Somewhere in Jan Lesher’s office is a notebook brimming with information about the challenges awaiting Pima County’s next top bureaucrat.
Our lawyers say we can’t offer a reward for 20 minutes alone with Lesher’s notes on running Arizona’s second-largest county, so we did the next best thing: We asked her about them on Friday.
With less than four months before Lesher retires as county administrator, she says her successor will inherit a long list of problems without easy answers — and more reasonable demands than the county can afford to meet.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that at least one page in her notebook is dedicated to the county’s crumbling infrastructure.
Pima County has a $1.81 billion annual budget, but that still isn’t enough to address decades of deferred maintenance across its buildings.
“We’ve got buildings that are dying on us,” Lesher said on the “Bill Buckmaster Show” last Friday.
She specifically pointed to the county’s Legal Services Building on North Stone Avenue, home to the Pima County Attorney’s Office.
“Some days they don’t have elevators, and some days they don’t have water, and some days they have neither.”
Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher (sans notebook) talks with Bill Buckmaster and Joe last Friday.
Plans to move the County Attorney’s Office out of the 60-year-old former bank have been in the works for some time — but there have been few easy options to move roughly 200 people into another county building.
County officials are also expected to ask voters to approve a roughly $100 million bond next year to address deferred maintenance as well as other unfunded priorities.
It has been more than a decade since Pima County put a bond package before voters. The last attempt came in 2015, when voters rejected seven propositions totaling about $816 million — and by pretty wide margins.
“That was a huge bond issue that went down in flames,” Buckmaster added.
Lesher called the still-unfinished 2027 bond proposal the “next great challenge” for the next county administrator as they test the appetite of voters for bond questions.
In the coming weeks, the county is expected to announce its top finalists for Lesher’s position and bring them to Tucson next month to meet with the community.
Competing demands
The next administrator won’t just inherit a list of broken buildings.
Lesher said some of the county’s most difficult decisions ahead will involve worthy ideas that clash with one another.
For example, let’s take a look at proposed outdoor lighting at county-owned parks.
New lighting at athletic fields would allow children to play organized sports later in the evening, when temperatures begin to dip. But it could also affect wildlife corridors and Southern Arizona’s prized dark skies.
“The challenge is going to start to be what I see as those things that are headed towards each other on a bit of a collision course,” Lesher said.
She offered public libraries as another example.
Libraries give unhoused residents somewhere to escape Tucson’s brutal heat. But Lesher acknowledged that balancing their needs with those of other library users can be difficult.
“Libraries are a wonderful opportunity for some of our homeless community to find a place to get out of the heat. But they sometimes can be off-putting to library patrons,” Lesher said, specifically mentioning the Joel D. Valdez Main Library in downtown Tucson.
The county hasn’t announced when it expects to close the current downtown library, but it will eventually relocate across Stone Avenue into the former Wells Fargo building the county bought last year.
The county plans on turning the old Wells Fargo Bank on Stone into a library in the next few years.
Officially, the move is driven by a long list of unresolved maintenance problems at the existing library that would cost the county library district at least $72 million to repair.
But the enormous downtown library also illustrates the complicated role public buildings now play in responding to homelessness.
Library staff have long dealt with patrons sleeping, bathing or carrying all of their belongings into the building, along with incidents involving mental-health crises or intoxication.
The county permanently assigned a nurse from the Health Department to the downtown library to connect people with services and help staff de-escalate difficult situations.
Whose budget priorities?
Lesher’s replacement will have roughly six months to work with the supervisors on the county’s next budget.
On Friday, Lesher said the county remains in “good, solid fiscal shape.” But the next budget cycle could be more difficult as Pima County spends the last of the federal pandemic-relief money that has flowed through county government for years.
Lesher said that before she retires, her successor will receive the “shell” of a budget assembled with department heads, elected officials and input from the supervisors.
That plan will be guided by a series of long-term strategies covering everything from parks and infrastructure to debt repayment.
“As an example, if you want to know what the future of parks looks like, there is a master plan,” Lesher explained.
Those plans will tell the next administrator what county officials hope to accomplish.
They won’t necessarily tell them how to pay for it.
