to do business as a utility. And you have to pay any fees. That's part of

cost of doing business. What's amazing is the $2 million a year is shareholder money. That's just incredible. And again, congratulations to the team that's been working so hard. Uh thank you, mayor. Thank you, Councilman Lee. Thank you, mayor. I also want to thank the team at the city as well as TE for working together in good faith to get us here today. Um, just a quick clarification, and I apologize if either of you already said this. These are two separate documents, right? We have the ECA, we have the franchise agreement, but can you help me understand the ECA would only be applicable if voters approve the franchise agreement? Is that correct?

That's correct, Council Member Lee. Um so the implementation of the ECA would begin uh the I believe the January 1st after the uh um uh the vote a successful vote of on the franchise. Of course the the franchise also would if it failed then we'd have to be sort of act at the back of the drawing board but they they sort of feed off each other so they don't they don't implement without the other.

Okay. I just wanted to confirm that part because I also was browsing through some of the feedback and just wanted to call that out specifically. If there were elements of the ECA that people didn't like, they ultimately will have the decision on this, right? We are going to put something to the voters, but they will have the ultimate decision on this. So, I just wanted to put that out out there. Any others? Council member Schubert and then Council Member Baras.

Thank you, Madame Mayor. Um really appreciate the work on all of this. um especially the work that the city undertook last year to inform the draft ECA. Um it was great to be able to see the comments that were received in both sessions and I'm excited to um dig in more into the comments that we received today. But I think this is a really really important part of the process. Um, I see my responsibility here in representing W 6 is to make sure that constituent concerns are being filtered through and that those prevalent themes are rising to the top so that they can try to inform the franchise agreement so that it can pass. Um, just trying to set it up for success so that we don't fail at the ballot box again. So, I I understand it's a delicate balance because we can't obviously incorporate every piece of feedback that we receive. Um, I just wanted to share some of the top level concerns that we've received at W 6. Um, luckily it's pretty pretty much in keeping with the themes I can see in the documents. Um, so definitely the number one thing we've been hearing is about the TE contribution. Um, the frustration over what they see as a limited contribution. Um, and uh, Mayor Romero and I had a bit of a chat about this yesterday and Mayor expressed that it would be helpful to um, have some suggestion about a specific amount. If it's not 2 million, what should that look like? Um, I heard an interesting idea about um about tying the contribution to um the the worth that TE offers to fortis like creating some kind of formula or the the worth that the Tucson market offers to TE and using a percentage calculation. So, um I have more information about that that we could drill into, but um personally I think that what would be equitable is some type of formula um that's a percentage of um revenue or of um the the value of TE. Um and then also the inflation rate thing. I saw that come up in the comments too. So the the 2% escalator um I've heard from people that

they're very concerned about that keeping pace with inflation. The second concern we heard um people have a lot of questions about how the ECA and franchise agreement could limit our community's ability to pursue public power. Um so to that end, how can we incorporate the feedback we heard um at last week's listening sessions and that many of our offices have been receiving in the past weeks into the ECA to make it stronger and more likely um along with the franchise agreement to pass if it was put to voters. So just trying to honor those concerns. I know we can't do everything that people want. again. Um, and then secondly, how can we secure a more meaningful contribution amount? Um, for example, have we considered other ways to calculate the TE contribution as I said, such as tying it to a percentage of TE's value to Foris or a percentage of the franchise fee. Um, for example, could we get create an arrangement in this ECA where city of Tucson receives capital investment for its climate action plan goals and for TE rate payers to get relief um from their monthly bills. And I I see the capital improvements part and I appreciated the discussion about not being able to get too specific. So, um I appreciate that. Um but weatherization is a big one that I think we need uh we need more investment in especially since the ACC repealed requirements for energy efficiency programs. Um so yeah, those are just a few of my comments for now. But um we just had an overall question about as we receive so many messages and emails and phone calls from constituents, what's the best way to transmit that information um to ensure that we have like an organized process and that people's concerns are filtering through

um council member Schuer. Uh the city of Tucson's uh comment form is still open and that is uh that would be my first recommendation so that we have it all in one place. So when people call we can be like thank you so much. Can you use the form please? Yes. The form would be great. Thank you so much.

Thank you council member. Um just just to address uh a couple of things. Um the escalator instead of inflation increase, which is part of the current draft ECA, uh was done because um inflation could hinder the escalator. So inflation could actually lower uh the percentage added um every other year to uh the investment um in the stakeholder investment into our climate action plan. So that was discussed. Um the other thing that was discussed is what I keep hearing this $2 million is not enough. Um I guess for me it's uh how do you connect um the investment coming from the stakeholders into our climate action plan in a way that we could you know that we could both parties could um sign out on the dotted line. This this has been a back and forth and as was said at the table. There has been a lot of negotiation. We started a very different number than we are right now. Um, I guess for me my question is, uh, what is it that we can do with $2 million a year and how does that, um, escalator function so that we can, um, put that $2 million investment and then rely on the on the 2%. I don't know if Roy if you want to talk about it.

Honorable mayor, members of the council. Um so that would be part of like the implementation strategy to define like the guidelines and parameters around what can be done and what is prioritized with those $2 million. Just to provide you with an example, uh you funded the solar empowerment program and you dedicated uh $900,000 um to that program and so far um 15 uh public housing units um were solar panels were were set in 15 public housing units and 29 uh residential homes in low-income homes. And so that's what the dollar amount uh contributed. Uh I do want to say that um it wasn't all grant funds um or it didn't cover 100% of the system um but it did cover over 50%. And so that's one example that we essentially will you know further investigate and see what we could do.

Mr. Mayor

Mayor if I could add to that. Having a known steady stream of income allows us two opportunities on top of what it could buy directly. One is we if there was a desire for a larger investment earlier on in the program um we could borrow against that that revenue stream once we know it's set and coming. If we let's say there was a $15 million investment we wanted to make in year four. We don't have to wait for seven and a half or eight years to get there. we could actually borrow against that revenue stream and actually pay uh get more work done earlier. So having a steady and fixed escalator helps us with that conversation and the other is it actually becomes a leveraging source for us to pursue additional grant funding through other funders whether it's the federal government, state government, philanthropy, you name it. When we have identified historically a steady funding source for something, we're almost always able to turn that and leverage it into two or three times the amount of money that we actually have in hand. We do that in every program we have across the city. So that's uh the 2 million with an escalator is important. It is going it would go from zero now to that number and then that number becomes a known leverage point for us to acquire additional dollars into climate work.

All righty. Council member Arazz and then vice mayor.

Oh, thank you mayor and thank you Fatima for all the work you've been doing. I was at that town hall last year and walked away just um learning so much and I I think um you know moving forward we can bring more people to the conversation have more diverse voices uh participate in you know the comments and just in the meetings in general. So I was glad to hear that you extended that invitation to more Spanish- speakaking you know neighbors. Um, I know we touched upon that, you know, while this is a city-wide agreement, we must ensure that those frontline neighborhoods are at the forefront. You know, because here at W 5, we have the hottest neighborhoods, our residents pay a higher um higher bills for their energy costs and and we're exposed to more heat. So with that said, I would love if we can um work to bring more trusted partners to the table. So when I look in the audience of these meetings, I don't see the same faces that attend every single meeting, virtual, in person. I would really hope that we can diversify um our community because these conversations are really uh dense. you know, they're they're sometimes talking about green energy and um sustainability could be very intimidating, but um I know we can make it relatable and accessible. And I would also love if we can bring up the conversation around the Arizona Corporation Commission because I know a lot of our residents um are not aware of how that model is ran and how the commissioners um have a lot more control than they may think. So, if we can bring that up and I I did have a follow-up question of what oversight structure will be in place to ensure that two uh million annual investments produces

measurable outcomes and will we as mayor and council have input on how the funds are prioritized. Thank you. Can I take a crack at that council member? Um and I and I think those are two two of those are very important questions. Um

well then you know the other one's great too. I mean, I want to make sure. But but more more importantly, um I think that's why uh the mayor and the manager and and the negotiators sort of pushed back on that initial um uh sort of structure of grants and that sort of thing because really what we're looking at right now is is an a wonderful opportunity for the city, the mayor and council, and the community to come together and decide how they want to how they want to both leverage that that $2 million, but also how they want to spend it and how they want to impact the climate action plan specifically. It really opens up a a wide variety of options uh for the for the mayor and council and the community. And I think um this is just the beginning. It's sort of a beginning of a conversation, right? I mean this is not the the this is what's h what's happening and that agreement and the reason why the agreement is is sort of vague on that implementation piece is for that very reason to ensure that no matter what happens if we enter into this agreement the community will have a say in every every decision we make through either through CCEES or with the mayor and council's input and and any other variety of ways. Uh I did want to comment also on the uh what you said about the um the the community uh involvement and what the community looks like, right? Um I was also very surprised because I was a part of those meetings as well. I was I was very surprised. Yeah. And I was very surprised that that a lot of the folks that I didn't hadn't seen before in the Spanish language uh um uh meetings as well uh just asked about education. They just really wanted to know how their what their power options were, where it comes from. They wanted to know more. Uh and I think there's a real opportunity there to create some education pieces in along with that climate action plan as well.

And vice mayor,

um I feel like all of y'all kind of took different um of the the points that I I wanted to contribute to this conversation. Um I think you know we are it doesn't sound like we're giving any direction today like we're just kind of getting updated. Um I know that to get to this point it took years of engagement. So again, Fatima, thank you for that. And I know you had um stakeholder groups, you know, that you were intentional about reaching out to making sure that our our monilingual Spanish speaking community is also represented. Um because like council member Barak has said, our communities care about affordability and reliability, you know, and that needs to continue to be our northstar as we have these uh energy conversations. So um again, you know, we have that comment period that's still open. I encourage people to continue to engage and um just going back to what the mayor said that it doesn't have to be uh either or you know we're trying to do both and you know we I think all of us here at the table have shared our commitment to um looking at other options you know when it comes to affordability and reliability um and that we can we can be on this course of doing both things um and thank you for getting us to this place and um looking forward to continuing this conversation.

Uh thank you, Vice Mayor. I I do agree that that um for far too many things I think uh the community um says either or, right? It's either this perfect or nothing. And um we've had a conversation at this table most recently that uh all of us unanimously approve the idea of uh the study of public power. And um you know it's it's important for us to be able to have deliberate well-informed uh factdriven conversation about what are the options that we have. I think right now with the ECA, uh, we have an incredible opportunity, not ever seen in Arizona, uh, and seen only in a handful of cities across the country, to be able to, uh, receive shareholder funds above the franchise fees that a private utility company pays. That's about $15 million uh, that the franchise fees are. So, it's on top of um and the opportunity to be able to have continued um uh participation by our community. Um because I I think that this is something that we've discussed with T. Um I know that the Tucson Greater Climate Coalition met last week. They really like to see their ideas on the ECA. Um, they did comment that $2 million was not enough, and I think that's the one comment that I hear across the board.

Um, they would rather see a 20-year contract and a chance at review uh at year five and years 10. And that's something, Roy, that you and I have talked about. Can you can you clarify for us that review process? And then I'll go to Council Member Cunningham.

Sure. So, so the the current the current proposed franchise would uh allow uh for TE and in the city to review at the 10 and 20 year mark at this point um that uh certain provisions of the franchise just to make sure they're working, make sure that uh things like uh the the reporting and and things like uh undergrounding and those sort of things to make sure that we're all on the same page. Ultimately though, I would I would just sort of push back a little bit just with the understanding that because we now have this unique structure with the ACA and the franchise, if at any point we decide, hey, this is not really working for us, I think that's an opportunity for obviously the conversation between TE to T and the city to ha to have uh but we can have that conversation at any point. If we believe that the ECA is just not functioning well and the and the franchise is not functioning well, we terminate one and the other one is a notice of termination, then we have to sort of start the whole process over. Okay.

