Maybe Pima County’s newest administrator, Carmine DeBonis, really didn’t need our primer on the issues facing Pima County.
We even publicly gave him an out in the seventh paragraph.
“Carmine, you can skip this edition. Everyone else, let’s get acquainted with what you’re signing up for,” we wrote.
The Pima County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday night to select DeBonis, a current deputy county administrator, to replace County Administrator Jan Lesher when she retires in early January.
Carmine DeBonis
For the politically jaded, it would be easy to argue that DeBonis is an extension of a political dynasty led by the county’s “sixth supervisors” over the last several decades: Lesher and her predecessor, Chuck Huckelberry.
Huckelberry’s enemies derided him as “King Chuck,” but he earned the respect of countless elected officials and community leaders for helping keep Pima County from becoming a smaller version of Phoenix.
The Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, is one example of that vision — shared by Huckelberry and the supervisors who supported it — coming to life.
And when asked to unexpectedly to step into the role, Lesher built her own legacy leading the county successfully from the pandemic, worked with the feds to address a historic immigration surge through Southern Arizona and wean the county off of federal COVID-era funding without having to make deep cuts in services.
DeBonis deserves to be judged on his own merits, including his decades of work for Pima County. He’s spent more than 30 years with the county and has served for the last decade as a deputy county administrator overseeing roads, planning and development, environmental regulation, economic development and the county’s finances.
And before that he was the director of the county’s Development Services Department for about 15 years. And if you really go back to the early days, he was a staffer for Republican Supervisor Ed Moore.
Yes, DeBonis was the internal candidate in the botched national search that seemingly missed the fact that one of the candidates resigned from his job in California amid a cloud of allegations of poor conduct.
But the undeniable truth is DeBonis knows the political landscape well, and he knows where the bodies are buried.
What does county admin do?
We’ve referred to the position as the “sixth supervisor” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to how big a role the county administrator plays in Pima County politics — but the job is more political than many might expect.
One nice perk is the county administrator works out of the Historic Pima County Courthouse.
As he transitions into his new role as the county’s top bureaucrat, DeBonis will shape the county’s next budget (we’re guessing $1.8 billion), help oversee the county’s roughly 7,000 employees and manage relationships with its regional partners, including the City of Tucson.
Why did we single out the City of Tucson? The county and city have a complicated relationship that’s been strained by Project Blue, differential water rates and decisions surrounding the prosecution of public drug use crimes.
Some of these things are being ironed out, but we recommend someone get DeBonis a new copy of “The Art of War” as a welcome gift.
The county is beefing up its governmental affairs division, but next week’s election could be really big for Pima County.
As a big blue dot in Arizona’s purple landscape, Pima County could have a very powerful delegation in the Legislature if Democrats flip it. Conversely, if Republican Andy Biggs becomes governor next year, the county could face budget shortfalls if Biggs gets traction on eliminating the state’s income tax.
Is it worth it?
With Lesher retiring in January and DeBonis set to take the reins in the coming weeks, the county could face two expensive payouts.
Lesher’s contract includes a clause for unused vacation and sick time, and as a Pima County employee, DeBonis is also entitled to a similar payout.
We have no idea how much unused vacation time either has, but when Lesher was paid out from her last contract two years ago, the unused time translated into about $225,000.
We haven’t seen DeBonis’ new contract as of Tuesday night, but there’s a lot more to the compensation package than the base salary. (We won’t know his official salary for a couple of weeks.)
Our one piece of advice for DeBonis is from “The Art of War”: Know your enemy. Or, in this case, know your regional partners well enough to avoid turning every disagreement into an intractable fight.
