Better know Ward 3
Good parts, bad parts … Someone is getting sued … And this hour has 22 minutes.
Welcome to Better Know Your District: Ward 3, Tucson’s very own microcosm of civic chaos, policy clashes and the occasional drone used to catch street racers.
It's one of three wards in the city with an election this year, as Democrat Kevin Dahl squares off against Tucson Unified School District board member Sadie Shaw in next week's Democratic primary.
Ward 3 stretches from the foothills down to Speedway Boulevard, mostly tucked between I-10 and Alvernon. It’s a Democratic stronghold, home to a diverse mix of neighborhoods — think Jefferson Park, Sugar Hill, Campus Farm — plus areas struggling with crime like the Oracle Corridor.
As rents climb, older parts of the ward are feeling the pressure. Housing affordability is a constant concern, and homelessness has become a visible and growing issue in many neighborhoods.
The area is peppered with mom-and-pop shops and strip malls, but it’s also anchored by bigger business districts — including the Tucson Mall, new development along the edge of the University of Arizona campus, and soon, the new Casino Del Sol Grant Road, slated to open late next year.
Big initiatives, Big issues
The city’s “Thrive in the ’05” initiative — named after the 85705 ZIP code — has spent years trying to revitalize struggling neighborhoods in the ward, focusing on housing, education, and economic development.
Crime remains a persistent issue, especially in parts of the ward now included in Tucson’s Violence Interruption and Vitalization Action (VIVA) program, which is designed to reduce gun violence. In 2024, VIVA expanded into Ward 3 with the Fort Lowell Corridor, a unique stretch between Oracle and Mountain that covers multiple blocks rather than a single intersection.
According to Tucson’s 2020 “Poverty and Urban Stress” study, roughly 28% of Ward 3 residents live below the federal poverty line — nearly double the national average at the time. The median household income in the ward was just $31,000, compared to a citywide average of $42,000.
Politically, Ward 3 is deep blue: 45% of voters are registered Democrats, 28% are independents, and only 17% are Republicans.
Before Dahl took office in 2021, the seat was held by Democrats Paul Durham and Karin Uhlich.
Meet the candidates
A retired environmentalist married to a schoolteacher, Dahl has become one of the most outspoken voices on the Council in recent months.
He voted against criminalizing sleeping in washes, loudly opposed Project Blue early on, and even took a jab at the Trump administration when they asked federal employees to email lists of their weekly accomplishments — he encouraged Tucsonans to send their shopping lists instead.
During his first term, Dahl helped create the Friends of Ward 3 nonprofit, pushed to turn an empty firehouse into a homeless shelter, and supported sanctioned encampments as part of the city’s strategy for addressing homelessness.
Running against him in the Democratic primary is Sadie Shaw, a Tucson Unified School District board member, activist, and Sugar Hill resident. Shaw opposes Project Blue and said she would’ve voted no on the washes ban, calling it inhumane.
Her priorities include converting surplus city property into sanctioned campsites, expanding tenant protections, beefing up rental and utility assistance, and reassessing the police department’s budget to emphasize harm reduction over criminalization.
And then there were three
Whoever wins the Democratic primary will face Republican Janet “JL” Wittenbraker in the November general election.
Wittenbraker is making her third run for public office in as many years — having previously campaigned for Tucson mayor in 2023 and a seat on the Pima County Board of Supervisors in 2024.
We’ll cover her more closely after the primary, but so far, she’s positioned herself as a critic of nearly everything the current all-Democratic City Council has done.
Her odds are further complicated by Tucson’s charter-mandated election system, which lets all city voters — not just those in Ward 3 — vote in council races during the general election.
The Civic Rorschach Test
Ward 3 is Tucson’s political inkblot test: everyone sees something different.
To Dahl, it’s a district ready for continued progress and smart environmental policy.
To Shaw, it’s a community in need of compassion, empowerment, and bold structural change.
To Wittenbraker, it’s a warning sign about what happens when one party holds the reins for too long.
But to voters, it’s a reminder that local politics isn’t about red or blue — it’s about office hours, camping bans and who shows up to fix the potholes.
We’ve been doing exactly what you’d expect behind the scenes with Project Blue: requesting public records that offer more detail on the proposed massive data center than the developers want out there.
Last week, we — along with several other news organizations and concerned residents — received a letter from Pima County explaining that we would not be receiving many of the records we seek.
Allow us to walk through parts of that letter and explain three reasons why getting answers beyond what’s in the County’s Project Blue FAQ is so maddeningly difficult.
Reason 1: The NDA
“The NDA requires the County to notify the NDA party of its intent to release records, and the NDA party must then ‘promptly’ decide whether to obtain an order from the Pima County Superior Court to prevent the release of records.”
So the legal threshold of not releasing documents because it is in “the best interests of the county” will likely be argued1 by the group that signed the NDA: massive global conglomerate Amazon Web Services. If this doesn’t make the case for revamping the County’s NDA policy, we’re not sure what will.