Um not not preferable of course that we want to do that in any at any point, but the reality is is that the 20 10 and 20 year the 25 year term of the franchise really is sort of irrelevant at this point. um I understand people people's concerns uh but this the uniqueness of this structure really lends itself to flexibility in a way that I've I've not seen in in the industry so far

and I think that that the reviews um the five and 10 year review we can review every year we can review every year and see if um if it's all working out so uh the exit clause I wanted to make sure it was very very clear for both TP and the city of Tucson and um that it was completely connected one with the other. And so um you know I I I think that the 5 10 20 year review is superficial because we can actually do those reviews every year with the help of the Commission on Energy and Sustainability. Council Member Cunningham. And then I think we've run out of time today. Um was specifically to have this conversation to get all of your input. Um make sure that um the community uh community's voices are part of this conversation. And I don't you know I don't pretend to uh be the owner of community's input in this. Um, I appreciate you all uh giving me your perspective in this and uh just know that we have been working with uh many people in the community to make sure that their voices is reflected in this draft. So, Council Member Cunningham.

So, I have three pieces to this. Uh, number one, um, I'm I'm really I'm really happy to hear that T is going to give us all this money for, uh, clean energy and and sustainable energy. That's great. Um, are they going to use it against us when they go back to a rate case? I mean, has anybody asked him that question? because that's probably one of the biggest pieces we need to understand is that if I don't want to be taking $2 million for them and them going to the ACC on a rate case and going, "Well, we have to give them $2 million part as part of the ACA. I just don't want to I don't want to do that." So, I think that's really important if we're really going to talk about affordability. That's one of the questions that needs to be had. Are they going to be able to use this when they present for a rate case? And when we do talk about this franchise agreement, how many rate cases are they going to go? We have a lot of people who want sustainable energy. Everybody Everybody wants that, but at the end of the day, people don't want to have to pay $500 a month for their their electric bill. That's really more important. And so, I want to make sure we're talking about some of the re some of the other things that are kind of real. So, I want to know if there's safeguards on whether or not this is going to be part of a rate case. I think that's probably pretty important and it would help us discuss that with voters. Go ahead, Roy.

Thanks, Council Member. Um it's and it's very important to understand that that specifically is disallowed in the in the ECA. So the TP cannot go to has agreed to not seek relief for that $2 million in the in a rate case.

Okay. My second qu my second piece is um I I really want to talk about whether or not the um there's any discussion in this with undergrounding and does any of this go with any of the undergrounding discussion that we've had in the past regarding T. That's one of the big inputs from people is that they want to see more undergrounding, more underground utilities and is that any part in the ECA? If it isn't, that's fine. I'm just curious.

Thanks, council member. So, the the undergrounding conversation we've been having with TB is is long and storied. We understand that. But, uh there is some clarifying language within the new franchise. Uh just to clarify everybody's responsibility versus undergrounding. More importantly though, the ECA does not uh specifically include any undergrounding language. And the import and the reason why that's important is because um again going to to the vice mayor's comment earlier, uh we really want to focus on affordability and and we understand that there's some additional um uh cost related to undergrounding. And so we're we the main focus of the ECA is the climate action plan and we want to make sure that remained the focus. Finally, I want to be very clear and very I want to give I want some assurances that if some of the projects we've talked about like Donna Lian, like some of the quote unquote pseudo municipalization projects, uh we're going we're bringing a project to the council on April 17th called the Tucson Renewable Energy Enterprise. I want to I want those asurances that those are going to be protected in this agreement because those are those are sustainability. Those are part of what the spirit of this agreement is. and this agreement's open-ended enough and that the Tucson Renewable Energy Enterprise discussion is going to be open-ended enough that they they may end up being collaborations instead of adversarial, but I want to make sure that they are protected. And so that's kind of my last piece to this. And I hate to be the cynical one, but again, someone's going to pay and the last people it's going to be are are my rateayers. That's just not going to happen. So I I want to make sure that uh this is a this is sincere and this is a foot forward by TE to being part of the community. I think there is some merit to the idea that we we push hard a little for more or at least we leverage some more. At the end of 25 years based

on my math I think the payout's about 2.576 million. So we can build out a financial model on how much that's going to be over every other year for 12 1/2 years. And I think that can give us some understanding. But at the end of the day, I want to I mean uh the additional 2.56 million, it a lot of it's going to do with how we leverage it and what we use it for because if it it just goes to one specific piece of of the of the the system, then it probably won't make as big a dent as we we want it to. So th those those are my comments for today. But uh to to be a little bit on the uh the other side of it, it's incredible work how much compromise went into this and you guys did an an amazing job at least dancing through all the different landmines that surround a discussion like this. So I'm very understanding of that, but I'm also going to be a little cynical because of the rate cases over the last 10 years. Mhm.

All right.

Well, and and you know, that's something that's in front of the Arizona Corporation Commission. I' I've invited the community, especially the climate and sustainability community to get in front of the Arizona Corporation Commission. There are things that the city of Tucson um and its mayor and council cannot um you know cannot cannot take um or make decisions on when it comes to regulating utilities in our city. We have a franchise as council member doll uh says and that is our leverage. And so, um, again, I want to bring attention to how incred incredibly important an energy collaboration agreement and and being here at this point in time uh would be. Again, we would be the first city in Arizona to have an energy collaboration agreement with a private utility company. Uh, the only a few in handful in the United States. again the city of Tucson is leading on uh climate action work uh that we've started more than five years ago. So um it we are in a good place. There has been a lot of conversations, a lot of negotiations um and lots of input from the community. Uh the last three town halls uh were just the end, right? Uh there's still a comment period that people can comment and submit their comments on. Um but I look forward to continuing the discussion. We do have to make a decision on the ECA and the franchise uh and placing those on the ballot the first meeting in April. And so there is a timeline I think that we have in order

to finalize the language of the ECA and be able to uh post it uh as the final document for the community to see. Um Roy, you have just real quick, mayor, I just wanted to clarify for for folks at home, um the uh decision that you have to make is to enter into the ECA and then uh v vote on whether to place the franchise on the ballot. The ECA doesn't get voted on. It's mayor and council decision. Thanks. Oh, perfect. Thank you for the clarity. Anything else? Any other comments, questions? All righty. Thank you so much, Fatima. I really appreciate your hard work. Thank you all.

All righty. So, we're moving from item eight to item nine. Item nine, time has been set aside for an update on the fentinel opioid public health crisis and discussing related matters pending in front of the Puma County Board of Supervisors and other jurisdictions. Mr. Manager, I know that you're waiting for uh our team to come up.

Thank you, Mayor. Um joining us here at the table, uh we have the fabulous Lee Hopkins from our community safety, health, and wellness team and the equally fabulous Stephanie Zamora from our city manager team. Well, we'll uh we've combined these two items for this particular meeting and it's the you know kind of local jurisdictions in Pimac County and specifically with the emphasis on the uh opioid um settlement fund and and things related to that. And so I turn it over to um are you going first Lee? I am. Lee's up first.

Good afternoon honorable mayor and members of the council. Thank you so much for having me and us. Um, and I just want to compliment everyone's green today. You're looking fabulous. So, I'm going to do a quick overview of the opioid settlement funds as well as some of the work the city's been doing related to um the opioid crisis. I'll keep it short and sweet, but if you have follow-up questions, feel free uh for more details. So, our last ROSAC meeting, which was the first one of 2026, took place on February 18th. Um, we have not received any additional funds since October 31st of 2025. So, nothing has really come in as far as there's no updates on the totals. I do want to just highlight, apologies for a typo. Um, in the memo it does say a total of 131 million. That should just say 31 million. Um, big difference. Sorry. And so just to uh refresh everyone's memory, we've received 31 million to date to our region. That does include what has gone to Saurita and Oro Valley. And so the poolled jurisdictions, which is what city of Tucson is a part of, we have we have received uh approximately 30.3 million um in December and January. Uh 5.8 8 million were dispersed to grantees uh to start to do work in the areas of um priorities that we had identified and so the that left uh 2.2 million unallocated so far and so ROSAC has been actively working on how we should uh allocate that. So the only decision that has been made so far was to allocate 300,000 of that 2.2 to to um revamp and reissue that request for

proposals for mobile. There was a lot of um buyin from you all at the table in that and making sure that that goes back out and that we are really fostering engagement for providers to apply for that. So that is in process but that leaves a remaining 1.9 million. So just for folks to have a a preview of some of the discussions going on. No decisions have been made yet, but the option of funding another six months of the safer center is on the table. Also, we um the city of Tucson, myself representing the city of Tucson have brought up um an idea to continue to fund Desert Cove shelter, but convert it into um a a recovery center for individuals who are leaving incarceration. um that would be able to also provide a safety net for folks who maybe their insurance isn't active yet, so they don't have other options to go to treatment. Um and it would be population specific to really meet the the needs of folks who have had that experience who are returning citizens. So again, no decision has been made. I look forward to your input. Um and the next meeting is in April. Um just to give a brief overview and if you have any follow-up questions I can respond after. Um the funded agencies are um community or pumac county justice services um CPIH inner mountain healthcare behavioral health the haven Tucson Indian center um University of Arizona school of agriculture garden kitchen boys to men Tucson LPKNC pep and then CBI Kodak and University of Arizona is as for safer. So quickly uh uh moving on to the safer center which is one of the big areas of investment. Um we have seen a significant increase in folks who are going to the safer

center and are staying at the safer center. Um the there's a significant number of those referrals coming from the city of Tucson police department as well as community safety health and wellness. um as well as CBI trans transitioning folks from their 23-hour stabilization unit into the safer center to provide more trauma-informed ongoing support and making sure that they can go to the next step. Um the health department has been providing intensive oversight. um they're getting weekly reports that they share with us and also the University of Arizona's um con uh evaluators that are contracted for this project have also been meeting with us and other stakeholders. So we are anticipating a more conclusive report coming out in April where we'll be able to see more details of that data and um any trends that we're seeing and what's working and what needs to continue to um be adapted. Um then moving on to some of the work that TPD and community safety health and wellness are doing. Um TPD has continued to focus a lot on deflections trying to f get folks into services out of away from jail. And so they've accomplished deflecting 111 people in services between October and February. Um and core TBD core is also using the safer center a lot for deflection purposes. Um they also have done joint trainings recently for outside partners as well as city staff. Um one recent one on February 27th was u 100 people attended and it was part of all it was for all the agencies involved in the safe city initiative outreach efforts. And so the um curriculum for that dayong training was about city court and community court discussions with the city prosecutors and public defenders, a wellness

discussion for the staff themselves, a Narcan training, a deep dive on opioids and and neurological effects, as well as a discussion just about the work that's being done um between the city teams. Um then moving on to the safe city deployments, community safety, health and wellness, TPD core and our partners uh at outreach organizations had one smaller operation February 17th at the South Swan and East Valencia area and then on February 25th at the Alveron corridor between Grant and Speedway. Um and so just to refresh everyone, staff have committed to doing one small operation and one large operation each month in areas identified as high need. And so those smaller operations are operation clear path and that's TPD core, community safety staff and a few outreach agencies. Then the larger ones that are on the last Wednesday of each month are this called safe city deployments and that's TPD core but also additional TPD field staff, community safety uh staff, county transition center and justice services as well as some of our additional outreach partners. And last but not least, um we uh TPD uh in partnership with community safety and the county's health department applied for um a grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance called comprehensive opioid stimulant and substance use program. And we were granted a three-year grant. It began about a year ago. So, we've gotten through the first phase, which was to integrate the overdose data that is collected by the hospital, the fire department, and the um the police department that was not integrated before. So, there was potential for missing data, duplications. So, the first phase of this project was to create a regionwide

solid data system so that we have very reliable data about overdoses to then provide uh follow-up on. Now we are moving into the second phase of that project. Hopefully within the next month we will be hiring three additional people that are funded from that grant. One will be a program manager and two will be navigators. I want to just correct in the memo it said one navigator but it's actually two. Um at the time that I wrote this it was only one uh published but we're we're excited there's going to be two. So basically they will work together to provide followup and really go and visit people after an overdose within 48 hours. And part of the first phase in addition to integrating the data and making sure that we have reliable knowledge about who to visit and when they also developed like a risk assessment so that we know can it be just the navigators who go out or does it also need to be a co-response with TPD. So, that is going to be staffed very soon and we're really excited about getting that work going.

Thank you. That was all. Thank you so much, Lee. Stephanie, did you want to jump in?

