Choose your own (reporting) adventure

Finding the best way to report on a public meeting is such an interesting conundrum.

On the one hand, Tuesday’s meeting of the Pima County Board of Supervisors was where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, for policies that affect the lives of roughly a million people.

On the other hand, public meetings can be disjointed affairs involving dozens of unrelated topics that aren’t organized in a way that immediately makes sense to the average reader.

That leaves reporters with a tough task, which I’m going to walk you through as we wrap up our week without Joe doing the actual local government reporting you’ve come to expect from the Tucson Agenda.

Let’s go through some of the options, shall we?

One way to write up a public meeting is to look for the topic that got the most discussion. After all, if the county supervisors spent so much time on it, then it must have at least some news value.

If we took that route, today’s newsletter would be all about the 45-minute executive session that was held prior to the supervisors’ regular meeting.

But we’d be stymied there because county officials took a page from filmmaker J.J. Abrams and used the “mystery box” technique.

Like I noted on Tuesday when I went through the meeting agenda line by line, county officials didn’t explain what the discussion was about, other than it had to do with changes to federal grants proposed by the Office of Management and Budget on May 29.

We can connect the dots to the Trump administration wanting to control science research and banning DEI, but it’s kind of guesswork and the confidentiality rules around executive sessions might make officials wary of talking about it.

Still, a reporter could hang a story on the fact that the supervisors ended up voting to join a lawsuit to block those changes (with Republican Supervisor Steve Christy casting the lone nay vote).

Another route a reporter could take would be to find the politically juiciest item and write it up as a “talker,” or, as a former editor at the Arizona Daily Star used to put it, a “Hey, Martha.”

That’s the route the Star’s Hannah Cree took with the discussion of a $122,000 grant for the Southern Arizona Education Council. She wrote a solid story about the controversy surrounding the contract and the council’s director, Rocque Perez.

The scuttlebutt on this one, as Cree noted, is the controversy may have been ginned up by allies of Democratic Rep. Alma Hernandez, who beat Perez in a nasty Democratic primary for the state Senate seat in Legislative District 20.

Perez tried to defend himself at the call to the public, saying the accusations against him were “political and personal,” rather than grounded in what the education council actually does. He got a little support from a former student, but he also got dragged by several speakers, including a local rabbi.

And, in this case, a reporter could lean on a clear connection between the scuttlebutt and the actual choice the supervisors had to make.

When Supervisor Rex Scott explained why he brought up the contract, he directly referenced the Hernandez v. Perez dispute, saying he wasn’t trying to stir up controversy, but as a former educator, he was concerned about the council’s activities over the past year.

The supervisors went on to approve the contract, but they added some accountability measures to it, like getting reports from the council before releasing any more county money.

Another route a reporter could take would be to focus on the most expensive item on the agenda. More public dollars means more public interest, right?

That would have been a $35 million contract for a road project, but the only discussion that item got was a one-liner from Supervisor Matt Heinz, and that came during the discussion of the education council, when he said, “later on in this agenda, we’re going to approve $35 million for asphalt, by the way.”

When it came time to actually vote on the $35 million contract, the discussion dealt with how to phrase motions to bundle together agenda items and pass them en masse. (Supervisor Andrés Cano did ask for staff to explain how many jobs each contract was expected to generate.)

A reporter could investigate the merit of that $35 million contract, but it would require days of phone calls and parsing procurement documents, at the cost of every other story they could write during that time.

And it might turn out to be just a run-of-the-mill contract. (Or perhaps they could stumble upon the scandal of a lifetime!)

What about searching for the issues that split Democrats and Republicans? That kind of conflict is fertile ground for news stories.

The best example from Tuesday’s meeting was the memorandum of understanding between Pima County and several other entities, including the University of Arizona, to build a relationship with a university in Taiwan that specializes in semiconductors.

Christy drew on old-school conservative principles when he objected to the county providing the Roy Place building for the program, instead of putting it in a tech park. He said the building in downtown Tucson is prime real estate, and county taxpayers could make real money if the county leased or sold it.

Under the agreement that the supervisors ended up approving, the county is going to get $100 a year from the lease.

This wouldn’t be a bad route for a reporter to pick. Local governments have all sorts of weird financial arrangements for businesses and nonprofits they want to encourage to put down roots. There’s some good accountability reporting to be done there.

Plus, the discussion was pretty interesting. For example, Heinz said it would be a sign of respect to their Taiwanese counterparts to put the program in a prominent location, like downtown and across the street from the seat of government.

A reporter could always turn their attention to the characters at the dias themselves. They are public servants who wield a lot of power, after all.

The question of the moment is who will replace County Administrator Jan Lesher, who’s retiring in a few months after about five years in charge.

It’d be worthwhile to craft a story explaining how Lesher was the deputy of former Administrator Chuck Huckelberry, who held that position for nearly three decades.

That’s nearing “dynasty” levels.

Then, a reporter could explain the wide-ranging power of the position and move into the procedure for replacing a county administrator, including the update on the hiring process Allen gave at the meeting.

The “news hook” on that is that the recruiter hired by the county is still working on finding candidates. The supervisors will have an executive session on September 22 to talk about the semifinalists, then slowly work their way toward announcing finalists on October 14. They expect to make a final decision in late October.

Finally, a reporter could just write up whatever they find most interesting. That’s usually a good way to get the reader interested.

In my case, I was intrigued to hear Lesher talk about the “agenda committee” that puts together the meeting agendas. I’d like to be a fly on that wall — as regular readers know, I have lots of thoughts about how to improve government meeting agendas.

I’m also interested in what Linda Bixby has to say about the Taiwan program. She’s in charge of that type of thing at the UA. Plus, she spoke at call to the public, so that means a reporter has a good chance of convincing her to do an interview.

But more than anything, I’m stuck on that contract dispute with Achen-Gardner Construction. The county rejected the company’s bid and then reversed course. I don’t know how those disputes work, or how often county officials backtrack, but I’m curious to find out.