A Republican vision for Tucson
From delivering pizzas to serving constituents? … Faculty, students want PCC to fight … And the Department of Education needs a spellcheck.
As a student at the University of Arizona, Jay Tolkoff pursued an unusual path, double-majoring in music theory and composition and electrical engineering.
The Republican candidate for the midtown Ward 6 seat had been playing music professionally since he was 12 and had no intention of leaving the music industry.
An accident that damaged his right forearm ended those dreams, and Tolkoff returned to Tucson looking for a new job, as the ones he held before were too labor-intensive.
“I realized I wasn’t going to be the next John Lennon,” Tolkoff said.
Struggling and still pursuing his degree, Tolkoff took a job delivering pizzas before Domino’s was a household name.
Then, Domino’s franchise owner asked him to help open a second store. Then a third. Then a fourth.
By the time he left the company, he was the president of the company’s Domino’s franchises in Tucson.
There were other careers and passions along the way — including helping build up KXCI as an early board member — but these days, Tolkoff is focused on local politics.
He’s running for the Tucson City Council against Democrat Miranda Schubert in the November election.
“I want to see good, effective, and efficient governance. I want to see people being able to get value out of their tax dollars,” he said.
His platform includes a significant increase in the size of the Tucson Police Department, with a goal of reaching 1,200 patrol officers. Generally, this would mean hiring about 400 people, which Tolkoff says is in line with national standards for a city as large as Tucson.
“I’ve seen way, way too many organizations come to Tucson … and finding out that their people are happy living here. But they’re not happy with the roads. They’re not happy with what’s going on on every street corner, and what’s going on at every bus stop,” Tolkoff said.
Back-of-the-napkin math says hiring another 400 cops would cost the city about $57.2 million a year, not including equipment costs.
The city has a $2.4 billion annual budget, but roughly $750 million is its general fund that can be shifted from one program to another.
Tolkoff concedes that he doesn’t have a step-by-step plan to pay for the new officers.
A new Council, he argues, could reallocate the city budget to hire officers and expand road work through a mix of program cuts and asking the community to help pay for the increase — which he believes would pay dividends throughout the Tucson community.
While the current Council thinks Tucson is strapped for cash and that hiring another 400 officers would blow a hole in their already stretched budget, Tolkoff thinks they just don’t have their priorities straight.
“I don’t necessarily think that it’s a revenue shortage. I look at our budgets and I say, okay, it’s gone from $1.4 billion to $2.4 billion in five years,” he said.
Tolkoff, who has built commercial properties in Tucson for decades, also wonders whether the city is spending too much on developing properties.
He doesn’t object to building affordable housing but says the costs related to refurbishing the massive city-owned Tucson House complex and building the “Sugar Hill on Stone” affordable housing project are too high.
He noted Bruce Ash, a local property developer and former national committeeman for the Republican Party of Arizona, told him that he recently built a luxury apartment complex for much less per unit than what the city is expected to pay for affordable housing.
We can’t corroborate those numbers, but it shows that Tolkoff is deeply engaged in city policy debates.
Ballots for the City Council election are arriving in mailboxes this week.
We’ll profile Tolkoff’s opponent in the Ward 6 race, Democrat Miranda Schubert, in Tuesday’s Tucson Agenda. Stay tuned!
A large crowd of faculty, staff and former students spent Wednesday night pleading with Pima Community College’s Board of Governors to fight for the U.S. Department of Education grants.
As you may remember, the Trump administration abruptly cut $1.6 million in grants to the community college this summer, forcing the college to scramble to cover the costs of the Upward Bound program two days before it started.
On Wednesday, the locals turned out to tell the board how the Upward Bound program has helped low-income and first-generation high school students receive mentoring, counseling, college prep classes and financial aid guidance.
They want Pima Community College to join a lawsuit filed against the Department of Education for revoking various education grants — including Upward Bound.
The Upward Bound Coordinator on the Desert Vista Campus, Carlos Romero, noted that Upward Bound students had met with an astronaut, graduated from the program, and gone on to attend 28 separate colleges across the country.
