For a few minutes during Tuesday night’s Tucson City Council meeting, a woman could be heard booing from the cheap seats, invisible on the city’s live YouTube feed.
While not completely out of the ordinary as government meetings go, the booing served as a constant din as the council discussed a new contract for Tucson City Manager Tim Thomure.
A majority of the council eventually signed off on a roughly $50,000 annual raise for the city’s top bureaucrat in the final action on the council’s agenda.
With the new contract, Thomure will make $375,000 annually, but the vote to extend his contract was far from unanimous.
Tucson City Manager Tim Thomure earns more than 3x what the mayor does.
Council member Paul Cunningham balked at the roughly 17% salary increase for Thomure, who first assumed the position in 2024 after previously serving the city as a deputy city manager, and before that, the director of Tucson Water.
“First of all, I want to just say that it’s important we pay people what they’re worth,” Cunningham said. “With all respect to my colleagues, it’s just a little too much at once for me.”
Council member Miranda Schubert also could not back the pay increase after months of being told by city administration that Tucson was essentially broke.
“We’ve been told repeatedly, including by our city manager and chief financial officer, that lean budget years are ahead,” Schubert told her colleagues.
Maybe sensing she needed to convince her colleagues that the pay increase was simply too much given the difficult financial decisions made by the council earlier this year, Schubert recited from a memo written by Thomure’s own staff months ago.
“Given the tight revenue picture, staff do not expect to have funds available beyond what is needed for the base budget, current program commitments and the investment plan. Departments have been asked to limit supplemental requests to essential unmet needs as we work through anticipated funding challenges,” Schubert said, reading from a February memo written by Assistant City Manager Anna Rosenberry.
This is Tucson City Hall, where you go to complain to your government.
The context is important, as the council had just kicked off a discussion on building the FY27 budget, with officials projecting a $40 million budget shortfall. This was the same discussion in which Thomure referenced Tolkien to describe the journey ahead of them.1
“We’ve raised recreation fees and parking rates this year. We have slowed and frozen hiring. We have constrained departmental spending and reduced programs. We have asked our employees, departments and residents alike to tighten their belts to chip in,” Schubert said, arguing against the salary bump.
Mayor Regina Romero pushed back on her colleagues’ criticism of Thomure’s new contract, saying they had time to bring up their concerns before the Tuesday night meeting.
“We had more than a week of this issue being a part of the agenda and there was no communication from anyone to try to delay this item to try and get a different contract in front of us,” Romero said.
She argued that the city manager job requires Thomure to always be available.
“This is not a Monday through Friday, 8 through 5 (job). This is 24/7/365,” Romero said.
We’ll note that his contract includes several weeks of vacation, and he has two deputy city managers — not to mention department heads like the police chief and city attorney — to keep city hall standing while he’s away.
But we get her point.
One thing we’d like to point out is several members of the council used nearly identical language about the pressures of managing the nation’s 34th-largest city. Schubert, Romero and Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz all specifically mentioned its 5,000 employees and a $2.4 billion annual budget.
Quietly, some council insiders are concerned that the comparable salaries used as a metric for Thomure’s new contract were not publicly disclosed before the meeting.
Comparing what other high-level executives are making in the region is par for the course in these types of negotiations, but locals were left in the dark about whether it was an apples-to-apples comparison.
To be clear, there were two camps opposed to his new contract — those on the council who balked at the increase but publicly praised Thomure, and those in the audience who didn’t think he deserved a raise at all.
The skepticism in the audience likely ties back to Project Blue, for which Thomure is still seen as having been a major advocate before the council unanimously rejected the proposal.
Remember those hearings? Tim Thomure has a tough job.
Vivek Bharathan, a member of the No Desert Data Center Coalition, said during the call to the public that Thomure failed to answer basic questions about Project Blue during a public meeting last year.
He said Thomure was unable to explain how the data center developer could be held accountable if it violated its agreement with the city.
“During the public process for Project Blue, the city manager showed up to those public meetings — which were essentially propaganda sessions for the data center — and in a condescending and arrogant way,” Bharathan said.
This largely echoes some of the feedback we heard after the public meeting in Vail about the proposed data center.
Regardless of his performance at the meeting, Thomure wasn’t going rogue — he represented the city with the backing of the Tucson City Council.
This isn’t the last salary discussion for council members. They are expected to discuss a new contract with the city attorney in the coming weeks.
The choice is yours! The Pima County Recorder’s Office mailed out 477,000 ballots yesterday, writes Tucson Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel. Voters are being asked to mail their ballot back by no later than October 27, or bring it to a voting center by Election Day.
Straight to jail: A Tucson-based YouTuber will spend a total of three years in prison after a Pima County Superior Court judge found he violated his probation by repeatedly harassing the wife of a City of Tucson prosecutor, writes Republic’s Taylor Seely. Lane Myers pleaded guilty to harassing and stalking the wife of a city prosecutor who was involved in prosecuting him for other crimes in 2024. Myers is appealing, and vowed he would continue to speak out about the case from prison.
An example to follow? The Las Vegas Valley Water District is pursuing a rule change that would outlaw the irrigation of decorative grass on commercial properties beginning in 2027, with escalating fines that could exceed $5,100 per violation. The changes, according to Las Vegas-based Fox5, follow broader efforts in Nevada to absorb Colorado River cuts, and codify a state law passed in 2021 banning the use of the river’s water to irrigate “non-functional turf.”
“If you want to think about what is non-functional turf, if the only person walking on it is the landscaper, if it’s not a place that you would let your kids play frisbee or kick a soccer ball back and forth, that’s what non-functional turf is,” a water district staffer told Fox5.
The grass feels funny: Tucson is also trying to figure out what to do with its “non-functional turf,” though our officials haven’t been quite so forceful as their counterparts in the City of Second Chances. Through its rebate program, as we reported this week, Tucson has retired 165,000 square feet of turf in city parks and an additional 381,000 square feet on commercial and multifamily residential land.
Get away from the Greek: The University of Arizona has suspended all fraternity activities amid misconduct allegations involving almost half of 21 chapters on campus, per the Daily Star’s Prerana Sannappanavar. The misconduct allegations run the gamut from forced consumption of drugs and alcohol to forced consumption of live goldfish and much more. Dean of Students Chrissy Lieberman said that the number of cases is overwhelming the investigative capacities of the Dean of Students Office.
Inside the Issues is a nonpartisan series from the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission about the issues shaping Arizona’s future — the ones that are complex, consequential, and easy to overlook.
Each episode brings voters into the conversation with experts, public officials, and community leaders who explain what’s actually at stake and what decisions are ahead. No pundits, no party line — just the context you need to walk into the voting booth informed instead of guessing.
We’re only laughing so we don’t cry.
Daniel Contreras, the aptly red-headed owner of Tucson’s award-winning El Güero Canelo Sonoran hot dog restaurants, is putting his business up for sale, according to the Arizona Daily Star.
The three El Güero Canelo locations — one on the north side, one on the east side and its south side location — are for sale through commercial brokerage Kidder Mathews, per the Star’s Gabriela Rico. An offering memorandum reviewed by the Star doesn’t list a price.
Contreras began his culinary career as a boy making tortillas in Sonora, then climbed the back-of-house ranks of Tucson hotels and restaurants and opened his first cart in 1993. Since then, he’s grown the business and notched a number of national plaudits, including a James Beard Award in 2018.
The 65-year-old told the Star that he is retiring, and he wants to pass on the “blessings” of the business to a new owner.
Any takers?
1 That was also the meeting where we learned Tucsonans are not smoking as much pot as city officials had predicted, which hurts the city’s bottom line. Do your part, people!