Reason 2: The delays
“There may be delays beyond the usual redaction time for records that would trigger the need for the County to notify the NDA party if the NDA party seeks to enjoin the County from releasing records.”
The NDA party… or rather, Amazon… seems to be poised to threaten legal action if the County tries to release any records that offer details about Project Blue. But a Superior Court Judge will ultimately decide whether to release the records. So we’ll have to wait until a judge decides before we either get our records or get a letter telling us that it isn’t going to happen.
Reason 3: The lawyers
“The County also is keen not to release any records covered under the attorney-client privilege exemption.”
Such a release of confidential information would almost certainly have legal repercussions, and it’s unclear whether our request (or someone else’s) hit a nerve. A number of local news outlets, including the Agenda, are willing to go to court as well.
Help us fight bureaucratic secrecy by becoming a paid subscriber today.
Bonkers demands: The Trump administration’s mass deportation program is pushing the absurdity meter to a breaking point, especially while the administration cuts off funding for legal-aid services for immigrant children. A pair of stories from the Arizona Daily Star’s Emily Bregel and the Arizona Republic’s Nicol Leon bring the absurdity to the forefront. An immigration judge in Tucson admonished a 14-year-old girl from Guatemala for not hiring a lawyer, saying “You've already had several months to find an attorney.” And when a 16-year-old boy from Guatemala showed up without a lawyer, a judge told him "You can't keep coming back to court without having made some effort to help yourself.” What does all this look like? Check out how Leon set the scene at a court hearing in Phoenix:
“Seven siblings, ages 2 to 12, file into the room on a Monday afternoon in June, whispering among themselves, dressed as if for church. The girls are in pretty dresses, pink and white bows in their hair; the boys in button-down shirts, hair neatly combed. Behind them, the youngest of the siblings, a 2-year-old toddler, carried by an adult, began to cry, as the others slid on to the wooden benches, which resembled pews. But this was no church. It was Courtroom 4 inside the Phoenix Immigration Courts in downtown Phoenix,” Leon wrote.
Please don’t go: South Tucson officials are considering lowering the city’s sales tax rate to keep Food City from moving out, the Star’s Gabriela Rico reports. It’s the only big grocery store in the city and the owners announced they’re closing the location on South Sixth Avenue on October 3. Meanwhile, South Tucson voters are wading through misleading campaign flyers as a recall election for three city council members approaches, courtesy of former Mayor Paul Diaz, the Arizona Luminaria’s Carolina Cuellar reports.
Making the call (or not): The Pima County Sheriff’s Department got hit with a lawsuit from the ACLU seeking records detailing when the department calls federal immigration officials during traffic stops, KJZZ’s Kathy Ritchie reports. Sheriff Chris Nanos says his department doesn’t make those kinds of calls to immigration officials.
Any which way but loose: Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum is confident she’ll reach an agreement with the Trump administration before the 30% tariffs on Mexican goods take effect on August 1, KJZZ’s Nina Kravinsky reports. A separate set of tariffs already is in effect on the tomato industry, which is now dealing with a 17% tariff on tomatoes grown in Mexico and imported through places like Nogales. The Associated Press details how those tariffs are hitting a tomato farm in Queretaro, Mexico.
Click that button before the Trump administration puts a tariff on the news.
Making history: Downtown Tucson has four new murals to commemorate the city’s upcoming 250th birthday, the Star’s Sierra Blaser reports. The artists were given near-total freedom to make the murals. Click for the backstory on the murals, stay for Star photographer Kelly Presnell’s dynamite pics of the murals and the people who can’t get enough of them.
The last meeting was a big hit!: Citing a lot of community interest, the City of Tucson has scheduled two more public meetings about Project Blue ahead of next week’s Tucson City Council study session. Representatives from Tucson Electric Power, the City of Tucson and Beale Infrastructure will be on hand to answer questions. The first will be an online-only meeting on Thursday at 5 p.m. and the second will be held next Monday at the Tucson Community Center at 5 p.m.
We were tempted to reference the Canadian television classic "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" when talking about yesterday’s Pima County Board of Supervisors meeting.
But it only lasted 21 minutes.
The special meeting — certifying election results from the recent Congressional District 7 special election primary — only lasted twice as long as it probably should.
A number of technical issues prevented two Supervisors from joining on time and led to several officials either being muted or their cameras not working.
The first ten minutes were particularly awkward.
We’d link to it to but the county replaced it yesterday afternoon with an edited, 10-minute version.
#ReleaseTheOriginalCut
Clarification: We’ve updated this section to note that a Superior Court judge will ultimately decide whether records will be released if Amazon’s lawyers object to the County releasing the records.
Also, there is a press conference/rally at Ciscomani’s Tucson office tomorrow from 8-10 a.m. It’s billed as a celebration of Medicaid’s 60th anniversary, but I hope people show up in numbers demanding an in-person public forum during the August recess (not holding my breath)
When the Food City closed in Douglas...it was a crushing blow. The produce at Wally World is inedible.