The fight for Ward 5

Filling Fimbres’ shoes … All quiet on the southern front … And maybe stick with Jim Click.

We’ve been channeling our inner Stephen Colbert for months now with our own version of Better Know a District — and this week, as we start to wrap up coverage of the Tucson City Council primaries, we turn to “the Fighting Fifth,” better known as Ward 5.

Unlike The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — which Paramount Global opted not to renew — our series hasn’t been canceled yet. So let’s make the most of it.

Ballots have already gone out for the August 5 election to pick a new councilmember to represent the southside ward.

The first thing to dive into is the political history of the district, considering this election marks the first open southside seat since Richard Fimbres was first elected in 2009. Fimbres stepped down earlier this year for his health. He was replaced by Rocque Perez, who is not running for the seat.

Ward 5 contains some weird non-contiguous chunks of city land south of the airport.

Fimbres had a long, respectable career in law enforcement prior to public service, spending 32 years with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and serving as a military police officer during the Vietnam War era. Later in life, he joined the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety under then-Gov. Janet Napolitano.

He also helped launch the Homeless Work Program, which gave folks experiencing homelessness a day’s pay, a hot meal, and access to services in exchange for doing outdoor landscaping work.

Tucson Marketplace at the Bridges may be one of his most visible accomplishments in the Ward — turning a barren lot along I-10 into a bustling hub of jobs, shops, and housing in Ward 5.

Now, three Democrats — Selina Barajas, Jesse Lugo and Chris Elsner — are vying to replace Fimbres.

And Ward 5 voters have just two weeks left to decide who will represent them at City Hall.

From left to right: Elsner, Barajas and Lugo.

Chris Elsner

As a former Peace Corps volunteer who now works at the University of Arizona, Elsner believes the city needs to take a more effective approach to the housing shortage and the growing number of unsheltered individuals living in Ward 5.

He told the Tucson Agenda that while there are many nonprofits and community groups already doing important work, there’s still a long way to go.

And while the southside does have several facilities helping people living on the streets, Elsner says the city should be stepping up to offer resources throughout the city — not just in Ward 5.

With talk of another sales tax increase to tackle homelessness and housing, as well as a potential renewal of the Regional Transportation Authority (another sales tax) next year, Elsner thinks voters are open to the idea.

And he warns the city will need to make a better case than it did with this spring’s failed Proposition 414.

Selina Barajas

Barajas says one of her top priorities is expanding resources for affordable housing — a key issue she ties directly to the rising number of people who can’t afford rent and end up on the streets.

Her campaign has knocked on thousands of doors, and she says she’s often met by older residents in the southside ward who are frustrated with the lagging infrastructure.

They want safer, smoother streets — and so does Barajas. She says the city needs to invest more in road repairs and improving lighting at night.

Barajas also wants to prioritize environmental justice: adding more green space to the southside and continuing efforts to clean up contaminated water wells in the ward.

Jesse Lugo

Lugo, meanwhile, says his top priority is boosting the number of officers in the Tucson Police Department. He says residents are telling him they’re afraid to go out after dark.

Best known for running a holiday charity that gives bikes to kids, the retired businessman has also served on several city commissions representing Ward 5.

Like the others, he wants more investment in infrastructure, especially in southside neighborhoods. He noted that while some parts of the ward got street repairs through voter-approved initiatives, there’s still a lot that needs fixing.

If elected, Lugo also says he’ll push back against the city’s long-term plan to treat wastewater and deliver it back to customers as potable water — a process often (uncharitably) referred to as “toilet to tap.”

Local water officials, for their part, say that term oversimplifies a complex — and safe — process.

We’ve linked to each candidate’s website above if you’re a Ward 5 resident who is still having a hard time deciding.

With no Republican in the race, the winner of the August 5 primary will automatically take office next January.

Project Blue is Amazon Web Services, the Arizona Luminaria reported on Monday.

County officials inadvertently released the name of the developer behind the proposed sprawling data centers in a trove of emails and an internal county memo that the Luminaria requested earlier this month.

Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher then seemingly confirmed the finding, saying “the memo naming Amazon Web Services as Project Blue should have redacted details, including the name of the company.”

The scoop from the Luminaria’s Yana Kunichoff and John Washington pierces the veil of secrecy that has surrounded the project for months.

Both Pima County supervisors and the Tucson City Council members said even they didn’t know the name of the company, thanks to non-disclosure agreements signed by their respective economic development teams.