I do. Good afternoon, mayor, members of the council. Um, I prepared a report for you all uh outlining some updates um at the level of Pimac County, Miranda and Saworita, as well as Rio and the UOVA. Um, but one of the most exciting updates is related to the adoption of Pima County's 10-year housing uh regional housing strategy. And we want to acknowledge the significant investment from Puma County uh to the Wildcat. The Wildcat is projected to serve approximately 1,620 households for over 9 years. And as such, the county has committed an estimated $1.1 million in annual operating funding for the Wildcat beginning in fiscal year 28 as city uh funding sunset. So, it's very exciting and uh we are very grateful uh for 9 years. Thank you, city manager. So, um with that, I'll leave it on a high note and thank you.

Thank you, Tiffany. That is wonderful news and I want to thank my colleagues on the board of supervisors uh for their um you know, willingness to support the innovative programs that we have in the city of Tucson. I think uh uh Councilman Lee, your uh rich cousin paying the bill comment at the joint meeting uh really was helpful, but but it really their commitment on the board of supervisors to invest in housing and now including low barrier shelter is great great news. So, thank you to our colleagues on the board of supervisors in Pima County for uh for this incredible investment. I I just wanted to thank you all uh for such an amazing update. our our housing first, our community safety, health and wellness teams, our police officers, um our multidisciplinary outreach team, Justin Hamilton, branding champion, you uh Lee, uh and every single volunteer and nonprofit organization that partners with us um every day to connect people to treatment uh versus incarceration is very very important. important. We have put forward researchbacked strategies, strategies that actually work and we are showing success and um really connecting at an incredible pace, especially with our safe city initiative. The the I get I get so happy when I see 111 people have been deflected into services. uh that not only saves us money uh from incarceration, but it actually puts people into the services that they need

the most. And I know that our core team is doing yman's work um and love the safer center. I've been told this by a police officer. We love the safer center because it takes them five minutes to deflect a person into treatment. uh they have their very specific entry at the safer center and so it it is a nice warm handoff that our police officer uh could connect a person to possibly life-changing work. So thank you so much. Appreciate the update. Appreciate all of the efforts from every single department that plays a role in this. Um, and I'm looking forward to our continued uh, work as we move forward. The one question I did have, and I'll just, you know, open it up for my colleagues after is something that we talked about the with the board of supervisors. It's the gaps in service. And I know that Pima County Public Health Department put a gaps analysis together. I just wonder how we connect that gaps analysis and then continue doing that work from our joint meetings uh to find the gaps um so that we could start creating those I would say bridges to the or programs for those gaps. So Mr. manager, I don't know if you wanted to add to the to the work outside of our joint meetings with the Puma County Board of Supervisors and how we can um fill the gaps that exist still.

Thank you, honorable mayor, members of the council. So, assistant city manager Liz Morales continues to lead the safe city task force meetings. Um, but she also oversees community safety, health, and wellness, the office of violence prevention and intervention and the related services that all kind of stitch around those efforts. And we uh do owe some followup to the joint meeting that uh county administrator Leeser and I need to just finalize some reporting on that. Uh, but that that work does continue. We are actively um not just doing the things that we've talked about previously, but continuing to innovate in the new space and identify those gaps and how we can and work to fulfill them. Um while um we we took a moment to celebrate the Wildcat in and the funding of that, that's an example of a a looming gap that was there. That was something that was stood up by the city. It's been funded out of essentially onetime dollars to this point. And it was right at the moment where we were going to have a tough choice to make. and the the county stepping forward through an application that the city made has allowed us to to be able to continue that process so that we prevented a gap and at the same time we need to be identifying and filling the gaps as we go forward. Uh, assistant city manager Morales, did you the I think I would defer to you on the the low barrier shelter gap that we've talked about and and and some of the recent developments there as well.

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Manager, mayor and council members. Um those gaps are certainly part of how we're guiding um our safe city action plan and we will um what I would like to do and as we do our updates is connect the work we're doing to those gaps that have been identified and so we will make sure that we um present those gaps and as we're addressing um safe city updates and all our future updates on both uh unsheltered and opioid

and mayor Mayor, if I may just add at the next meeting on April 7th, um similar to we've been doing these monthly alternating opioid uh updates andor unsheltered homelessness updates alternating in the second meeting of the month when we lean into the April 7th meeting on the first meetings of the month is when you'll be getting routine safe city updates. We actually started that with the joint meeting. Um but we actually have three topics ti uh teed up for next next meeting. And Liz, would you refresh us on what those three topics are?

Yes. The first will be the public drug use enforcement and pathways to treatment. The second will be um the housing and emergency uh declaration and how we're um looking at site guidelines for safe parking and um safe outdoor space. And the third is transit safety and security action plan update. Thank you.

That's great because now we have funded transit safety and security action plan. Uh so I think we can start moving on that. Um already any questions, comments from our colleagues on the council? Uh council member I was going to say council member Ulik. Oh my god,

there are there's worse people to be uh mist huge compliment. I'll keep it really brief. Um thank you so much for all the work. I'm such a fan of Cashew um and of just hearing these updates about the efforts. Um we hear from constituents every single day who are asking what is the city doing about these problems? And so it's so helpful to get just timely information because I'm so anxious to share that. um with the people that we are working for so that they know that um every effort is being made that innovation is happening and that thoughtful people um are engaged in the work. Um so I just just want to appreciate you and give you flowers. Um and then just really quick I noticed in the memo that it said that there was a deployment in the Alveron corridor between Speedway and Grant and we'd love to get that information. We get calls about um Speedway and Albernon all the time. So, it's also helpful to share out numbers from these deployments.

Yeah, for sure. I will follow up with my colleagues and Justin Hamilton and get that information to your office. Would all offices like that or W three and W six? Okay. Okay. Great. before you say it again.

Um I I also wanted to remind my colleagues to now that we're talking about safe city update item um I would want to remind you that uh we presented to you last the last time that we met with the board of supervisors as well as with them the draft safe city action plan. Please take a look at it. Please, your voices are important in that in that action plan. I know the vice mayor wants to add uh pedestrian bicycle safety and security in that action plan and so um please find a space for it in the um city the safe city action plan draft that we shared with you all. Please include um your thoughts and make sure that you work with assistant city manager Liz Morales to give her your input. Um because I mean it is a living document. We will be including and changing and moving and um you know we are a learning organization. We um run with the ideas that are working and are giving us uh results. we pivot from those that uh are not, you know, showing data that that they're working. So, please I want to remind you to include your voice in the safe city action plan draft. Other than that, I want to thank you all so much. Thank you again for the presentations. Lee, Stephanie, thank you for the great news. We're very happy to hear and um yeah, looking forward to continued work together. really appreciate you all.

Thank you. All righty. So, we move on to item 10. Item 10 has been set aside for mayor and council to receive an update on state and national legislation and regional committees, executive orders, and direction to any associated litigation. Mr. Manager, thank you, Mayor. Um, so we're trading out Lee Hopkins for Laura Dent, which is an absolutely equal trade. There is no upgrade, downgrade. It's like they're both precisely equally fabulous. And and without further ado, uh I hand it to my colleague Laura then.

Thank you, mayor, members of the council. Mr. Manager, I will share a federal update to get us started. Uh staying on the theme of housing. The 21st Century Road to Housing Act was recently passed by a strong bipartisan majority in the Senate that funds a lot of the amazing work uh in our local jurisdiction. Um, so that bill now moves to the House for further consideration. Um, additionally, the Department of Justice has um appealed a federal court ruling that blocks HUD's proposed changes to how we navigate um funding for the unhoused. You might remember that HUD last year did a really abrupt shift away from housing first um which many local jurisdictions and nonprofits objected to given um the really abrupt change away from housing first and towards treatment programming. Um so city of Tucson has been part of those challenges. The administration is now asking a federal appeals court to lift the injunction um that has been in place. So, we'll keep you posted on litigation surrounding this and how it impacts the city. Um, at the state level and in relation to some of the conversations that you all had at the table today, there are two bills, a a bill and a referral um companion HB430 and HCR 2052, which is one of our highest priorities at the legislature. This is the um set of bills that would freeze uh local revenues, rates, and fees for 5 years. Um this bill is awaiting third read which is final consideration in the house before it moves to the senate but it was recently amended. So I wanted to share an update around uh that the moratorum at this point in time um based on where the bill is at would not apply to principal interest and long-term debt service obligations, special improvement districts or the support of a school district. Um, and the amended bill will also exempt a municipality that has not raised utility rates by 12% or more over the past four years, but it only allows increases that are linked to CPI, which

is commonly known as inflation. Um, and new rates can be deployed to support the acquisition and delivery of new or additional water resources. So, some additional wiggle room in the utility and rates uh realm. I'm working um and going to be engaging with the city's attorney's office to confirm how this will impact the city, but it still um ties the hands of local lawmakers um pretty severely. So, we'll continue to oppose that and welcome your support and engaging with lawmakers around why those are bad um for local communities. And to end on an affirmative note, you'll remember um SP 1745 is the uh revenue bill that would have capped um TPT rates for uh Phoenix and Tucson specifically. that bill is no longer moving forward in the Senate. So, um you know, never say never at the state legislature, but that that has um been put on pause. So, um good news on that front. And that concludes my report.

Thank you so much, Miss Dent. Really appreciate your incredible work uh that you're doing up in the state ledge with our delegation and others that want to work with the city of Tucson. I just wanted to open it up if there's any questions. Uh, Council Member D. Thank you, Mayor. Uh, Laura, the preeemption on the utility, uh, increases, if it's passed, when would it affect fiscal year uh, 2027?

I So, there's two bills. There's an uh, 4030, which is a traditional bill, and then um, HCR 2052, which would go to the ballot. So, those have different timelines, and I'm I'll need to confirm with you. I'm assuming that it wouldn't because there's a a time period around implementation after the fact and you all have to make some decisions about the budget in the immediate future, but I'd like to confirm that and get back to you on it. Any others? All righty. Well, thank you so much. I know you're going to keep us informed. Thank you. I know you're going to keep us informed, especially those bills that could go directly to the um voters uh and completely skip the governor. And then any um bills that we need to beg and plead the governor to veto, I know are lined up. Um and and I'm willing to do the work. Uh thank you so much, Miss Den. I really appreciate your update. Uh if there's nothing else, well done. As uh Council Member Cunningham just said,

we move on to item 11. Does anyone have any items to remove from the consent agenda for today's regular meeting? Seeing none, we move on to item 12. Does anyone have any items for future agendas? Hearing none, we are adjourned. Study session is adjourned. The next regularly scheduled meeting is on Tuesday, April 7th, and we are scheduled to start our regular session at 5:30. See you in a couple of hours hopefully. I'm going to take a I think I'm going to take a walk and go pick up some coffee. Thank you all. Hey, hey, hey.

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Item 2 C. Uh, I would like to welcome the PaloE High School boys basketball team who are celebrating their win at the as the 2026 3A state championship team. Congratulations. And I would like to invite my colleague, Council Member Paul Cunningham, uh, that brought this item to our attention and that coordinated all of all of you being here in the mayor and council chambers. Uh, Mr. Cunningham, I was thinking of inviting all of us down there to celebrate with uh with the team.

Well, we have a proclamation and we have some uh uh certificates for the young men who represented us. Um, this was a pretty interesting uh team in that uh congratulations to coach Smith and Coach Mark who built this program. This was actually the second year in a row they made the state final, but they came through victorious this year. Okay, dramatic pause. Uh, but uh in an interesting situation, the team they beat, Kulage uh was met with some adversity uh in one of their playoff games. though we served as the perfect hero for them. So Palibi uh not only brings pride to the city of Tucson and to the east side but to the whole state of Arizona with their championship. So congratulations boys.

Congratulations. So I'd like to invite my colleagues as well whoever wants to join us. All righty. So, if you'd like to all join us up here, you could be right here. Look at this. Oh, call them up one at a time. Okay, perfect.

Coach Smith. All righty. So, we're going to do the pro proclamation first and then we'll call uh the students individually and we have some extra proclamations for you. Congratulations. Thank you so much.

