There couldn’t be a worse time for Tucson Electric Power to put something on the ballot.
The wholly owned subsidiary of the Canada-based Fortis is on a lot of people’s shit list for all sorts of reasons, including its work with data centers, not undergrounding power lines, sky-high utility bills and a requested rate increase.
But these complaints really don’t have much to do with Proposition 421, the utility’s second attempt to get voters to pass a new franchise agreement with the City of Tucson.
Despite what the term may imply, voters are not being given a choice of whether the electric utility can operate in Tucson, but whether it has to (maybe) check with the city every time it wants to replace a downed power line or make routine repairs to its equipment in city-owned rights-of-way.
Could voting against the franchise agreement make it harder for TEP to operate in Tucson?
Yes, but the company made $283 million in profit last year and generated nearly $1.69 billion in operating revenue. It isn’t going anywhere, even if voters reject the franchise agreement, like they did in May 2023.
Time is running out on the current franchise agreement, so TEP has begun bankrolling a series of ads making its case for a new franchise agreement.
If you’ve been on YouTube in the last week, they’ve been hard to miss. Or skip.
What’s at stake?
It might be a cold comfort to those who are skeptical about the franchise agreement on the ballot, but TEP learned some lessons when voters rejected the last one.
It has stripped out the additional fees that were proposed in the last ballot question, instead largely mirroring the existing franchise agreement it has with the city. The only major difference is the Energy Collaboration Agreement (ECA), which will put $2 million annually into city coffers to invest in local infrastructure and sustainability projects.
The money for the ECA will come out of the company’s coffers and not from a fee charged to its customers, per Joe Salkowski, the director of communications for TEP.
“It would come entirely from corporate resources, and we would not seek recovery of that through future rates,” Salkowski told us.
While TEP is pursuing a rate increase, it has nothing to do with the franchise agreement.
We don’t have access to polling on the proposition, but we’re guessing that TEP has taken some PR hits in the last year.
Between its relationship with Project Blue, its proposed 14% rate increase that’s currently being considered by the Arizona Corporation Commission and a handful of local elected officials who have publicly discussed potentially taking over the privately owned utility, it has been a relatively rough year for the multibillion-dollar multinational corporation.
Residents are also suing the city over a Tucson City Council decision to allow TEP’s request to use overhead transmission lines (rather than putting them underground) at the planned Vine substation near the Jefferson Park neighborhood.
It’s part of the reason we’re seeing a hard push by TEP to get its message before voters, using social media, op-eds and appearances before community groups to make its case for Prop 421.
Its message? We’ve been operating with a franchise agreement with the City of Tucson for so long that we don’t know what a post-franchise Tucson would look like.
It sounds hypothetical, but TEP doesn’t know what would happen if crews needed to repair a transformer after a storm on city property. And almost all of its equipment inside the city limits sits on some kind of easement controlled by the city.
Do they call someone? Do they need a permit? What are the consequences of acting first and begging for forgiveness later?
TEP implies in its ads that some repairs will require permits, but there isn’t any metric for which situations would require written approval from the city.
City officials aren’t quite sure either, but they said they’d work closely with the utility after storms or other acts of God requiring immediate repairs.
A likely outcome would be some sort of short-term agreement between the two parties if voters reject Prop 421.
As for claims that it would cost more to operate without a franchise agreement, that’s harder to pin down.
We were unaware TEP repair crews have standard-issue easels in their work trucks.
The logic of higher costs is largely tied to the same legal uncertainty — will repairing downed power lines take days rather than hours?
No one seems to know for sure, but that’s the message TEP is pushing in its ads.
Doubt and political baggage
We couldn’t find a single, organized opposition campaign against the franchise agreement. But there are plenty of community members who are openly and vocally opposed to Prop 421.
Their concerns include:
It’s a 25-year agreement (rather than a 10-year or five-year agreement)
It doesn’t control how TEP will source its energy, including nuclear power
It doesn’t address current fights over undergrounding utility lines
There are no incentives to use green energy or encourage broader adoption of residential solar
It is an agreement with a privately owned utility that has a fiduciary duty to shareholders
It’s unclear whether the Tucson City Council could have negotiated any of these terms into the proposed franchise agreement, but we’ve heard some of these complaints directly from councilmembers.