Berkman vs. Conover, Round 1,000: The Pima County Attorney’s Office is hiring a prosecutor who got fired two decades ago when it came to light that he may have known about a grisly murder plot before the murder took place, but he didn’t report it to police, the Arizona Daily Star’s Griffin Salkowski reports. Shortly after the prosecutor, Paul Skitzki, was fired in 2004, he was hired at the Pima County Public Defender’s Office, where he has overseen defense lawyers ever since. Hiring Skitzki didn’t sit well with David Berkman, a former chief criminal deputy county attorney and looooong-time critic of County Attorney Laura Conover. Berkman called the decision to rehire Skitzki “appalling” and an “insult to the victim in the case.” Conover said she didn’t put much stock in a decision made by her predecessor years ago.
“It’s better that I look at the breadth and depth of Paul’s experience in the two decades that have elapsed since,” she said. “The previous administration has been gone and retired for six years now, but I understand it can still be entertaining to listen to them, shall we say, opine.”
This is going to stop at some point, right?: Add Secrist Middle School to the list of schools Tucson Unified School District officials are considering closing. Like several other schools on the chopping block, Secrist is only using about one-third of its capacity, the Arizona Luminaria’s Shannon Conner reports. If the district governing board decides in December to close Secrist, the school’s students would move to Santa Rita High School, which also has lots of unused capacity.
Pima County is at about 28% turnout so far, per Democratic consultant Sam Almy.
Unsung heroes: As you send in your ballot, maybe take a moment to recognize the workers who make elections possible, especially as they face threats for going above and beyond their civic duty. Nationwide, about one-third of election workers have been threatened, harassed or abused for helping out with elections, Elenee Dao reports for ABC15.
“Most people only see Election Day. You know what the rest of us do not (see)? The months of preparation, the testing of equipment, the training, the long nights, the recounts, the audits and the quiet precision that is required to get every detail right,” Arizona Supreme Court Justice Maria Elena Cruz said.
Digging a little deeper: If you’re curious about the border wall the Trump administration is building along the U.S.-Mexico border, including in Arizona, the Border Chronicle launched “Wall Watch,” a project that shows where the wall is going up, the type of barrier, the cost of each wall project and the contractor building it, among other data points.
On a lighter note: Tucson officials are trying to come up with the city’s first official font, Thatcher Warrick Hess reports for Arizona Public Media. Organizers of the effort put three large canvases in the plaza of the Historic Pima County Courthouse during the annual Tucson Meet Yourself festival earlier this month. Hundreds of people dipped their fingers in paint and added a line or curve to a canvas. Now, the Los Angeles-based Culturist Group is using photos of those lines and curves to put the “unspoken Tucson magic” into the city’s official typeface.
The Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission is the state’s only official, nonpartisan voter education resource — created by Arizona voters for voters.
We publish the voter education guide, host the debates, and break down what’s on your ballot. Not who you should vote for — what you need to know before you do.
Get the facts at AZCleanElections.gov.
It’s not often you see actual glee pouring from a reporter as they write about politics.
But the Tucson Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel clearly was having fun — or at least finding some long-awaited catharsis in the face of political madness — when he wrote up Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s ongoing attempts to distance himself from Elon Musk, even though Musk is spending lots of cash to get Ciscomani reelected.
Nintzel starts by noting Ciscomani “could hardly contain his excitement about Elon Musk’s DOGE endeavor,” before a lengthy, exuberant quote from the congressman saying he was “thrilled to join the DOGE Caucus.”
Then we get a Leslie Nielsen-level deadpan description of the DOGE fiasco, which “involved using a group of young tech workers with no government experience — including one nicknamed ‘Big Balls’ — to go over the federal budget for savings and dig into sensitive data about American citizens.”
Big Balls was followed by this little gem: “The DOGE team — so-dubbed by the Trump White House and Musk in a reference to a joke cryptocurrency featuring a cartoon dog — pushed about a quarter-million federal employees out of their jobs…”
Finally, the news peg for the whole thing, which looks to us like Ciscomani climbing further into the warm little hole where he can close his eyes and imagine he didn’t have any responsibility for enabling the worst impulses of the Trump administration.
“Ciscomani has stopped talking about DOGE. Ciscomani’s campaign strategist Daniel Scarpinato did not respond to questions about DOGE,” Nintzel writes.