So proud. So proud. Thank you so much. Alrighty. So, uh, on behalf of the city of Tucson and the office of the mayor, um, we would like to honor the 2026 Palo Verde High School boys basketball team. Whereas Palo Verde High School has a proud tradition of serving the east side of Tucson through excellence in academics, athletics, and the arts. And whereas the Palo Verde High School boys basketball program has achieved remarkable success over the past four years, demonstrating perseverance, teamwork, and competitive excellence, including earning the title of state runnerup in 2025. And whereas on Thursday, March 5th, 2026, the Palo Verde High School boys basketball team brought great distinction to their school and community by capturing the AIA 3A boys basketball state championship. And whereas the accomplishments of the 2026 Palo Verde High School boys basketball team reflect extraordinary hard work, dedication, unity, sportsmanship, and their championship victory is the source of joy, honor, and pride to the entire Tucson community. Now therefore, I, Raa Romero, mayor of the city of Tucson, recognize and honor the 2026 Palo Verde High School boys basketball team for their outstanding achievement and commend the players, coaches, and supporters and parents for representing our community with excellence and pride. In witness whereof, I have here unto set my hand and caused the seal of the city of Tucson, Arizona to be affixed this 17th day of March, 2026.

Um, on behalf of Mayor Raa Romero, Council Member Paul Cunningham, the Tucson City Council, and the residents of the city of Tucson, we proudly recognize and honor the accomplishments of the 2026 Palo Verde High School boys basketball team. Your victory in the 3A state championship reflects extraordinary hard work, dedication, unity, and sportsmanship. Your success is a source of joy, honor, and pride for the entire Tucson community. Given under my hand and the seal of the city of Tucson, Arizona this 17th day of March 2026, the award of appreciation and recognition to the 2026 Palo Verde High School boys basketball team 3A state championship. Congratulations.

Do you want to say something? All right, you guys ready to meet your champions? Uh let's first of all present the copper letter to coach Smith. Um this is for Coach Smith. We made one for you and we made one for the school to hang at Palaverie. And this is what the mayor just said basically. So congratulations for that. Here's two copies of the proclamation for you and uh the principal to also hang. All right. Uh, also coach for you, you're going to stay right here.

This is your certificate of part uh, appreciation from the city of Tucson. All right. But guess what?

I think I think we shouldn't just leave it. It's not all about one guy. What about Coach Mark Abocola? Where's he at? And our freshman coach. This is a This is a very special young lady, uh, Joe Ortiz. And then we also have uh this is a this is a an excellent young man. I just had the chance to meet him, Fernandanda Ayella. And ne and next to him should be Ethan Graves. And next to him is Gio Riola.

And you can start lining up on this other side as well. Next we have Jared Benas. Congratulations. Next we have Timote Nasabina. Nas Nasa Bimana. Congratulations.

Uh next we have uh the leading scoreer Rash Rashad Ortiz. Next we have Sir Lance Brown. Next we have Sto. Vatour.

Congratulations. Next we have Loki Norris Vander.

Congratulations. Next we have Christian White. Congratulations. Next is Cameron Pippen. This is Noah's. I've got yours somewhere.

Uh, next we have Camalu Ortiz. A couple of notes about Cameron Camalu. Uh, Cameron was their senior point guard. I think it was their only senior starter. So, he's a special young man. Give him a round of applause. And then uh one more I've got Jordan Noble. And then uh the other one with Camalu uh Rashad's brother uh what coach told me earlier today was they weren't going to win unless he played well and he played very well. So give him a round of applause as well. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, the Palib High School state championship basketball team.

Let's take some pictures. Come on in, everybody. Ready? If you can all squish in. We're all going to take a picture. You're very, very tall, so we might not show up. Oh, there you go. There you go. Come on in. I just want to touch it.

Congratulations. One, two, three.

Good job. So Jordan, we don't have Jordans. Congratulations team and don't we could keep it but don't forget your trophy. All righty. Item 2D appointments to boards committees and commissions. City manager communication number 70 dated March 17th is received into and made part of the record. May I have a motion to approve the appointments in the report, please?

So moved, your honor. Second. There is a motion to approve the appointment of Logan Green to the public art and community design committee. Amy Martin to the landscape advisory committee. Mao Tjo to the Bario Historico Historic Zone Advisory Board. Christopher Dolman at the West University Historic Zone Advisory Board and Melinda Gomez to the Puma County Tucson Women's Commission. Thank you so much for your willingness to serve your city. We appreciate your service. Any discussion on these appointments? Council member Dah.

Thank you, Madame Mayor. I just want to thank uh Logan Green for being the W three appointment to the public art and community design committee. He's a musician and youth music educator and he was a the founder of Groundworks Tucson, which is a revolutionary nonprofit promoting a youth-driven music and arts community. Happens to be located in W 3. Thank you, council member. Any others? Hearing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying I. I. I. Any against? Motion carries. Are there any personal appointments to be made at this time? Hearing none, we move on to item three. Mayor and council report summary of current events.

City manager communication number 65 dated March 17th is received into part of the record. This time has been scheduled to allow members of the mayor and council to report on current events. These are to be current events of activities within the community, not position statements on policy issues. Does any council member have anything to report at this time? All righty. We see a lot of yeses, so we'll start this on this end first. Council member Schubert.

Thank you, honorable Mayor, members of the council. I'm going to start off my current event report with a traffic violence update um as part of my commitment to um supporting safer streets. Um I just want to call attention to serious uh car crashes that have happened since the last council meeting. So, I'm doing this at every current event report in the hopes that someday I don't have any to report. Um, okay. So, since the last Marin Council meeting on uh March 5th and March 14th, um there were two there were two separate shootings related to road rage. Um so, these were within a week of each other that really stood out to me. The first one was after a two vehicle crash in which one driver was fatally shot after confronting the other driver. And both of these drivers were in their early 30s. The incident that happened on March 14th happened after one driver, a 29year-old, became upset following a lane change dispute and he shot into the other car from his car. It's really fortunate that there were no other injuries or fatalities related to these shootings because it could have been much worse. Um, and it just really underscores the fact we need to focus on safer roads through the five E. enforcement, education, encouragement, engineering, and evaluation, and also on advocating for common sense gun laws. On March 9th, around 4:30 a.m., there was a two vehicle crash in which one driver was pronounced dead at the scene and the other was transported to a hospital with minor injuries. March 10th, there was a crash with a serious injury after a driver lost control of his vehicle and was ejected when it rolled over. Um, at least one person suffered serious injuries in a rollover crash on March 15th as well. Um, and a 24 year old woman was killed on March 12th when she was thrown from the vehicle she was riding after the driver ran a red light and crashed. Um, so again, you know, this is something that I I firmly believe is a top priority of people across Tucson,

regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, and um that there are things that we can do as a mayor and council to reduce the risk of more of these incidents happening. Um, moving on to past current events, on March 7th, I had the opportunity to attend a small groundbreaking ceremony for Freedom Park's new community garden as part of the 29th Street Thrive Zone project. It was a beautiful event. Um they are going to build a new community garden and it's part of creating more community connectedness in the 29th Street Thrive Zone. And on March 8th, um I had the pleasure of co-leading a community bike ride with Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz to commemorate International Women's Day. We had um a leisurely 10mi ride from Ward 5 to Ward 1 to Ward 6 uh where we had a break and then we rode back to Ward 1. Um, it was pretty slow. We had burritos. Uh, we had water at the W 6 office and it was great to welcome everybody to the space. Um, if you haven't made it out to the W 6 office, we're open for walk-ins Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. And then, um, some upcoming some current current events. Um, as you know, probably know already, um, Attorney General Maize has been gathering testimony for the TE rate case. Um, so we've been including this information in our W 6 newsletter. There is a March 19th session. There's also another opportunity to offer your testimony in person or by phone on March 23rd. We're happy to share that flyer with anybody who needs it. But if you hadn't had a chance to share the impact of um rate increases, you should. Um, we need as many people to speak up as possible. Um, I also wanted to update people who are interested in the Tucson BY Fusion facility. Um, we shared in our last news news newsletter that that facility's opening is delayed until at least July of 2026 due to unexpected circumstances this winter, including storms,

electrical infrastructure, and securing permits needed to begin construction. While this news is not ideal, we have been in contact with Brian Ellison of By Fusion, and he's based in Tucson. He's been super helpful. So if you have any questions about the facility um or about the recycling program um we in the W six office can connect you. And then finally I want to congratulate Logan Phillips as the 2026 to 2029 Tucson uh poet laurette. Um so this three-year honorary post began on March 1st and it recognizes Logan Phillips blend of literary achievement and community engagement. Um, this is in partnership with the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. So, again, congratulations, Logan. And that concludes my current event report.

And don't forget the city of Tucson because we Oh, I forgot. So, sorry. Uh, council member,

I said we named him. That's right. I would uh like to take some time to thank everyone who participated and made their voices heard in the propositions 418 and 419 election. The RTA next plan and corresponding sales tax have been approved and will take effect July 1st, 2026. Last Thursday, our office along with you, the mayor and our vice mayor, celebrated the $1.2 2 million green storm water infrastructure project along South 12th Avenue. We hosted a community cleanup and a safe city deployment connecting our unhoused neighbors with resources. Huge thanks to Storm to Shade, the Office of Economic Initiative, Small Business Center, Housing First, Team Up to Cleanup, the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association, and everyone else who helped make this holistic investment a reality for long-term community benefit. After the cleanup, our office participated in Borton Elementary School's career day. It was a great opportunity for me to introduce students and staff to who their local represent representation is, explain what a council member does and how they can get involved in local government. Over the weekend, I attended the Rodeo Parade Committee appreciation dinner and dance. I want to thank Stan Martin, the Tucson Rodeo Parade Committee chairman, and Herb Wagner, secretary of the committee, for all their hard work and dedication. We cannot wait for next year's parade. If you would like to learn more about the history of the parade, please reach out to the Tucson Wagon and History Museum located at 4823 South 6th Avenue. On Sunday, our Ward 5 office hosted a community dinner to break the fast and celebrate Ramadan. I want to give a special thank you to our W 5 team who organized this um gathering and to all

the families who attended this beautiful uh dinner. It was wonderful to host so many of our W five neighbors. Uh we were able to connect and celebrate the spirit of togetherness. I want to congratulate Sunnyside High School um graduate Audrey Himenez who became the first ever NCAA all-American and national champion from the Leah University in 2026 NAA women's wrestling national championships the first official NCAA's women's wrestling championship. What a historic achievement and a fantastic way to celebrate women's history month. I would also like to invite our Tucson community to celebrate the world premiere of Anita by Borderlands Theater, a powerful musical of hope playing at the Leo Rich Theater starting April 2nd until the 19th. Finally, I want to offer my condolences for Dr. Selo Viegas who passed away on March 9th. Dr. served for more than 25 years as the first and only executive director of the Tona Atam Nation's water resources department. He was a champion for educating our youth on natural resources, addressing climate change, and encouraging stewardship of the land. His legacy will not be forgotten. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member. Councilman Lee, no announcements. Mayor Council member Doll.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Hey, it's going to get hot out there, so please be careful on any events this weekend. I have one announcement. Um, it seems early, not this Saturday, but this Saturday next, uh, March 28th, uh, Parks and Rec are doing an extravaganza at, uh, Donna Lian's near Donna Lian's Recreation Center at Doris J. Thompson Park. That's at 2000 North 4th Avenue. It goes, it's on Saturday from 10:00 to 1:00. It's free entry. Families can enjoy music, games, prizes, egg hunts. Bring your own basket or bag to to do the collection. And it's time to entry for the kids. So 2 and under at 11:00 a.m., 3 and 4 is 11:30. 5 to 7 is at noon, 8 to 12, at 12:30. Bring your own baskets. The Easter Bunny will be there and we taking photos. I will have my photo taken with the Easter Bunny from 10:00 to 11:00 and 11:30 and 12:30. My friend wanted to remind you to come so that you can collect eggs. This is a This is today's St. Patrick's Day. This must be a St. Patrick's Day egg. And And this little chick wanted to remind you it's not really bunnies that produce the eggs.

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Dah. Council Member Cunningham.

