When it comes to the City of Tucson’s budget, there are three discussions happening simultaneously.
Conversations about short-term, long-term and something in between — maybe the next two years of revenues and expenses — are easy to conflate and hard to track as these discussions crop up at every City Council meeting.
And between RTA Next and the city’s almost antagonistic relationship with the state and federal government about how tax revenues should be spent, financial forecasting is next to impossible.
The news isn’t good. On paper, the budget hole for next year could be $67.5 million — a large increase over the $40 million figure that has been publicly touted for the last few months. Officials aren’t committing to that figure publicly, noting we still really only have a partial snapshot of how much money the city will take in this year when it comes to various revenue sources.
For example, it will be a solid month before we know how much the City of Tucson will collect in various revenue streams tied to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show.
It’s estimated to be worth as much as $11 million to the local economy — although we think this number is inflated — but city officials have previously hinted that a decline of international travel to Tucson is already hurting the local tax base.
While still preliminary, that big red circle is the biggest sign that the Tucson City Council is bracing for more than a $40 million hole in their budget next year.
For those that don’t have to get into the weeds of the city budget, we’re lumping the issues into the things the council is talking about privately, publicly, and things that are — at least for now — still off-limits.
For example, it has been slightly more than a decade since Tucson voters overwhelmingly went to the polls to turn the red-light cameras off for good as part of Proposition 201. Red-light cameras were, at the time, as unpopular as Flock cameras and Amazon’s now-canceled plan to turn their Ring cameras into a crowd-sourcing tool to find lost dogs are now.
But lately, we've caught some stray public comments made at council meetings indicating support for asking voters to revive the traffic cameras. Yes, there is a financial component tied to bringing them back1 but there is also a concern about how deadly city streets have become since we turned them off.
It would take another referendum to bring them back — and there is a state law being floated to ban them statewide — but those dollars could be used to put more police officers on the street, including beefing up the team that is specifically designed to address traffic-related issues, including speeding.
But even if it happened, it could be years before a dime comes into city coffers.
We get that this is likely to be a vastly unpopular proposal — but it is clear that the City of Tucson would adopt a policy that the data collected would not be shared with outside agencies.
Short-term fixes
Officials have already taken some steps to address the looming financial shortfall, including laying off some temporary staff in the city’s Parks Department, but the council was asked last week to sign off on another $10 million in cuts.
The council was given two options last week to help cut roughly $9 million out of the current budget.
The council reduced the amount it had been sending to the state and city-run retirement systems, as it has been overpaying for the last few years to address a long-term projected shortfall in contributions. The move will save the city $7.6 million this year.
The city has found some common ground with the Pima County Attorney’s Office, allowing it to at least delay plans for the city to implement prosecutions of low-level drug possession offenses. The city believes it can shave off another $1.5 million in expenses this year if it doesn’t spin up that court this year.
Then there’s the RTA Next
With the possibility that Propositions 418 and 419 — also known as RTA Next — may not pass next month, the council is still talking about the future of fare-free transit.
Free buses could be on the chopping block if the voters reject RTA Next and the city loses roughly $35 million in dedicated transit funding annually.
Councilwoman Miranda Schubert again said she won’t support any substantive changes to the transit system until there is a full economic study on the impacts of fare-free transit, both positive and negative.
“So just want to plant the flag again for our transit system as we're going into these difficult budget conversations with a very real deficit, but just really needing that comprehensive analysis of anything vital to the community that we might be looking at cutting,” Schubert said.
That study is expected by no later than April 1.
Schubert — who has come out against RTA One — briefly touched on what she sees as a disconnect between the current proposal and what midtown constituents are telling her.
“A solution that I've been hearing more and more about from constituents has been coming up with our own proposal, and that could involve other regional partners who want to jump in with us, but something that we could control ourselves and that would reflect what voters would actually want to support,” Schubert said.
Her comments drew a rebuke from Mayor Regina Romero last week.
“The only problem with that is that it really is not based on the reality of the loss of $30 million immediately to the system,” Romero said. “How can we cover a $30 million hole immediately to the transit budget? I think that's an answer we have to find. And elections cost money. And so where will we find the $800,000 to million dollars that we need to put it on the ballot when we have a $67 million budget deficit?
Sacred cows
There are a handful of items that are simply political non-starters.
For example, no one is talking about a hiring freeze for first responders. Or for that matter, tightening down on overtime at a time when the departments are still below approved staffing levels.
City officials work directly with people experiencing homelessness to help ease emergency systems by offering resources to individuals through the Safe City Initiative.
The Tucson Safe City Initiative, which Romero launched in late 2025, is a comprehensive program focused on reducing crime, addressing substance abuse, and improving mental health services. While still in its infancy, this multi-agency program is expected to move forward and survive any potential budget cuts to cooperating agencies.
In fact, several councilmembers want to push to expand court resources to hold virtual court beyond the two hours a day it currently operates.
While we continue to expect discussions about the budget at every Council meeting between now and late June, the next big step forward will be in April when a complete proposal is made public.
Catch Joe talking about the RTA Next and the city budget in today’s episode of AZPM’s The Press Room.
It’s official: ICE is setting up an immigration detention center in the former state prison in Marana, per an 86-page policy paper on the future of the facility posted on a federal procurement website. The paper confirms widespread speculation about what would happen to the facility since Arizona officials sold it to Utah-based Management & Training Corporation last summer for $15 million. Marana officials told us they are aware of the posting and they’re expecting to meet with MTC officials soon.
Fewer and fewer ways to protest: Arizona House Republicans approved a bill this week aimed at teachers who called in sick for a national protest after federal agents shot and killed two people in Minneapolis, per Capitol scribe Howie Fischer. Tucson Unified School District ended up closing 22 schools when hundreds of teachers said they weren’t showing up to work that day. Republican Rep. Matt Gress said HB2313 would clarify the definition of “coordinated work stoppages,” which technically don’t qualify as a strike. Under his bill, teachers would be fired and forfeit any chance of being rehired at public schools.
Unending media circus: Reporters and social media streamers have clogged Nancy Guthrie’s neighborhood to the point that Pima County officials just widened the no-parking zone around her house, per the Associated Press. One neighbor said she keeps her doors closed to avoid hearing TV newscasters, and she won’t sit in her backyard because of all the drones flying overhead.
Support a local news outlet that avoids media circuses. Click this button and we’ll keep covering the city council instead.
Don’t want to hear it: Teachers at two charter schools in Tucson, City High and Paulo Freire Freedom School, are trying to form a union and they say the governing board won’t let them speak at meetings, the Arizona Luminaria’s Shannon Conner reports. Instead, the board hired a law firm that specializes in thwarting unions.
Naked confusion: Some local voters aren’t happy with the single-envelope ballots being used for the RTA Next election, KGUN’s Alex Dowd reports. They’re worried about exposing personal information, like their signature, on the outside of the envelope. Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly says the single-envelope system cuts down on “naked ballots,” when voters mistakenly return ballots without any identifying information on them, which happened more than 700 times in the last election.
We spotted our first statewide candidate using the deeply unpopular Project Blue data centers to gin up votes in the 2026 election.
Democrat Clara Pratte, who is running for a seat on the Arizona Corporation Commission, started texting Tucsonans this week to ask them to to sign her petition to get on the ballot.
Pratte isn’t a local, so props for someone from Flagstaff knowing Tucson well enough to know this is one Corporation Commission issue locals actually care about.
1 Because of the complicated nature of how revenue from tickets goes to different agencies, the city did not get a big chunk of the red-light camera money the last time around.