Is one lawyer enough?
Call in a backup … We're gonna need a bigger venue … And the winner has 37 votes.
Imagine holding one of the highest elected offices in Pima County, overseeing a $1.7 billion budget and nearly 7,000 employees, but not being able to get your own attorney to back you on a key position.
That’s what’s playing out on the Pima County Board of Supervisors, where at least one supervisor is now looking to hire an outside attorney to represent the Board.
Supervisor Matt Heinz said he’s been frustrated for years by quiet but persistent conflicts between the Board and the County Attorney’s Office stemming from the fact that she represents a lot of different government agencies.
The latest example involves his role representing the Board on the Pima Association of Governments (PAG) and the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA).
When PAG’s attorney resigned, Heinz sought legal advice from the County Attorney’s Office about what could come next — including whether he could move to fire then-PAG Executive Director Farhad Moghimi.
County Attorney Laura Conover declined, saying her office couldn’t participate on internal matters involving another agency, even one closely tied to Pima County.
Heinz called the experience “frustrating” and said it wasn’t the first time the County Attorney’s Office had refused to help him.
Earlier this year, Heinz pushed for an investigation into the Pima County Sheriff’s Department after budget projections showed it would once again overspend by millions, even after receiving a funding increase last year.
The issue, he acknowledged, is that the County Attorney’s Office is obligated to represent both the Board and the Sheriff, who is also elected independently.
This type of conflict isn’t new.
Years ago, former Pima County Assessor Bill Staples clashed with the Board over how he valued property and equipment owned by Raytheon, one of the region’s biggest employers.
Staples ended up hiring his own attorney to continue a legal fight with the U.S. defense giant. Several supervisors sharply criticized the move.
The issue isn’t about loyalty, Heinz said.
It boils down to the County Attorney’s conflicting responsibilities. That office doesn’t just represent the Board of Supervisors; it also serves all other elected officials in Pima County.
Conover is herself an elected official, with her own independent political authority.
The Board does have a designated part-time attorney who usually attends its meetings. That role is currently filled by Chief Civil Deputy County Attorney Sam Brown.
However, Brown is bound to the same competing loyalties as Conover, representing all elected officials.
Conover said while this issue comes up from time to time, county attorneys have always found a balance. She called it a chance to have a healthy dialogue.
“The County Attorney is prohibited from singling out a particular board member and representing their individual wants or desires. This is just another opportunity to go through that educational process for both our board and our community,” she said.
A new memo from County Administrator Jan Lesher outlines the narrow circumstances when the Board can bring in outside legal help. The 40-page memo cites an email from Arizona County Supervisors Association Executive Director Craig Sullivan, who outlined potential options.
“The short answer is that the Board may choose not to go through the County Attorney on very limited circumstances, essentially when there is a conflict of interest or a ‘lack of harmony’ about legal strategy,” Sullivan wrote.
He added that this issue comes up from time to time, largely due to competing priorities between the County Attorney and the Board.
Lesher’s memo also notes that even if the Board hires outside counsel, the outside attorney would still be required to consult with the County Attorney’s Office.
Heinz told the Tucson Agenda that he still hopes to put the issue on the next legislative agenda. His goal is to change state law to make it easier for the Board to hire its own full-time legal counsel.
Just a few months ago, Catalina High School was the go-to spot for a splashy Congressional District 6 town hall hosted by Democrats. The lineup? Sens. Cory Booker, Mark Kelly, former Rep. Gabby Giffords and a number of local elected Democrats — all rallying deep in GOP Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s home turf.
Hundreds packed in to hear Booker and friends fire up the crowd in what felt more like a partisan rally than a community forum. (Now, Rep. Yassamin Ansari is taking her own swing through CD6 as part of her “Accountability Summer” tour, with a stop planned for Saturday.)
Fast forward to this week: The City of Tucson was still eyeing Catalina High School as the site for Thursday’s Project Blue town hall as late as Monday.
And then, a hard pivot.
City officials abruptly switched the whole thing to a virtual meeting, saying the school’s auditorium was just too small and that the parking situation was a nonstarter. (This is fair, we were at Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ rally at Catalina and let’s just say parking was... aspirational.)
Sure, nobody’s thrilled about logging onto another giant town hall on Microsoft Teams. But the only thing worse? Watching a mob of residents get turned away at the door.
Meanwhile, Monday night’s other Project Blue town hall will be held at the Tucson Convention Center — where the city promises seats for 1,000 and more than enough parking. So, fingers crossed.
Editor’s note: After yesterday’s edition noted that “we received a letter from Pima County explaining that we would not be receiving many of the records we seek,” the County pushed back. County spokesman Mark Evans said that’s incorrect, since the County is “working diligently to provide all requested records that can be released under the state’s laws.”