I've got a few of them. Um, one, uh, the free Lego build events are going on at the zoo. Uh, and that's going to be March 21st from 5 to 8:30 at the zoo. There's another one April 25th. And this is an opportunity for kids to build Legos. I think it's really cool. Two, the spring concert series at Palverie Park Ramada continues this month. This Sunday, you can enjoy some soul music from Mama's Kitchen Sink. And March 29th will be local folk artist uh, Ben Tully. Both concerts will be at 4:30 p.m. at Palverie Park. While we have the Palib High School basketball team here and talking about Palib Park, we should probably mention that we will be dedicating the uh Judith Blair Basketball Center at Palverie Park sometime in midmay. More details to come. I want to extend my condolences to Anna, the widow of John Galass, uh former FC Tucson UVA women's uh soccer coach. He passed away from cancer after being diagnosed. He uh actually went to uh raise money for cancer and uh he was an inspiration to a lot of young athletes in Tucson. Um and uh he worked at uh with the University of Arizona Wildcats, FC Tucson, and the RSL Academy. And I just want to extend my condolences. That's a big loss to our community. Okay, so this is the worst announcement I have to make uh about for a little pool. Um I put it in my newsletter and I want to let everybody know what's going on. Uh about a ye about 3 or 4 months ago, we discovered there was a leak in the drain underneath the pool at Fort Lool. Now, that pool is 71 years old, and we can't we could not find where the water is. We tried every little trick in the book with X-rays and scopes, but we didn't want to spend too much money doing it. So, we're going to cut a small hole in the shell of the pool and try to locate the leak and hopefully be able to line the current drain, plug the leak, and restore the

pool. It's a $60 to $70,000 risk to the taxpayers. But if it works, we get our pool back. If we crack the shell or we can't find the leak or a sinkhole is developed, we're going to have to close that pool. And it's a special pool. And for as a contingency, I want to announce tonight that I'm already going to work with some of our community members and stakeholders to raise the money to build a new Olympic pool there. So, I just wanted to let people know out of transparency how important it is to for government to tell you what you're thinking. And so, that's what's going on with Fort L pool. Um, we're going to hopefully we can get it restored maybe even this summer. But if you do, if you hear somebody complaining about the Fort Lau being closed this summer, you can say, you know, I was at the coun I was at the meeting where the city council explained why. So, thanks for indulging me on that. And everybody have a great week. And oh, one big more round of applause for a Talibirdie, but also our University of Arizona Wildcats. All right,

Vice Mayor Hi, mayor. Thank you. Trying to like get my my notes in order right here. Um, let's see. We've had a a busy weekend. I have the um privilege to take over all of your weekend events when you're out of town representing the city of Tucson. So, I had the opportunity to be at the Tucson Festival of Books, the author's uh table dinner, um for our 17th annual I can't believe it's 17 years. Is that right? That's all right. I guess we're getting old. Um the you know this evening was brought together with an inspiring group including our um poet Laurette Laurette TC Tober who um was stepping down and I had such an amazing just evening speaking talking about poetry with him and our congresswoman Alita Grihalva. Um we had the honor of sitting at the table with the author Carol Maldo and celebrate her work including her new book Go Figure. It was a beautiful evening. um just continues to highlight the strength of Tucson's arts and literacy community. So, thank you, mayor, for giving me the opportunity to be there. And then, um that same evening, we also attended the Pima County Community Land Trust Kins celebration. Um so, I had the opportunity to be there and read a proclamation on behalf of the mayor recognizing um the Land Trust's long-standing commitment to affordable housing in our community. Um, and I was especially um, grateful to have the opportunity um, to acknowledge our own assistant city manager, Liz Morales. So, thank you, Liz, for your tireless work and championing affordable housing um, and all, you know, your your different hats that you play. Um, as well as our representative, Betty Viegas. And so, I really want to thank them for their

leadership and their advocacy. on Sunday. Um I also had the opportunity to attend the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation out brunch at Toono Chul. Um and always that event leaves me feeling energized from the love, the pride, the resilience of our community. I think we raised over $200,000 that day. Um so incredible work. Um and I just want to thank all the um the awardees um that were honored that day, including um my dear friend Dr. Jamie Lee and um Congresswoman Adelita Grihalva who received the Richard Leas public servant award. Um so I'm just super grateful um for all the the work community does um the out brunch benefits the vital programs and services of safe um and and you know I want to thank the staff for creating the space you know for all of us to connect. Uh this Saturday, March 21st is World Water Day Celebration of Verdugo Park in Bario Kroger Lane from 8 to 10:00 a.m. Um Sonorin Institute, the Wilderness Society, Favor Celestial, Tucson Clean and Beautiful in Ward One. Um we'll be coming together to to celebrate and um uh putting some sweat equity um into the community. We're asking for volunteers to help us care for the Santa Cruz River corridor while learning about watershed health, um conservation, and the importance of water in our desert environment. All ages are welcome. Um please come prepared with close to shoes, sun protection, and a reusable water bottle. And then on um Saturday, March 28th, uh we have the Kennedy Park Improvement Ribbon cutting at Kennedy Park. We'll be meeting at the Northwest Buff Fields um between 9 and 10:00 a.m. Um join the city of Tucson, community members, local partners for ribbon cutting, celebrating and highlighting the latest improvements to Kennedy Park, including a new dog park, shaded playground, and upgraded ball fields. The events will take place at the new

ball fields during the Little League opening ceremonies marking an exciting investment in our community spaces um that include youth recreation. All are welcome to attend. And then on Monday, March 30th, um we have the women's leadership forum um from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. So join um Congresswoman Alita Grihala, myself, and other local leaders for a powerful conversation in honor of Women's History Month. We'll be highlighting the role of women in driving change on breaking barriers in our communities. This forum will center leadership, resilience, and collective power. Um to attend, you do need to RSVP. Um and you can do that at grihalva.house.gov. GV/womenle. And then on Tuesday, March 31st, we have the Tucson Town Hall on Extreme Heat and Climate Accountability at Donna Lian's Recreation Center, um, 2160 North 6th Avenue between 5:30 and 7:30. Um, join Public Citizen, Veterans Power America, Common Defense, and Community Partners for an important conversation on how extreme heat is impacting Tucson and what we can do to respond. This town hall will bring together local leaders, Congresswoman Grihalva and myself included, and residents to discuss climate solutions, equity, and accountability. All are welcome um to attend. Also um appreciate if uh we would RSVP. And so those are those are all my events, mayor. But I did um you and I put out, you know, a post earlier today, and I did want to recognize that because typically um this time of year, you know, we'd be talking about um our Cesar Chavez um uh Andolores Werta uh marching rally. And so I just wanted um to take a moment to address some of the concerning news, you know, that that came out today. Um, and for those who have might not have heard, many groups across the country have chosen to cancel or amend their events commemorating

Cesar Chavez as they learned of allegations of sexual abuse. The Cesar the Arizona Cesar Chavez Holiday Coalition has renamed this year's event on on this coming Saturday to the Konid Labor Unity Fair. Um, I am devastated to learn about this concerning behavior. The extent of the harm will take time to it will take time to um fully reckon with and I support Tucson groups and that are choosing to pause this year shift their focus toward centering labor organizing. As this holiday approaches, we should redirect our appreciation to the thousands of farm workers, especially women who fought for better wages, dignity, and safer working conditions. These victories were bigger than one individual because they required collective action. Everyone who's participated in protest, strikes or marches deserves to be celebrated. And I also want to be honest about something deeper. Um that this is not an isolated situation. Harm in movement spaces is too common and too often it has been minimized or pushed aside in the name of protecting the work or the legacy of individuals that has not protected our communities. It has not protected our women and children. And we have to do better. As a mama, I'm holding what kind of what this kind of violence does to our children. My parenting and leadership have been rooted in creating conditions where our children can live and grow with dignity. Um, and that has to be true in our homes and in our movements. So, in this moment, our responsibility is to center survivors to listen and create conditions where accountability is real. The United Farm Workers and the Ceset Chavez Foundation have announced they will provide a confidential independent channel for people to come forward. As a leader here in Tucson, I will help amplify these resources as they become available in Arizona. And we can both in this moment hold pride um while also holding the truth. And that's what is meant to honor the full

legacy and to build something stronger moving forward. Thank you, mayor.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Um, first and most importantly, thank you so much for um covering as vice mayor for me all this weekend. It was a very busy weekend, so I put you to work. Um, and thank you so much for doing such an amazing uh job and and um adding your words and presence to so many activities in the community. I too uh put out a statement on um on the allegations that um that are being weighed against Hazard Chavez and I'm personally devastated. Um um there are allegations of serious abuse uh that Chavez engaged in inappropriate behavior with women and minors during his time as president of the United Farm Workers of America. As reported by the Cesar Chavez Foundation, I know how important it is to make sure everyone knows help and resources are available to people who need them right now. Uh we must believe survivors and help all heal. my parents and other farmworking families in Summerton, Arizona and across California and Arizona participated in the United Farm Workers fight for their for better wages for better working conditions and my family was one of them. The changes um that Chavez and the United Farm Workers brought to working families and people working in the

fields were significant and our family was the beneficiary of those changes. Later, as a council member, I led the effort to create a city holiday to recognize that work. And more recently, me and my council colleagues um added the Lores Wuerta to the name of the holiday, which honors workers and the movement. Moving forward, we will consider with the input of the community on how to address the name of the holiday while continuing to honor workers and acknowledging the work that still needs to be done. I hope that our community comes together at the communad labor unity fair on Saturday and that we all remain committed to the ongoing fight for justice, equity, and worker rights. Luigi, thank you so much uh vice mayor for um really helping me process this information. Uh you've been around and have been able to help me through this. It's hard um because it is an identity that I carry. Um but we also have to remember that movements for peace and justice and equality are not centered on one individual. It is a collective movement that we all take a part of and form in. So, thank you so much. And on to a happier note, I too am very very happy um that we were able to announce our new poet laurate uh Logan Phillips. Uh this has been such a meaningful and carefully cap crafted

process that I have had the honor to take a part of. Um when I first became mayor, TC Tolbert was our poet laurate and it was a um a position created by our my predecessor Jonathan Rothschild who himself was a poet. Um, and TC Tolbert hung on and and uh was the poet laurate for many years until we figured out a process with uh the arts foundation and I want to especially thank uh Kelly Wei uh my staff at the mayor's office Charlene Mendoza and Jackie Ortiz that have helped us through our Somosuno cultural AL heritage strategy that mayor and council unanimously approved. Um my office is going to pay for the position. It's just a small tiny token of the of the representation but I wanted to make sure that we professionalized um the the office uh or the position of poet laurate. Uh, I want to thank TC Tolbert for his amazing work and playing such an important part of the being the voice of Tucson for so many years and he was so gracious. Uh, he was part of the panel as well as my office as well as a representative of the arts foundation of Tucson. So I just want to again thank our new poet laurate Logan Phillips. Uh it was a wonderful process uh that he went through. He gave us wonderful ideas. I believe that his words reflect the sonor and desert and it's important to continue with the poet laurette

tradition. So I am looking forward uh to Logan Phillips continuing the work that TC Tolbert started. So uh thank you all. Thank you for helping me uh process uh such a difficult day and uh being able to talk about it here at this table because it needs to be talked about. So again on a good note uh thanks Logan Phillips for his service. Um also I wanted to talk about uh TPD awards that I attended last Thursday. I was honored to recognize our TPD officers and professionals who serve Tucson with a unwavering dedication and integrity to protect our community at the TPD annual award ceremony. I was especially excited to recognize one of our very own uh TPD officers, Lisa Jeffrey, uh for a medal of distinguished service. Uh she is part of my security detail. Every day, TPD is making meaningful change in our communities. From our safe city initiative, I have seen firsthand how TPD is leading an evidence-based policing that has the perfect balance of accountability and compassion. Their actions, both seen and unseen, are the foundation of our public safety. The TPD annual awards served as a reminder that behind every badge is a person who cares deeply about Tonins they serve and it is through their service that we are able to live in a safe, thriving and resilient city. With that we move on to item four, city manager report summary of current events. City manager's communication number 66 dated March 17th is received into tune made part of the record. This time has been scheduled to allow the

city manager to report on current events.