Romero urged the board to fight for the next generation of Pima College students, noting that it’s not the first time out-of-town politicians have threatened successful local programs that helped empower low-income and Latino students: More than a decade ago, the state killed Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American Studies program.
“They are accusing a civil rights program of violating civil rights,” Romero told the Board, ending his comments by quoting Voltaire. “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
The board again met in executive session with its attorneys to discuss potential responses to the cut — the second such meeting in four weeks. At the same time, the college has started laying off staffers tied to the Upward Bound program.
A decision could come in the coming weeks, with options ranging from joining a lawsuit, sending a letter of support in the lawsuit or doing nothing at all.
In other education news, University of Arizona President Suresh Garimella sent a letter to the community saying they were ”thoroughly reviewing the compact to understand its full scope and implications.”
The letter comes a day after both the Tucson City Council and the UA Faculty Senate publicly opposed the compact sent by the Trump administration to the UA and eight other universities.
If you’re still not subscribed to our new weekly newsletters covering water, education and artificial intelligence, here’s what you’re missing.
Education Agenda
The 2026 primary election battle between Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne and State Treasurer Kimberly Yee, who wants Horne’s job, is already getting contentious. The two are trading barbs via letters and news releases in a political tit-for-tat that includes name-calling and accusations.
And a tiny rural district in Nadaburg, Arizona, is caught in the crossfire.
Nadaburg is facing what would otherwise be considered a good problem: It’s growing so fast that it needs more money to keep up with enrollment.
There’s a mechanism in state law to let them access additional funds.
Horne says the district is eligible. But Yee says he’s wrong, and she cuts the checks.
Elsewhere in the Education Agenda, intern Alysa draws on her years at Arizona State University — the spiritual home of Charlie Kirk’s campus debates — to write one of our most popular editions ever: Tumultuous times: A Kirk and Crow story.
A.I. Agenda
Artificial intelligence is good at a lot of things, but perhaps most of all, it’s a great yes-man.
There’s a name for this problem: AI sycophancy, and it’s leading AI models to flatter us over even our dumbest, most dangerous ideas.
And that constantly supportive voice can turn dark quickly when people struggling with a mental health crisis turn to AI for help. AI models have encouraged several young people to harm or kill themselves, and psychologists and Congress are taking note.
Also in the A.I. Agenda, check out the newest starlet in Hollywood: An AI-generated “actress” named Tilly Norwood.
She’s bad news for actors. But technically speaking, she may sidestep that strike-ending agreement with the actors’ guild that created the first-ever guardrails around AI actors.
Water Agenda
In Arizona, they say whiskey is for drinkin’, water is for fightin’.
And there’s a whole lot of fightin’ going on over Arizona’s water resources.
Fondomonte, the water-guzzling Saudi-owned alfalfa farm in northwestern Arizona, is fighting back against Attorney General Kris Mayes’ novel attempt to use public nuisance laws to stop them from pumping. The company has asked a judge to throw out Mayes’ lawsuit, arguing Mayes is inventing a “backdoor” way to exercise regulatory authority over groundwater pumping that she doesn’t possess.
Meanwhile, the “Upper Basin states” at the head of the Colorado River are fighting with Lower Basin states like Arizona over who should have first dibs on the dwindling river’s water supplies. For years, the feds have been playing referee and threatening to step in and settle the dispute in a way none of the states will likely be thrilled about. But as the deadline moves closer, it raises questions about their legal authority to do so.
Maybe the saying should be that water’s for suing.
And in today’s edition, we catch up with Kyle Roerink, the executive director of the Nevada-based Great Basin Water Network, about a new report on the “indisputable evidence of drier times ahead.”
Covering Tucson politics means we’ve spent more time staring at screens than at sunsets.
But you can still stay informed without missing golden hour.
Follow the Tucson Agenda on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
There’s just something passive-aggressive about pulling funding from a college in a letter that looks like it flunked Writing 101.
After reading the U.S. Department of Education’s letters announcing it was revoking TRIO grant funding from Pima Community College, we couldn’t help but wonder how many of these things they crank out in a day.
Probably a lot, considering it doesn’t appear they have time to run a spellcheck.
Today’s hard-to-spell word? “Critrion.”