And again, the council is still toying with the idea of some sort of public power option for Tucsonans — ranging from small, neighborhood-level compacts that would use solar and batteries to supply most of their energy, to what amounts to a hostile takeover of TEP.
The latter would likely be a billion-dollar proposition requiring voter approval.
As we mentioned at the top, none of those larger fights is on the ballot.
But TEP can’t magically wipe the slate clean as it asks voters for another 25-year agreement. The utility has spent the last year accumulating some hefty political baggage, and locals are bringing that mental luggage into the voting booth.
That doesn’t mean voters will reject Prop 421.
It just means TEP picked a hell of a time to ask Tucson for a vote of confidence.
Papers, please: U.S. Customs and Border Protection is planning a sprawling new patrol station near the rural Pima County community of Three Points, Lookout’s John Washington reports. Washington obtained a CBP “scoping letter” from a county official that notifies the county of an upcoming Environmental Assessment — a formal requirement under the National Environmental Policy Act — to study the potential impacts of the project, which would land on an 86-acre parcel of federal land along State Route 86. The potential new CPB station would come in addition to plans to expand existing CPB infrastructure in the region.
“There is a gross lack of oversight of these agencies and their aggressive tactics targeting (of) moms, children, students and other community members,” Pima County Board of Supervisors Chair Jen Allen, who gave the letter to Washington, told Lookout. “Building more infrastructure for this agency that operates as though it is above the rule of law is not welcome here.”
Frenemies on many fronts: After Attorney General Kris Mayes floated an all-out moratorium on building new data centers in Arizona, Gov. Katie Hobbs told reporters this week that the three-year pause on tax credits for new data centers (not including the many that are already in the pipeline) that she signed as part of this year’s budget package is enough, KOLD’s Alexis Dominguez reports.
“Data centers are an important part of the high tech economy that we are growing here in Arizona,” Hobbs said.
Did you know Joe live blogs from local meetings on Bluesky?
Cross-border frenemies: The Mexican government has announced a massive investment into the road to Puerto Penasco. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said she’s pouring $100 million into fixing up and widening Federal Highway 8, which connects Arizona to “Arizona’s beach” as the locals refer to Rocky Point, the Republic’s Michael Salerno reports. News of the project comes after the U.S. government issued a travel warning for Nogales, Sonora last Friday. The Mexican government hopes the investment will encourage Americans to travel to the resort and fishing town, where tourism has plummeted in recent years.
Before you blow your budget in Rocky Point, consider throwing us a few bucks to keep this newsletter running.
I’ll see you in court?: The Central Arizona Project’s board voted last week to authorize a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s plan for the Colorado River, a 10-year vision that could bring major cuts to Arizona’s share of the river’s water, per the Republic’s Brandon Loomis. To be clear, this isn’t the same as initiating litigation, but it is a formal escalation in tensions with the feds. State and local water officials have repeatedly threatened litigation. The state Legislature has also appropriated millions of dollars to fund potential Colorado River litigation. So far, though, Nevada is the only of the seven Colorado River states to sue the feds, and Arizona, despite being slated to lose the most water under the federal plan, has stayed on the sidelines.
Do you feel old yet?: On the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, AZPM’s Noor Haghighi checked in with a Alex Braithwaite, the director for the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, about how students who weren’t even alive in 2001 view the terrorist attacks, and how it has shaped Americans’ thinking about foreign policy, security and immigrants.
“We're much more comfortable defining something foreign as terrorism. You'll notice this: if ever there's an attack, if we get the sense that the person may be foreign or have connections to some sort of foreign group, we will — without hesitation — say ‘terrorism,’” he says.
Remember how we told you about these weird “Evil Torta” campaign signs that are popping up around Tucson?
Well, some internet sleuths have captured footage of a man planting an “Evil Torta” sign next to an Adelita Grijalva campaign sign on a Tucson street corner.
No, we don’t know who he is.
And no, we still don’t have any insight into what these signs mean, if anything.
But we’re very glad that drivers and the internet sleuths are also on the case.
As Tucson Agenda readers may remember, we do know that the signs come from a mysterious, Tucson-based right-wing 501(c)(4) and AI music factory that opposes Grijalva, fellow Democratic congressional candidate Joanna Mendoza and other candidates and causes.
If you recognize the “Evil Torta” sign planter, please let us know.
We have lots of questions.