Thank you, mayor. Um, just one thing for tonight. I would like to thank our staff for hosting uh another one of our safe city events called Hope in the Park. Hope in the Park was a one-day one-stop resource gathering for unsheltered individuals that was held Friday, March 6th in Freedom Park. The event was sponsored by the multidisciplinary outreach team and housing first. Services officered included health screenings, legal help, behavioral health assistance, shelter and housing help, free clothing, haircuts, animal care, VA benefits, food, and more. And while we're on the topic of um our own safe city initiative, it was also really u the mayor uh held us helped us join a national effort to reduce crime. Mayor Omero and other governmental leaders and community members recently announced local participation in an initiative called scaling safety joining four other cities that work with nonprofits to help strengthen community- based safety strategies proven to prevent violence and support victims and survivors. Thank you, mayor.

Thank you. All righty. And we move on to item five. Liquor license applications. City manager communication number 69 dated March 17th is received into and made part of the record. Miss clerk, please read the liquor license agenda. Your honor, on this evening's agenda, we have four applications for new licenses, one owner transfer, 10 applications for special events, and one acquisition of control. All applications are in compliance with city requirements. An appropriate motion would be to forward items 5B 1-5, 5C 1-10, and 5D1 to the state liquor board with the recommendation of approval. May I have a motion, please? So moved. Second.

There's a motion and a second. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor, please signify by saying I. I. I. Any against? Motion carries. Item six. Your honor, I wanted to let our awardees know they don't have to stay for the whole meeting. We're we're going to be here a while.

So, if the awardees, you are always free to stay if you'd like or you are also free to uh go if you'd like. We can make a little bit of time.

Call to the audience. Mr. Clerk, do you have any announcements? Yes. At this time, any member of the public is allowed to address the mayor and city council on any issue except for items scheduled for a public hearing at the meeting. Call to the audience will last for 30 minutes, and speakers are limited to three-minute presentations. The green light will turn on when you're called to speak. It will turn yellow when you have 30 seconds remaining, and then it will turn red and beep when your time is up. At that time, please conclude your comments.

Thank you, Miss Clerk. And I do have a nice uh pack of uh people that want to call uh that want to speak a call to the audience. If you do hear someone say what you were intending to say, um you can cut up your remarks just so that you could give as much room for as many people to speak to us. Our first speaker is Neila Hummer. Am I waiting or do I start? No, please go ahead.

My name is Nezla Hummer. I'm a resident of Puma County and I work as an organizer with AI Liberation Mutual Aid or Alma. For the past one and a half years, Alma has held a weekly mutual aid event in the AI neighborhood where we invite the neighborhood to give and receive a hot meal, hygiene items, and other lifeup supporting services. I'm here tonight to tell you the story of a neighbor who is at risk of homelessness due to failed section 8 inspections. We've been working to provide support to this neighbor since the issue came to our attention last fall with the goal of keeping them housed. I'm here to ask you to halt all Section 8 evictions in the city while we work on a better system to keep people housed. Our neighbor was homeless before being awarded Section 8, which means that they've experienced the trauma and violence of living on the streets. They've also been dealing with chronic physical and mental health problems since they became homeless. And I've personally reached out to the city of Tucson and Old PBLO community services multiple times since last fall requesting additional support for this person. The city's section 8 administrators did not provide support after the failed inspection last fall or last month. Two weeks ago, during a follow-up inspection, I voiced my opinion that our neighbor needed a different type of housing support, such as housing in conjunction with case management. OPCS representatives advised me that to qualify for such services, our neighbor would have to lose their voucher, be evicted, become homeless again, and then complete a new intake form to reapply for housing and services. I wasn't surprised to hear this, but I think we can all agree that there's something very wrong with our system if it's operating this way. Repeatedly in my work, I see evidence of the violence inflicted on unhoused folks, people with disabilities, people with substance use disorder by our city,

county, and federal governments. Current strategies utilized by the city are not protecting these people, no matter what you say. Um, uh, you know, but you, mayor and council, you're in a really great position because you have the power to change the system if you desire to. I hope you have the courage to start protecting vulnerable people in our community. Specifically, I ask that you halt section 8 evictions while we work on a better system. This is especially critical now that the city has clo closed the wait list for section 8. And we don't have to know how to solve a problem to know that what we're currently doing is failing people in really dangerous ways. I ask you to please be brave and start trying other strategies without knowing what the outcome will be. And if you'd like additional information about potentially effective strategies, I'm happy to provide them. Thank you.

Thank you. We will share your information with housing community development. Thank you for coming tonight. Patricia Bowle, I think it is. Patricia Bowell, I'm sorry if I'm I've gotten your last name wrong.

That's fine. It's pronounced many different ways. Um, in fact, my my name is Patricia Bowerley, but I don't even know how to pronounce it the correct ethnically German way. Um, so myself. So, um, I have a sister-in-law though who pronounces it well though. Um, my, uh, I'm a resident of Tucson. I'm speaking here to speak about please ban concentration camps and and I'm representing myself. First, a huge thank you to Tucson City Council for banning immigration and custom enforcement that is ICE activities on any and every piece of Tucson property. More similar courageous action is desperately needed. Please nonviolently ban concentration camps from your jurisdiction in any area intersecting with your jurisdiction. Please nonviolently ban concentration camps, whether referred to as detention centers or by any other name. On or about February 15, 2026, the online news publication entitled Common Dreams published at least two different articles documenting that the federal Trump administration has been building out mass detention centers, which are actually concentration camps and documented why and how the detention centers are actually indeed concentration camps. After immigrants have been imprisoned in those detention centers, they rarely come out. One article entitled, "Trump's concentration camp buildout includes nearly 40 billion for warehouse conversions," authored by Julia Connelly, cites the following quote. "Germany's concentration camps didn't start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours," wrote talk show host Tom Harmon recently. "History isn't whispering, it's warning, it's shouting." Um, in addition, might the government choose to use any data centers that seem to fail as additional concentration

camps? Moreover, the United States government's immigration and customs enforment enforcement, referred to as ICE, has been routinely violating people's constitutional rights as documented in part by someone in front of this Tucson City Council on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026 during the call to audience. Our federal government has also been majorly violating the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution's right to substantive and procedural due process and equal protection under the laws. Please refer to my letter emailed on March 15, 2026 to this Tucson City Council. Thank you.

Paul Ferrell. Paul Ferrell. Hello. Uh, are we on? There we go. My name is uh Paul Ferrell and I'm a resident of Tucson and I'm here speaking on my own behalf. I wanted to talk about a ACLU program that's set up to help city governments and state governments uh with not sharing their information with the federal government. Now, this is necessary because of Donald Trump's war on domestic terrorism. Uh, just about anybody can be labeled as a domesticated a domestic terrorist. Uh, so it looks like Trump is going to be going after individuals and groups and uh different organizations using the FBI, the IRS, and the Department of Justice. Uh, their purpose is to stifle their free speech and maybe even throw a few people into prison. Now, the ACLU's plan is that uh we would get the mayors of the different cities and the governors to create an executive order that says we're not going to cooperate with the feds. Uh we have a uh I have right here, this is a sample, actually, this is a model mayoral executive order provided by the ACLU. this can work as a a template for the city attorney to create an actual uh uh executive order. Now, uh you some people might say that this would be redundant because the the count the city already uh provides protection of citizens private information, but this would add an extra layer of protection and might even help

to patch any holes in in the coverage. Uh you could say that this would be symbol symbolic but symbolism is important. Uh you might have seen the presidential inauguration and symbolism that was there behind the president were the billionaires. Uh there were four out of five people there that were the richest people in the world. Uh this is the oligarchy. This is the uh the uh Epstein class. Now a member of the oligarchy that was there was Elon Musk and you might have seen him do the Nazi salute. Uh he did that twice. Uh so what's the symbolism there? I don't know perhaps fascism. Uh so what I'm I'm I'm afraid that our country or actually our government is on the road to becoming a white supremacist Christian nationalist oligarchy and we need to stop it. Now I don't really have time right now to talk about the tariffs and ICE and Cuba. That's going to be our next war. and talk about the the trillion dollar uh budget with the uh with the Pentagon and Christian nationalism, cryptoc corruption. We're selling pardons out of the White House. We're going to be going having voter suppression coming up. So Trump is quickly uh consolidating this power. And so we need to move fast. We need to get the city and attorney to create an executive order. We get the council to vote on it. And we need to get a signature from the mayor. Uh we we need to make some noise about this as well. We need to let the whole world know that Tucson is standing up to this dictator and this might encourage other cities to do the same.

Thank you so much. Before you go, before you go, Mr. Ferrell, uh we're going to get your u contact information. You did not give us any contact information. And then if you could give us a copy of that ACLU. Um the city of Tucson because of the type of government we have, we don't have a strong mayor form of government. I cannot do executive orders unless it's for public health reasons. Uh that's why I was able to do it during CO. Um but give us the information and we will be more than happy to look at it. I appreciate your input. Betsy Bodia.

Very good. Thank you. Uh, Mayor Romero and city council members. My name is Betsy Boja. I am the current president of the League of Women Voters of Greater Tucson, and I am here to speak in support for funding for the Domestic Violence Firearms Technical Assistant Program, otherwise known as DVFT. Um, to refresh your memories, this program was originally funded by a grant, which is no longer available. It provided for police officers to serve court orders and remove firearms from domestic abusers when court ordered. It also paid for a high-risk advocate from Emerge Center Against Domestic Abuse to connect victims with needed resources. In addition, it provided for an assistant who coordinated with all involved agencies and entered the prohibited possessor's name into the Nyx database so they would be identified in future encounters with law enforcement. Without this program, guns would not be removed from abusers, and studies have proven that a firearm in the house makes it five times more likely that an abuser's female victim will be killed. We would be very grateful if you would consider funding all or part of this program since the grant money is no longer available. We realize there are a lot of claims on your limited resources, but the cost of 120,000 a year for this program seems a small price to pay for saving the life of even one domestic violence victim. Thank you.

Thank you, Rick Talis. Rick Talis. Rick Tolles. Thank you.

I'll be brief. I'll be brief. Uh my name is Richard Tolles. Um I'm a resident here at Tucson, a retired Air Force chief master sergeant and a proud former recipient of a mayor's copper letter. Um, I just want to speak in regard to uh item number eight that's going to come up on the resoning Murdoch uh on Rosewood on the east side of Tucson. Uh this process has been going on for about a year and we've gone through all the appropriate formal steps um organized the neighborhood uh petitioning uh did all the appropriate layers and dialogue uh professionally uh with the developer and the neighbor the word to Councilman Cunningham. And I want to tell you that um through this process the it it it's very obvious that the the rules seem to be written that enable um I'll say uh developers or business people familiar with the process to uh move through it pretty smoothly or logically. It's very difficult for a citizen concerned citizen who wants to responsibly engage in this process to have instruction. It's if you don't ask the right question to the right person, you'll never find out anything. It was very very difficult. Um I led the the initiative of our neighborhood. Um we had 131 people sign a petition. uh out of the 90 homes that are being affected in the immediate radius, every single one of them opposed what was being proposed. And we currently have a solution. Uh what the uh Mr. Mazako and the zoning examiner presented or deliberated over uh heard everybody's um justifications. Uh he came up with a very reasonable solution, a compromise uh but it was one

that provided for up to 25 homes. the the reszoning really wasn't an issue because you redefined what zone one is under the middle housing initiative. Um they but they did limit them to no two-story homes which was a big issue for the neighborhood. Um and uh and there's still questions about the water. Uh it's a 4.7 acre lot and the it's got a pitch to it. There's a lot of water that's going to come off of that when they hardscape it. So it remains to be seen how that's all going to work out, but the engineers will figure all that out. I I will I want to thank Councilman Cunningham for his u advice and help along the way on on some of the technical stuff um and his support. So uh that's all I have. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Tolles. Melissa Cordero. Melissa Corddero. Where's the other mic that everybody talks into first? Uh, good afternoon, Mayor and Council. My name is Melissa Cordderero, award-winning resident. I'm a veteran and organizer and a proud Fugista. And I've lived in Tucson for 12 years. And I'll be honest, I still have a crush on this desert city. And part of why I love Tucson is because we do things differently. I want to start with gratitude. Thank you for your work on RTA Next and for taking on something this complex. I know these decisions aren't easy, and I see the effort to address long-term gaps in safety, connectivity, and infrastructure across our city. My work in climate justice takes me all over the country and my biggest flex is telling people Tucson is fair free. What we what Tucson is doing really does matter. I also spend a lot of time in rural Arizona and I've seen what disconnection really looks like. People who can't get to work, can't get to services, can't even make it to planning and zoning meetings to advocate for their own communities because they simply can't get there. Fairf free transit isn't just about getting from point A to point B. It's about reducing barriers, reducing emissions, and making sure the people most impacted by climate change can actually access solutions. As a veteran, I was trained to lead with mission, not comfort, not ideology, and definitely not privilege. My mom was a veteran who experienced homelessness, and her biggest barrier was transportation. Not efforts, not motivation, transportation. It's about access. It's about participation. It's about who gets to show up. So when we talk about the future of transit or ask people to wait, we have to be honest about who that impacts. It's the folks

who rely on it the most. That's why it's so important that we continue to center voices that with lived experience, people who are raising their families here, who reflect communities impacted the most. There is real leadership in those spaces. Indigenous ingenuity is real. Look around us. Our desert is confused. The plants are confused. It's so hot. Let's protect our mobile cooling units, a tangible resource that is up and running and working. And let's keep it free. We are excited. Fuga's excited. We see the movement and we're ready to support progress. And at the same time, we'll continue to hold the conversation accountable because we want a Tucson that works for everyone. So, thank you again for your leadership. Let's keep moving forward, pun intended, and keep Tucson transit fair, free, accessible, and rooted in the people who depend on it most. Because, keep it real, we are all here because we all have a crush on this city. Thank you. Thank you, Kathleen. Um, the last name starts with a D. Kathleen. Kathleen.

