The groups pushing to renew the Regional Transportation Authority for another two decades have a new high-profile critic — Tucson City Councilwoman Miranda Schubert.
The newly elected Democrat, who has made transit a top issue on the campaign trail, wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Daily Star on Monday arguing that she could not support the $2.7 billion proposal headed to voters in March.
The complicated plan on the ballot is a compromise of the competing priorities of eight different municipalities, but Schubert believes it is antithetical to Tucson’s long-range transportation plan, also known as Move Tucson. The 354-page plan, adopted in 2021, emphasizes multimodal transportation options, improved safety and reinvestment in the city’s existing streets.
To be fair, the RTA Next plan pours millions into these same priorities, although the devil is in the details.
This graphic, part of Plan Tucson, reflects public input on what individual neighborhoods identify as their top transportation priorities.
In her argument, Schubert says she wants to see the city adopt a half-cent sales tax to fund transit priorities after the RTA (and its half-cent sales tax) expires this summer.
Fully implementing the Move Tucson plan would cost an estimated $13 billion over 20 years — far more than the $2.7 billion that a half-cent sales tax would raise over a decade. (The RTA Next is a countywide tax, versus Schubert’s proposed city-wide tax, which would generate significantly less funds.)
“We don’t have to accept a false choice between ambition and realism,” Schubert wrote. “Tucson can fund its own priorities with a half-cent sales tax for Move Tucson, our long-range transportation plan developed with extensive community outreach.”
Joe sat down with Schubert recently to discuss her priorities in 2026, touching on pedestrian safety, the city’s strategy to reduce homelessness and a long-awaited transit fare analysis.
That transit fare analysis is somewhat groundbreaking, as city officials have been reluctant to dig into the costs of re-instituting fares after the council repeatedly backed fare-free transit. The council’s support for fare-free buses has always been characterized as short-term, with one-year extensions approved as the council grapples with current and future budget shortfalls.
Since taking office, Schubert was able to finally break the political logjam, asking for a transit fare analysis that would outline the upfront costs required to re-institute fare collection, along with the potential annual revenue the city could expect. The revenue portion of the equation, we expect, will vary widely depending on how a divided council finds consensus on charging fares.
For the record, Schubert is unlikely to support any plan to reinstate fares, but she says it is hard to make a decision without knowing the facts.
Miranda Schubert.
As an example, a study by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC)1 found the streetcar generates substantial indirect revenue, producing an additional $1.5 million in tax revenue in 2023, when the city wasn’t collecting fares. The comparison year was 2019, when the streetcar was charging riders.
“It stands to reason that if fares are reinstated, there will be a financial cost like sales tax. Revenue along the corridor will go down, and revenue will plummet,” Schubert said.
At the same time, the city would have to replace the existing fare-collection infrastructure and hire additional staff to manage the system, including increased security to ensure compliance.
Tying back to her opposition to the RTA Next plan, Schubert said she is focused on pedestrian safety.
Schubert is a former member of a city commission focused on transit, the Complete Streets Coordinating Council, and she said the city needs to look at new ways to make streets safer for pedestrians.
“We're in the top five consistently most dangerous roads for cyclists and for pedestrians,” she said. “I think road design has to be a major component of what we're talking about, not just (traffic) enforcement.”
On the topic of addressing homelessness in Ward 6 and throughout the city, Schubert is hopeful that recent contracts funded by opioid settlement dollars will help find long-term solutions for those living on the streets.
While Schubert wasn’t on the council when it voted to criminalize sleeping in washes, she said too many past solutions were tightly tied to law enforcement and incarceration.
“I think this holistic approach that really is focused on maximizing the amount of people that get into treatment and rehabilitation and not seeing incarceration as the goal. I want to dismantle the myth that incarceration and accountability are synonymous, that's the only mechanism we have to arrest and punish people, and that's the only way to solve the problem,” Schubert said.
A supporter of the city’s Housing First model, Schubert wants to see whether Tucson can increase the overall amount of housing available during her term.
“We need to scale up and we need to invest in these things and be serious,” she said. “This is about diverting people from prison and allowing them a way to actually live in Tucson and make a life for themselves.”
The Council will meet next week, with discussion about the city budget expected later this spring. It is unclear when the transit fare analysis will become public.
We’ll be at next week’s Council meeting — follow Joe on Bluesky to read his live blogging from the meeting.
Not quite that simple: As voters get ready to vote on RTA Next, they should take the economic projections from the backers of RTA Next with a grain of salt, Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller writes. The jobs and revenue that the plan is expected to bring in don’t quite match up with official data, and even if voters decide they don’t want RTA Next, there’s nothing stopping local cities and towns from doing transportation projects on their own.
Not with a bang, but a whimper: The Trump administration gave up on its legal battle to force universities to get rid of DEI last week, the Associated Press reported. Schools like the University of Arizona quietly removed or renamed programs that promoted diversity shortly after President Donald Trump’s second term began, and long before they would have been forced to do so, even if the demand was legally valid, as retired Tucson newsman and former UA employee Michael Chihak notes in a guest opinion in the Star.
“At our university, administrators folded quickly, without objection, plea or fight,” Chihak writes.
Held in Eloy: Several members of a Venezuelan family that ICE arrested on Friday in Tucson are being held at the Eloy Detention Center, Democratic state Rep. Alma Hernandez said in a social media post. They still don’t know why they are being held in detention, she said. ICE officers tried to get them to sign deportation papers, but the family is seeking asylum in the U.S. and has the appropriate paperwork.
That’s a long time to be temporary: After 16 years of running a checkpoint on Interstate 19, the Border Patrol is planning to make the checkpoint permanent, Jorge Encinas reports for the Green Valley News. Santa Cruz County supervisors gave the green light last week to an access agreement for a parcel next to the checkpoint, which will allow the Border Patrol to do due diligence before a final decision.
You can help the Agenda move from temporary to permanent by clicking this button.
Moving in the right direction: The homicide rate in Tucson dropped to the lowest level since 2019, Arizona Public Media’s Nick Rommel reports. Tucson police reported 54 homicides last year, down from 69 in 2024 and a peak of 78 in 2021. There were no homicides reported by police departments in Marana, Oro Valley and Sahuarita.
The Tucson Crime Free Coalition believes socialism is taking over Tucson politics, citing in part the election of Miranda Schubert to the Tucson City Council three months ago.
Tucson politics are pretty liberal, but we’re going to cast doubts on the idea “that socialist groups are professionally organizing these protests.”
Until we get our Soros check, we’re pretty sure they are being organized by (unpaid) locals with a passion for their community.
1 The NITC is based at Portland State University, but is partnered with several higher-education institutions, including the University of Arizona.