Prop. 414 tops $300k
Campaign enters final stretch … Border theater is back … And that poster is a little old.
The money keeps rolling in as Tucson voters decide whether to approve Proposition 414 next week.
Unions, law enforcement groups and prominent Democrats gave more than $151,000 to the Yes on Proposition 414 - Safe and Vibrant City political action committee in the last two months.
As the sole PAC promoting the half-cent sales tax measure, it spent $123,000 as of February 23 on political campaign signs, political mailers and targeted text messages to city residents.1
The Yes on Proposition 414 campaign and the Tucson Metro Chamber’s political action committee, which opposes the measure, have together spent about $313,000.
Voters have until a week from Tuesday to make their choice.
So who is bankrolling the Yes on Prop 414 campaign? A series of filings with the City of Tucson show the PAC received $122,500 from unions, corporations and nonprofits over the course of two months.
Checks came in from:
$55,000 from the International Association of Firefighters union
$25,000 from the United Food & Commercial Workers union, Local 99
$10,000 from the Tucson Police Officers Association PAC
$10,000 from the Fraternal Order of Police
$10,000 from the Arizona for All nonprofit
$5,000 from the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of AZ
$5,000 from CORE Construction, Inc.
$2,500 from Newport LLC
Another 15 individuals donated an additional $28,000 to the Yes on 414 campaign. Notable donors include former state Rep. Demion Clinco, real estate developer Scott Stiteler, business owner Fletcher McCusker, attorney Keri Sylvin, Tucson City Councilman Kevin Dahl and the chairman of the Yes on 414 campaign, Pat Deconcini.
The campaign reported spending nearly $123,000 on the race, with the largest single expense — $79,000 — going to Berkeley, California-based Uplift Campaigns to pay for text messaging, mailers and digital ads.
Yes on Prop 414 paid another $32,000 to Los Angeles-based Fairbank, Maslin, Maulin, Metz, & Associates for a survey. They also paid REA Communications $10,000 for local radio ads.
With just eight days before the election, these reports are likely to be the last we’ll see before the measure is decided.
Yes on Prop 414 won’t have to file with the city until April 15.
As for the Chamber, they are bound by the state's Voters Right to Know Act as a standing committee, which requires them to file a report if they spend $15,000 or more on a local race.
So there is a chance there might be at least one more report before the election.
Aren’t you glad you now know who’s spending money to try to persuade you one way or the other on Prop 414? Upgrade today and we’ll keep digging this stuff up for you.
In a little more than two months, the Tucson City Council will adopt its new budget, spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.4 billion of your tax dollars.
With all the discussion about Proposition 414, city leaders have repeatedly been forced to defend the city’s budget and acknowledge its limits. The outcome of the proposed half-cent sales tax increase will serve as an indicator of the community's trust in the Council's fiscal management.
For the next few months, we’ll be discussing the budget in short, bite-sized stories. It isn’t going to be trivia, but we’re going to talk about a lot of numbers and arcane aspects of municipal budgeting.
#WeWillTryToMakeALotOfNumbersIInteresting
The deep dive starts this week with a few core concepts before we dig into departmental budget analysis.
And a word of warning for accountants, grammar nerds and lawyers: We are going to use general terms to make it easier for a larger audience to understand.
For example, revenue isn’t always the best term to use, but we are going to use it often.
The city currently has a roughly $2.4 billion budget. But this figure includes segmented revenue funds that can only be used for one specific thing.
For example, the city’s debt service fund is specifically set aside for paying off voter-approved bonds.
The terms are specific to each fund but we counted roughly 30 special revenue funds in the city, ranging from enterprise funds like the city’s water utility, its self insurance fund (the city has its own insurance policy as it argues it is more economical for staff and the taxpayer) as well as the Tucson Supplemental Retirement System.2
It’s always a good time to get to know your local lawmakers. Our sister newsletter, the Arizona Agenda, sat down with Tucson lawmaker Kevin Volk for a quick Q&A today.
The freshman Democrat pulled off an upset of sorts last November when he unseated a Republican lawmaker in GOP-leaning Legislative District 17, which runs along the north side of Tucson from Saddlebrooke to Vail.
Tune in to hear what Volk had to say about his running mate, John McLean, dying in a car wreck shortly after the November election, as well as what surprised him in his first weeks as a lawmaker and which songs he’d put on House Democrats’ Spotify list.
Step right up: Border theater is in full swing in Nogales, Sonora, where Mexican National Guard troops are visibly searching vehicles at the border, but not finding a lot, Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller writes. What they are accomplishing, though, is showing President Donald Trump that Mexican officials are holding up their end of the bargain they struck with Trump to avoid new tariffs on Mexican goods. Not that it warded off the tariffs. Trump officials said they plan to put the tariffs in place on Tuesday.
Clamping down: In the wake of a $39 million embezzlement scheme in Santa Cruz County, state lawmakers are considering more stringent rules for county treasurers, the Arizona Republic’s Sarah Lapidus reports. GOP Rep. Matt Gress introduced HB2369, which would make state officials evaluate the accountability measures used by county treasurers. They would then give recommendations to county officials, who would tell state auditors whether they plan to adopt those recommendations. Last October, former Pima County Treasurer Chris Ackerley laid out the steps his office had already taken to ward off embezzlement schemes, with an eye on legislation Ackerley expected to see coming this year.
Not happy with Musk: Lots of Tucsonans showed up on Saturday to protest Elon Musk outside a Tesla dealership on Oracle and River, KVOA’s Isabella Fredrickson reports. Protesters said Musk and President Donald Trump were undermining democracy by making cuts to federal departments and pushing tax cuts that would hurt the poor. They carried signs that read “Wake up and smell the fascism” and “Nobody elected Elon,” among others.
Putting a face to the firings: One of the people caught up in the DOGE purge was Danelle Scott, the only hydrologist at the Coronado National Forest, KGUN’s Maria Staubs reports. She is one of thousands of probationary U.S. Forest Service workers who were fired by the Trump administration recently. She worked in wildland firefighting in Michigan and started working as a USFS hydrologist in Tucson in January 2024. She served as a Burned Area Emergency Response Specialist last summer and gathered data on three active fires. All that ended when she got a phone call.
"They said you're fired. And my 11-year-old ran off crying," Scott recalled. "Then they called 30 minutes later and said, 'Wait, no, never mind. We refreshed the list, and now you're not on it.' Then they called Monday morning and said, 'Wait, no, never mind. You are fired. Come in on Tuesday and turn in all your stuff.'"
On the list: Fort Huachuca is on the list of sites that could be used to hold migrants during the Trump administration’s crackdown, the Arizona Republic’s Tom Vanden Brook reports. But officials might not need to use it that much. Apprehensions of migrants at the border hit a record low last month, following a decline that started last summer and accelerated in the first full month of the Trump administration.
Children see everything: A Venezuelan family in Tucson recently had to deal with the stress of unfounded allegations of human trafficking from federal officials, a situation that’s likely to become more frequent during the Trump administration. Local and international groups are rallying to make sure children in immigrant families don’t bear the brunt of the trauma, the Star’s Emily Bregel reports.
We caught this on Twitter, but we are mostly mentioning this to ask why the poster of the Gulf of America is still in the Oval Office.
Wasn’t the “Gulf of America Day” in early February?
This was the batch of campaign finance reports we mentioned last week.
We will have more on the retirement system in another edition. Pensions deserve their own write-up.
The smiles on the faces of Ciscomani, his wife and his royal lowness remind me of "shit eatin' grins".