Yeah, I couldn't read it. I'm sorry.

Yeah, my name is Kathleen Dubs and uh a proud um resident of Ward One and uh in spite of what it says on my shirt. I'm here as a private citizen tonight. So, imagine you have a family member whose partner has been abusing her. He, and it's almost always a he, has been ordered to relinquish his firearm. Now, imagine that no one has checked to make sure that that gun has been turned in. Your family member is in grave danger. Now, imagine that that abuser is ordered to turn in their firearm and a member of law enforcement actually goes to their house and removes the gun. Your loved one is now five times safer. As they said, with a gun in the house, you are five times more at risk. So, I'm sure you're aware of Judge Wendy Millian's program, which which Betsy has has talked about uh when that grant is no longer available. But Judge Millian has come up with an idea that would allow her not only to continue this life-saving work, but expand it. She suggests that the city and county work together to pay for a full-time firearms coordinator and two full-time emerge center against domestic violence high-risisk advocates. This makes so much sense that I'm sure someone will try to think of reasons why it cannot be done. However, I have noticed a couple of joint meetings between the city council and the county board of supervisors recently. So, I know that you are all thinking outside the box, and I think that this is a wellthoughtout opportunity to combine your resources and pay the $180,000 it would take to implement this plan. Judge Millian's recent uh op-ed in the paper explains uh the details, and I'm sure she'd be happy to answer any questions. I would hate to read in my morning paper that a woman has been killed when such a tragedy could have been prevented by

implementing this program. I urge you to try to work together to find the funding to save lives. Thank you, ma'am. Me Pradelt. Mag Pradelt.

Thank you. And good evening, Mayor and Council. Um Kathy spoke essentially um to the same issue that I was going to make. I am a um resident of the county and I have been following local politics for the many years that I've been living here and have been very encouraged lately to see uh the city and county governments working more closely together. And I feel as she did and expressed that this would be a perfect opportunity to indicate to the community at large that our governments are willing to invest in issues and policies and programs that can save lives communitywide on an issue that affects everyone who lives in Puma County. So thank you. I also urge you to work with them and see ways to fund the components that Judge Millian brought up in her article. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Hakima Hakima. Hello. Sorry. Uh, hi. Hi, my name is Akim of Abdad. I'm a junior at the University of Arizona W 5 resident and I'm also the environment community care fellow at the W 5 office and I stand before you today because Sunday, March 15th, we had our first ever community if dinner. Y'all, I'mma cry through this. Okay, so give me a sec. Let me read it real quick. Um, but I'm saying this as an individual individual before over my title to you, council member. I thank you very much and I thank our W five team cuz I'm a young black Muslim girl and for 20 years of my life I've never felt like the majority or the priority and for the first time ever like ever I felt seen and my parents felt seen and in that space there was all age ranges from babies my sister baby um to adolesccents to elders um but Being in a government space and being in a space where you are where you're seen and where you are told it's okay to ask for more meant the world. Especially having parents who they've only ever checked that box every every four years. They they're not aware of local government. So being extended a genuine grace. I thank very much that if dinner prompted conver conversation and promoted conversation and I think the little girl in me would have wanted that dinner much much much sooner and that dinner reminded me that it's it is okay to ask for more um I'm my parents

representation um their refuge the refugees um they took refuge 20 plus years ago and I've never seen them smile like so wholeheartedly. I've never seen my dad like smile that bright and I think my W five team. Um, and I think the crazy part about it was um, our chief of staff and our council member let us take points on it and it meant the world cuz truthfully I didn't know what my title meant. I only knew the environment part. I only knew that aspect. I didn't know what community like what I was supposed to do with community care. But it reminded me I'm a Southside baby and I'll forever be proud to say that I'm a Southside baby. Um but right then and there we had a week to plan it and my community showed up. We showed up. We definitely ate. We got ready. Um and you going around council member, not just being a council member but with your title too um with you as an individual. I thank you for that because they saw you as a human. And I asked of you guys to continue to keep having these conversations cuz the art of having a conversation of being curious about somebody else's values of somebody else's backgrounds um reminds us that my normalities don't have to be a shadow that sometimes having the same comfortable conversations that are routine like are not always okay like you must step in unfamiliar. Thank you very much. Thank you, Hakima. And thank you, Council Member Vajas, for that beautiful dinner. Um, Judy Bowen,

can you use the tall mic, please? I made um some copies for Yes. Someone from the clerk's office will take them from you if you'd like.

These are um those are a petition 100 signatures from the Armory. Okay. My name is Judy Bame. I'm here to ask you our mayor and the members of the city council to do everything in your power to reinstate Saturdays at the Armory Park Senior Center. This center is so important for the well-being of the 50 and older senior members. It gives us a place of camaraderie, a place to seek advice, a place of many activities. Bingo, music, art class, computers, puzzles, pool, a phone, a workout room, a place to rest, air conditioning. The armory used to be open seven days a week and it was free. Back then, my generation honored those seniors who are now gone but not forgotten. Those seniors were rep respected and cherished for their wisdom and longevity. The seniors received privileges for being old. They were treated like first class citizens, not the way I feel I am being treated like a secondass citizens or like I don't even matter. Is there no longer respect for elders? Now it seems that seniors, the most vulnerable population, are being suppressed. I see you doing so much for other causes. Why not us? I realize that finances are the main issue here, but the armory can pay for itself and generate income for the city. The ballroom has the biggest wood floor in town. It has been rented out for birthday parties, kids and eras, graduations, health seminars, anniversaries, and other money-making endeavors. The smaller all-purpose room is also rented out often and generates income. The ballroom dancers appreciate the new beautiful ballroom floor. We waited over a year for the floor after the flood. We put on a grand opening, invited the mayor, all the city council members, and the parks and rags elite. Not only did no one show up, we were informed the same week that Saturdays were being eliminated. We were devastated. We are still devastated. We've had to move to Thursdays. We've tried to make it work, but it's not working. Our dance members have dwindled

and soon we will be forced to disband. That after I have danced at the Armory for 22 years, Barroom dancing has been going on at the Armory for 50 years. It is not just the dancers that need the Saturdays at the Armory. Many senior members frequent the armory for activities and relaxation on Saturdays. And the saddest injustice that has incurred from closing Saturdays is losing the Tucson Philarmonic Youth Orchestra. The director, Susette Baton, has conducted this nationally recognized group for 36 years. This is the first and only Arizona orchestra to present a concert at the historically famed New York Carnegie Hall. They have won many accolades. The youth orchestra has over 90 musicians. They always practice at the Armory on Saturdays. I am here to implore the city council to reopen the Armory Park Senior Center on Saturdays. We are seniors. We're old. We paid our dues all our long lives. We want to spend our remaining days with as much dignity and respect as we can muster. It's hard to be a senior. Many aches and pains. We're wrinkled. We're losing our hair. We're losing our family and friends. We've already lost our Sundays. Please reinstate Saturdays.

Thank you, ma'am. Patrick Yarley, Patrick Barley, Patrick.

Good evening. Good evening, sir. Yeah, thank you. Um, yeah. Good evening, Mayor Romero, city council members. All right. And Mr. Tamore. How do you pronounce your name? the more Tom here.

Tom here. Okay. All right. Thank you for your time. My friends here and my fellow uh petitioners which we handed in. All right. Want you to reconsider your current policy decision to cease funding for the Armory Center Saturday hours. We're here to call upon you to reverse that decision and to restore those hours. All right. From our perspective, this would be an easy fix for you, Madame Mayor, City Council members. Um this policy establishment of procedures that you follow for uh concluding that armory centers should be closed on Saturday should just be revisited and reversed. Simple as that. Without knowing the exact reason for enacting the closure policy, a good guess would be that at its foundation, it's the park and wreck budget. All right. Now, we understand that budgeting reasons must be ground zero uh of your persons as responsible representatives of the city. So, may I suggest that you find a new source of funding? I don't know what that actually means in terms of our situation. All right. But, uh this suggestion is and must be based upon uh incomplete data on my part. There may be uh prerequisites that preclude the use of those funds. um preclude the use of those funds, but the general assertion is sound. Find another source of funding the armory sad the hours and this restoration of the other centers that will cut back. Thank you.

Thank you, Victoria Devasto. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Victoria Devasto. Hello, mayor and council. As you all know, it's about to get extremely hot very soon. It's already hot. It's March and we are looking at 100 degree 100 degree degree days. Community on Wheels is serving over 200 people twice a week at a minimum near Sanorita Park. We are holding meetings and having discussions to plan for this summer and the upcoming heat wave that will be devastating for the unhoused community. I say this to motivate you further because I know conversations are already underway. But please invite homeless outreach and mutual aid leaders to the table as you are talking about the upcoming summer avoiding heat related fatalities as well as general prevention strategies. We need larger solutions but we also need immediate care. We are watching. We are all watching as the sidewalks fill with more people. We need different tactics. The cooling centers need to be doubled. Not only the amount of centers themselves, but the capacity within them. We need better quality service on site, alternative models, and realistic care. We can look to recent successes like Star Village. However, these pilots can be much less expensive. We can see results quickly with alternative success metrics and surveys throughout neighborhoods. I have upcoming meetings with W 5, W 4, W 6, and W one. I appreciate this communication greatly. I'd like to meet with both mayor and city manager to dive into this further and very quickly. I would also like to state my support for Alma and the many people affected by faulty systems, including the cycle of realistically temporary but permanent housing. The person referenced needs immediate assistance in the form of medical and mental health outreach support and personal advocacy. I encourage W three to reach out to Neesla directly to

assist with this individual case. Their contact information is on the yellow card. Wow, that was the quickest I've ever been. Thank you, Victoria. And we've run out of time for call to the audience, but I'm going to do the the next three um speakers, Patricia Mish, and then Savannah Leaport. Patricia Meech,

thank you for letting us speak this evening. I am here to I have a personal mandate to try to stop gun violence as I witnessed 13 murder 13 attempted murders and six murders on January 8th, 2011. And I have some numbers to pass on you. I can't encourage you enough to cooperate with the county and try to stem the tide. It is worth it just in dollars what it cost Puma County. I don't have numbers for the city, but I do have for total Puma County, one in four women and one in seven men are affected by domestic violence. And um it costs $20,000 over the economic lifetime for each one of these people. And the cost include ER plus hospital visits, mental health care, policing in courts, shelters and advocacy service, loss productivity, employer cost, long-term health plans, and to many many are never reported. So we get off easy on the money because not everybody reports if you can call that easy. But it's long-term chronic health carees are huge. Child exposure impacts are massive and housing instability and homelessness cost are rarely included. So I am I'm happy to leave these numbers with you if you want them. I am an activist for Brady, for Gfords, for Mom's Demand Action, for Arizonans, for gun safety, and they're all would be in favor of your attempting to fund this. And we will be at the county next Tuesday with these same proposals. Thank you.