Earlier this year, county departments and elected offices submitted nearly $50 million in DREAM requests — bureaucratic shorthand for Department Requests for Expenditure Authority and Money.
Only $15.8 million of those requests made it into Lesher’s recommended budget.
In other words, county officials considered roughly $34 million worth of initiatives that didn’t make the cut.
That might seem like a drop in the bucket inside a $1.81 billion budget. But much of that money is restricted to specific programs and existing obligations, leaving county leaders with far fewer options than the billion-dollar figure suggests.
It’s pretty clear whoever inherits Lesher’s notebook will spend next year saying “no” — the only question is how often, and how often they’ll kick the can instead.
The nuances of the deal: The new cuts to Arizona’s share of the Colorado River might not be as devastating as they seem, Tony Davis reports for the Arizona Daily Star. The starting point for the cuts isn’t how much each state uses, but how much water it’s entitled to. And Arizona hasn’t needed to use all the water it’s entitled to since 2014. Still, drought and a dwindling Colorado River have some experts concerned about Mother Nature making even deeper cuts to Arizona’s water supply.
Wolves in the crosshairs: After announcing he would import beef amid a rise in beef prices, President Donald Trump threw a bone to ranchers by starting the process of removing protections for gray wolves and Mexican gray wolves, the Tucson Sentinel’s Paul Ingram reports. Tucson’s Center for Biological Diversity said it is ready to sue to ensure the wolves stay on the Endangered Species List, while Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani wrote on Twitter that he was “PROUD” of Trump’s decision and called it a “major win for Arizona ranchers.”
Trying to make sense of it: A general sense of unease has fallen on Tucson after the city was rocked by at least four high-profile violent crimes so far this year, Star columnist Tim Steller writes. Even though the incidents weren’t linked to each other and official stats show violent crime declining, “it doesn’t feel like violent crime is dropping, even if the numbers say so.” Another worthwhile nugget in Steller’s column is a detailed timeline of how local officials reacted following the shooting at the Venture-N, as well as an analysis of how information flowed to the public after the shooting.
Setting the wheels in motion: The Tucson Unified School District Governing Board released the information officials will use to decide which schools to close, as well as the names of the members of the public who will help guide those decisions, per the Arizona Luminaria’s Shannon Conner. The district is planning to announce the closures of as many as 10 schools next month and make a final decision in December. The district has watched enrollment steadily decline as birth rates drop and the use of school vouchers rises.
Just like public schools, local journalism is in crisis. Luckily, the remedy is simple: Show your financial support for news outlets you trust.
Tucson man behaving badly: A Tucson man had to be duct-taped to an airline seat after he apparently got wasted, called a Black flight attendant the N-word and hit the passenger seated next to him, Jose R. Gonzalez reports for the Republic. Layne Arthur Lundeen, a local real estate agent, faced a swift backlash on social media, as well as criminal charges in Maryland. But his self-inflicted troubles didn’t end there. Soon after his arrest, Long Realty publicly cut ties with him.
Here are the top events this week for those who want a front-row seat to local politics.
Pima County Republican Club meets today at 11:30 a.m. at The Kettle just west of I-10 on 22nd St.
The Pima County Board of Supervisors meets today at 5 p.m. at the County Administrative Building in downtown Tucson. (Agendas/livestream)
The Tucson Unified School District Governing Board meets today at 4:30 p.m. at the Duffy Community Center, 5145 E. 5th Street, 85711, in the Multipurpose Room. (Agenda/livestream)
The Tucson City Council meets on Wednesday at 1 p.m. inside Tucson City Hall in downtown Tucson. (Agenda/livestream)
Did we miss an event? Email Joe to get it on our radar.
The billionaire who runs the Arizona Daily Star’s parent company just slapped a vanity license plate on the Star.
The paper now lists David Hoffmann as “majority shareholder,“ just in case you’d forgotten what a special guy he is.
That’s the second sign we’ve seen that running newspapers is an ego trip for Hoffmann.
The first one was him ordering all his newspapers to run a cringe-worthy package of stories praising him as the savior of local journalism.
The good news is Hoffmann also announced he’s planning to pen “From the Chairman” columns, which will make it a lot easier to write our “What we’re laughing at” sections.