The last item on Tuesday’s Tucson City Council consent agenda — the portion of the meeting usually set aside for things too routine to discuss — was Tucson’s plan to hand over roughly 200 acres of land to the U.S. Air Force so that Raytheon, one of the world’s largest missile makers, has room to grow.
The matter quickly became an existential question for the city council, whose members have spent the last year arguing the city shouldn’t give up land for causes that don’t reflect Tucson values. (Remember Project Blue?)
But four members of the council approved the land transfer anyway, saying they didn’t think they had much choice.
A Tomahawk missile blasting off.
That’s because more than three decades ago, the Tucson City Council signed an agreement with Hughes Missile Systems, which Raytheon later bought, promising to keep the land around Air Force Plant 44 clear of development and give the missile maker a buffer from competing developers.
The city made good on that promise in 2020, when it purchased roughly 300 acres from the Tucson Airport Authority for around $6.5 million.
Now, Raytheon and the Air Force want what’s left of that land.
The 31-year-old agreement raises an interesting question: Is the council required to simply rubber-stamp the deal, or do they have any autonomy to say no?
The council has a long history of supporting the defense contractor as it has expanded over the last 75 years. But the Iran War — and the missiles used there and built in Southern Arizona — is making that support more politically challenging.
And in the end, a slim majority of the council signed off on transferring the land to the U.S. Air Force, specifically to be used by Raytheon for the “continued buffering, security, and potential operational growth” of the company. (Fun fact: The U.S. Air Force owns almost all of the land underneath Raytheon’s main Tucson campus, which is referred to as Air Force Plant 44.)
Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz and Councilwoman Miranda Schubert voted against it.
Schubert, who pulled the item off of the consent agenda, forcing a discussion about it, pushed staff to answer whether the council had any ability to reject the contract.
“If we believe the consequences of American military power deserve moral scrutiny abroad, then we should at least be willing to apply some of that same scrutiny when the infrastructure supporting that system appears on our own consent agenda at home,” Schubert said.
Still, she noted that Raytheon is Tucson’s largest private employer, and she acknowledged the cognitive dissonance of opposing missiles being used to fight a war overseas while supporting those who work at the Tucson plant.
“We can also wrestle honestly with what it means for our community to benefit economically from the production of weapons. I don’t think that acknowledging the contradiction is an indictment of the people who work at Raytheon,” Schubert said.
Mayor Regina Romero, who voted for the land deal, said the council has taken strong stances against “extractive industries” in the past.
“A year ago when we had a discussion about Project Blue at our table, we talked about moving in the direction of economic development that matched the policies and priorities of not just mayor and council, but this community. We on the mayor and council have taken a position against extractive corporations like mining … (and) Project Blue,” Romero said.
Councilman Kevin Dahl said he wants to see the council continue to diversify the economy long-term. But he also voted for the deal.
“The points about where we are in the war economy and how Tucson can start encouraging businesses that are more regenerative, sustainable, more part of our values, I think is a discussion that we’ve had before and I think we should continue to have it,” Dahl said.
Councilwoman Selina Barajas and Councilman Paul Cunningham also voted for the measure.
Councilwoman Nikki Lee abstained from discussing and voting on the item because her husband works for Raytheon. His 401(k) — tied to stocks in Raytheon’s parent company RTX — was worth more than $100,000, according to her 2025 financial disclosure form.1
While the council approved transferring the land to the Air Force Tuesday night, it’s unclear when construction would begin, and no one from Raytheon was at the meeting.
So ... What’s the land for?
Tucson City Manager Tim Thomure told the council that he doesn’t know what the defense contractor will ultimately do with the 200 acres adjacent to the main Raytheon missile campus next to Tucson International Airport.
But he noted that the zoning codes that were revised as part of the new Data Center Land Use Code (as well as the city’s Large Water User Ordinance) would make it impossible for Raytheon to build a data center on the property.
We don’t know what the plans for the land are either.
But we have a theory.
The military reportedly fired more than 850 Tomahawk missiles in the first four weeks of the Iran War.
And Raytheon recently entered into a new $22.9 billion federal contract to speed up Tomahawk missile production.
The state-of-the-art missiles are built in Tucson, and the U.S. Navy prices them at about $3.6 million each.
Thomure told the council that COVID largely paused Raytheon’s expansion, and public records show that Congress didn’t buy any new Tomahawks in FY2018.
In FY2019, they only bought 90 missiles — the minimum number required to keep the Tomahawk production line operating in Tucson.
Now, the Pentagon wants to build 1,000 new missiles a year.
In May, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told U.S. Senator Mark Kelly at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that it would take “months and years” to replenish munition stockpiles.
President Donald Trump walked back Hegseth’s comments, and took to Truth Social to share the U.S. has massive amounts of “munitions” and vowed to go after those “leakers” of the “treasonous statements.”
Could the council just say no?
First, a bit of history.
Let’s go back to 1995, when the Tucson City Council made an annexation deal with Hughes Missile Systems to set aside unused undeveloped land tied to the Tucson Airport Authority as a buffer zone.
It was a win-win on paper — the land would continue to serve as the airport’s buffer zone to prevent future residential developments from cropping up. And the ‘90s-era council made the long-term agreement that still left the defense contractor room to grow in the future.
The agreement would also benefit the U.S. Air Force by giving it more land to expand operations at Air Force Plant 44, which was specifically built in 1951 to manufacture Falcon air-to-air missiles for Hughes. Raytheon bought Hughes in 1997, two years after the ink had dried on the contract with the City of Tucson.
The agreement was updated in 2016 to add a carve-out to set aside some of the taxes the defense contractor would pay into a separate, city-managed fund called the “Raytheon Annexation Account” to ultimately buy the 200 acres owned by the city.
The parcel that was part of the buffer zone was actually closer to 300 acres at the time, but roughly 80 acres were given to the Arizona National Guard to build a new entrance to the base.
Raytheon would ultimately pay $6.47 million for the parcel through its tax dollars, but it didn’t initiate the transfer of land for roughly eight years.
Only two current council members — Romero and Councilman Paul Cunningham — were serving when the agreement was updated in 2016. Both voted in favor of the land transfer.
So since only two of the seven members of the council ever agreed to this deal, can a majority say no now?
Well, sure, they can say no to anything.
But not without consequences.
Breaking the contract would, at the very least, mean that the city would have to give back the roughly $6.5 million that it used from the Raytheon Annexation Account to buy the land.
But Tucson has struggled for the last year with tax revenues declining and costs increasing. At one point last year, officials estimated a $40 million budget deficit for the current fiscal year.
And a city that’s struggling financially probably doesn’t want to go to war with its largest employer.2
Meanwhile, Raytheon has a massive checkbook — and a Trump administration-issued mandate to build a lot of missiles.
1 State law requires politicians only to check one of three boxes in the value of assets, with no cap on the third box other than a minimum of $100,000. So that 401(k) could be worth billions for all we know.
2 The last time we recall someone in local government picking a fight with Raytheon was when former County Assessor Bill Staples tried to assess Raytheon’s equipment at a higher value than the missile defense company thought it was worth. That got contentious quickly, as Raytheon got involved and successfully pressured the Pima County Board of Supervisors to override Staples’ decision.