Thank you, Pat. Thank you so much, Savannah Leaport. I'm not sure if it's Leaport or Leaporte. Good evening, mayor and council. My name is Fann Leaport and I'm a resident of the city of Tucson. Tonight, I would like to express my concerns regarding data centers in Tucson. I understand that a proposed code amendment for the for large-scale data centers is underway. I have read the fact sheet and understand that the intention of this amendment is to establish clear standards and guardrails for large data centers that are proposed in the future to ensure that they align with Tucson's values and long-term goals. But myself and the majority of survey respondents to the amendment don't agree with this indication of data centers as inevitable in Tucson. It's not enough to simply establish vague energy, water conservation, noise, and environmental compatibility requirements without explanation of how these will be enforced. What are the consequences for violating the regulations in regards to the setback standards? 400 ft from residential areas and 200 feet from commercial areas is not far enough a distance considering the great amount of noise pollution and carbon emissions that these data centers will emit. Even more, it is not practical to assume that large large-scale data centers that guzzle thousands of gallons of water for cooling a day can be situated in a desert without disastrous effects. Not to mention the high energy demands of large-scale data centers will no doubt strain our local grids. Yet, the code amendment doesn't take into account energy when defining a large scale data data center. It defines it as a single facility or multiple on a contiguous site that has an area of 50,000 square feet or more and houses computer systems and telecommunications equipment for data processing and distribution. When large- scale data centers increase their energy demand,

the costs are passed on to everyday people. We will see our utility bills rise at the hands of big tech and power companies who will profit. For the good of the city and its people, I urge you to listen carefully to our common voice. We don't want data centers and believe that there is a way to ban them. They should not be accepted and are not inevitable. Thank you.

Thank you, Savannah. Vanessa Ggo. Vanessa Ggo. Good evening, mayor and council. Happy bike month. Um, I want to bring more joy and thanks. Um, first and foremost, um, I want to echo what I heard earlier about, um, a special community. Um, we really take care of our own. We've heard today about entering the hottest week of the year, the hottest summer of our lives. And I always lead with that because it's really coming and affecting us. So I see that our mayor and council is taking initiative to protect our community, take care of us. I hear our community doing that. And what I'm not hearing is how are they going to get there? That's not an issue, right? How are they going to get to those services? That's not an issue because we have fair free. So, while we're implementing all these great strategies, all these great resources, that's there and people are using it. Um, today I ran into a situation where a woman um it was stealing water from a barber shop and it wasn't the issue. The barber shop knew the woman. The officer clearly knew the woman. It wasn't the first time. And they were all just saying like, "Okay, just leave the facility. Leave the area." And to me, it was just like, "We're taking care of them." the the barber shop was like, "Not the first time, it's not the last." The officer was like, "It's okay. Just leave." And then I gave her a piece of pizza. And that's what you know, we do, right? We look for our own. We take care. So, as we lead into these hot summer months, thank you. Thank you, community. Because what you showed last week is that voting counts and we're securing more funding for

transportation, whatever that looks like, for our safe streets. But right now, what it looks like to me in making our streets safe is continuing to have those resources. And that to me is fair, free, keeping that universal, keeping that accessible so folks can reach the resources that we have and not make another barrier. So with that, gracias all of you and all the work that you do and thank you mayor and council um because this isn't easy. Um especially in these times where it's hard to celebrate. Um so thank you for having these spaces adante. Thank you, Miss Gaya. You were the last speaker tonight. Thank you all so much for joining us and caring about speaking with your mayor and council. Item seven, consent agenda.

Reports from the city manager on the consent agenda are received into and made part of the record. Miss Clerk, you are requested to read the consent agenda.

Item A, approval of minutes. Item B, intergovernmental agreement, transportation funding agreement amendment with the transport regional transportation authority of Pima County and the city of Tucson for design of improvements at First Street Grant Road to River Road. Item C, intergovernmental agreement for city to provide basic training for the Achin tribal police department's peace officer recruits at the southern Arizona law enforcement training center in return for the Action Indian Communities payment per recruit or alternatively the Ochen Tribal Police Departments providing full-time class counselors. Item D, amendment four to intergovernmental agreement with Arizona Healthcare cost containment system for September 30th, 2025 through September 29th, 2026. Item E, intergovernmental agreement with the city of Tucson in the state of Arizona for operation and maintenance of intelligent transportation system facility and freeway management system conduit use. Item F, Puma County Community Land Trust, Bario Cro Kroger Lane Green Street impact fee subsidy request. Item G, City of Tucson people, communities and home investment plan funding recommendations, home investment partnerships, acquisition, rehabilitation, new construction of affordable rental housing, gap financing loans. Item H, issuance of industrial development revenue bonds series 2026, Senior Dreams Foundation Endeavor Project by the Industrial Development Authority of the City of Tucson, Arizona.

May I have a motion, please? Your honor, I move that we pass adopt all the uh items on the consent agenda. There's a motion and a second. Any further discussion on the consent agenda? Hearing none, we do need to go to roll call. Council member Cunningham. Hi, Council Lee. I council member Schubert. I council member Dah I. Council member Morahas I. Vice Mayor Santos, Mayor

I. Uh, the items on the consent agenda are approved by a vote of 70. All righty. Item eight. Item eight, resoning, city manager report TP& 1025-000019, Murdoch, East Rosewood Street, SR2R1, W 2. City manager's communication number 76 dated March 17th is received into and made part of the record. This is a request to reszone approximately 4.8 acres located at 9220 East Rosewood Street from SR to R1 for the development of 25 lot resident residential subdivision. The subject parcel is located at 1600 ft west of Harrison Road and 1300 ft south of Speedway Boulevard. Rosewood Street is a local street per the major streets and routes plan. The zoning examiner recommends authorization of zoning subject to certain conditions. Is the applicant or representative the applicant present?

Good evening, Madame Mayor, Vice Mayor Santa Cruz, and members of the council. Uh, I'm Brian Underwood with the planning center to East Congress and um we are in agreement with the conditions. I'm here to answer any questions you may have and I'd also like to thank council member Cunningham and the war I staff uh for getting involved in the process and and helping be a resource for the neighborhood because as you heard from Mr. Tolas uh there there was a lot of interest in this project. So, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Underwood. Just want to make sure that we have for the record um is are you as a representative of the applicant agreeable uh to the proposed requirements? Yes, Madame Mayor.

Thank you so much. What is the council's pleasure on this item? Council member Cunningham. Your honor, the developer agreed to reduce some houses. We're not going second story. Um this was done even even with the new middle housing provision. So it it it was a really good balance with the neighborhood. It's a good infill project. It results in some impact fees. I'm proud to vote for it. So, I move we pass and adopt uh item. I move we pass and adopt the item. Second.

There is a motion and a second. Um if there are no further discussions, um all those in favor of the motion, please signify by saying I. I.

Any against? Motion carries. All righty. Uh, item nine, reszoning ordinance adoption TP NT0323-000018, TEP Veil substation, S Rita Road, RH2I2. City manager communication number 68 dated March 17th is received into and made part of the record. This is a request by the Tucson Electric Power Company on behalf of the property owner, Unisource Energy Corporation, to reszone 125 acres of of a 219 acre parcel from RH Rural Homestead Residential to I1 Light Industrial for the expansion of the existing Tucson Electric Power Veil, 345 kilovolt, and 138 uh kilovolt substations. The city manager and zoning examiner recommend approval of the resoning request. Is the applicant or representative of the applicant present? I do not see the applicant or representative the applicant. Um, Miss Clerk, I don't know if if we have to ask the question about agreement to the proposed requirements,

Mr. Attorney. Thanks, Mayor. Um, so I think the options are you can continue it to sponte on your own uh motion or uh we can give the applicant a few moments to respond. Okay. I don't know if the applicant is here. Um, should we continue? Yeah. Yeah. I would I would suggest uh Mr. Attorney that we continue this item. Okay. That would be appropriate, your honor.

Okay. So, we're going to continue item nine, Miss Clerk, for just know for the record. And then we're moving on to item 10. Uh would you like to can can we postpone to a date certain to the next to the next meeting would be appropriate. All righty. So let's put postpone to April 7th.

Okay. Great. Uh item 10, notice of intent initiation of environmental services rate revision process and proposal of fiscal year 2023 through fiscal year 2030. ES rate schedule. City managers communication number 81 dated March 17th is received into and made part of the record. Miss Clerk, you are requested to read resolution 2489 by number and title only. Resolution number 24089 relating to environmental services approving the publication of a notice of intent to increase fiscal year 2027 through fiscal year 2030 environmental service rates and fees and scheduling a public hearing and declaring an emergency.

What is the council's pleasure? Madame Mayor, I move to pass and adopt resolution 24089. Second. There's a motion in a second. Any further discussion on this motion? Hearing none, let's go to roll call. Council member D. I. Council member I. Council member Barahus. I. Council member Schubert. I. Councilwoman Lee. I. Vice Mayor Santa Cruz. I. Mayor Romero. I. You're on. Resolution 24089 passes by a vote of 70. Council member Cunningham.

Your honor, just really quick on this one specifically. Um, one, I I I I I thought the director did a really good job with this presentation this afternoon, but the other thing is is that I've gotten so many compliments this week about some of our environmental services staff and and I think that reputation is why we're not having a lot of community feedback here. And I thought I'd mention that. All righty. Thank you, council member. Um, item 11. Item 11, notice of intent, initiation of rate and fee revision process, proposal of rates and fees charged by the Department of Transportation and Mobility. I move to pass and adopt resolution 24085. Sir, I need to read the

I need to read the title. Oh, sorry. City Manager's communication number 77 dated March 17th is received into and made part of the record. Miss Clerk, you are requested to read resolution 24085 by number and title only. Resolution number 24085 relating to transportation adopting the notice of intent to increase and revise the Department of Transportation and Mobility's fees directing staff regarding notice to the public of proposed fees revisions and additions scheduling a public hearing and declaring an emergency. What is the council's pleasure? I move to pass and adopt resolution 24085. Second. There's a motion in a second. Any further discussion? Seeing none, let's go to roll call. Council member Barahus.

I. Council member Cunningham. Hi. Councilwoman Lee. I. Council member Schubert. I. Council member Dah. I. Vice Mayor Santa Cruz. I. Mayor Romero. I. Resolution 24085 passes by a vote of 70. Item 12.

Item 12, notice of intent, initiation of planning and development services fee revision process and fee proposal for fees charged by the planning and development services department, including amendments to chapter 16 and chapter 26. City manager communication number 82 dated March 17th is received into and made part of the record. Miss Clerk, you are requested to read resolution 2490 by number and title only. Resolution number 24090 relating to planning and development services approving the publication of notice of intent to increase rates and fees scheduling a public hearing amending Tucson code chapter 16 and chapter 26 to remove fees and declaring an emergency. What is the council's pleasure? Hi Mayor, I move to pass and adopt resolution 2490.

There's a motion in a second. Any further discussion on this item? Seeing none, uh let's go to roll call. Vice Mayor Santa Cruz. I council member Cunningham. Council member Dah. I councilwoman Lee. Hi. Council member Barahas. Hi. Council member Schubert. I. Mayor Romero. I. Resolution 2490 passes by a vote of 70. Item 13. Item 13, notice of intent initiation of water rate revision process and proposal of fiscal year 2027 through fiscal year 30. City. Oh,

water rate and fee schedules. Now I was the one that jumped in. Uh, city manager's communication number 79 dated March 17th is received into make part of the record. Miss Clerk, you are requested to read resolution 24087 by number and title only. Resolution number 24087 relating to water, approving the publication of a notice of intention to increase water rates and fees for fiscal year 2027 through 2030, scheduling a public hearing and declaring an emergency. What is the council's pleasure? I move to pass and adopt resolution 24087. Second. There's a motion in a second. Any further discussion? Seeing none, let's go to roll call.

Council member Schubert. I. Council member Cunningham. Hi. Councilwoman Lee. I. Council member Dah. I. Council member Barahas. I. Vice Mayor Santa. I. Mayor Romero. I. Resolution 24087 passes by a vote of 70. Item 14, adjournment. Council will stand adjourned. The next regularly scheduled meeting will be on Tuesday, April 7th, 2026 at or after 5:30 p.m. Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Hey. Hey. Hey.