That doesn’t mean we’ll receive what we asked for.
Evans also took issue with the line that “the legal threshold of not releasing documents because it is in ‘the best interests of the County’ will likely be decided by the group that signed the NDA.”
He’s correct that we should have mentioned that any objection to releasing information by Amazon lawyers will be decided by a Superior Court judge — after Amazon makes its case to the judge. We updated yesterday’s edition to reflect that.
(Project) Blue Man Group: Every Democratic candidate for three seats on the Tucson City Council opposes Project Blue, per Jim Nintzel of the Tucson Sentinel. The Dems running in the Aug. 5 primary say the data centers would use too much water and energy. But they’re less united on whether to keep offering fare-free transit in Tucson, particularly in the Ward 6 race.
Just in case: Meanwhile, the City of Tucson has already taken steps to annex the land where the Project Blue data centers would be built, the Arizona Luminaria’s Yana Kunichoff and John Washington report. City officials filed a petition to annex the land just hours before the first public meeting about Project Blue last week. City officials say it is a routine step and doesn’t indicate any kind of commitment to actually approve the annexation.
Sounding off: Democratic state Rep. Alma Hernandez went off on Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly over a screwup that led to 358 voters getting mailed the wrong ballot for the upcoming primary elections. A representative for the Recorder’s Office declined to respond to the tweet, saying Cázares-Kelly is focused on the upcoming elections and doesn’t have time to respond to politically motivated attacks from a fellow Democrat.
Cashing in: The ink is drying on a deal to sell a closed prison in Marana to Utah-based Management & Training Corp, Capitol Media Services’ Bob Christie reports. The company is staying mum on what they’ll do with the prison now that the state has sold it to them, but it looks like the prison will be used to house immigrants as the Trump administration ramps up its mass deportation program.
No crime but definitely some punishment: At least some of the people who end up detained at the prison in Marana won’t have a criminal record at all. More than one-quarter of the people detained by ICE in Arizona don’t have a criminal record, and that percentage has been growing since January, Axios Phoenix reported. Nationwide, it’s even worse. The national average surged to 47% in early June.
You can't always scan what you want: A federal watchdog report found dozens of scanners designed to peer into vehicles and cargo to intercept contraband have not been deployed or maintained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, per Paul Ingram for the Sentinel. The Inspector General with the Department of Homeland Security said that out of 150 scanners CBP purchased, just one-third have been deployed and installed on the border, and almost half of the systems were inoperable because of maintenance issues.
"We do have technology that’s in the warehouse that has been tested. But we need approximately $300 million (to) actually put the technology in the ground," Troy Miller, the acting commissioner of CBP, told NBC News. "It’s extremely frustrating.”
See what happens when officials are left to their own devices? It’d be a whole lot cheaper just to hire more reporters…
In udder news: The Nogales livestock port of entry was closed following reports of cattle infected with New World Screwworm (NWS) in southern Mexico, Daisy Zavala Magaña writes for the Nogales International. NWS is when fly larvae burrow into an open wound. A petition has begun circulating asking U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to reopen the port until the end of 2025, noting cases of NWS found in Veracruz and Oaxaca over the past few months have not had any relation with cattle in Sonora.
“I hope I'm wrong, but we're mid-year right now and there's nothing. There's no information out there that indicates to me that we're gonna open up again in 30 days or 60 days,” Nogales broker Juan Suarez said.
It’s official: Eduardo Quintana is your Green Party nominee in the CD7 special election.
Now that the Pima County election canvass is complete, we know that Quintana, a write-in candidate, clinched the nomination with a grand total of 37 votes in Pima County — which, yes, is technically a win.1
Out of the 98 ballots mailed to registered Greens in Pima County, 51 voters went rogue and wrote in someone else entirely. Another eight just sent their ballots back blank, like a passive-aggressive RSVP to a party they didn’t want to attend.
It was a multi-county election, so he’ll probably get a few more votes from the other counties, too.
 | A guest post by
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I won the No Labels Party primary without getting a single vote in Pima County—which last week asked me to approve how the September 23 Pima County ballot looks.
Candidates in parties not entitled to continuous representation on the ballot (currently the Greens and No Labels) need a plurality of the vote to win a primary. Write-in votes cast for anyone not registered with the state as a write-in candidate are invalid and discarded.
So thanks to one voter in Pirtleville in Cochise County, I received 100% of the vote and will be the first No Labels Party primary winner and be on the ballot alongside Grijalva, Butierez and Quintana on your special general election ballot.
Democracy triumphs!
They say “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” I disagree when it comes to PIOs, and would correct to “reading your newsletter every day and bothering to ask for a correction is the sincerest form of flattery.”
And on that note, good morning Mark 😘