“It was way too secret for way too long,” Supervisor Matt Heinz told the Luminaria.

Heinz reiterated his support for the project, but said the secrecy “makes us look like we don’t have our shit together.”

The release of the information — potentially violating the non-disclosure agreement —could throw a wrench into the massive economic development proposal.

Several weeks ago, we reported that Chamber of Southern Arizona Treasurer Fletcher McCusker told the Pima County Board of Supervisors that the developer was ultra-secretive and would pull the plug on the project if their name got out.

”They do not want their name in the public domain,” McCusker said. “They've made it crystal clear to us that ‘if our name gets out there, we're done, we walk.’ So it's an all or nothing proposition.”

The city has a public meeting on Project Blue planned for Wednesday evening at Mica Mountain High School on Valencia Road at 5 p.m.

Quieter and quieter: For the first time in a very long time, the number of migrants that Border Patrol agents encountered in the Tucson Sector dropped to triple digits. The new statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show just 968 encounters with migrants in June in the sector, which runs from the New Mexico state line to the Yuma area. That’s a staggering drop from a peak of 80,000 encounters in December 2023. It wasn’t any busier in the Yuma Sector, where agents reported 137 encounters last month.

After you finish that juice box, hire a lawyer: Unaccompanied migrant children — including babies — are sitting through immigration court hearings in Phoenix and other cities, while supposedly advocating on their own behalf, the Republic’s Nicol León and Puente News Collective’s Gibran Caroline Boyce report. The Trump administration’s crackdown on child migrants, including cutting funding for legal representation, is straining the nonprofits that scramble to make sure child migrants understand what the judges are saying to them.

“For an adult, it’s almost impossible to navigate immigration court,” said Michelle Ortiz, the director of U.S. legal services at the nonprofit International Rescue Committee. “Imagine a 12-year-old, 4-year-old, a 17-year-old. It’s impossible to present a case without a lawyer.”

Springing into action: As Project Blue seemed to suddenly burst onto the local political scene, so has the local opposition to it, the Arizona Luminaria’s Yana Kunichoff reports. Tucson advocates recently sprang into action via the No Desert Data Center group, just as they have for past efforts where loose coalitions were able to apply pressure to local officials, such as the No New Jail Coalition and Transit for All.

Want to join our loose coalition of journalism-loving Tucsonans? Just click that button.

Busy as a beaver: Native cottonwood trees are coming back to the banks of the San Pedro River, and wildlife specialists are crediting two relocated beavers, KGUN’s Alex Dowd reports. The beavers were blocking irrigation ditches in northern Arizona, so the Arizona Game and Fish Department relocated them to the San Pedro, where they’ve been busy building dams ever since.

Joe was right back talking politics at Arizona Public Media’s reporters’ roundtable last Friday.

Asked and answered: What does Tucson’s housing director think should be done about the housing shortage and homelessness? You can hear Ann Chanecka’s answers in a Q&A with the Luminaria’s Kunichoff, from what city officials are actually doing to how federal funding cuts will hit the city’s plans to help unsheltered people.

Tough choices: How will the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education affect local school districts? The Flowing Wells Unified School District is up first, Tucson Sentinel columnist Blake Morlock writes. They’re plotting out how to deal with several grant programs that could end up with no money in their budgets, thanks to federal funding freezes.

Dude, where’s my food truck?: The relocation of Borderlands Brewing Company sparked a lot of conversation in Tucson about the direction downtown is headed. Now that conversation includes a food truck that was whisked away, and then found in the flooded loading dock of Borderlands’ former brewing facility, the Arizona Daily Star’s Cathalena Burch reports.

With the primary elections for Tucson City Council seats coming up on August 5, now’s a good time to check in with our readers in Ward 5.

So we put together a quick reader survey to hear what you have to say.

It’s basically just two questions: Who would you like to see win the Ward 5 council seat, and why?

Keep in mind, there aren’t any hyper-local polls for Tucson’s council races, so this could be your only chance to sound off before the ballots are counted.

Whatever you do, don’t try to buy a car from City Council candidate Jesse Lugo on Facebook.

We talked to Lugo today, and no, he is not selling “a variety of personal items as my brother-in-law is moving into a nursing facility” as a Facebook page in his name would suggest.

And while the suspiciously low prices and demand for a deposit before seeing any of the vehicles should be obvious red flags, Lugo says he’s filed a police report just in case anyone still thinks this is a legit side hustle.